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About Lofi Gaming

What is Lofi Gaming?

It is a site devoted to old-tech and low-spec games and machines. Old-tech covers everything like old computers, consoles, and stuff like Nintendo Game and Watch hand helds. Low-spec includes new machines, that are retro or old styled, at least in heart. This essentially means the Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advance, Neogeo Pocket, Wonderswan, and even to some extent the Dreamcast with its capacity for emulation.

Who are you?

I'm /|ndy. Otherwise known as andyk. It depends on whether or not I can use punctuation in my username :). You can find out more about me on my About Me page.

Why are you living in the 80s?

I'm not. I just like older machines more than new ones. Maybe in 15 years time I'll be into the XBox or whatever, but until then, I'm happy with my old stuff. Video games today are far more mainstream than they used to be, and in order to appeal to the mass-market often more thought is given to graphics and style than gameplay. That isn't to say all new games are crap, far from it, but originality and meat-and-potatoes quality has become less apparent.

Yes, I like the odd game of Metropolis Street Racer, or Half Life, but I still enjoy Run Baby Run and Gauntlet equally. I think maybe I like the GB, NGPC and WonderSwan so much as, besides being portable, they're not very high powered. As a result, more has to be given over to gameplay, as the graphics and sound can't be as flashy as they can on the Dreamcast, PS2 and PC, for example.

What about emulation?

Emulation is a dream come true for me. When I was younger, with my Speccy, there were thousands of games I wanted. I wanted a NES. I wanted a Master System. I even wanted a C64 (just to play Gilligans Gold on :P). But I had no money. Now I have all these things - so why emulate? Well, partly because of space. I can't have all my machines set up all the time. Partly because I can't find to buy all the games I would like. Partly because the loading times are much shorter :)

How did the site come about?

When I went to uni in 1996, I was given some free webspace (a staggering 1Mb of it too!). So I created my first site. But what could I write about? Speccies. And the Amiga. And Me. Not very exciting, I know, but it was the first step.

After a year, I started again, writing more about the Speccy, and less about the Amiga. My site was a Spectrum site, essentially. At this point, I wasn't into emulation, and being a student, I didn't have much money to just go out and buy up old consoles and games and all the things I wanted when I was 8. I didn't even have a PC, so the only emulation I could try was a Speccy emu on my Amiga (ZXAM). It didn't run full speed, and didn't run 128k games.

In 1998 I built myself a PC so I could use it to type up coursework. And I also found that it was powerful enough to run almost any emulator out at the time. And so I was suddenly heavily into emulation. A new site, an older version of the current one, was born in 1999. I still wrote about the Speccy. I always will, as it was my first computer and I loved it :).

But now, I also wrote about the world of Emulation - in particular, the emulation of 8 and 16-bit machines. I have little interest in N64 and PSX emulators.

After leaving Uni, I had a bit of money, and so built up my collection of old games machines. I bought a NGPC and a WonderSwan, and decided to write about them too.

So what's next?

I don't actually know. Not as far as the site is concerned anyway. I'll just keep adding to it. I have got unlimited webspace anyway :). I see the site as being 4 main sections. One for the Spectrum, one for emulation, one for my Museum and one for everything else. Not that I am quite that constricting with the borders though - everything links in really.

Why don't you write about XYZ?

Because I don't want to. If I don't enjoy writing about it, I won't. This website is a hobby, not a job. Sometimes bits are killed off (the Amiga section) or put on hold because I have lost interest. I want original features, and stuff I like on my site. I make the site for me, not for you. However, if you have suggestions about improvements I could make, please email me.

Why can't I see such-and-such a page?

I don't know. I have tried to make as much of the site as possible XHTML 1.0 compliant. Most browsers support this standard. I have tested most of my site on the following browsers without major problems:

• Internet Explorer 3.0 (WinNT4)
• Internet Explorer 4.0 (WinNT4, Win95, Win98, MacOS 8)
• Internet Explorer 5.0 (WinNT4, Win98)
• Internet Explorer 5.5 (WinNT4, Win98, Win2000)
• Internet Explorer 6.0 (WinNT4, Win98, Win2000)
• Pocket Internet Explorer (WinCE3)
• Opera 5.0 (Win98, Win2000, SuSE Linux 7.3)
• Opera 6.0 (Win2000)
• Netscape 4.78 (SuSE 7.3, Mandrake 7.0, Mandrake 8.0, MacOS 8)
• Mozilla 6 (SuSE 7.3, Mandrake 8.0, Mandrake 8.1)
• Konquerer (SuSE 7.3, Mandrake 7.0, Mandrake 8.0, Mandrake 8.1)
• K-Meleon (Win98, Win2000)
• Lynx (SuSE 7.3, Mandrake 8.0, FreeBSD, Win2000)
• Links (SuSE 7.3)
• Galleon (SuSE 7.3)
• StarOffice 5.2 (Win98, Mandrake 8.0, SuSE 7.3)
• StarOffice 6.0 (Win2000)