Mile
Zero

The lower-right corner of my desk, where I keep my retro console hardware, contains:

• A Dreamcast, yellowed
• An Nvidia Shield Portable, barely charges these days
• A GameBoy Pocket Color, lime green
• Two Nintendo DS systems, in stereotypical colors (pink for Belle, blue for me)
• A Nintendo 3DS, black
• Various controllers and power cables
• A GBA SP, red, with the original screen
• A GBA with an aftermarket screen, speaker, and USB-C battery pack, black
• An enormous Hori fight stick for the XBox 360, largely untouched

I wouldn't say I'm a collector so much as I just stopped getting rid of anything at some point. I was lucky enough to have held onto the systems that I bought in college, long before the COVID speculative bubble drove all the prices up. And most of these have sentimental value: I wasn't allowed to have anything that hooked up to the TV as a kid, but I saved up and bought an original GameBoy, and it got me through a lot of long car trips back in the day.

Still, this is a lot of stuff that I barely use, and most of which is redundant. So of course, I gave into my worst impulses, and ordered an Analogue Pocket.

A Brief Review of the Analogue Pocket

If you don't have original cartridges, the Pocket is hard to justify: emulation has reached the point where it may not be flawless, but it's certainly good enough, and there are much cheaper handhelds that can imitate more powerful consoles. But I do own about 20 GB/GBA carts that I go back to fairly frequently, and although I did rip them to ROM files last year just in case, I like playing them on actual hardware. About half of the systems listed above were purchased with that in mind.

A modded GBA will actually cost more than the Pocket in 2024, which is wild, and the result is an uneven experience. Retrofitted hardware is still old, meaning that the buttons on mine can be sticky, the d-pad is a little stiff, and I had to re-solder the power switch this winter. Obviously the Pocket might age poorly too, but if you're examining your options today and you don't actually want to do console repair as a hobby, it's probably the more reliable choice.

But the big draw on the Pocket is the screen, a high-range panel that's sized specifically to display classic GameBoy games with integer scaling (at a 10:1 ratio), including a number of uncanny display filters to mimic different original hardware color aberrations, refresh rates, and quirks. It's very good, and even on systems that don't round evenly to the 1600x1440 resolution, it's so sharp that you'd be hard-pressed to see any scaling errors.

You can, of course, also run ROMs and non-portable hardware systems on the Pocket through OpenFPGA plugins, as long as they don't exceed the complexity that the internal FPGA chips can model (topping out at around the 16-bit era, including some arcade machines like CPS-2). It does this quickly and accurately, and with relatively little fuss. I'm more suprised that it borrows some traditional emulation features for actual cartridges: since the Pocket runs its "virtual hardware" on an FPGA, it actually offers save states for physical media, which is frankly unhinged (but entirely welcome).

Permacomputing and modern ROMs

Uxn is a virtual machine designed by and for the Hundred Rabbits artist collective, a two-person team that lives on a boat. It's a stack-based graphical runtime with four colors, so more like a simplified assembly with SDL bindings than, say, a Forth. Like a lot of fantasy consoles, it runs "ROM" files even though there are obviously no actual read-only memory chips involved. In other words, there are a lot of aesthetic choices here.

This may seem like an unconnected topic, but Uxn was designed in conversation with gaming and its preservation. Hundred Rabbits had worked on iOS games and seen how they had a lifetime of about three years, between Apple's aggressive backwards incompatibility efforts and the complexity of the tech stack. They were inspired by the NES, as well as the history of game-specific virtual machines. Out of this World and the Z-machine, for example, are artifacts of an era where computing was so heterogenous that it made sense (even on limited, slow hardware) to run on a VM. This works: we have access to a vast library of text-based gaming history on modern platforms, because they were built from the start to be emulated.

There are two conceptual threads running through the design and community of Uxn. The first is permacomputing, shading into collapse computing: the idea that when we revert to an agrarian society, we'll still want to build and use computers based on leftover Z-80 or 6502 chips or something. This is, generously, nonsense. It's a prepper daydream for nerds, who imagine themselves as tech-priests of their local village.

The other thread is implementation-first computing, which comes out of the nautical experience of living with extremely limited connectivity. Devine Lu Linvega, the developer for Uxn, has a very good talk about the inspirations and thought process behind this. Living at sea, they can't rely on Stack Overflow to answer questions, and they certainly can't spare gigabytes of bandwidth to update your compiler or install dependencies. Whereas it takes about a week to write a Uxn interpreter, and from that point a person is basically self-sufficient and future-proof.

Most of us do not live on boats, or in a place where we can't get to MDN, so the emphasis on minimalism and self-implementation comes across as a little overdramatic. At the same time, I don't think it's entirely naive to see the appeal of Uxn as a contrast to the quicksand foundations of contemporary software design. I'm always tempted to be very smug about building for the web and browser compatibility, until I remind myself that every six months Safari breaks a significant feature like IndexedDB or media playback for millions of users.

In a very real sense, regardless of the abstract threads underpinning the philosophy of Uxn, what it really means is choosing a baseline where things are "good enough" and sticking with them — both in terms of the platform itself, but also the software it runs. It trades efficiency for resiliency, which is something you maybe can't fully appreciate until you've had cloud software fall over in transferring data between applications or generating backups.

The end of history

In addition to old GBA carts, this month I also started replaying Halo Infinite, a game that I think is generally underrated. It was panned by hardcore fans for a number of botched rollout decisions, but none of those matter much to me because the only thing I really wanted out of Halo is "a whole game that's made out of Silent Cartographer" and that's largely what Infinite delivers.

Unfortunately, sometime between launch and today, Microsoft decided that single-player Halo was not a corporate priority. So now the game starts in a dedicated multiplayer mode, and you have to wait for all that to load in before you can click a button and have the executable literally restart with different data. There's some trickery that it does to retain some shared memory, so the delay isn't as bad the second time, but I haven't been able to discover a flag or environment variable that will cause it to just start in single-player directly. It's a real pain.

I think about this a lot in the context of the modern software lifecycle, and I hate it. I don't think this is just me getting older, either. Every time my phone gets an OS upgrade, I know something is going to break or get moved around — or worse, it's going to have AI crammed into it somewhere, which will be A) annoying and B) a huge privacy violation waiting to happen. Eventually I just know I'm going to end up on Linux solely because it's the only place where a venture capitalist can't force an LLM to monitor all my keystrokes.

In other words, the read-only nature of old hardware isn't just a charming artifact. It ends up being what makes the retro experience possible at all. The cartridge (or ROM) is the bits that shipped, nothing more and nothing less. I'm never going to plug in Link's Awakening and find that it's now running a time-limited cross-promotion with a movie franchise, or that it's no longer compatible with the updated OS on my device, or that it won't start because it can't talk to a central server. It'll never get better, or worse. That's nostalgia, but it's also sadly the best I can hope for in tech these days.