Welcome to Copperhead Retro
The purpose of this website is to relay my personal voyage in retro computing. Sadly, most of the computers from the 1980s wound up in e-waste. This is a huge ecological issue but rather than get into environmental politics, I want to focus on the difficulty in acquiring real hardware as opposed to emulation.
Why use emulators?
- Cost - I'm not going to mince words.The price of real hardware is getting expensive. Anyone scouring E-Bay will soon discover you can easily spend hundreds, or even thousands of dollars on 40-year-old hardware.
- Parts - This can vary. Old parts and peripherals are equally hard to find and equally just as expensive as the machine itself. Consider a disk drive for a Commodore 64, loading software from tape can become tedious, furthermore games were often released on diskette. Apple II disk drives are often as expensive.
- Maintenance - When finding machines and peripherals on E-Bay, you may encounter that unfortunate caveat "untested". This is a huge problem! What if there are bad power supplies? Or bad capacitors? This is a big deal! Not all of us know how to solder or de-solder components. Not only that. What component needs to be replaced? Not all of us know what to look for.
Conclusion: I recommend emulators!
- Most emulators are free! While some emulators require Patreon membership, or donations, I highly recommend paying that price!
- Most emulators are good enough to run authentic software images.
- Emulation requires no maintenance from the user, or risk of electronic failure.
- Authentic media is often difficult to find. This is a bigger deal than the actual hardware. Working tapes and diskettes can be extremely difficult to find.