Your take on emulation - history, habits etc.

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Yeah, I know there's a separate thread connected with emulation but it serves mainly for novelties and solving technical problems. This one is focused mainly on the past.

Plz share your view on emulation itself: when did you dive in emulators, what's your take on emulation vs real hardware battle and similar things. Lots of authism from fellow Codexers expected.


Hystorical Part:

My first step was demoscene ZX Spectrum stuff that was delivered with some of the summer '98 CD-Action magazines. Demos were bundled with X128, which played them great, I still keep the copy of that and run it from time to time (Eyeache by Codebusters is my favourite one) but it wasn't anything gaming related. I didn't feel need for 16 bit console nor Amiga soft - that period was PC supermacy era and for 8-bit goodness everyone had Famiclone with bunch of yellow pirate carts.

But there was an even that triggered the interest in emulation in Poland almost instantly - in late '99, RTL7 TV station started fuckin' Dragon Ball and by the time DBZ has happened (April or May of 20000), everyone went batshit about it so video games were natural step after anime. But PC MASTER RACE didn't have any, right? People started to share (still on floppies) Snes9x program and bunch of roms: horrible Botounden trilogy, text-based game (don't remember the title), great Legend of Super Saiyan and decent fighting game Hyper Dimension.

How did it run on current hardware? On my P200MX / 32 MB Ram games were pretty playable but nowhere near the 60 fps which could be reach on twice as good PC. Thanks to OpenGL filter I was able to use my Voodoo 2 for nice, pleasant blur and some moar fps but that's all. A shame I didn't know then about ZSNES that could propably run these game at full speed.

In 2000 Pokemon craze has happend so it popularized Gameboy emulator, it was pretty efficient and have extremely low requirements but I cannot remember it's name. For sure it wasn't the No$GB that is rumored to run stuff even on 386DX (!).

Thanks to another freshly translated to English Dragon Ball titles (4 card-based JRPGs) I found out the existance of save stating, which gives a reason to ttry NS emulation. Thanks to it, I was finally able to finish Fantastic Adventure of Dizzy, brilliant gem that SCREAMED of save game feature. Used Rocknes, never heard of NESticle 'till recently.

Then, I've read somewhere about CPS1 emulation so I could finally play at home SF2:CE, Puniisher and Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, all of that cost me tons of money on arcades. I've been using Callus, it has great efficiency because it read the unpacked roms, sparing the RAM consumption. After Callus I was pretty disappointed with thing like Winkawaks (CP1/CPS2/Neo-Geo) or NeoRagex (Neo-Geo), which demanded roms as zip/rar archives so to play it at full speed and even start the fucking game earlier thane after 5 minutes you need to have at least 64 RAM - what a waste o resources!

PSX? After a famous lawsuit (fortunately lost by Sony), Bleem! gained some popularity. It was a decent emulator but average Joe hardware was not ready for that, least the P200 which runs Tekken 3 with like 10 fps and lots of glitches and missing textures. There wa an alternative - VGS, it was much faster but didn't allow to change graphical setting, looks like it run the games on jaggy software mode.

The last old emulator that impressed me back in the day for UltraHLE (N64). By time I upgraded hardware to C400, 64 RAM and Voodoo 3 and despite trying very few games, it run Mario Kart 64 at full speed - comparing to the state of PSX emulation it blew my mind.

Now, Emulation Habits:

I tend do dislike emulation of hardware that I've already use in reality. NES is ok because of save stating which is crucial for some games but what I truly HATE is fucking Dosbox! For years, '98'06 I was pushing my DOS hardware to the limits, proud of how much could I squeezed from and and, thanks to NT core of WinXP and need to EMULATE PC ON PC, with extremely high resource consumpion, pretty bad (then) compatibilty, terrible mouse support etc. It was awful and felt somehow 'fake', a giant middle finger againt 'PC is backwared compatible' selling point. Since 2008, since the first time I used that Dosbox crap I finished like three game - Z, Colonization and Wiz6. For similar reason, I hate to use Virtual Machine. Heh, now even run something like Red Alert on WinXP/Win7/10 feels fake too. I think I'm going to made again some old PC build, some Pentium with 3DFX. As a irst step I bought dirty cheap Ibook G4 just to play the 'true' way again Dark Colony, Diablo and few others classic computer games (recently I'm trying to run Tie Fighter but no luck so far). Playing those Mac ports feels much closer to good old PC experience than 'poser' VM or Dosbox.

Nowadays, I'm slowly loosing interest in messed-up emulator like PCSX2 that are demanding, glitchy and resource hungry. Original PS1/PS2 hardware has no appeal to me so I either play it on PS3 (I mean, when this overrated piece of shit does not overheat) or just choose superior Xbox ports (MK:Shaolin Monks says hello).

Recently, I'm surprised how good Cemu is, I can run Captain Toad and Tokyo Mirrage Sessions at full speed, same with Tropical Freeze but that has some annoying lag, I'll definately check out the other games, modern consoles feels like modern PC's to in this case, hardware authenticity doesn't matter.

Out of some other weird habits, I don't like to play games on overpowered PCs. Emulation on Genesis on Core 2 Duo? Waste. Thanks to BSnes/Higan and that all 100% accurancy bullshit at least I have an illusion of resources being used for justified reason.

 

[Sigourn]

History

My earliest memories with emulation are Game Boy Pokémon games. Then the Game Boy Color Pokémon games: Gold, Silver and Crystal, but surprisingly enough I didn't play Crystal until much later. I remember using a Game Boy Advance emulator to try and emulate the newest Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, so new in fact that there was no English translation available yet. Not only were the games in Japanese, but the combo of old computer + brand new emulator made for a very sluggish experience, to the point I literally DREAMT about playing Ruby in a language I could understand and at 100% speed.

Habits

I pretty much emulate NES, SNES and PS1 games I've never played. I refuse to use PCSX2 because anything less than "virtually perfect" is not good enough for me. Since discovering the ability to stream PS2 games from my PC to my PS2, that's what I use. But the truth is I'm not too fond of console games. My preferred genre of games are RPGs, and console western RPGs of that era are shit, whereas JRPGs are a hit or miss (as much as I like the King's Field series when it comes to the tone, setting and aesthetic, I find the gameplay clunky) and so I don't emulate anywhere near as often now. Stuff like platformers, action-adventures, etc., are not my thang. I did emulate plenty of fighting games after getting into the genre months ago, but it was just a small fad for me. I have emulated some PS1 games of other genres, in particular the Resident Evil series. But that's about it.

 

[Gregz]

I've emulated Atari ST (Amberstar) and Apple II gs (The Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, others). They were a lot of fun, and not too terribly difficult to get working.

Emulating an Amiga is a pain in the ass.

Emulating consoles is relatively painless these days. Shadowrun on Sega Genesis is damn fun.

 

[Hyperion]

when did you dive in emulators,

When I wanted to play Final Fantasy 5 that actually worked without the data being corrupted. Think it was a ps2 thing, but I can't find my ps1 anymore.

what's your take on emulation vs real hardware battle and similar things

Playing on the real hardware is how it should be played, but emulators are so much more convenient with save states letting me stop when I want to rather than needing to actually find a save point. I try to limit to games I already own and want to replay, or for one reason or another never finished. The other exception is for games that have an outrageous price tag on them. Suikoden 2, Gamecube / Wii Fire Emblems, most SNES games these days even though I own most of the good ones already.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

My earliest memories with emulation are Game Boy Pokémon games.

Took me about an entire day fumbling around like a (litteral) child, but got pokemon red/blue running in DOS, MULTIPLAYER STYLE. Me and my buddy could play side by side splitting the keyboard, do battles and trade pokemans. Shit was craaaazy.
no$gmb nevar forget

 

[Sigourn]

My earliest memories with emulation are Game Boy Pokémon games.

Took me about an entire day fumbling around like a (litteral) child, but got pokemon red/blue running in DOS, MULTIPLAYER STYLE. Me and my buddy could play side by side splitting the keyboard, do battles and trade pokemans. Shit was craaaazy.
no$gmb nevar forget

I remember my brother would set up NO$GMB for me because it was complicated (for a kid at least). He would also fiddle with save files so I was able to trade-evolve Pokémon. Good times.

 

[The Decline]

The first emulated game I played was Super Mario World. But the game changer for me was when Neo Geo games became playable. Being able to play Metal Slug even without sound was fucking amazing.

Emulation really took off when I was a senior in highschool so I would install emulators on the library computers and play games when the librarians weren't looking.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Keyboard only controls for a JRPG piss me off and that drove me away from emulation. I heard modern emulators let you USB connect a controller and use that but I never learned how.

 

[CaffeineConquistador]

Plug’n’play just slipped on past you, huh?

 

[ghostdog]

I think the first time was when the zsnes emulator started circulating. I got the NES as a kid just before the snes was released and I always wanted the snes, but never got it. I emulated super Mario World at first, as Super Mario Bros 3 was my favorite NES game.

Then also a PSX emulator was released, which was a big deal since PSX was current gen at that time for consoles. My first games emulated were ISS Pro Evo Soccer, Spider Man and Final Fantasy VII.

Then a friend of mine got really into emulation and showed me MAME and another emulator that could play more advanced arcade games like TEKKEN and Soul Calibur. That really got me into emulation, being able to play the arcade games on PC was great. I was really into MAME where I could play my favorite arcade games like Shinobi, Snow Bros, Final Fight, Neo Turf Masters, Run'n'Gun Basketball, NBA Maximum Hangtime, Metal Slug.

I also got late into DOSBOX since I used to have and old 486 computer hanging around which I would use for DOS games. I also snubbed dosbox for a while, but let's face it, it's a great piece of software that helped preserve an awesome library of games that microsoft completely ignored when transitioning to windows.

 

[Mikeal]

Only game I emulated was Berserk on PS2.

 

[Grauken]

Keyboard only controls for a JRPG piss me off and that drove me away from emulation. I heard modern emulators let you USB connect a controller and use that but I never learned how.

https://joytokey.net/en/

helps in most cases, not just emulation

 

[MpuMngwana]

I first played emulated Pokemon at elementary schools “informatics” class (no one ever bothered to teach us anything, they’d just let us play vidya all the time). Later at home I downloaded Visual Boy Advance for that purpose.

I still mostly emulate jRPGs, in fact when older games are concerned I might prefer emulation to any eventual PC port or even original hardware, since the speed up function is super convenient and greatly increases my enjoyment. I usually avoid using save states, I only feel justified using them if there is a hard boss after a long easy section with no save point in-between.

I don’t emulate any 3D action games, since they tend do be awkward to play with keyboard only and I cannot into controllers.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

My very first emulation experience was on an ancient Pentium computer (actually, I couldn't even afford a real Pentium back then and had to make do with its equivalent - a 586-based AMD cpu) and it was for an SNES. It. Ran. Like. Shit. Through. A. Funnel. So I basically didn't touch another emulator until I could run something at full speed, which was a couple years later when I got a real Pentium II cpu (actually, it was their cut-rate Celeron model because- well, I was a poor boy from the rurals of central Massachusetts *cue harmonica music*). Always had a fascination for emulators and my last extensive use of one in gaming was Cemu and Zelda Breath of The Wild, which ran brilliantly.

That's basically it. I still love to dabble in them but nothing beats the feel of original hardware. I realized this when I bought a used PS3 off ebay a couple of years ago. Sure, older console games in modern emulation tend to run better than on original HW but there's just something about playing these old games with that big clunky controller (OGXbox) that looked like a melted slab of plastic and feeling the rumble & purr of genuine hardware.

 

[Sigourn]

Keyboard only controls for a JRPG piss me off and that drove me away from emulation. I heard modern emulators let you USB connect a controller and use that but I never learned how.

I use my PS3 joystick connected through a USB cable. I installed Scarlet Crush Productions for that, the only negative is that PC games use Xbox icons instead of PlayStation (so I get "A" instead of "X" for instance), and that can be annoying. I don't know how it goes anymore, but until recently I could buy standalone PS3 controllers, so I would say it's a very good investment for those who emulate console games and want something more comfortable than using a keyboard.

Speaking of ports, I also prefer emulating over playing Windows ports. But this is not just with games that received awful PC ports (e.g. Final Fantasy VI), but with pretty much any game, period, unless it is a 100% straight improvement over the original. Which no game actually is. It doesn't help that I use shaders a lot, and these ports don't lend themselves to that.

Exceptions to this rule are remasters of PS2 games and above, which use high quality polygons instead of sprites or the low polygons of the PS1 era.

 

[laclongquan]

WTF is this I dont even~