I’m a sucker for the design aesthetic of the NES. The color scheme, the shape and layout of the controller, and everything else. I also love emulation. I’ve written about OpenEmu a couple times, and I’ve been using a Wii U Pro controller with it a lot lately. It’s great and pairs easily with computers, but this NES-styled Bluetooth controller looks awesome.

Sure, it’s got four buttons (and shoulder triggers) instead of the classic two-button NES layout, but that just means you can use it for more than NES games. The NES30 looks very well built and sells for around $40. You can use it with your phone, tablet, or computer, and it would look cool just sitting on your desk. I’m going to pick one up and hope that they release a SNES-styled version sometime in the future. I’m more nostalgic about the NES controller, but the SNES had the best controller of all time, in my opinion.

Via Gizmodo

I have a weird relationship with retro gaming. I enjoy having a few old consoles and a small collection of games, but I love seeing crazy huge retro gaming collections on Instagram and Reddit. Some people have insane gaming rooms with dozens of consoles hooked up to an old CRT television with numerous video switchers to make it all work. I enjoy the nostalgia of old game hardware (and the convenience of emulators), but really want to find a practical, usable way to enjoy retro games. The upcoming RetroN 5 from Hyperkin seems to be the perfect solution.

Over the past year or so I’ve (re)acquired the NES, SNES, and Genesis consoles. The NES I found needs to be repaired and I just haven’t gotten around to replacing the pin. The SNES works occasionally, and the Genesis works really well. I would still keep them if they were all completely bricked, just for the nostalgia of having them on a shelf. But, the RetroN 5 looks like it will be my go-to system for playing old games. This console can play games from these consoles:
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I wasn’t a Kickstarter backer of the Ouya, because I thought an Andoird-powered gaming system sounded pretty dumb. It wasn’t until I started hearing about how it was pretty great for emulation that I started considering it. Then over the summer I got a $100 Amazon card and it was burning a hole in my pocket, so I ordered an Ouya. I’ve been meaning to write up a review for months, but I hadn’t used it much until the past couple weeks.

When I first got it, I loaded up a bunch of ROMs, from NES all the way up to Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1, onto a flash drive and dove into setting up emulators. Some are obviously just ports of Android apps and have very crappy UIs, but there are a few that are very nice and look great on a TV in your living room. Overall, they worked well, but N64 and PSX games were a lot more flakey.

I thought for $99 it wasn’t a bad little gadget to get if you wanted an easy (and couch-friendly) way to get ROMs on your TV. The made-for-Ouya games I tried were horrible, and so I wrote off that whole aspect of the console. Then last week I played Towerfall with a friend.

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Mac people usually expect two things when it comes to software: the it just works factor and beautiful interfaces. One genre of software that has never gotten much Mac love is video game emulators. Often, they have ancient UIs and are buggy as hell. Well, after years of work, OpenEmu 1.0 is finally available for download, and it’s great.

Much like the XBMC media center software I’m obsessed with, OpenEmu automatically scans your system for games and downloads the box art and information, and presents it all in an easy-to-use and gorgeous interface. There are a ton of options for controllers, and I’m hoping to get a Wii U Pro controller sometime soon to use. I’ve had an old 24″ iMac sitting in my desk for about a year not getting used, and I think I’m going to turn it into a dedicated emulation machine now.

I briefly got into the world of retro game collecting over the summer, but my shelves are too packed as it is, and the cost of old games and systems just seems silly when you can play ROMs instead. I think I realized that my favorite thing about buying old games was the packaging anyway. I’m perfectly fine emulating games, and I’m glad to have a good way to do it on my Macs now.

PS – Sorry for being MIA over Christmas. The combination of getting super busy with work and my grandpa dying kind of made me forget about the site for a while. I hope you all had a great holiday and I’m looking forward to the new year!

If there’s one thing the Internet is great for, it’s benefiting from other people’s hard work. If you’re wondering what kind of car to get, which dog breed would be best for your tiny apartment, or what the worst Land Before Time Movie is (actual search query that led someone here), chances are at least a bzillion people have wrote about their experiences online.

When news broke about iOS 6 being jailbroken yesterday, I didn’t pay much attention to the headlines. I toyed around with Jailbreaking a few years ago when I had an old-school iPhone 3G, but since then iOS has improved so much I haven’t felt the need. Until I realized I could play retro games on my new iPad Mini, that is.

I don’t much like the idea of messing with my phone when it’s the device that I need to be able to use to call 911 and order pizzas and such. But now I have a second iOS device that isn’t a phone and when I started thinking about playing Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and NES games on it, I got a little giddy. So, I did some quick research, found plenty of other people who had figured out the hard stuff already, and now I have a jailbroken iPad Mini loaded with ROMs that I can pair with a Wiimote.

Hopefully by sharing my resources and explaining what I did I can help you out in case you’re even lazier than me, and perhaps feel like I’m contributing a little Karma to the web in some tiny way. Just remember, if you’re doing this to your phone, as of a few days ago it’s kind of illegal, but whatever. So is playing games via emulators.
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