There's never been a better time to be a retro video game enthusiast. Playing old video games on modern screens used to require elaborate cabling and detailed electronics knowledge, or you would have to wade into dodgy ROM sites and tinker with confusing emulators. Today, however, we are blessed with a panoply of options, led by Nintendo's "classic" mini-consoles. But the premium, top-of-the-line retro console maker remains the hipsterish British-American company, Analogue. Analogue's Super NT, a Super Nintendo (SNES) hardware emulator released last year, was a revitalization of the SNES library ready to plug and play (and upscale) to modern HD televisions with a graphical fidelity unmatched by even Nintendo's own offerings.

Nature abhors a vacuum – and so does the video games industry. Over the last year, Nintendo and Sony have each announced new versions of their classic consoles: the Mini NES and SNES machines are outselling modern platforms, and the forthcoming PlayStation Classic is stirring up interest. So what of Sega, the creator of the Master System and the Mega Drive (AKA Genesis), the console that brought the arcade home in the late 1980s? When it comes to retro consoles, until now there have only been cheap third-party Mega Drive retro consoles, which often have popular games built-in but use software emulation to replicate the original hardware. This has meant that games often run with terrible input lag and tend to look horrible on contemporary LED displays, making for a disappointing nostalgic experience.