Having grown up in the Star Wars / Atari 2600 / Commodore 64 era, I have some affection and nostalgia for old school computing and culture. Here are some links to various cool 8-bit things:
Trash80, the semi-affectionate name for the RadioShack (a.k.a. RadioSchlock) TRS-80 computer. Here, Trash80 is a musician that uses gameboys, and other oldness to write music, most notibly for the game:
Darwinia: Winners of the Independent Games Festival main award. You can download it from Steam. It reminds me of an RTS set in the world of Tron.
Tree Wave: Another band, this time creating and perfoming all music on Atari 2600s and 286s . You can download MP3s, or buy his Homestar Runner RPG (for the Atari 2600 here)
Of course, there are C-64 emulators here and here, more music, and art exhibits.
O'Reilly has a great homebrew article with loads more links.
Atari is pushing retro gaming by releasing the Atari Flashback2. The Flashback is a scaled-down version of the Atari 2600, but uses standard Atari controllers. There is no cartridge slot, as 40 classic titles are built in. For old timers like me, just the mere mention of the word Atari brings back glossy eyed memories of the first days when you could bring the arcade home.
My first computer was a PCjr. I wanted an Apple but my dad was an IBM XT man. I paid for the whole thing myself with paper route money with with all the extra's was around $800...in 1984!
Eventually I got an AdLib sound card for my 286. I couldn't believe that I was hearing such great music from my computer.
Thanks for the link to Darwinia, it looks sweet!
AdLib sound, I had forgotten. I bought an original SoundBlaster 1.0 (rev -) and it was backward compatible with AdLib.
Relevant link:
History of Adlib.
A cool article on Introversion Software, the makers of Darwinia.
They are coming out with a new game, Defcon which looks like a lot of fun.
I ordered Darwinia last night, so I'll post a review once I've played that a bit. Here's a write up on Introversion's trip to the US, including some photos inside Valve plus some sweet shots of San Francisco.
An interview with one of the Darwinia devs.