#387: Tink to the past

It was such a simple idea to start with. These things always are.

I no longer dread the summer holidays the way I did when the kids were small — back when they required constant supervision and stimulation by the bucketload, when the need to coordinate six straight weeks of childcare between my wife and I, our respective parents and anyone else we could rope in meant we lived under the iron-fisted rule of a spreadsheet I would quickly come to detest. These days the boys are a lot more manageable. If a grandparent wants to take them for the odd day out here and there, or have them to stay for a few days, then great, but it’s no longer the please-god necessity it used to be. If I and Mrs HP are stacked up with work, they are more than capable of entertaining themselves for a few hours.

I still find myself scratching around for inspiration, of course, hunting for novel ways to spend this precious time with my rapidly-growing offspring, which I am belatedly realising is not going to last forever. You can’t just keep doing the same things over and over again; they have long since memorised the layout of our local aquarium, for example, and if a well-meaning relative takes them there one more time I fully expect the youngest to start naming all the crustaceans, if he hasn’t done so already. Besides, as kids grow older, their tastes start to change. Over time they begin to skew in a more grown-up direction, and will hew progressively closer, providing I’m doing my job properly lol, to my own.

They both play videogames, obviously. They would be mad not to, with the access they have to the damn things chez Hit Points. They have a reasonable interest in the medium’s history, jumping eagerly into the retro libraries on Switch Online without wrinkling their noses at the blocky pixels, muddy textures or slideshow framerates. But they have never experienced the hardware on which those classic games originally emerged. They do not know what it’s like to clonk a SNES cartridge into place, or hear the magical thunk of its power switch. They do not know the blissful soft eject of the PS1's lid; they have never passed a Wavebird to the next player in line for Monkey Target, or witnessed the melancholy animation of a save file being deleted on PS2. I could show them the world — original games on original hardware, warts and wonders and all, one console per week throughout the holidays. I thought this was a brilliant idea, not least because, as you’ve probably guessed from the state of the last few sentences, I love all that stuff, and have missed it terribly.

There was only one flaw in this idea. These beloved old workhorses rig up through Scart, or Component, or Composite or even RF, god help us, and there is not a single screen surviving at Hit Points Towers that will accept all that. What, then, would I need to hook classic consoles up to the LG OLED in my study? How would I go about doing that?

Like I said, a simple idea. And look where we are now.

I’d been aware of the name Retrotink for a while, though it was that tenuous sort of awareness — the sort that isn’t really awareness at all, that just means you’ve heard of something but don’t really know what it looks like, or does, or is for (see also MiSTer, the carburettor, and Watford). I would google the name every so often, get confused by the number of devices on offer, balk at the lofty sums of money involved, and get annoyed at the inability of seemingly the entire internet to explain what this fucking thing is and does in terms I could even vaguely understand. I would forget about it and go about my day. Now, though, I had a vested interest. I needed to learn, and to know. And so I did, and now I do. Sort of. I think.

So, here’s that succinct explanation I craved. A Retrotink converts signals from old consoles to new-fangled HDMI, and scales them to higher resolutions at a cost of precisely zero latency. (The Retrotink 4K, of which I am now a proud and slightly intimidated new owner, goes to 4K, obviously.) Just about every facet of the video signal can be finely customised, and CRT TV effects like scanlines etc overlaid, to authentically replicate not just the original look of the game, but its original look as you remember it, on whichever TV, in whatever dimly lit room, you first played it. This last point, I now realise, is the real allure of these things, their true magic. The reason they are so popular among the retro cognoscenti, and the reason for their lofty pricetags. They don’t just let you play old consoles on new TVs; in the process they also turn your TV into the most luxurious CRT ever made.

Settings can be saved as ‘profiles’, and saved to specific buttons on the device’s bulky remote for ease of switching. Happily for idiots like me, bundles of profiles made by members of the bustling Retrotink community are included on the SD card that comes with your purchase. There’s an intimidating selection of profiles on offer for each console, available in 4:3 and widescreen flavours, tweaked further for connections by Scart or Component etc. One particularly mad lad has devised a suite of profiles that mimic the screens of the legendary CRTs of the era: if you ever owned or merely lusted after a Sony KV-FV310 or Toshiba AF44, heaven awaits. This thing, man. I am still not entirely sure I understand it, like, but my word. This thing is brilliant.

I was not prepared for the mania the Retrotink 4K would inspire in me when I first took it out of its box, though in hindsight, knowing the way my brain works, I should have seen it coming. Ten days down the line, while I still plan to introduce the boys to one console per week over the holidays, showing them the satisfying thunks and clicks of OG hardware in loving, slightly overbearing detail, very few of these machines will be going back up in the roof when we’re done. Indeed, I have already made the necessary preparations to ensure they can stick around for years. Consoles and peripherals have been thoroughly cleaned, in some cases taken apart for a full valet service before reassembly. (Speaking of which: if you’ve never put a Wii Remote back together, you haven’t lived. Every button has a unique outline so it’s impossible to put one in the wrong hole, or even to put the right one in the wrong way round. A marvel of engineering, honestly. Absolute magic. Give it a go!)

The GameCube now connects over HDMI, and runs games off an SD card in a serial port on its underside that I had no idea even existed two weeks ago. The PS2 has a 2TB HDD in its belly, the Wii hooked up to its own over USB. I haven’t got the SNES down yet — I am saving that for last, since it’s my favourite — but am already exploring modern storage options and hoo boy, things have come a long way. (I should stress at this point that these storage devices only contain backups of games that I legitimately own, though bizarrely all of them appear to have converted themselves from PAL to NTSC in the disc-ripping process. Weird!)

I have played nothing but ‘retro’ games — sorry for the scare-quotes; I hate that term and always have — over the last ten days, and I genuinely can’t remember the last time I had so much fun. Part of it, I am sure, is that playing a game on the PS2 or GameCube etc transports me back to a simpler era, before I wrote about these things for a living. When there were just games I liked and didn’t, and I could sit and soak them up without mentally putting a score on them, internally drafting a paragraph about how to improve their onboarding, or looking for ways to squeeze a newsletter out of them. But it’s also just that they are all so pure. So unencumbered with the bloat and the cruft, the sad dads and RPG systems and best-practice hokum that so haunt the gaming landscape in 2026. I stuck on Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time at the weekend. A cutscene started and I instinctively reached for my phone, but it had ended and plonked me back in the game before I’d even got past the lock screen. Beautiful.

I love it here. I might stay for a bit. And you might find, in the weeks and months to come, that Hit Points takes the occasional trip down memory lane, devoting the odd subscriber edition to some beloved old banger that has set something off in me when revisiting it. Part of me feels a bit bad at the thought of turning these lovely old classics into #content, sure. But it’s better than writing about Xbox nonsense twice a week for the rest of time, eh. Back to Virtua Tennis 2 I go, then. See you in a bit.

(I wrote this last night. This morning, as soon as I'd sent some consulting work off to a client, I went up in the roof for the SNES. I think I may have a problem.)