The era where "retro" meant "NES" is behind us, now retro means Game Boy Color, PS1, and Quake-era PC aesthetics. To wit, the developers of Shovel Knight (the premier NES platformer homage) are developing a GBC-styled Bloodborne-like called Mina the Hollower: https://www.yachtclubgames.com/games/mina-the-hollower/ (though sadly it's not designed to run on original hardware).
In the late 90's to early 2000's, I considered "retro" games to be anything from the beginning of time right up the the NES. So, roughly anything that fell out of popularity about 10 years in the past. It didn't seem weird because in the late 90's, we were calling everything in the '80's retro. All that funky synth music and hair was pretty weird and alien to those who grew up on either side of it, after all.
The most modern gaming system in our living room (if you don't count the Steam Deck) is a Wii which is legitimately a retro system these days and I get a little grumpy every time I am reminded of this.
There are Gen Z that played PS3/Xbox 360 when they were children, and are now adults out of college with their own children. I think that's a good measure of "retro", and it would mean PS4 will enter retro status in ~2031.
Most modern games could be ported to the PS3 and Xbox 360, keeping gameplay the same but lowering graphical fidelity. The same cannot be said of porting N64 games to the NES. I think a better measure of retro-ness would include the degree to which gameplay experience is influenced by the game's age.
Many in the community, such as the long-running Retronauts podcast, use 10 years as the line when something becomes "retro". By that definition, the PS4 becomes retro later this year.
I'd even argue that any console that is no longer in production can be considered retro; after all, you're then dependent on secondhand consoles and repairs to be able to play things on them; they have become a finite product.
I find it difficult to call any PC that has a CPU clock expressed in GHz retro / vintage. Even though I know PCs 20 years ago were already in that ballpark.
I'm currently playing around with a PC I built up from random parts, based on an AMD Duron 1200. I have Windows 98 SE on it. It does feel retro. But then I compare it to my 486, and it suddenly doesn't anymore.
Well, both have the same access to the SSL/TLS web: almost nil. With W95 on the 486 with 32MB of RAM and a de-IE4'ized W98 both would be virtually the same except for the speed.
A Pentium II would be a better example for both: Not too old, not too recent. Yet it suits as retro and a usable machine. Enough to render some XVID videos at 360p and 420p with a good video card. Slackware, NetBSD and lot of distros would still run fine. TLS under Lynx and Gopher would still work, the same as a Gopher client.
Nope. I was born in 1987, and Chinese NES clones were sold well up to 1997 until everyone in ~1999 got a Play Station at home as the prices went down. So, to US, retro was NES and the older GB games such as Mario Land 1.
