I’ve been using it for GM as well as mt-32. At least until I find a way to easily hook it and my X2GS waveblaster card up and manage the audio properly.
I used to have an antenna hooked up just to watch Svengoolie on MeTV and live tweet along (then they changed the schedule.)
Being able to switch to Star Trek and just zone out was nice too. Sure I can pick and choose specific ones on streaming, but there’s episodes I’d otherwise not think to revisit which pop up on broadcast.
I agree with a lot of your concerns. Two medical staff taking drugs and beating a mob of Klingons senseless with little hesitation and no apparent ramifications is horribly, horribly out of tone with what I’ve come to expect from Trek.
Spock is another issue. I’m fine with him undergoing growth and having a full character arc - but I really don’t see this Spock becoming the one in TOS — a Spock who disobeyed direct orders from Starfleet and was reluctantly able to potentially kill two crew members goes on to have the disastrous experience as leader in the Galileo Seven? Best I can see is he actively goes as hard as he can on suppressing his human side in the near future but that wouldn’t make him suddenly forget what emotions, illogic, and all that human baggage feels like when he’s interacting with humans later in his career.
(And for the record - I really enjoy Ethan Peck as Spock and watching his struggles with his emotional control. I just don’t feel like it’s the same character as in TOS and don’t see how he’d get there.)
Federation and Lemmy and all this reminds me of the olden days of talking Trek via USENET and FidoNet (much more the former although technologically, it’s closer to the latter.)
The mt32-pi has really taken off in the MiSTerFPGA community, so there's less resources about using it with vintage hardware (or places to buy prebuilt ones that use a MIDI jack) but it works great for that.
What makes hardware “retro” is certainly an interesting question. This machine is 24 years old, although I’m using it to recreate an experience closer to thirty years old.
At the same the Pentium III came out, the Apple II line would have been 22 years old. Was the Apple II considered “retro” in 1999? It was only six years discontinued at that point…
I think retro will invariably be the generation of computer the person in question used as a youth. Maybe.
I noticed Kirk didn’t have a “thing” in TOS. It’d be funny if he at least thought having a warp catch phrase was stupid and didn’t do it in SNW.