In the past I squinted to see the screen in sunlight. In the present I squint to see this screenshot in native resolution.

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   \\ (slash@cdrom.tokyo)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 10:17:58 JST \\

   Old man rambles at clouds time.

   When I was a kid, one of the most persistent urban myths that went around in school was the existence of the ‘Phantom’, a secret gaming console in testing that you could plug a game for any system into and you could play. It was fantastical, and ridiculous, and the kind of thing that everyone sincerely wanted to believe that even one kid’s uncle was legit and the whispers were true and all gamers would be able to lay the console war to rest because what mattered was we all got to play the games we love together.

   Obviously this wasn’t true (the story was so powerful that a company half a decade later tried to capitalize on the name and actually make a console with it) but late in the 4th grade, I accidentally discovered emulators, and for the first time it kind of felt true. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t exactly the same, it required effort to find the games out there in some of the darker corners of the internet at a time that pop up blockers weren’t really a thing yet, but I could play these games. All the cool games I’d heard from friends on systems I’d never played or had in my house, I could find out about them, I could try them, I could learn the history of this art form I loved called games by taking it in though my hands one at a time. You’d better believe that’s exactly what I did. I became a ludologic encyclopedia and I didn’t regret it for a moment.

   Time passes, and now we are approaching the age of the FPGA, and that mythical system, the Phantom, is real, or at least close enough in practical terms. Today I got an Analogue Pocket, and with the right adapters I can plug in not only all my old game boy games, but many of the other portable systems of the time too, and the accuracy is nigh-perfect, and the collective will of the internet means we can even reprogram these FPGAs to support even more old systems, and through software play back the classics from a wide cross section of them in a much more precise, true to intent way.

   But it’s kind of funny, because I held that thing in my hand, considering what to play first with the history of handheld gaming at my fingertips, which cartridge to dig out, which cores to load onto the system, which classics to give the honor… and the inaugural title I chose to play is the same game of my very own that I first clacked into the cartridge slot of my precious transparent game boy pocket when I was a kid: Bomberman GB. It just felt right, and even with all the other nostalgic games that made my childhood at my fingertips tempting me- I had a great time.