In my experience relatively few of the components on old computers and game consoles are particularly failure prone and most of them can have a future contingency plan:

- Electrolytic capacitors can be replaced relatively easily. Some people are replacing them with solid state capacitors to try to improve reliability and avoid corrosion from leaked electrolyte.

- Batteries likewise can be replaced easily, and you can usually fit a socket in there if there isn't already one.

- Damaged traces on PCBs (usually caused by leaky capacitors or batteries) can often be patched. It is definitely not the easiest work, but if patching a few traces is all that's needed to get something back into working order, then it's probably worth it.

- Some of the old AC-DC transformer blocks are dying or horribly inefficient anyways. Most of them are outside of the machine and can be replaced with readily available modern equivalents, so this one is extremely easy. For old computers, ATX supplies are easy to adapt to pre-ATX standards and even some different machines entirely since they provide some of the most commonly-needed voltage rails (some new supplies lack -12V but it will be listed on the PSU specs either way). There's even very small form factor ATX supplies using GaN based transformers that can fit pretty much anywhere.

- CD-ROM lasers are definitely starting to wear down, but there's quite a lot of optical drive emulators available nowadays for a variety of machines, with more showing up every year. As long as small-order PCB manufacturers remain around, it will probably remain viable to make more of these ODEs.

- Likewise, floppy disks and their drives can fail for a variety of reasons, but floppy drive emulators are at the point of reasonable maturity and can support a lot of machines, too. I'm sure there's some weird standards where emulation may be spotty (thinking of NEC) but for typical Macs, PCs and Commodore computers I imagine most of the ground is covered already.

It is true that a lot of hardware is failing and some of it is not so easily replaced, but honestly, I think if we wanted to, we could keep a good amount of the retro hardware working for possibly hundreds of years longer. The real question is if enough people will deem it worth their time and money to do so. But then again, I suppose it's not much different in that regard from vintage automobiles.

There will always be a place for emulation, probably a much larger one at that. Not only does emulation give a very nice long-term solution to keeping software libraries accessible, they offer plenty of advantages over actually using old hardware, and it's obviously a lot more accessible.

P.S.: to whoever does eventually come into possession of the machines I worked on next, I apologize for my soldering. In fairness, some of these old boards are stubborn even with a ton of flux.

The optical drive emulators are great but sad: being able to play games with original disks is half the fun, IMO

>- Some of the old AC-DC transformer blocks are dying or horribly inefficient anyways. Most of them are outside of the machine and can be replaced with readily available modern equivalents, so this one is extremely easy.

Except the commodore ones that fry the computer when they stop working.

I believe the Commodore 64 power supply I am using I ordered from c64psu.com. I did not evaluate the quality in any way, but years down the line it hasn't failed me. So, at least working replacements are available, and while they're not necessarily cheap, it's probably worth it considering you're definitely right about the fact that the Commodore ones tend to fail in pretty ugly ways.

re: FPGA, the Analog Pocket with an Everdrive also works great. I use it to play GB/GBC/GBA games on my TV via its dock. Sadly, those don't support sleep and stuff but that's worth it.

Why bother with an Everdrive on an Analogue Pocket? Mine has only seen a cartridge once, just because my partner happened to have an old GB game she wanted to see if her save had survived on, otherwise it runs entirely off SD.

I guess it's mostly because I already had it? That's a good point though.

Not a bad reason, especially if you have saves on it. I'm sure there's a way to transfer them and make it work but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't perfectly straightforward so I can totally see not finding it worth the effort.

I never had a Game Boy, back in the day I was the kid tethered to the power cord with his Game Gear. I almost bought the adapter, but then I realized none of my games had saves so I had no reason to want to use the real carts.

The save transfer is very simple. You just copy them to the correct folder.

I already had a GBA Everdrive but I picked a GB/C one up because for about a year after release, the FPGA cores didn't support the display emulation features of the Pocket, which is a good chunk of the reason I bought mine. I believe they are now all fully supported though. The Pocket's sleep doesn't really work with flash carts either, so arguably the core + SD card route is now the better option, though I still own my AGS-101 model SP and GB micro, and it's cool to play on those still sometimes.

Real Time Clock support for GBA games that need it. The OpenFPGA core doesn’t support it.

There are also companies like Analogue who are producing high quality clones which will keep gamers (mostly) happy for at least another generation.

Analogue makes FPGA-based emulators. These are pretty cool because they can eliminate a number of downsides with software game console emulation while still retaining some of the upsides, and versus pure hardware clones, they can be updated and patched, either to fix bugs or add new targets. Another bonus of FPGAs is that they're accessible to hobbyists. I don't know what the current preferred solution is but a while ago people were buying DE10 Nano boards for running MiSTer, which could support a large variety of cores.

MiSTER is going strong and the recent release of the excellent-but-confusingly-named MiSTER Pi [1] board has brought the cost of entry down considerably. After I do some more SD card shuffling and verify game compatibility I plan on selling my N64 and Saturn and using OEM controllers with my MiSTER Pi. Unfortunately the Altera Cyclone FPGA in it doesn't have the horsepower to run anything beyond fifth-gen systems so a new platform would be required for the Dreamcast, Gamecube, and PS2. The common refrain from FPGA enthusiasts regarding these systems is that because the hardware has many more layers of abstraction they're less dependent on cycle-accurate timing than older consoles so the juice might not be worth the squeeze as far as building HDL cores for them is concerned.

[1] https://retroremake.co/pages/store

> they're less dependent on cycle-accurate timing than older consoles > so the juice might not be worth the squeeze as far as building HDL > cores for them is concerned.

There's also the question of the huge amount of engineering effort required to recreate the more advanced platforms.

The Replay2 board should provide both a much more capable FPGA and loads of RAM bandwidth to go with it. (Finishing touches are apparently being made to the prototype board layout, and production is slated for the Spring)

And for anyone who thought FPGA gaming was a new phenomenon, work on the original Minimig FPGA recreation of the Amiga started in January 2005 - 20 years ago!

It's worth nothing that while they do eliminate many of the drawbacks with emulation, FGPA solutions are still not 1:1 recreations of consoles.

Yeah, totally fair. I was actually debating whether "clone" was appropriate. I've also struggled with how to explain how my Pocket works to friends who don't know what FPGA means. "It's like emulation but ..."