Emulators

[Braindead]

Is Retro/Classic going to be the go-to section for emulator discussion, or is it likely to have its own section?

I imagine emulator stuff can be a bit of a sketchy subject, as linking to illegal ROMs and BIOS files seems like it might not be a good idea from a legal standpoint, but I imagine emulator chat in general is okay?

[Odyssey]

system11, interesting to hear. Will check that on my recent capacitor replacements.

[system11]

Re: components. You probably won't be very surprised to hear that I end up replacing many more bad capacitors on newer games (leaking usually) than even my oldest PCBs from 1980 or so. In particular early surface mount capacitors are absolute garbage without hope of redemption, but that said I've also seen brand name replacements leak again within a year.

[grayfox313]

Well, it's more hardware simulation than software emulation. And you don't have USB and OS overhead, thus, no lag or less lag than emulators

[Odyssey]

FPGA is just the emulators point of view of the processor architecture. FPGA arent carbon copies of the given processors. So FPGA is more or less software emulation solved with hardare.

[grayfox313]

Emulators will never match real hardware (or FPGAs) in one thing along, and that's the most important thing imo: INPUT LAG
I love cycle-accurate emulators like Higan or Stella or Nestopia, but have you tried beating Ninja Gaiden on an emu? And speed-runners will never use them.
Don't get me wrong, they have a place in gaming for sure (I own the Nintendo Classic consoles for convenience alone in bringing them somewhere with me)
But I'll always be a fan of ROMs. I own 6 flash-carts and I could never live without them, it's just so much cheaper and easier than buying hundreds of carts. Not to mention just popping the SD card into your comp and backing up your save games.

[Odyssey]

One more thing: Todays products arent as good as products back then. The problem is that we use today less reliable components for our products. That has partially ecological reasons (like no lead at tin anymore) or essential components are underrated so that the product will fail earlier (thats why this generation will never play games on Playstation 4 like we play games now on the Atari VCS 2600). Not only cause download games are worthless when it comes to archive purposes. But also the Playstation 4 isnt meant to work at all anymore in 10 years or 20 years).
But yes, when your C64 power supply stops working (which mine never did - beside the rumours that C64 power supplies are not stable) a new one is way better then none at all.

[Odyssey]

Its hard to get an CRT? There are literally thousands avail on eBay alone . So getting a CRT isnt the smallest problem at all. And yes, the graphic looks amazingly better on a CRT compared with any recent display.

Bout the SD card readers you were talking about: Yes, thats another solution for playing retro games! Even a good solution! But .... the C64, at which your SD Card "1541 disk drive" is connected (via the datasette connector ), wont also work forever. So yes, flash cartridges or SD cad reader right now are an awesome cheap and perfect way to play your old games the right way. But they would just delay the end of the original hardware. But for now ..... I got a flash or SD solution for almost any platform I got here . So all this eBay scalpers should go to .... .

[aileron]

I neither endorse or nor deny that cartridge

[Matcam89]

I have a certain cartridge with every SEGA Genesis game on it and it plays perfectly on my original hardware

[aileron]

Odyssey has a point that the games were meant to be displayed on [email protected]#$&y CRT TVs. The C64 games I've run in emulation do not look like they did back in the day on the real thing and it isn't just my nostalgia saying that.

Depending on the platform, e.g. C64, you can get replacement parts or newer replacements that are actually better than the original, e.g. power supplies.

I'm not condoning anything here, please don't ban me but for C64 there are multiple devices available that plug into the back and take an SD card that you can load with games, while still using the actual C64 hardware, and not having to worry about corrupted disks. A CRT TV to hook it up to though, that might be harder to come by.

[Odyssey]

Emulators arent the real thing. They arent even close to the real thing. You have to use thos games with the correct output devices (its so incredible dumb this days to see all thos megapixels, when the designers of thos games had blurry CRTs in mind which blurred the images in an amazing way (and I dont talk about thos braindead scanline filters (as if even on the cheapest TV back then you could only see half the lines at a time (indeed they showed just half a picture at a time, but thanks for the glowing delay that worked perfectly)). That way they were able to do antialiaising for score figures (without CRTs you often cant read the score figures anymore, cause the blending colors doesnt work well without blurring), to do perfect blends (outside a CRT they are looking like crosswalks ) and, most important, blending colors to produce a new color (on HD displays it just looks like a strange chessboard). You cant emulate that softness the easy way. Even expensive hi end upscalers like the HQ Vita (not cheap trash like FrameMeister) could only do that just close to CRTs, but still not perfectly. You also need the perfect input control. Todays joypads are way too inaccurate to control games with digital input. The worst example is the horrible DPad at the Switch Pro Controller. Therefor you need the Atari controller to play Pac Man on the Atari VCS 26600. And you need a Competition Pro to play Out Run on the C64. Yes, there are some recent clones of them, but all of them are cheaply built and dont even include comparable microswitches. And indeed you need the correct hardware. Many games were written to use the full potential of thos platforms. And no emulator on this planet could include the full potential, cause most of this is still undocumented.

So no, emulation isnt even close to the real thing. But !!!!!

- the original hardware wont function correctly forever. We all dont know how long our Atari VCS 2600 or Commodore 64 will continue to work fine (and I dont give a damn about estimates, cause I read the same estimates durng the 90s ), but it wont work forever for sure. And there is the first perfect spot for emulation. As I said: Emulation doesnt come close to the real thing. But being almost close to the real thing is way better then having nothing. That all of this amazing art done since the early 1970s would be lost forever. That where emulation is the perfect solution to keep this pieces of art alive.

- todays eBayers have lost thier mind completely. Im one of the lucky ones which started collecting at the last 2 years of reasonable prices. Indeed there were already rare games back then at prices like 1000 Euros (like Giana Sisters for the C64 or Starcross (folio) for the C64). But thos games were really rare and there were just a few of them (so you could buy one of them to get a masterpiece for your collection). Today even the most average games like Ghostbusters for the C64 are at almost 200 Dollar (its always funny to see the usual american YouTubers (which never realize that the NES and SNES were mainly a US only thing) whining about the high prices for NES games. They should start to check the prices for 8bit and 16bit personal computer games )! Thats incredible dumb! So I perfectly understand that people dont give a damn about all thos scalpers and simply use the free alternative: emulation. Cause its better to use an almost close version of the real thing then spend all your money on 2 games .

So emulation is overall a third class solution, but for a few areas its the best solution out there.

[SnowyJess]

I've discovered some really good games through emulation, to be honest playing The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess on Dolphin is what convinced me to get a Gamecube. I've used quite a few emulators and have some complete romsets for some consoles partly because they can be good for discovering interesting stuff that I'd never heard of before, but mostly just because I like to have an archive of things in case they disappear someday. I have no idea what most of the games are and rarely use emulators at the moment but I find it comforting just knowing it's there.

I think Fusion is probably the best emulator I've used since it supports a good amount of Sega consoles, has some really good features and I discovered that it seems to run perfectly on pretty much anything. Seriously, I tried a few emus on an old netbook plugged into a 1080p tv at the time and it struggled to run most things in that situation but Fusion still ran at a full 60fps when none of the others would. It's also the only program that I could fullscreen in Wine without any issues. I've been thinking of getting some flashcarts at some point as I do like to play on original hardware if I can and it's a lot cheaper and takes up less space than collecting the official carts, and there's less likely to be connection issues since I won't have to swap cartridges very often.

[HippopotamusRex]

Usually the only thing forbidden in emulator discussion is the sharing or linking of ROMs. Which is entirely understandable. I mean technically even the official virtual console stuff is an emulator. They're everywhere. They've been everywhere so long as people have been reverse engineering tools and technology trying to figure out how machines work.

I love them too. I've been using them since NESticle in the late 90s. I remember the first game I played on it was Mega Man 2 in 97. I had beaten Mega Man 2 a million times but I immediately dropped off the platform in Bubble Man and died. Over and over and didn't understand why. Turns out years later I learn most emulators have a very slight input delay which was causing those platforms to drop before I jumped off them.

[Matcam89]

Yeah - i have no qualms with emulation especially if the Games are no longer available or if they are insanely expensive with no other option to purchase it officially, I am not going to pay $100 for a SEGA saturn game off of Ebay when the money isn't even going to the Developer or SEGA