Emulation talk has reminded me I want to spend a weekend soon setting up developer mode on my Xbox and ripping some PS2 games.
I have this fantasy of building a micro PC thatâs small enough to throw in a bag with 4 controllers, so when I go to someoneâs house instead of watching youtube clips endlessly I plug it into their TV and we can play like Smash Brothers 64 or something.
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The lesson is: Marketing works and people will always choose convenience over having to fiddle with obscure programs just to get things setup and running decent-ish let alone optimized.
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The mini-console point is a good one and further points out that itâs money, moneyâs behind it because these hardware gimcracks can be sold, whereas software emulators canât, at least not nearly to the same degree, for the most part. So all the marketing is going to be about telling people hardware is where itâs at.
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Maybe Iâve confused PCSX2âs Software Renderer and hardware renderer with what is being called software emulation Iâve played lots of PS2 emulation in super tweaked states. Iâve used that emulator robustly!
I guess we are just talking about hardware based emulation versus (PS3 emulating PS2 games) and using software on your PC like PCSX2, Dolphin, etc?
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ohhhhhh OK yeah that makes more sense!
âsoftware emulationâ refers to essentially any emulation that is performed in software (which would historically be almost everything but an FPGA or a PS3 running PS2 games, exactly as you said) as opposed to using strict software-based 3D rendering without GPU T&L or shader programming (which is usually impractical but doesnât philosophically move the needle on this either way)
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Also there is the element of object fetishization. People like to own actual physical stuff, not just licenses or data on a hard drive. Even though everything can be digitized we still prefer the act of holding and handling an object. Unboxing the mini-console, hooking it up, having all those tactile experiences etc. Keeping it on the shelf or in the box on display as a conversation piece and so on.
All of that stuff overpowers the fact that the end experience is often inferior.
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Also I guess a lot of that kind of stuff is being sold to lots of people who werenât actually playing those games on a CRT 35 years ago or whenever so itâs not like they can even tell that something is off or not right. For all they know the experience theyâre getting is the same or better than the original.
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I donât even think MiSTers are convenient, theyâre as fiddly as installing homebrew on an original xbox for emulation in 2004
nowhere near the dead simplicity of pcsx2 nightly or duckstation
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The thing that frustrates me is that this was no longer the case for any system a mister can emulate. Every 16-bit and earlier console already has a cycle-accurate emulator. The PSX and N64 MiSTer cores are still a good deal off from the accuracy that you can get with mednafen or duckstation or the parallel RDP for n64
(n64 emulation on mister is a total joke imo, Itâs gliden64 tier)
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it makes me feel like Iâm taking crazy pills!!!
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I donât have a PC
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Up until now I thought I was the only one looking around and feeling this way!
I have a few Analogue items having one been drawn in by the fuss and I never use them. The PC or the Vita are so much more convenient, even with the initial investment of time to configure, and the like. And this is with having a fair handful of carts, still.
I definitely feel the connection with possession, so to speak, as theyâre hard to part with, but I havenât hooked up my SNES in ages! Nostalgia is a powerful force, especially given the uncertainty about us in the world.
But our memories lie, and it wasnât always better just because it was before. Chasing around a few kids, let me tell you, I love save states! I love quick resume!
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digital media is cheap now and we live in a world where physical media has been dwindling in the mainstream, so now itâs become this boutique realm for collectors to show their appreciation of being fully committed to their hobbies. the same thing is happening with the vinyl market and the blu-ray market. it also often just has a nostalgia element of capturing how youâd experience a piece of media in a specific moment in time esp when youâre talking about older videogames or records.
i do think itâs kind of sad - because itâs a reflection of people feeling sad about things, but it is hard to go from a world where the stuff that matters to you is some kind of physical tangible object to an interchangeable file on a computer. and even then a lot of people donât understand file structures very well and just handle everything through apps so thereâs not even the pleasure of organizing folders in a personal/idiosyncratic way and itâs all through these kind of hostile interfaces and ecosystems owned by someone else.
i do also think games look different on CRT tvs, and there are some emulators with not great compatibility or that donât run very well depending on what your computer is. i refused to mess with PCSX2 for years for example because i couldnât get games to run at a consistent framerate and every time i looked up it was a bunch of condescending advice basically telling me i should build a computer around the emulatorâs problems. i also donât like it when a lot of games have popping and clicking in their audio - a lot of n64 games have that on emulator. i was trying to emulate a Saturn game a few weeks ago also and the emulator definitely had a lot of different problems running the game without hiccups too.
i do think in general tho the biggest thing being in a moment where the physical object is really highly valued for a lot of reasons - because people are feeling sad about the current state of media, because collectors need stuff to show off on their youtube channels or whatever, because thereâs a lack of permanence in so many digital platforms or theyâre filled with DRM, etc.
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The PS1 like passes every hardware test the original does.
Everyone that has a mister is very happy with it and I fuss with it so much less than with retroarch. Do not judge by whatever happened to Marvel Vs Capcom at the meetup.
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And the N64 emulation now works great.
Are yâall seriously just complaining about a way other people play games?
Like the real complaint with MiSTeR now it is it is too expensive. It is far too expensive now. But once you have it, itâs like âthis owns.â
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I got black pilled when we turned on shrugâs Ps4 at the meetup and none of the games worked because he hadnât turned it on in a year and thus hadnât phoned home in a year.
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Oh okay this is from GYPT that explains the tone.
As a hardware devotee, physical games are less easy to defend than blu-rays or vinyl.
Boutique shot on video re-releases or noise lathe cuts arenât easily available digitally (plus those are the exact people you should support by actually buying stuff from), but if I want to play some PC-88 game, a perfect copy is easily in reach online.
That being said, Iâm still bitter about fumbling my controller while playing something on my raspberry pi and in some sort of off Grimaceâs head scenario, I managed to remap the retroarch menu button combo to something else necessitating a reinstall. Between that and trying to talk a not super tech savy friend through pairing a Bluetooth controller to play Bloody Wolf on the pre-set up pi I gave him, emulation still teeters on that unfriendly edge. Retroarch needs some summer of code style attention to make that UI not a total mess.
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