Start it at 11 minutes. Everything before that is just his opinions on why people don't want to emulate games.
Not saying it's a waste of time or anything, just if you already know the arguments then it's unnecessary.
How about I just don't even click on the article at all, because I'm not going to watch a video that could have been an article.
"Hey guys here's my video about why you should watch me talk about using emulation to play classic console games, be sure to hit that like button and subscribe to my channel BYAAAEEE!"
People should quit wasting so much bandwidth and storage on useless videos.
So angry. See as you see fit my friend.
Fuck any article that tells you what you SHOULD be doing.
Even worse, it's a video
Emulating games is important but I would argue that preserving the games is moreso. If you have discs of old games lying around (I grabbed the original floppy disk version of Marathon by Bungie for less than 5 quid), please find out how to dump them into an ISO or some other archive. It's important now more than ever as games tend towards digital distribution and old games are lost to time. The games don't have to be good, they just need to be preserved.
I'd argue emulating games is more important to the preserve effort. Unless you have some extremely rare one of a kind prototype game (chances are you don't) most games have already been dumped at the point. What's important is these dumps continue to get shared. Emulation drives people to find these games and adds one more seeder to the community meaning the more obscure stuff won't just be dependent on one person keeping the file alive.
I agree for the most part, however, unless someone had dumped the games in the first place, the emulation wouldn't be possible. It's important that people know how to dump their games because they might be sitting on games that haven't been uploaded yet. I mainly use vimm.net to find ROMs and it tells you how complete the collections are and which games are missing.
Most "retro" games have been backed up but the definition of retro shifts all the time. You don't even need to go that far forward: the PS3 and X360 have a ton of missing stuff - games yes but especially DLCs and update versions.
The pre-online era was "easier" - find each revision of a Donkey Kong Country cart and your job's done. Now, every game has 12 versions and casual pirates that "just want to play the game" only bother sharing the oldest and newest ones. There's content locked behind promotions and account bonuses. There's patches that alter or remove content (or patch important speedrun tech out of games). And the presence of online in otherwise single-player games is always going to be something inherently opposing preservation of the original experience - you're not going to ever get the same experience playing Wind Waker HD with Tingle bottles that I did because either the feature is dead or it's been reimplemented through something like Pretendo. And with a reimplementation, the source for the community posts is no longer casual fans taking selfies with bosses but instead comprised exclusively of tech savvy users who bothered to install a fake Miiverse on their hacked Wii U / emulator. You can emulate Demon's Souls (PS3), but you're not going to get the messages or phantasms from the original.
I lost all my Marathon disks but I do still have an original boxed copy of Halo for Mac OS on CD-ROM
Oh man, did you have the entire trilogy? I hope you can find them! CDs are incredibly easy to dump, you just need a disk drive and Linux has easy tools for copying the data into an iso file.
No they only made Halo 1 for Mac. I played Halo 2 on Windows XP with a hack that unlocked its dependency on having Vista.
I meant the Marathon trilogy. I'd be so keen to get the ROMs for the original floppy disks for 2 and Infinity.
Yeah I did have all of those. Don't know where they went but it's possible they are archived on the vast Internets as well
Son, I've been doing it since 1998
Bleem!
I was thinking nesticle, but yeah
Thanks Shitman!
I had Atari 2600 Action Pack 2 for Windows 95, which I didn't realize at the time was one of the earliest console emulators (though you could only play the games included in the pack).
Then 97-99 had this explosion of console and handheld emulation. Nesticle, SNES9X, No$GB. Remember No$ was a big deal because it could emulate the link cable between two instances for getting all the Pokemon across red and blue.
Don't forget to check out rom hacks as well. There are so many creative people who have extended or redeveloped games into their own image. Some good ones that come to mind are Chrono Trigger: Prophet's Guile and Super Mario 64: Last Impact.
Piracy is a moral imperative. I donate to these projects whenever I can.
Imdoingmypart.gif
If you need a quickstart on emulation, I highly recommend Ludo. it's a wonderful frontend that comes packaged with most emulators and just works without any fiddling.
Ludo is a retroarch spinoff that has sane defaults and a simpler interface.
Everytime i play an emulategame it tastes like game history
For those who have the cash, FPGA recreations of consoles are superior to emulation, if you're not interested in enhancement and strive for accuracy
What's the most modern you could emulate on an android phone (s23)?
And is retroarch the best bet?
I've been entertaining the idea of buying a cheap laptop to play with Linux after yesterday's posts and the idea of being able to emulate some more modern stuff and maybe install steam is appealing.
I've been deep in the Android emulation rabbit hole for a while.
RetroArch is a great all-in-one solution, but it can be tricky to customize. For example, you can't move on-screen controls through any sort of interface, but need to edit a configuration file to do so. It also won't automatically adjust the controls to the game you're playing - you would need to manually override the configuration to use an SNES overlay for SNES games. That said, the default "retropad" on-screen controls work fairly well for most consoles if you don't feel like customizing all of them.
RetroArch is going to provide the most accurate emulation cores for basically everything up through the N64/Playstation. Is it the best? If you take a few minutes to learn how to customize it then definitely. In addition to being accurate, it has a great system for video shaders that work across all consoles.
Outside of that Dolphin is solid for GameCube/Wii. Yuzu is available for Switch but only some games will be playable.
Ship of Harkinian is an absolutely brilliant way to play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I have it up and running on my Steamdeck and it blows the EmuDeck/RetroArch version out of the water.
Good to see they have an AppImage now. Setting it up on Linux was a hassle when I last played it around a year and a half ago.
Start it at 11 minutes. Everything before that is just his opinions on why people don't want to emulate games.
Not saying it's a waste of time or anything, just if you already know the arguments then it's unnecessary.
How about I just don't even click on the article at all, because I'm not going to watch a video that could have been an article.
"Hey guys here's my video about why you should watch me talk about using emulation to play classic console games, be sure to hit that like button and subscribe to my channel BYAAAEEE!"
People should quit wasting so much bandwidth and storage on useless videos.
So angry. See as you see fit my friend.
Fuck any article that tells you what you SHOULD be doing.
Even worse, it's a video
Emulating games is important but I would argue that preserving the games is moreso. If you have discs of old games lying around (I grabbed the original floppy disk version of Marathon by Bungie for less than 5 quid), please find out how to dump them into an ISO or some other archive. It's important now more than ever as games tend towards digital distribution and old games are lost to time. The games don't have to be good, they just need to be preserved.
I'd argue emulating games is more important to the preserve effort. Unless you have some extremely rare one of a kind prototype game (chances are you don't) most games have already been dumped at the point. What's important is these dumps continue to get shared. Emulation drives people to find these games and adds one more seeder to the community meaning the more obscure stuff won't just be dependent on one person keeping the file alive.
I agree for the most part, however, unless someone had dumped the games in the first place, the emulation wouldn't be possible. It's important that people know how to dump their games because they might be sitting on games that haven't been uploaded yet. I mainly use vimm.net to find ROMs and it tells you how complete the collections are and which games are missing.
Most "retro" games have been backed up but the definition of retro shifts all the time. You don't even need to go that far forward: the PS3 and X360 have a ton of missing stuff - games yes but especially DLCs and update versions.
The pre-online era was "easier" - find each revision of a Donkey Kong Country cart and your job's done. Now, every game has 12 versions and casual pirates that "just want to play the game" only bother sharing the oldest and newest ones. There's content locked behind promotions and account bonuses. There's patches that alter or remove content (or patch important speedrun tech out of games). And the presence of online in otherwise single-player games is always going to be something inherently opposing preservation of the original experience - you're not going to ever get the same experience playing Wind Waker HD with Tingle bottles that I did because either the feature is dead or it's been reimplemented through something like Pretendo. And with a reimplementation, the source for the community posts is no longer casual fans taking selfies with bosses but instead comprised exclusively of tech savvy users who bothered to install a fake Miiverse on their hacked Wii U / emulator. You can emulate Demon's Souls (PS3), but you're not going to get the messages or phantasms from the original.
I lost all my Marathon disks but I do still have an original boxed copy of Halo for Mac OS on CD-ROM
Oh man, did you have the entire trilogy? I hope you can find them! CDs are incredibly easy to dump, you just need a disk drive and Linux has easy tools for copying the data into an iso file.
No they only made Halo 1 for Mac. I played Halo 2 on Windows XP with a hack that unlocked its dependency on having Vista.
I meant the Marathon trilogy. I'd be so keen to get the ROMs for the original floppy disks for 2 and Infinity.
Yeah I did have all of those. Don't know where they went but it's possible they are archived on the vast Internets as well
Son, I've been doing it since 1998
Bleem!
I was thinking nesticle, but yeah
Thanks Shitman!
I had Atari 2600 Action Pack 2 for Windows 95, which I didn't realize at the time was one of the earliest console emulators (though you could only play the games included in the pack).
Then 97-99 had this explosion of console and handheld emulation. Nesticle, SNES9X, No$GB. Remember No$ was a big deal because it could emulate the link cable between two instances for getting all the Pokemon across red and blue.
Don't forget to check out rom hacks as well. There are so many creative people who have extended or redeveloped games into their own image. Some good ones that come to mind are Chrono Trigger: Prophet's Guile and Super Mario 64: Last Impact.
Piracy is a moral imperative. I donate to these projects whenever I can.
Imdoingmypart.gif
If you need a quickstart on emulation, I highly recommend Ludo. it's a wonderful frontend that comes packaged with most emulators and just works without any fiddling.
Ludo is a retroarch spinoff that has sane defaults and a simpler interface.
Everytime i play an emulategame it tastes like game history
For those who have the cash, FPGA recreations of consoles are superior to emulation, if you're not interested in enhancement and strive for accuracy
What's the most modern you could emulate on an android phone (s23)?
And is retroarch the best bet?
I've been entertaining the idea of buying a cheap laptop to play with Linux after yesterday's posts and the idea of being able to emulate some more modern stuff and maybe install steam is appealing.
I've been deep in the Android emulation rabbit hole for a while.
RetroArch is a great all-in-one solution, but it can be tricky to customize. For example, you can't move on-screen controls through any sort of interface, but need to edit a configuration file to do so. It also won't automatically adjust the controls to the game you're playing - you would need to manually override the configuration to use an SNES overlay for SNES games. That said, the default "retropad" on-screen controls work fairly well for most consoles if you don't feel like customizing all of them.
RetroArch is going to provide the most accurate emulation cores for basically everything up through the N64/Playstation. Is it the best? If you take a few minutes to learn how to customize it then definitely. In addition to being accurate, it has a great system for video shaders that work across all consoles.
Outside of that Dolphin is solid for GameCube/Wii. Yuzu is available for Switch but only some games will be playable.
Ship of Harkinian is an absolutely brilliant way to play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I have it up and running on my Steamdeck and it blows the EmuDeck/RetroArch version out of the water.
Good to see they have an AppImage now. Setting it up on Linux was a hassle when I last played it around a year and a half ago.