oddech_wymarlych_swiatow
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2013
- Messages
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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.
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.
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