Low-tech nostalgia goes high tech

We’ve all had that experience of staying up till 3am playing Tetris so frenetically that when you do finally drag yourself off to bed, all you see when you close your eyes are the tumbling blocks that have been burned into your retinas. Ms. Pac-Man used to do that to me, too, after hours at the skating rink dumping quarters into the machine (think: 1983). I still get the urge to play a few games when I come across a Ms. Pac-Man machine, and sometimes I even give in and waste a bunch of time and money.

A long time ago, clever geeks developed the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, which allows us to flash back to our nerdly childhoods by playing games on our PCs from companies with names that make you weep with sentimental longing for the past: Intellivision, Coleco, Atari. And now, those same geeks have figured out a way to run those hoary games on the drool-inducing Playstation Portable.

I dunno, it just makes my dorky little heart sing to know that really smart people are pulling all-nighters so that we can all wallow in disco-era nostalgia by manipulating chunky, 8-bit graphics on a piece of technology that looks like it was snatched from Captain Picard’s ready room. Geekiness doesn’t get any geekier than that.

[via Slashdot]