HPR4765: BruCON interview 3: Awesome retro

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Awesome Space Hilversum https://awesomespace.nl/ Awesome Space is open every Friday for anyone to play great classic games. We have over 100 retro consoles, home computers, and arcade machines playable in space. So come over NEXT game night to explore the Awesome Space. We are located in the Game Capital of the Netherlands. Bring friends, play games, and have fun. Provide feedback on this episode .

November 6, 2026Duration unavailable

In brief

Episode summary

Kristoff interviews RJ from the Awesome Retro Foundation at the BruCON cyber security conference in Belgium. They discuss the foundation's mission to preserve retro gaming history, the tactile importance of physical controllers, and the vanishing art of electronic component repair for vintage hardware.

Takeaway 1The Awesome Retro Foundation aims to keep retro gaming accessible to everyone through interactive play rather than just observation.

Physical interactivity is vital to the retro experience, emphasizing the unique feel and responsiveness of vintage controllers like Sega.

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Adapted from “HPR4765: BruCON interview 3: Awesome retro” by Hacker Public Radio, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This transcript was generated by speech recognition and the summary and chapters by AI, so they can contain errors. BestPodcast is not affiliated with the creator. These adaptations are available under the same license.

This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,765 for Friday the 6th of November 2026. Today's show is entitled BruCON interview 3 Awesome Retro. It is part of the series interviews. It is hosted by Kristoff and is about 27 minutes long. It carries a clean flag. The summary is Kristoff talks to RJ of Awesome Retro about retro gaming and the art of repairing old game consoles.

Hi everybody. Welcome to an exciting new episode of Hacker Public Radio. My name is Kristoff. In this show we continue the series of interviews done at BruCON 2026. BruCON is a cyber security conference here in Belgium but it does host a number of side activities that are more in the hacker scene. That is hacker as in the HP R meaning of the word hacker. In this interview I talked to RJ from the Awesome Retro Foundation about retro gaming and the arts of repairing old electronics. In this case old game consoles.

Enjoy. Next interview good well afternoon RJ. Hi. Hi. Let's introduce us. Yes. Hi. I'm RJ. She they pronounce I'm here with a foundation Awesome Retro slash Awesome Space. The foundation that that keeps retro gaming available to everybody. Well, to be frank we're at BruCON which is a security conference but being as a hacker conference they have some other stuff here too. We seen was a hacker space here. We seen lock picking etc. and you do the the retro gaming art. It seems to be a very popular thing I have noticed with a lot of people actually have a watching party they come to play games.

Yes. It's actually been a problem sometimes. People who came to sit with some retro consoles and just completely forgot the time. You actually are you're not the first time I felt you are BF from the beginning of BruCON of actually I don't think the first one but very in the beginning but yes. I believe I heard this is our the foundation's 15th time being here. And this is BruCON 0x12 and that's well means 18. That's everybody knows who little bit who does it how was the hex.

So I Okay. So so you do retro gaming. That means you have a room here full of games. That being console games computer games. Both actually. Because gaming started out on the home computer. So the original hackers started making fun games for it when after we found out that Pong was a thing. Yeah. So we have a whole bunch of home computers set up in order of release. So from the ZX Spectrum all the way up to a Apple iMac from 2008 2007. 1984 1985 something like that.

That is a that is a 81 which you have already one. It's somewhere around there. I'm not very good with dates but we did label them all. So we can go downstairs and check. So you actually have how many equipment how many games do you have here now? Oh that's a very good question. I think we brought 30 screens. So we probably have 28 setups set up. 28 games in total. That Yes. That's a combination of computers and consoles. Yes. So consoles being starting with I guess the old one being I don't know if you have Pong up on here or if you have Pong.

We actually do have an old Pong machine. Okay. So that's probably the oldest that we have set up today. We do have the uh Fairchild Channel F machine in storage right now. Um that is I think the very very first cartridge based system. As far as I know from gaming remember from console gaming the first consoles were one game. Or or perhaps two if you're lucky at the the tape or the cassette things were actually came late. Absolutely. Yes. So the Pong machine that we have they um were made for a very long time because they were very inexpensive to produce.

So they sold well at a good margin. So they kept selling for well after actual consoles had come out. The consoles being the one with the cassettes being Atari 2600 like that. Okay. And in addition to that you have also arcade machines but if I'm got correct part of the part of the arcade machines were done by the collab the maker space or the fab lab here and Mac of an but that's not something you you don't have a cooperation well this is the thing for BruCON but this is not part of your normal setup.

No not part of our normal setup. No. We do have um arcade cabinets at the space. So cabinet is the that's the big yeah exactly with the joysticks and the buttons yeah. Um and in that cabinet you can put any device or any game that you want I don't know if that's there's multi arcade machine emulators MAMEs that do that but usually the original ones had one game in it. And that tried to take as many quarters from the youth as Yeah yeah. But that means for every game you need to have this they needed to design a different cabinet.

Yes. Absolutely. not easy for you to find them because I guess after a while that you get thrown away or you get reused like perhaps Uh some of them might get reused yes. The signage might be replaced but the shape of the cabinet was very much a part of the marketing for a machine because you go into an arcade hall and it's all the same machines and then there's one that's really weird looking and you're like I wonder what that game is. But yes the boards uh if if the machines get stored improperly the boards can rust up or the wood can soak up water.

So actually well just finding retro games is more than just finding stuff. It's actually restoring stuff and actually well first you need to find them I guess. Absolutely. Yes. You go you go on eBay everything else or something. Is that how do you actually specialized website or to like just find random that perhaps slow closes down and they find the old retro cabinet somewhere in the back that they forgot about it and For sure that happened sometimes where something closes down and they're like oh we need to close dig out everything from our storage and they turn up with something.

But mostly it's through either collectors whose collection has grown too big or they get married and their partner is like I can't deal with all of this or just people who are done with the collection and want to give it away to a worthy cause. Okay. And some stuff we buy but we try to use the very limited funds that we getting through people who you are a strict thing as they say foundation. A non-profit foundation. Non-profit organization you you actually so in essence you kind of like the you're a museum but not a museum in the sense that the museum you go to museum and you watch it.

I mean Yes. So there are more retro gaming museums which are very important and have very rare and interesting stuff. But because there those things are so rare you can very rarely actually touch them. And so for us the most important part about a game is that it's interactive. That you can actually play it. Exactly. So you need to play it. You need to feel the way that controller feels in your hand and the way that the buttons push back against you or not. The Sega controllers are very squishy.

And that's very the responsiveness of the game and feeling how it goes. That it's really playing playing the feeling of playing a game. That's what you do here. That's giving people actually the Yeah. Giving it back to them as they are. And they're they're oh my god that was my first console. Come come play with me. This is my this was like the game that I played for hours as a kid. Yeah. And people share that because play is such an important part of culture that often gets forgotten.

Uh how we have we have museums for art and other things that you can look at but play the way the way that play tag on the street is different between cultures. Yeah. And so it's very important to keep this kind of play available to people so that we know what it was actually like. Uh uh being that okay people can actually touch and use it that means some they will get damaged sometimes. Absolutely. Sometimes it gets damaged. We also go to festivals to gain a little bit of funds to keep our hacker space funded and so yeah sometimes some drinks fall on it or dust gets inside the machine but we have a very dedicated crew of people who like to repair stuff and in that way that keep it available again.

That's really repair the old way. Electronics repair these days electronics repair is just you plug out a PCB you put in another PCB board and then okay that works again. Okay. It's really repair as being taking out components a lot of these capacitors have blown up. You have to replace the capacitors. You have to clean up the mess they made and then you have to really do the hard work of electronics the old way. And if an IC breaks a chip it's really hard to get them because they're not being produced anymore because they're all tiny tiny now.

Oh yeah that's an interesting point. That that what you do what you do BJ's or something or do you find other replacement chips or It's we try to find replacement chips sometimes. We keep older boards that are already broken as donors for new for different boards. And a lot we also have people who are really good with oscilloscopes and they can just figure out exactly what's wrong with it maybe tweak it in some way to get it working again. The really hacker mantra Yeah. But every once in a while it's just you have to accept that this is a shame and another thing that place it somewhere in the hope that maybe you can use it again later for another one.

Yeah you put in a funeral or something. Yeah. So perhaps we'll go a little bit over the history of games. So you kind of had the So the consoles were one game that you had the consoles for multiple games. PC well not PC I guess then you had the home computer were good at gaming like the Amiga Atari and the Commodore 64. I think that's later or is that older or do they part overlap actually? Uh they they do overlap. I think the C64 and those are right around the same time as no they're before the Atari cartridge based system.

So this 2600 and the Junior I think they're I think the C64 was just before that. And then you probably so you had okay the consoles then you had the the computers then you have the new consoles Xbox Sony PlayStation etc. etc. that Yep. How difficult or easy or difficult are the new ones to repair because I guess they're more computer now than just console or I guess. Yeah and So a lot of them are actually mostly just computers in a sense. The PlayStation is it has a central processing unit and a hard drive and a graphics component on it.

I think the Xbox tried to actually just be a Windows PC for a little while. Uh but I think they might have stepped back from that again because that means it repair becomes difficult or or you could say they probably they were sold some many of them you could probably find some other thing that you could take out the chip or take out the PCB from the one and put in the other one. Yeah for sure because there are so many replacement parts. It's quite easy to find but I think if you would try to start doing individual repairs like surface mounted devices you take weeks just to find which component has actually broken on there.

Yeah because there are not a lot troubleshooting tools on that neither or probably they probably were never repairs are pretty probably were never designed to be repaired also. Probably not. No. Just make a game make a game and when it's done then you throw it away and you get yourself the next generation anyway. Planned obsolescence might might be a thing. I'm not accusing anybody of anything but Okay but then again games are one of those things that do use your computer capabilities as much as possible.

So it's not really if you could call planned. Yeah. At some point you need to have a new device to get new possibilities. It's actually interesting to see how these older consoles because there were so little in there are so easy to repair to relatively to the newer consoles. The newer consoles are oh it's broken. Take out the whole hard drive and replace it or take out the whole graphics component and replace that. While on the older consoles you can just oh it's this little potentiometer that's 5 cm high.

You can just take it out by hand. When did game consoles actually became digital? Did the first I think the first Pong was probably an analog device. For sure. I don't know. What did the game console and the the thing that you saw in the arcade halls? Mhm. Were they just boards with all logic controls on that? I'm not entirely sure how it evolved but I know of the JAMMA boards which are the older arcade boards. Those are definitely like big green plates and sometimes they were stacked three four five high completely full of integrated circuits of computer chips just row up on row up on row of chips.

Okay. Let's take something else. So you are you put your you make your games available here or some other place. How do people react to that except the thing like yeah except for that. How do kids react? Kids react in a very interesting way. It's as as soon as they recognize something from the games that they play they immediately love it and they'll pick it up and play it for as long as their attention span allows them. What does it recognize recognize you mean like the the gameplay or the the figures or the the figurine or the Mostly the characters.

If they see a Mario it's like oh my god it's Mario it's Mario but dad look it's Mario. It's like yeah yeah it's Mario. And then the dad probably wasn't aware that Mario actually that Mario still exists now of course. That's one of the Yeah. Nice thing about certain of those characters. They have gone on for very long time. Yeah. So that means the kid now sees a Mario that could be the first game that his parent actually played. Yeah absolutely. That's what I said it's quite astonishing if you think about it.

Yeah. No the longevity of Mario is quite unique in that it's like a like a really I was going to ask how common is that but that's an exception. Mario is an exception and there's like the original characters where you have Mario and Sonic like the original console war between Nintendo and Sega. They've both survived to today and there's a lot of companies who've tried to bring their characters back and I might be forgetting one that's really obvious now but but it's never really worked. They never had the same appeal to people.

Yeah. Yes. I guess that's But for gameplay does kids still have that I know what it is or something because probably more games are more interactive and more than the older games that had limited possibilities. Yeah. I don't know the remember watching video last week on on games. Um the from going to 2D to 3D That was a point. Can kids go back to 2D? And still enjoy it? I think so. I think it very much depends on the gameplay and how willing a child is to set aside their uh, uh gained experience.

Uh, but there are still 2D games being released today on consoles. So, it should be fine for them. But it is it is a scale. Uh, it really is, um, adults are very open to finding out about the history of games because they see it as as this cultural thing. And that's their own history and their own memory and their own will be and then as soon as you go to more and more child timeline, then the older-ish kids are like, oh, well, that's stupid. That's so old.

And then you get a little younger and they're then they're with their with their parents and their parents want them to play the games and they're like, okay, I'll I'll look at it. And those kids have a harder time dealing with not having 3D graphics or or having to press buttons instead of swiping on their cell phones Subway Surfers. And then the really young kids that we don't really have an understanding or expectation of what games should be at. Huh? They're open to it all and they're like, oh, something's moving and I can affect it.

That's interesting. And you said in the beginning well, you said before before we had you the game of Pong? Pong is a generational bridge. Yes. Yeah, but that actually is quite enjoyed by kids by the younger kids now. Uh, yeah, yeah Yes, it's a very it's so So basic? understandable. It's such an easy to understand concept. The ball moves and if it goes behind the thing that you can move, the other person gets a point. Yeah. So, immediately clear what you have to do. You need to move the the paddle and then it also works that we have the one that we have set up here works with a potentiometer.

So, like twist the knob and you can either also twist the knob all the way around and make the ball off the screen. Oh. for miles you hit like and you have to also twist it back. Oh, really? I just lost my paddle. It just dropped off my screen. Yeah. And it's because it's it's You can make a joke about it. You just look behind the screen. It's probably somewhere I guess. You just dropped it somewhere behind the screen. There. But anyway, I think that you you are still your TV sets here are actually CRTs.

Yes. Absolutely. So that for some people probably is like, uh, did the television look like that? Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Um, yeah. TV Oh, yeah. TVs used to look like this. The And they were big and they had and very heavy. Why? Why would they do that? Why would they make it that long? I can't touch them. Yes. It's such an interesting You touch the LCD which is not the screen and then don't touch it. So, you're going to break the yeah, you got to have Yeah.

Well, we still have TVs in the house. So, usually kids don't touch the TV screens. But if you hand them something like um, an old phone or like a Game Boy, they have do have a tendency to try to swipe on the little screens. Yeah, well, you need to you try to control the have the the the the stick for the Game Boy. The Game Boy did the Game Boy had buttons. I had the the old okay, I was talking about the Nintendo but yeah, okay, the Game Boy.

Yes. Yeah. But it And it still some classics like Donkey Kong etc. Do they like that or is that no no? Um, Donkey Kong uh, was it of course interesting because it um, weirdly digitized 3D looking graphics. So, that might actually work easier than a Mario. But yeah. Huh? The it all depends on the person again. Okay. Some kids are really open to it and some just come in and you can already tell like, oh, we really need to work on trying to find something you like.

For me personally, one of the things that actually were uh, moment when everything changed was Quake and Doom. Oh, Quake. Yeah. It was pre-Quake games and post-Quake games. Yes. So, mouse aiming was uh, Quake was something like that. You can do that. Yeah. Like it was yeah, it was this big step up from Doom where Doom was of course the first really well-known 3D first-person shooter and then Quake added uh, looking up and down to it. Uh, that was weird This whole third dimension and that was and it did change like other games were okay, were pre-Doom pre-Quake.

So, uh, Yeah, that's it's a very interesting moment in time because I do think that a lot of game design as we have it now is informed by that moment where we started adding the mouse. A tech we don't really do anything different since that point. So, you move with the one hand and you look around with the other. Oh. Okay. Um, you actually that we have a maker space because you you you point that thing was it the the the thing where you said about the uh, you go to festivals to make a bit more money for your space.

So, you have not just your organization, you actually have also have a space. Yes. It's in uh, Hilversum right now. Right. Well, it's in Hilversum. Looks like where did I leave my space? Where did I leave my space? Where did it go now? Uh, it's uh, it moved a little while ago. So, that's why I said I said it's in Hilversum now. It's in Hilversum. Yes. We have a space. It's in Hilversum. Uh, that's the the media capital of the Netherlands. So, it only makes sense for us to be there as well.

Yes. And you you said you give workshops on things or repairing or you do stuff like repairing devices? Not just that you do for yourself but as well as classes or So, Awesome Space is also very much a community space uh, as hacker spaces are. Yes. And uh, people can go there to repair the older consoles and they're always open to teaching new people how to do it as well. Um, so there's standard days where people actually come in and go and repair stuff together. And you can come in if you don't know how to repair stuff and people will teach you how to repair it and then you can come in You can learn how to repair stuff.

It is Absolutely, yeah. Probably because these are things you can still repair. So, that is actually for you your your game consoles serves as a way to get people to learn how to repair electronics because these days electronics are just pulling out the PCB replacing it and okay, that's really a interesting point. So, you you you are more than just seeing you actually also teaching the the art the the the the technique of actually repairing electronics. Yes. Yeah. It's uh, it's a skill and an art form, I think.

Yes. Is it difficult by the way? Um, or it just depends on on generation of the or it depends on It really depends on what you're trying to do. Um, I learned how to solder uh, from Awesome Space. Uh, one of the first days I came in, somebody was like, this needs to be soldered. I don't know how to I don't know how to do that. Uh, help. And I was, oh, okay. Then The Come with me. We'll sit down here. I'll take out another soldering iron.

And they gave you hopefully not the thing to repair to to to learn how to solder but some other board some It was uh, some um, Soldering kits. Some uh, uh, neon wires. Oh, okay. Okay. So, you are you are just to give games but actually there's a whole history about that. Absolutely, yeah. And thank you very much. Yeah. And I hope you enjoy your the rest of the day. Yeah. Uh, we still have some hours left. So, you get some play time, yes? I also For sure.

You will see some more enthusiastic people relive their youth here. Yeah, but by the way, I was I was there today and it was funny. It was something on on the screen on teletext something. I think it was something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the guy was standing there and he started talking to a lot of people of your organization. Mhm. And they started with a question on teletext. Yeah. For an hour or something. Yeah, yes. Like really okay. People in IT are a special breed of Yes.

So, this is a special place here. Yeah. Absolutely. And we love everybody and all of their special interests. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Very nice. Thank you very much for the interview. Absolutely. Bye-bye. Come by Hilversum and uh, we'll Okay. Well, we'll put the name of your space in the show notes. People will come by and I guess they find their website they could see one which you're interested in learning how to repair and how to desolder or solder uh, old consoles. Yes. Or just play Pong. Or just play Pong.

We always have Pongs set up. Okay. Yep. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio Podcast at hackerpublicradio.org. Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is. Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR community content delivery network. Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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