The Glossary

8-bit

The generation of machines built around 8-bit processors — the NES, Master System, Spectrum, C64. Chunky pixels, bleepy music, and where a lot of us started.

16-bit

The next leap — the Mega Drive (Genesis), SNES and Amiga. Smoother sprites, richer sound, and the console wars of the early '90s.

Abandonware

Old software no longer sold or supported by anyone. Still copyrighted in most cases — 'abandoned' is about commerce, not law.

Attract mode

The looping demo an arcade cabinet plays when nobody's feeding it coins — high-score table, a snatch of gameplay, 'INSERT COIN' blinking away.

Boot sale

A car-boot sale — the great British Sunday-morning ritual where a Mega Drive and ten games can still turn up in a cardboard box for a fiver.

Cartridge

A game in a plastic shell you slot straight into the machine. Instant loading, and you could blow in it when it played up (don't, actually — it doesn't help).

Chiptune

Music made with the actual sound chips of old machines — or in that style. The reason a level theme can live in your head for thirty years.

CRT

Cathode-ray tube — the heavy glass telly old games were made for. Scanlines, a soft glow, and pixel art that looks how the artists intended.

Demoscene

A subculture of coders and artists making jaw-dropping audiovisual 'demos' to show off what a machine can really do. Pure craft, no game attached.

Emulator

Software that pretends to be an old machine so its games run on a modern one. Legal grey areas live in the ROMs, not the emulator itself.

Homebrew

New games (or tools) made by hobbyists for old hardware, long after the shops moved on. Proof the scene never really stopped.

Light gun

A plastic pistol you point at the screen — Duck Hunt, Time Crisis. It works by reading the CRT's beam, which is why most won't fire at a flat modern telly.

NTSC / PAL

The two big TV standards. NTSC (US/Japan) ran faster; PAL (UK/Europe) often ran a touch slower with black borders. Why some ports felt sluggish over here.

Peripheral

Anything you plug in that isn't the machine or a game — a light gun, a steering wheel, a memory card, that mad Power Glove.

Pixel art

Images built deliberately, pixel by pixel. A constraint born of tiny memory that became an art form all its own.

POKE

A line of code that writes a value straight into memory — famously typed in from magazines to give yourself infinite lives. The original cheat.

RF / SCART

How old consoles hooked to the telly. RF (the aerial socket) was fuzzy; SCART, the big rectangular plug, was the good stuff — a proper picture.

Region lock

Hardware or software stopping a game from one part of the world running on a machine from another. The reason import gaming got fiddly.

ROM

Read-only memory — and, loosely, a file holding a copy of a cartridge's data. The chip that held the game that never changed.

Speedrun

Finishing a game as fast as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, often with routes and tricks the makers never dreamed of. A whole sport now.

Sprite

A single moving image the hardware draws on top of the background — your character, an enemy, a bullet. Machines could only push so many before they flickered.

Tape loading

Loading a game off a cassette — a screech of data, wobbly loading bars, and a five-minute wait that occasionally ended in 'R Tape loading error'.

Type-in

A game printed as pages of code in a magazine that you keyed in by hand, bug for bug, then saved to tape. Retro Delights runs on that spirit.

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