Period rec rooms
----------------

I spent this last weekend in Tampere with my wife, and among other things we
visited the Finnish Museum of Games[1].  I was happy to find that, just like the
Computer Spiele Museum in Berlin[2], it had some "period rooms", where you could
play games on old machines in small rooms which were setup to resemble bedrooms
or lounge rooms or "rec rooms" (from "recreation room", aka "rumpus room" and
probably lots of other regional terms).  Both museums do it pretty well, and I
really enjoy them.  In addition to the obvious CRT television screens and
suitably 70s or 80s furniture, there are posters on the walls for popular
musicians or movies from the time, bookshelves of contemporary science fiction,
and other details that really make it feel like you are hanging out in the
prototypical parent's basement of a young nerd from that time.

In this time when nostalgia can be so easily cashed in on, I wouldn't be
surprised if somebody could make a viable business out of renting really
well-done period hotel rooms or even whole apartments (maybe slugmax would be a
happy customer?[3]).  I think that would be kind of fun.  You'd need to install
some kind of cell phone jammer, otherwise people would just spend the whole
time on their damn phones taking Instagram or Snapshot selfies of themselves
infront of various 80s appliances instead of actually using the damn things and
roleplaying the recent past.  It would be quite neat to have e.g. TVs and radios
which had been hacked to only play back archived footage/recordings of real TV
and radio broadcasts from the time, a stack of real newspapers and magazines,
etc.  I have heard that there are a few experimental retirement villages for
people with various kinds of cognitive problems which try to emulate the 50s in
this fashion, and that apparently the residents really benefit from being in a
"familiar" environment.  If this takes off, I look forward to being stuffed in a
simulacrum of the 90s some day.

On a smaller scale, I'd also really enjoy the ability to pay a small fee to
spend a few hours in a "hacker's version" of these videogame rooms.  At the
Tampere museum, the C64 in the 80s room was behind a clear plastic shield so you
could not remove the cartridge or toggle the power.  At Berlin, things were a
bit less locked down - you could reboot the machine to the BASIC prompt and PEEK
and POKE the screen colours around (they even had a manual on the bookshelf so I
could look up the memory addresses), but of course you feel bad doing this
because people are supposed to be able to come in and play some old game, not
watch some strange person spend hours writing BASIC programs.  But I would love
to have half a day's leisurely access to a working Commodore or Atari or
Sinclair machine with a full suite of peripherals and manuals and time to just
hack on it at my own pace in a comfy period-themed room.  Of course I could
set up emulators on my Thinkpad, but it wouldn't give the same experience, and I
think I'd enjoy it enought that I wouldn't mind paying for it occasionally to
same me the hassle of having to hunt down and ship working versions of all the
hardware involved.

[1] http://vapriikki.fi/en/nayttelyt/finnish-museum-games/
[2] http://www.computerspielemuseum.de/1210_Home.htm
[3] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/slugmax/phlog/i-miss-the-eighties