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What do you want and expect of emulation?


Keatah

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What do you want and expect of emulation? Both back then and now.

 

Emulators on PCs have been around for nearly 30 years now. And very likely us enthusiasts of the scene have had different reasons for being interested in emulators at various times.

 

Initially for myself, with the first releases of like Microsoft Arcade, Activision Actionpacks, DASarcade, Sparcade, and soon enough MAME, the reasons were nostalgic. Playing long lost games we never thought we'd play again..

 

Then as the scene ramped up. And I discovered it was an alternate way of collecting (and playing) the consoles I missed out on. NES, PS1, SNES, SMS, Genesis, and others. Without filling rooms and rooms of paraphernalia. I even went through a portable phase here. Taking my laptop everywhere. Having my entire set of childhood consoles with me in a small briefcase or lappybag. It was novel and just the thing (no matter how meaningless it seems now) to play Tempest or Assault or Zaxxon at your table while waiting for your meals to be served. Crazytimes!

 

Soon we would be getting into seemed like the years of the beginning of refinements. Thus making emulators viable replacements for physical consoles & cabs. Things like Shaders and BGFX, scanlines, NTSC imperfections were about ready to make a debut.

 

Surprisingly late in the game the viability of building up my childhood dream of an AIO became realistic. Especially with powerful i7 & i9 SFF PCs. This is also the time of archiving and preservation. While those activities have been ongoing since forever, it seems more important now than before. A-specially with manuals and other documentation.

 

Today I expect the reliability, convenience, versatility, and elegance from emulators. They bring a certain richness & class to the gaming experience.

 

So throughout the years what was it you expected (and now expect) of emulation?

 

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I first discovered emulation with an Apple II emulator on the Macintosh in the 80s.  It was incredible.  But my dream was always the "one system to rule them all," an all-in-one solution that could play all of my favorites and let me explore systems and games I missed out on when they were released.  That came close to reality with a CFW PSP and having so many classic systems emulated anywhere, anytime.

 

The RPi 3 was finally powerful enough for me to build that all-in-one console running Lakka (RetroArch).  Even years on, this Lakka console with wireless Bluetooth controllers is still kicking ass as my bedroom classic gaming system.  I run RetroArch on other more powerful computers when I want to play something modern or emulation that requires more CPU.

 

The "game station" has a MiSTer and several original systems, all with modern cart/storage options to load games and software quickly and easily.  A RetroN 77 is there are well, bringing excellent emulated 2600 goodness perfectly to the modern digital TV, something very difficult for the original hardware to accomplish because of video timing changes that cause dropped video on digital displays.

 

I have what I always wanted from emulation and gaming: ease of use, flexibility, comprehensive access to a large library, and redundancy for when my original hardware inevitably needs repair or replacement.

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On 6/18/2022 at 2:53 AM, Keatah said:

Emulators on PCs have been around for nearly 30 years now. And very likely us enthusiasts of the scene have had different reasons for being interested in emulators at various times.

It goes back further.   I recall always being fascinated by various emulators on my Atari ST,  and tried various demos of them.   But usually they ran too slow, lacked some important features and the authors wanted a fair amount of money for a product that usually didn't work very well.

 

What changed in the 90s was that I guess because of the internet,  people could now collaborate on emulator development,  and released them completely free.   These free emulators soon eclipsed most of the commercial ones.

 

As for what I wanted from them.   Well one thing was I wanted an ST emulator that would allow my to pull my work off the ST and be able to go full PC and put the ST into storage.

 

Another thing was the arcade emulators.   The early 80s arcade machines had become fairly rare by the 90s,  so playing these games again sure brought back old memories!    As for other stuff,  I was less in a hurry to play my old 2600 games again, but it was nice to have the 2600 emulators anyway.

 

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4 hours ago, zzip said:

What changed in the 90s was that I guess because of the internet,  people could now collaborate on emulator development,  and released them completely free.   These free emulators soon eclipsed most of the commercial ones.

I rarely if ever see commercial emulators exceed the capabilities and longevity of a collaborated freeware project. I got burned by bleem back in the day. And ever since have decided not to pay for emulators, among other types of utilities and indie games. I just feel cheated when support stops sooner than I was led to believe. That's the biggest complaint. Emu development time is too long for a one-man show, and when multiple devs are involved a paid model doesn't seem to fit well.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

As for what I wanted from them.   Well one thing was I wanted an ST emulator that would allow my to pull my work off the ST and be able to go full PC and put the ST into storage.

I never really looked to emulators as a way to import/export material. I of course use them for that, but my 1st preference is PC side utilities.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

Another thing was the arcade emulators.   The early 80s arcade machines had become fairly rare by the 90s,  so playing these games again sure brought back old memories!    As for other stuff,  I was less in a hurry to play my old 2600 games again, but it was nice to have the 2600 emulators anyway.

Yes the arcade revival was a big hit with me. I always wonder what it would have been like having a computer capable of playing the arcade games pixel-perfect like we have via MAME, in 1984 - 1987. Of course it couldn't have happened, but that would have been a fantastic time for such a thing.

 

In recalling the activision action packs, the notion of 2600 on a Windows 3.1 486 was quite the novelty. Each game seemed to have its own dedicated emulator. A different version for each bankswitching scheme. With careful renaming of files it was possible to swap in other mfg's roms. Mostly.

 

But there was a lot to do to make a viable console replacement. Many things like global settings and a centralized menu and bankswitch detecting needed to be done. As did hotkeys and customizable controls. And we needed a more robust and versatile OS anyhow. Win 3.1 wasn't going to cut the mustard here.

 

We'd see the first steps toward that with Z26 and PCAE.

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My first exposure was likely Nesticle in the early 80s. I was just impressed that I could play NES games on my 486 computer.

 

in the past the most important requirements were

 

  1. Speed: lots of emulators had specific game speed hacks to make them run without frame-skipping. Still probably the most important thing, although this likely doesn’t affect PC (GHz processors) versions only ARM emulators or portable devices (PSP overclock is only 333Mhz). If the system cannot play with 0 frame-skip, it isn’t acceptable.
  2. Sound: sound emulation is very difficult. I remember many emulators bitd struggled with emulating sound and playing at full speed. They sound doesn’t have to be perfect, but it cannot affect the frame-skipping. (See crappy Sega Genesis plug-n-plays)
  3. Compatibility: nothing is more disappointing than firing up an emulator and the emulator doesn’t have the proper mapper or additional software emulation support of add-on hardware to play the game properly. This does mean emulating additional hardware chips (DSP-1, DPC, MMC1)
  4. Ease of Use: MAME is great, but most people (including myself) don’t want to have to deal with a command line. All emulators need a great front end, and some way to save individual configuration settings on a per game basis.
  5. Save States: yeah I am lazy. Most of the time I just want to see all levels of a game. I don’t have time to “get gud,” so the ability to save my progress at any point so I can see everything once is important.

Other strong considerations:

 

Key-mapper: emulators should allow you to remap your controls however you like.


Game Database: At some point , you may want to play all the games by a certain developer, or all games made in 1982. A full games database that lets you sort the games however you like is a nice feature.

 

Other weak considerations:

 

Controllers: while I appreciate support for a wide array of input devices, I usually just use a crappy keyboard.


Cheats/Trainers: Save States mitigates most of this, but it is useful to be able to track/discover where a variable that controls lives/health/etc, so you can just hack the game directly and eliminate the need to save/load state.

 

Video Modes: speaking more about filters like fake scanlines, which I almost never use. Usually I don’t find these very useful (Stella’s phosphorus mode withstanding, which is a decent approximation of how games with flicker look on a real TV). I do like standard 2x, 3x, fill screen, etc. or the nice PSX renders that run games in higher than possible resolutions than on the original hardware. 

 

Netplay: dabbled in this bitd, these days I haven’t found much of a use. I would prefer to play co-op/head to head from the same couch.

 

Online Leaderboards/Hich Score tracker: I like the idea of this, but really only fits with Arcade games (and games from the era). Most games NES and onward were not score/time attack games.

 

What features am I missing that should be considered?

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12 hours ago, CapitanClassic said:

All emulators need a great front end, and some way to save individual configuration settings on a per game basis.

I'd much rather use a great unified front-end because it's rare for emulators to get this part right, and often their UIs just get in your way.   But external UIs require a robust set of command-line options, so it's annoying when an emulator clearly supports a feature but doesn't allow it to be enabled via command line parameter.

12 hours ago, CapitanClassic said:

Video Modes: speaking more about filters like fake scanlines, which I almost never use. Usually I don’t find these very useful (Stella’s phosphorus mode withstanding, which is a decent approximation of how games with flicker look on a real TV)

The old content doesn't look right on modern screens,  so I do use scanlines and other CRT emulation where available to give it a more period correct look.   That doesn't mean these features are always implemented right.  Sometimes the scanlines are too strong or get mangled by the scaler.   But when an emulator does these features well, the results can be great.

15 hours ago, Keatah said:

rarely if ever see commercial emulators exceed the capabilities and longevity of a collaborated freeware project. I got burned by bleem back in the day. And ever since have decided not to pay for emulators, among other types of utilities and indie games. I just feel cheated when support stops sooner than I was led to believe. That's the biggest complaint. Emu development time is too long for a one-man show, and when multiple devs are involved a paid model doesn't seem to fit well.

I think a lot of the small-shop commercial emulators gave up when the free emulation scene exploded.   They knew they couldn't compete.   There are exceptions.   Darek Mihocka who wrote the Gemulator and Xformer paid emulators still posts updates every so often.    

 

There's also lots of free emulators where the develop gave up supporting them.   Including some good ones, leading users to have to switch to an inferior emulator.

 

15 hours ago, Keatah said:

Yes the arcade revival was a big hit with me. I always wonder what it would have been like having a computer capable of playing the arcade games pixel-perfect like we have via MAME, in 1984 - 1987. Of course it couldn't have happened, but that would have been a fantastic time for such a thing.

We did.  Amiga and ST (1985) and Apple IIgs (1986) were capable of pixel-perfect ports.   Joust on ST was very close to the arcade.   Even newer games like Gauntlet II, the ST/Amiga versions compared favorably to the arcade.   But by that time there was much less emphasis on arcade to home ports, especially for the older arcade games, except in the homebrew/shareware scene.  Many of the shareware authors did a great job with arcade ports.

16 hours ago, Keatah said:

In recalling the activision action packs, the notion of 2600 on a Windows 3.1 486 was quite the novelty. Each game seemed to have its own dedicated emulator. A different version for each bankswitching scheme. With careful renaming of files it was possible to swap in other mfg's roms. Mostly.

My reaction to the Activision Action pack was different.   I was less amazed at than emulation than I was disappointed at how most of the Activision games were much more boring than I remembered!  I realized then that Activision's appeal was putting flashy graphics on very basic gameplay, at least for their early games.

 

As for the bundled emulators, I ignored them.   When I bought any of these types of compilations,  I'd just run the games under the emulator of my choice,  without feeling guilty because I bought the game.

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Quote

All emulators need a great front end, and some way to save individual configuration settings on a per game basis.

I'd much rather use a great unified front-end because it's rare for emulators to get this part right, and often their UIs just get in your way.   But external UIs require a robust set of command-line options, so it's annoying when an emulator clearly supports a feature but doesn't allow it to be enabled via command line parameter.

I worded that poorly. Even MAME bitd had a 3rd party create a front-end that would launch MAME with the correct command line options. I didn’t mean that the emulator itself needs to have a good UI.

 

What I meant is that most people don’t want to deal with individual emulator configuration settings, and stuff like RetroArch or other UI front-ends that make launching a game a simple matter of pointing to a couple of folders for OS/ROM/Save games/pics and double-clicking a title is what makes emulation ready for the masses. So like you said, a unified front-end that can simplify launching a game, play preview video/snapshots, and beautifying the UI and make using emulation easy to use is a huge requirement for current emulation.

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Ease of use, handling of .zip and .7z files, versatility in the screen output, and "close enough" fidelity is what I like. An attractive front end doesn't hurt either, but like with people, it's what's inside that really counts. 

 

I'm way past the stage of "wow, this is the game I played at Luigi's Pizza in 1981" and honesty, the old games are losing a little bit of luster because of the limitations of 1-quarter, 3-lives design choices. 

 

Even so, looking forward to my blue Miyoo Mini getting here so I can have yet another way to play Genesis and NES games on the run. 

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1 hour ago, CapitanClassic said:

I worded that poorly. Even MAME bitd had a 3rd party create a front-end that would launch MAME with the correct command line options. I didn’t mean that the emulator itself needs to have a good UI.

Ok then I agree.  At the end of the day I just want a seemless interface that allows me to select games and emulator from a controller and preferable free from keyboard interaction so that I could play comfortably from the living room soda.

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  • 1 month later...

I've always only looked for graphical and game-play accuracy vs. the originals, dependable operation, and controller customization. Apart from that, I'm not picky -- I even use the command-line-driven O2EM to emulate the Odyssey2, as it runs perfectly.

 

Even after using my '82 four-switch VCS from the time I was ten, and "bread-bin" C64s from the time I was 12, I was one of those who couldn't wait to get rid of my hardware, once a buddy proved to me that emulation worked. This was probably in my mid-30s, and I was still using the physical machines.

 

I couldn't give away my latest C64 and its slow, warp-less, alignment-dependent, unreliable 1541 fast enough, nor the fear of eventual mechanical failure in any of these platforms beloved to me, nor the power-supply paranoia. Hell, when I discovered that I could save and back-up every game made for a particular console or computer on a flash drive -- multiple times, for safety's sake -- I was immediately in never-look-back mode.

 

This might have something to do with the fact that nostalgia doesn't play a major part in my classic-game fanaticism. I'm not much of a nostalgic guy in general, and in spite of the fact that I've been heavily into video games since the early '80s, I mainly associate them with current playing, since there was never a time in my life when I took a break from revisiting my favorites on a pretty constant basis. And thanks to emulation, one is always discovering new old favorites, so to speak.

 

Regardless, I understand collecting, and I understand the common affinity with the actual hardware. It's damn cool. It's among the most fascinating stuff one can amass and exhibit. I get so impressed checking out others' collections. I also admire their engineering abilities, which presumably come into play when something malfunctions. I can even relate to the happiness that a physical electronic item can trigger just by existing in one's daily environment. These things are beyond awesome. I just don't want to spend the money, space and nerves, myself. It's subjective.

 

Just an unrequested editorial there, since we're on the subject. :)

 

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