So I have this ‘retro’ arcade machine, probably got it about eleven years ago now. About six months ago I spent ages writing various utilities to update the game list, now has around seven thousand games, basically every arcade game ever up to the millennium. All mostly work and play fine. I got a Chinese hard drive with pretty much every console game on it up to about the last ten years, managed to purge pretty much everything I wanted over to the arcade machine, plus I have all the console games ready to play on this drive.

I’ve now also got ‘The Spectrum’ which is a perfect emulation of the old ‘Speccy’, including all the rubber keys. Comes with a load of games, plus I got a USB drive with about forty-thousand more on it.

But do you know what? The games are crap. Colour clash, awful sound, glitchy sprites and appalling game play. Am I taken back to my childhood self, no.

I can’t go back to a time when I was fourteen years old, at ‘Spellbound amusements’ on ‘Whiteladies Road’, where every lunchtime was spent living off a king sized Mars bar and piling up ten pence’s on the screen of ‘Dragons Lair’.

You can recreate the tech, but you can’t recreate the memories.