Seob

HuckleCat, on Mon Feb 6, 2012 9:31 AM, said:

Emphasis mine. This is really the heart of it. With '90s PCs, you don't have a single, named product like a Commodore 64 or TRS-80. Instead, you have a collection of named components that combine to form a single node of nostalgia.

And believe me, it's just as "classic" as the '80s microcomputers that dominate discussion here, with just as much powerful nostalgia. If you need proof, just check out these subsections of the DOSBox forums:

http://vogons.zetafl...db6d60b7f26ca4c
http://vogons.zetafl...db6d60b7f26ca4c

There's a thriving subculture of retro-PC enthusiasts, myself among them, who delight in recreating pre-millennial systems. 3dfx, Aureal, Gravis - these names carry as much weight there as Applied Engineering and Beagle Bros. do here.

In fact, I recently finished my own PC project, a Dell Dimension XPS D333 heavily enhanced to be a late-90's gaming powerhouse (Voodoo2 SLI, SB Live!, P2-333 replaced by Celeron-500, Windows 98). It runs everything from Half-Life to Deus Ex like a champ and I couldn't be happier. Well, maybe if I could get EAX to work with System Shock 2 without a noticeable performance hit...

There's a tendency among the '80s flavor of retrocomputing enthusiasts to view the '90s with disdain, and I think it's (1) based mostly on emotion and (2) sorely misguided. The '90s were just as important as all the other decades that came before it for driving computing forward. Less fundamental, perhaps, but no less important and no less meaningful to people who became personally attached to the hardware of the era.

Dreamcast: not quite old enough to be retro, not quite new enough to be modern.

This is how I group the generations:

Antique = mid-1970's to mid-1980's

Retro = mid-1980's to mid-1990's

Recent = mid-1990's to mid-2000's

Modern = mid-2000's to present

The labels may change but the grouping will always stay the same for me. I prefer to label them by the predominant gameplay style of the era (arcade, platform, free-roaming 3D, etc.) but since the topic is more about age I thought I'd not confuse the issue. I actually lump everything from the first PlayStation to new consoles in the same category because they all feel the same to me.

ls650, on Sat Feb 4, 2012 12:36 PM, said:

Thats basically my take too. Its not a logical argument per se, but I also have a hard time looking at anything with a CD/DVD drive as retro. Too me retro is synonymous with carts.