Posts Tagged ‘Retro Gaming’

2026 – OFF THE CHAIN IN ALL THE BEST WAYS!

Posted: 10/23/2026 in Uncategorized
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2026 has been probably one of the busiest and travel heavy years on record for me, though most of it was based on family vacations and weekend trips. However this year, the family vacation and The Midwest Gaming Classic overlapped which had me going from New Hampshire to Wisconsin to South Carolina and back to NH in a weeks time and that ended up just being the start!

The latest trip however was to Retro World Expo that took place in Hartford, CT back in September and was an absolute blast in so many ways! Getting to be a featured guest of the show was humbling and putting us right in the middle of the convention made our booth hard to miss. The video above shows my recount of the weekend, but one of the coolest things that has happened this year isn’t just about my perspective, but those of the attendees and how many impressions they’ve made of my/our projects.

And by this, in particular, I mean the amount of coverage said projects have received from a variety of You Tubers and other social media influencers in the Retro Gaming fields. While it’s always cool finding yourself in the background of someone’s game hunting video or things like that, these past 2 years of MGC and RWX have had us front and center to some of the biggest Retro Tech creators out there and it’s mind-blowing to me to see the response they receive!

So, just so I could get a feel for the scope of how much other creators have supported Downing’s Basement (and by extension, BitBuilt) through their content, I’ve compiled a list of embedded videos by creator, that have directly showcased a project of mine at MGC 24, 25 & 26 as well as RWX 25 & 26.

I’ll include time stamps if you wish to skip ahead on some of the longer form videos, but I do highly recommend giving these videos a watch and help support the creators as much as possible!

And I know it is difficult to actually quantify how much of an impact some of these actually made, especially with some being over 30 minutes into a video, it still means a lot to me that they made it there to begin with and will always be counted as a win to me!

John Riggs

Lazy Game Reviews – 33:07 & 12:39

Macho Nacho – 10:15

RAD Junk – 2:27

Russ Lyman – 21:27

Retro Rick

Ray Out There – 41:35

And I’m sure if I looked, I’d find several others, but this is just a taste of the kind of stuff that keeps me in love with this hobby and all the people in it! Though I wouldn’t mind if 2027 was a bit less hectic, we’ve got some very cool momentum that I doubt is going to slow down any time soon! So stay excited people! We’ve got a lot more to come!

A First Step To A New Frontier, Pi Style

Posted: 05/14/2015 in General News
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IMAG1557For the past 3 or 4 years now, the Raspberry Pi has been a huge asset to the maker communities across the world. Within the past couple of months, a new, more powerful version of the Pi has come to market and I felt it was time to get my hands one.

For those who don’t know, the Raspberry Pi is basically a mini Lynx based computer system that is about the size of a credit card with a decent amount of power to run basic programs for a variety of different applications. One of those applications that holds great interest to me since it first came out though was its ability to run retro gaming emulators, which of course then transitioned into a portable gaming system.

The only downside was that the emulation was limited to about the Super Nintendo and prior consoles due to it’s hardware limits. But now, the Pi 2 is on the market with 6X the speed of the original and 2X the RAM. This has made it capable of running PS1 and N64 games at full speed which has now peaked my interest. And the best part, the system itself is only $35.

But, this of course is going to have its learning curves. I’ve never even used Lynx and there is a fair amount of coding that has to go into place to make this work as a portable system, but tutorials are vast on You Tube and the only issue I see is going to have the time to do it. I’ve just about completed the N64 portable commission (hopefully closing it up this weekend) and after that is complete, I have to finish off my OUYA project. So it’s most likely going to take some time before I get to this, but I really do want to see how something like this would come out and the designs are already being made for it.

So maybe by the end of the year I can start to play around with this, but at this pace I don’t really know how long it’s going to take to get to it. But at least I’ve got the idea in place and we’ll see how she turns out when it happens.