About Me

Cartridge Nostalgia is my little getaway from it all.

It’s a place where I talk about living with gaming for 35 years. My experiences, my thoughts, my memories. Sometimes the articles are random, like the one about crime or a Saturday mall run. Sometimes they’re console specific. Sometimes they go somewhere unexpected. It’s just a place where I express stuff, something I wanted to call my own.
I chose Blogger as the home for this because it fits the feel of classic blogging. Nothing fancy. Just writing.
Hey there, my name is Davin, and I’m based in Cape Town, South Africa. I’ve been gaming since the early nineties, starting with a Famiclone that my dad bought me, and I haven’t really stopped since. Over 35 years later, gaming is still my main hobby and one of the biggest pillars of my life. Not just the playing, but the whole experience. Modern and retro. Hardware and software. YouTube channels, collection videos, reveal conferences, the community for better or worse, co-op sessions, all of it.
When I’m not dealing with the challenges of life, my mind is usually somewhere in that world.
I’ve been living with depression, anxiety, IBS, IBD, and a few other things for over 20 years now. It’s rough, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Gaming has been my constant through most of it, a way of stepping out of whatever is heavy and into something manageable. A coping mechanism, an escape, a hobby that has genuinely kept me going through some difficult stretches.
That’s part of what this blog is about too. Not just nostalgia, but the honest experience of being a struggling gamer. If that sounds familiar to you, you’re in the right place.
Cartridge Nostalgia is a slow build. I write when I can, which isn’t always as often as I’d like. But everything here is real, written from actual memory and actual experience, with a little help on structure from AI, and a lot of editing by me.
Thanks for being here. It means more than you know.

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The Saturday Mall Gaming Run: Gone But Not Forgotten

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There was a period in my life where the Saturday mall run was practically a sacred ritual. This was especially during the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, the Wii era, the PSP and DS era. One of those windows in gaming history where the retail experience felt genuinely exciting. New releases all over the place, demo stations set up to play around with, shelf after shelf of cases you could pick up and read the back of. Online shopping wasn’t really much of a thing yet, and that meant the only way to see what was out there was to go and look for yourself. So I went, usually on a Saturday. Tygervalley Mall was my destination, and I had a route. The route always started at CNA. There was something about walking into CNA that just felt right. Soft carpets underfoot, the smell of books and stationery hanging in the air, a quieter atmosphere than most of the other shops. It wasn’t purely a gaming destination, but that was part of the charm. You’d browse the magazines, maybe pick up a gaming publication,...
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My First Gaming Memory: A Famiclone, What's Yours?

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Some memories don't just live in your mind. They stay in your body. That coin sound from Super Mario Bros, the little chime that rings every time Mario picks one up, I can feel it before I even finish thinking about it. Somewhere in my memory, the CRT image of it all is just burned in. The colours, the glow of the screen in a dark room, sitting too close and messing up your eyes, I miss all that. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I was around eight years old, maybe a little younger, growing up in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa. My friend David lived two houses down, which made visiting easy. After school, on weekends, most days really, I would just show up. His house was comfortable and familiar, in the way only a childhood friend's home can be. A small room, comfy carpet on the floor, a single bed, and a few magazines scattered around. I recall a large wooden display unit along the wall with family photos and some action figures. Some of these had seen ...
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What Thieves Don't Think About: Has Your Gaming Gear Ever Been Stolen?

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The first thing that ever got stolen from me was my bicycle. A silly old postman delivery bike with large brown mud flaps. Nothing fancy, just what we could afford. It was a gift from my parents, which is the only reason it mattered as much as it did. When I realised it was gone, I felt awful in a way I didn’t quite understand. Almost like I had done something wrong. Didn’t protect it. Like it was somehow my fault. I hadn’t. But that feeling stuck around for a while, and I still miss my silly old bicycle. That was my first proper introduction to what it feels like to have something taken from you. It wasn’t about the bike. It was about someone coming into our space and helping themselves. That part never really leaves you. Growing up in Cape Town, and still living here now, crime is just part of the background noise of daily life. It varies a lot depending on where you’re situated. Some neighbourhoods have it better. Others have it far, far worse. The northern suburbs sit somewhere in ...
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