Also original hardware’s cool when you still own all the stuff you’ve had since 1st grade, your taste was immaculate then so you have all the sought after games, and you don’t give a shit about CRT filters or upscalers.
If you’re just now getting into it now…yikes, prices are wild. I just had to get an A for a semester to get Dragon Warrior 4, not sell my house.
Also I don’t own a house
I will say that retropie is not representative of retroarch (and retroarch has a bad ui, dont get me wrong). Iirc, retropie is some unholy union of launchbox and retroarch and launchbox is WAY worse at managing controller setups than retroarch has been in years
Like a current, official release of retroarch just autoconfigs most common controllers w/ one caveat that is more a hardware interface issue than anything: 8bitdo controllers need to be in dinput mode to correctly report their controller id
That makes sense. Retropie has that jenga tower of different software and workarounds feel to it that I got my first whiff of telling retroarch not to use the mythical supposed one size fits all retropad configuration to make the onscreen keyboard work in the default ZX Spectrum emulator.
If this started because of my playing these weird Switch ports of Metal Gear - what can I say, love me a weird port.
Also don’t have any problem emulating a good version Metal Gear Solid…on my Mister FPGA 
(But nah, my main defense of the Mister is that it’s nice to have a very small, relatively low-fuss thing I can easily carry around and play a whole mess of games on. As with everything when it comes to the Mister, it makes more sense and was an easier sell when it cost like half as much five years ago. Probably more sensible to just get one of those small APU mini PCs and slap Batocera on it.)
I got radicalized by looking at an artist’s twitter page and they had a comic with the caption “buy physical, never pay full price for a rental”
I know Noah Baumbach is a kindred spirit after seeing While We’re Young, the older I get, the less physical totems I want, let the kids fight over those
don’t get me wrong, there are games I still want to scoop up copies of that haven’t exploded in price, but that’s more a statement of taste than slavery to ownership
i feel like the mister appeals to american gamers bc in many ways i think its american culture to prefer purchasing videogames (not a value statement just an observation / opinion)
I don’t even mind the idea of paying money for a whatever as long as it’s good
I randomly watched Tenma stream Metal Slug but she was playing one of those godawful dotemu versions of the game and the sound emulation was fucked in a way I hadn’t heard in 20 or so years
as someone who grew up with a Genesis, I’m insane and have very particular ideas about how the sledgehammer of FM synth should fuck up my ears and if you can’t get that right, why should I even bother stealing it
Its a me. Wahoo
The problem with me is, as an adult I started to look at it like well, I’ve paid a lot less for this stuff than other people, so it’s ok to splurge on a few missing pieces. I got earthbound for $1 but chrono trigger for $90. That was wrong of me but I am sort of glad now considering CT goes for even more now, etc etc I’m full of examples like this
I do agree with the idea that CRTs are the ideal way to play old videogames but using filters on emulators is fine too. I mean what are people supposed to do. But I’m in a weird place because I got rid of my CRT but I’m stuck with all these old consoles. So I felt kind of forced to buy a retrotink. I think that would have been a good time to sell everything and go full piracy. I don’t like the idea of having a really advanced computerized device connected to old consoles, it’s a constant reminder of how pointless it is to try so hard, it’s like the NES/SNES everdrives that can do all those mappers/enhancement chips in FGPA form, it feels vaguely offensive like just get yourself an emulator at that point. I think the ideal setup is either a normal ass computer with shaders or one of those software emulation boxes with analog outputs to a CRT…like a Wii.
I do think PS2 though…you need that console to have the pressure sensitive buttons. I guess that is technically true for Xbox too but nobody cares. And the DS unless you got an android phone with a stylus I guess.
I like CRTs
but I like my back and knees more
instead, fuck me up with 1 million nit panels, I’ll manage
The idea of paying good money to buy a little plastic box that looks like, but is not, an snes so you can play some tiny selection of snes games on it when you can trivially download every snes game ever made and play it on the computer you already have is, in my opinion, maybe one of the stupidest ways to spend your time and money I can imagine,
but,
the second I have to do anything in a configuration menu I’m done, I don’t care any more.
So I guess what I’m saying is I don’t play emulated games very often.
last time i loaded up a romhack in mGBA it was running at literally 5400 frames per second. it took me like 20 minutes to figure out that somehow both the “Sync to Audio” and “Sync to Video” settings had become unset when i wasn’t looking (and that an uncapped framerate was inexplicably the the default behavior in that case)
i love emulation
The only thing that has me consider a recent and decent remaster project on sale on my PS5 over just emulating something is that I don’t have a good solution for playing my PC on the TV in the living room with a controller. I’ve 180’d on the SteamDeck and find it super fucking annoying to use for this purpose, largely because the UI is unresponsive and you can’t wake it up with a controller.
emulation still seems to always find some way to really suck, even though new suck-proof methods seem to roll out every couple years
but much more ominous is that way that it increasingly seems like emulation in its entirety is a nearly impossibly specialized space for everyone let’s say more than ~10 years off my age in either direction. and that the might of corporations and whole nations is actively obscuring to them the fact that we live in a time of wildly unprecedented access to media for anyone with an internet connection. i got buddies working at walmart hemming and hawing about buying a used copy of dqv ds for $40, and for every child i know, all videogames are things you download for free on tablets and you click past the ads like on youtube. it’s extremely dark tbh. it’s possible that i try to avoid thinking about it and also dwell on it constantly. this has been an everything sucks post, shout out to videogames
If the experience is good and works for you, the method of play is good and valid.
See, I love those mini consoles because they just work. I can get my parents playing someone on them comfortably where as i used to have to be on the phone with my mom to talk her through something as basic as installing steam games. Configuring an emulator and getting a computer hooked up to the TV would be right out.
Honestly the fact that she got New Vegas up and running on her Steam Deck herself without having to do weird Wine shit, sold me on the platform. Mom tested, kid approved.
couldn’t the pcsx2 people literally just copy whatever code the rpsc3 people are using where you use the sony driver that came with psnow and it just recognizes a dualshock 3 and it works with pressure sensitivity.
I would like to just use duckstation instead of retroarch the problem is playstation stuff can be different resolutions and if you’re running a shader in reshade you have to manually change the resolution. using resident evil 1 as a test to get crt guest advanced to look as close to identical as I could to how it looks in retroarch, I had to change the resolution of the shader to 440x240, I don’t know why, I was just putting in numbers seeing what worked, the instructions for the shader say just always use the reported resolution but that doesn’t work. but if you do that in duckstation the game looks good but the ps1 boot logo looks like shit. in retroarch the logo looks clear and good like I remember. I assume the startup logo is running in some higher resolution than whatever the game is and the shader in retroarch is more adaptable to that. also if you want curvature in reshade you have to turn up the horizontal setting a lot more I guess because it’s counting the black bars on the side as part of the picture. anyway, the configuration menu and config file editing is the juice* (*the mental illness instilled in me from trying to get games running in dos growing up)
I think these things setup pretty simple now though and it’s just an endless nightmare for people chasing an unattainable idea of perfection. even dosbox stuff is simple now with their pretty adequate built in shader, I think my per game config file is just noting if the audio is mt32 or sc55 and the rest is going off the default settings I only changed one or two things on. don’t know why it took so long it was just like last year all the insane forum trawling I had to do to figure out I needed to put in “vgaonly” to get it to do the line doubling thing monitors are supposed to do for, and nobody anywhere seemed to give a shit about any of this, but that’s all automatic now. somebody finally cares about more than sony pvms now.
When I got into emulation back in high school, my dad started noticing us playing all these new games and kept going on about “YOU DON’T GET NUTHIN FOR NUTHIN” and threatening with what he would do if a huge bill came in the mail.
I guess these days I am more of a physical media collector nerd, mostly for movies though since I don’t like subscribing to multiple streaming services and most of what I like to watch isn’t on those anyway. Also faffing around with finding good torrents is annoying. Mostly though I just like being able to stand in front of a shelf and pick something up and just look at it, and I admit I get some kind of satisfaction when my friend comes over and sees something there and is like “WTF is that?”
ROMs are great but they just kind of disappear into the dark recesses of the hard drive and get forgotten about. So many recently translated old games that I have downloaded and never played because I forgot I had them.
I’m fine with stuff like official collections of ROMs like the Sega Mega Drive collections and Mini consoles, I kinda like seeing officially curated collections with fancy menus and extra features. I definitely prefer that to some goopy AI upscaled remaster or HD2D remake.
Anyway I think this post mostly demonstrates that I am a bit of a moron who for some reason finds it easier to waste money on shiny things instead of just downloading the same thing for free 
As somebody who spent roughly 2002 to 2014 obsessively RGBifying all the gaming around me, I think back and it was never perfect, really. CRTs do wonderfully for 2D motion, something I can’t unsee, but they tend to lack contrast and I’ve never had one with perfect geometry (and I used to have a fair share; now not so much !).
When I turned on my second-hand Vita like 8 years ago and looked at an OLED screen for the first time, I was swept away! A tiny, perfectly squared, utterly colorful image! Decadent color, dare I say!
It’s been hard to go back!
Memory is emotion, and my recall of playing SNES games through an RF adapter is colored by far more than display quality. Remembering this has helped me get past some semi-conscious reticence to embrace the creature comforts.