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