BOB: BEST OF THE BEST
THE GUY WHO GAVE YOU BACK THE WILL TO PLAY

It was just another afternoon. Nothing special. The kind of afternoon where you haven't switched on your computer to play in years, because of work, because of the kids, because life has been quietly colonising those hours with remarkable stealth. I was browsing the internet with no particular destination in mind — that sport those of us of a certain generation practise with a dedication we give to almost nothing else — when suddenly there was BOB.

Of course, you don't know what BOB is. You see a strange name, a Telegram channel with thousands of people and an absurd number of games. And you think: what on earth is this? Well, friend, this is Best Of the Best. The most complete, most carefully crafted and most beloved emulator collection in the Spanish retro scene. The work of a man named Nacho Portillo who one day decided that it was worth doing things properly. And he did. Very properly.

For the record, I arrived late, as I arrive to most things. But I arrived. And since I arrived I haven't stopped playing things I hadn't touched in decades. So if you don't think that's reason enough to dedicate a blog post to it, then we have very different values.

BOB is a collection of retro emulators and games prepared, configured and lovingly maintained by Nacho Portillo. What does that mean in practice? That instead of spending two weekends installing things, hunting for ROMs on dodgy forums, configuring controllers and cursing the universe, you simply download BOB, fire it up and start playing.

Yes. That easy. Yes. There is a catch. The catch is that Nacho has put in the hours you weren't willing to put in. Thank you, Nacho.

Depending on what system you use, BOB goes by different names and comes in different flavours, but the essence is always the same: a complete retro universe, ready to run, with the best games from each platform already hand-picked. No having 3,000 versions of the same Megadrive game. No broken ROMs. No configuring shaders at two in the morning. BOB works.

Opening BOB for the first time is like opening a chest you didn't know you had. Suddenly they're all there. The Commodore 64, with a generous selection of games. And the Spectrum. And the Amstrad. And the MSX. And the Atari. All those systems that shared the school playgrounds of the eighties, where every kid defended theirs as if their life depended on it, are now peacefully sitting together in the same menu.

The first thing I did was look for the C64. Obviously. And there it was, with more games than I expected. But then something happened I hadn't planned: I looked at the menu and saw the Spectrum. And the Amstrad. And the MSX. And I thought, hang on a moment. I loaded Freddy Hardest on the C64 — my version, the one I always knew, the one imprinted somewhere in my brain. And then I loaded it on the Spectrum. And then on the Amstrad. And I sat there for about half an hour, like an idiot with a grin from ear to ear, comparing versions of a 1987 game at eleven o'clock at night. My partner was watching me from the sofa with that expression that mixes tenderness and concern. Entirely justified.

But what truly made my day — literally — was realising I could compare versions. The same game on C64, Spectrum and Amstrad, each loading in seconds. Seeing how the same programmer solved each machine's limitations in a different way. Seeing where our specific nostalgia comes from, the one that belongs to the exact computer we had at home. And also seeing that the others were right about some things, though you don't tell anyone that.

This is where BOB levels up. Because one thing is having all this on your desktop computer, but life doesn't always happen in front of a desk. And this is where something I think is genuinely brilliant comes in: you can take BOB on holiday.

There's a huge market for Chinese handheld consoles — Anbernic, Retroid, Miyoo and friends — that for between 30 and 150 euros give you a little gadget that perfectly emulates everything BOB covers. And BOB has images ready for many of them. You flash the image, pop in the card, and on the plane, on the beach, waiting at the airport or while your partner watches a series you have no interest in, there's Trap Door on the C64, Tetris on Game Boy or Out Run on arcade, ready to remind you why the old games had something that modern ones rarely match.

It wouldn't be right to talk about BOB without talking about the person who makes it possible. Nacho Portillo has been working on this for years with a generosity that many companies would envy. BOB is free. The Telegram channel is free. The updates are free. The time Nacho devotes to answering questions, preparing new versions, keeping all this alive... that's all given freely too.

In the Spanish retro scene there are plenty of people doing great things, but few projects have reached so many people with such quality and asking so little in return. If you use BOB and didn't know who Nacho was, now's the time to find out. His YouTube channel has videos that explain everything you need to know, and his Telegram is one of the most active and useful in the national retro scene.