Hello and welcome to Retro Tat! This cosy little corner of the wibbly wobbly web is a somewhat vague and very likely misguided attempt to examine and to a degree review a fairly broad range of hand-held or direct to TV electronics and games software for a wide selection of hardware that all fall under the label of “retro tat”.

Okay, so what counts as Retro Tat then?
Well to be honest, it’s pretty much anything that takes my fancy! More specifically, the title refers to a mixture of things such as remakes and compilations of classic games for various consoles and computers, a selection of cheap and worryingly cheerful LCD games and Direct to TV (or DTV) devices. The link between them is that, although they might emulate an older game or machine, none of these devices or programs are entirely retro as such, which hopefully explains the “pretending to be retro since 2009″ tagline that the site carries. I’m not sure that makes a lot of sense, so I’ll try to clarify a little with a quick comment on each of the main fields that Retro Tat will be pitching a tent in.

Remakes and compilations
With the constant interest in retro there have been a significant number of these around, ranging from compilations of classic Atari 2600 or Commodore 64 games through to current or at least previous generation titles that take 1980s games and drag them, occasionally kicking and screaming, into the new millennium; this category is limited somewhat by the hardware I have access to, at the moment I’ve got hardware to look at titles for the PC, Xbox, PS2 and Wii.

LCD games
Along with the literally vast number of Tetris clones and Sudoku games that are available from market stalls, car boot fairs and all good pound emporiums there are all manner of simple electronic games in the wild that have been specifically developed in the same vein as Nintendo’s Game And Watch titles, items that have usually been released as promotional toys for companies such as McDonalds. Almost all of the games use displayed reminiscent of Nintendo Game And Watch titles, with elements on the LCD display lit up in sequendce to simulate movement.

Direct to TV games
DTV games are more often than not clones of older hardware that has been reduced to a single chip and then mounted within a facsimile of a piece of classic hardware and these devices range from simulations of the Atari 2600 running on a clone of the NES to full-blown Sega Megadrive emulations. Not everything this site covers is based on directly reproducing or emulating ye olde games however, since the technologies developed for those DTV units have sometimes been parlayed into products that aren’t directly retro – but using some NES On A Chip hardware to drive a cheap and cheerful dance mat or technology based on the Sega Megadrive for a cheap knock off of the Nintendo Wii (which might sound bizarre but there are several and I already have one) brings it pretty squarely into Retro Tat’s “remit”.

Retro Tat will, circumstances allowing, be updated once every couple of weeks on what I’m arbitrarily titling as “Tat Thursday” (it used to be on Tuesdays but they’re too close to the previous weekend and nothing was getting written!) mostly because it’s going to happen on a Thursday and tat of some sort will be added to the site.

That’s nice… so what about the author then?
Oh, I’m just one of those people who has a bit of an interest (well okay, it’s somewhere between a passion and obsession) with the computers and consoles of yesteryear. Although the software and hardware covered in Retro Tat doesn’t really fall into that category directly, a lot of it takes inspiration, design elements and occasionally far more from those machines and their software.

My “qualifications” for the job are a quarter of a century playing and developing computer games (mostly for 8- and 16-bit computers and almost always as a hobbyist) and about fifteen years of on-the-job experience writing about games and technology for fan-produced magazines, assorted websites including Oldschool Gaming (which I also act as editor for) or RGCD and magazines such as Retro Gamer. The writing of Retro Tat is something of a labour of love, one I don’t expect to ever finish as long as there are DTV devices to play with and pound shops or markets to sell them to me. Running out of money or being murdered by my partner for having so much tat around the house, that might stop me…!