What were the early days of emulators like?
>>12763096dogshit, tears and salt
Incredible because the concept of FREE GAMES was like winning the lottery. And you got to experience all the games you had only ever read about in magazines. It was a golden age of discovery.
>>12763106>Incredible because the concept of FREE GAMES was like winning the lottery.exactly how i described it. the main problem was finding working roms. navigating web rings and all these voting links they wanted you to click. something like nes mario was easy to find. however more obscure games, and especially lots of snes ones, were slower to find good roms for. but it was really incredible. i also found myself mostly playing games i had already played but never owned. to me being able to play all that stuff was more exciting than new things.
>>12763106This. When I, an '80s kid only given Nintendo consoles, got to play PSX and the Nintendo games I couldn't get, in 2001? Yes, it was an age of beautiful discovery. You think I cared about the screen tearing back then? No I did not.
>>12763106if you managed to make shit work instead of crashing, also most PCs couldn't handle emulations of consoles bigger than 16 bits because of shit optimization. I'm talking like early 2000.
Depends on what you were emulating.NES, SNES and Genesis emulation evolved very fast. Emulators such as NESticle, ZSNES and Genecyst had a rough at the start, but quickly got their shit together and after a year or so they were already pretty competent.PS1 emulation was rough for several years. I remember internet pages with complex guides to how configure your emulator to work with each individual game because there were no universal solutions.
>>12763128Thankfully by 2002 everyone and their uncle had a PS2 that was PSX backward-compatible, and everything most wanted was sold as $20 greatest hits copies in stores at the time.
>>12763134PS2 uses emulation.
>>12763096It was a lot of fun, especially the early romhacking scenehttps://overclocked.acmlm.net/there was a board called acmlmboard it was pretty classic
>>12763096You have no idea how awesome it was to see the raw pixels on a PC monitor in 1998. Save states were completely mind blowing too.Good fucking luck getting controllers to work though.
>>12763096Honestly not much has changed aside from what is considered old/new. 20 years ago, the older emulators were very good and the newer emulators were questionable and needed more time to cook
>>12763167Ok I take it back lol. PC controllers almost didn’t exist in the 90s. We had to play our snes roms with a keyboard and it sucked
>>12763173i bought a usb sidewinder and i came home and plugged it in to my win98 machine and... it did not work, why didn't usb devices just work, no driver would get it to work, i thought usb was fake and made up until i got my next computer with xp
>>12763173I bought a Gravis Gamepad Pro just to use with emulators and it worked in some of them but not all. The actual quality of the controller was one of the worst I've ever owned though. Like even worse than the Atari Jaguar controller. But it still felt like an upgrade from the keyboard, witch I still hate to this day.This was one of the reasons running emulators on home consoles like the OG Xbox was so awesome when that happened. You didn't need to fuck around with shitty PC controllers or drivers, and everything just werked.
>>12763167>>12763173I was strictly a keyboard kid when I first started emulating. I remember using DZXC as my movement (simply because I didn't like how the W in WASD was "on the left") and L<>? as the XYBA equivalent.
The really fun part was that my keyboard had only 4 simultaneous maximum inputs. So if I was trying to move diagonally in a heavy action game sometimes a keypress wouldn’t register. I had to unclick certain keys at precise times to get all my inputs in
At the time the entire PC gaming market was boomer dads, and their genres (CRPG, FPS, Sim City, lucasarts adventure, space flight sim, etc) all used mouse+keyboard or flight joysticks. We didn’t get console style controllers until way later, maybe because console game to pc ports became more widespread. PC vs Console gaming used to be very different experiences
>>12763191Key rollover.I'm pretty sure it depends on which keys you're pressing, some combinations lock your keyboard with just 3 keys, while other combinations can register up to 6 keys.Generally if you learn to use the actual arrow keys to move instead of WASD you won't have that problem.This is how I learned to play from the very start, but I imagine it must be awkward to use the right hand to move to someone who isn't used to it.It's not an actual problem if you get a keyboard with n-key rollover anyway.
>>12763180My first pc gamepad that actually worked (the sidewinder didn't) was something like this, I remember the dpad was the worst and wouldn't register unless you pushed hard, but I was pleased to play mario 64 with a proper analog stick on PC. Felt like a cheat :)
>>12763225Yep.Had a sidewinder with a shitty d-pad too, but mine didn't even have an anolog stick.It was the 2P controller, the keyboard was better.
NeoRAGEX was a miracle. Full speed NEO GEO games for free on modest spec PCs, with brand new $250 games still coming out and dumped in short order. Programmed in assembly so it could pull off the feat on circa 1999 computers, nothing else like it.
>>12763124>caring about consoles bigger than 16 bitsYou weren't there for early emulation. Bleem! And that shit was the second phase.
I remember having to disable/enable graphic layers in some SNES games to get through underwater or smoke areas because dithering wasn't working
ah yes I remember the days of pete's plugins and flipping through dozens of random graphics settings I had no idea what they even did trying to find a configuration that looked good and wasn't laggy. spending hours jailbreaking my psp and loading it with roms and emulators, just to find out even SNES games ran like absolute shit on it.I actually took a long long break from emulating at all because my experience with them was so bad, outside of emulating shit like gameboy and NES. When I got back into a few years ago and suddenly everything just werks, even ps2 and gamecube, that was a magical time and I went absolutely crazy downloading way more roms and isos than Ill never need.
>>12763353I remember that too. Also transparencies only worked in some emulators. Even ZSNES couldn't do transparency until a while after others could, though there was always some kind of catch like transparency worked but layer priorities were fucked.
>>12763395>spending hours jailbreaking my psp and loading it with roms and emulators, just to find out even SNES games ran like absolute shit on it.For whatever reasons you can run Neo Geo, CPS-1 & 2, Genesis, Sega CD and GBA at full speed on PSP but SNES somehow had trouble.
>>12763096it was like, you clicked stuff, but on older hardware and flimsier software, wooaahhh
>>12763096Only one I knew about was ZSNES and that was really bad at first. Some game worked great, others seemed to work great but would crash suddenly, and others you would get nothing. But it seemed like wizardry to me at the time because devs in game mags would talk about how difficult it was to port stuff and made it sound like you had to reinvent half the game sometimes.I never looked much into emulation until VBA hit. Being able to play GB, GBC, and GBA games in one program also seemed like wizardry especially because I can't recall ever experiencing a crash or game breaking bug even early into it's release. Likely I just got lucky with all the games I liked playing and probably forgot some, there's no way it was perfect in year 1 but I don't remember any issues.PS2 emulation was the one I remember having the most issues until now. It was rough for a long while. For like a decade, half the catalogue was barely playable. Some stuff would work but required a lot of super specific settings to get working and some needed that and it would still run like ass.
>>12763096Fucking magical. Free games, plus being able to play Jap-only shit. MAME in particular blew my mind. Being able to play real arcade games at home was amazing.On the other hand, however:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDlnEDoaLosThere was quite a lot of broken shit early on. Graphic glitches at least got mostly taken care of pretty quickly (on the 2D systems anyway, the 3D systems were a whole other story), but music sounded very off across the board for quite a while.Also, yeah, you had to get used to playing on keyboard because gamepad support was terrible at first. I didn't get one working properly with emulators until the XP days when I got a USB Sidewinder that mostly just werked, but it didn't have enough buttons for some systems so I had to bind those to the keyboard.So, it was a give and take. I was very glad to have it, but I also couldn't wait for it to get better because some games were kinda rough.
>>12763517Omg that audio. It sounds ok at first but then the detune is all broken and the WWRRRRRRR sounds
>>12763096Depends on the emulator. 8 and 16bit emulators got pretty decent by like 2003. A good example being the sega genesis emulator gens.
>>12763096What's with these stupid ass zoomer threads?>WHAT WAS [arbitrary subjective emotional content of thing i could never possibly understand] LIKE??
>>12763507ZSNES was magical because it could run on potato hardware. I had a AMD K6 machine that was maybe 350 MHz and ZSNES was the only thing that was cutting it, aside from emulating something like GBC or NES that I didn't do that much since I owned a GBA myself. Snes9x was a bit stuttery, and so was VBA - not unplayable but annoying compared to the buttery smooth framerates of ZSNES (and of course the amazing GUI).It was a rude awakening for me when ZSNES couldn't handle the Star Ocean compression chip properly, at first at least. I think they added support to it in some release but the digitised Star Trek sounds in the intro were still incredibly garbled. What a disappointment that was since Tales of Phantasia (DeJap translation) was my jam at the time.I actually still have some old emulators on my modded Xbox and I have done most of my SNES emulation on that machine. Good times.
I can vividly remember how awesome old technology was when it was new, you literally cannot go back and most people may never understand the feeling. But they'll develop their own nostalgia in their own life, probably over smartphone games and shit.
I remember being a kid and playing Crash 3 with espxe. You needed plugins like Lilypad and half of them didn't even work. Crash 3 on XP, CRT AND keyboard was comfy nonetheless.
>>12763173This is something PC oldheads are loath to mention. Console controllers settled on close to the optimal way to play a lot of genres, and are currently amazing now with gyro aim added, but the best you could get on PC was 'joysticks' designed for flight sims that were cumbersome as fuck.
>>12763096I don't miss it one bit. I hated having to comb through epsxe settings to make individual games run decently and some games still had numberous bugs because ps1 emulation just wasn't there back in 2004.Kids are spoiled with duckstation and beetlepsx on retroarch.
>>12763096It was fantastic. In the late 90's I used my hand-me-down Pentium 75 MHz to play properly through a bunch of great SNES games that I had only ever rented for an evening, including Super Metroid. I remember I had to start ZSNES in DOS mode in order for the performance to not be dogshit.In 2002 I bought a decent PC and played a bunch of PSX games, both some of my favorites that I couldn't play anymore due to my PSX breaking, and some that I never got to play before. Made for some neat Smackdown 2 and Tekken 3 matches against my neighbor.I also played through the two or three N64 games that were actually good.The emulation was far from perfect and there was a lot of fiddling involved, but I didn't really care.Then in 2004 I switched to Linux, and emulated console games basically became the only video games I'd play.
>>12763173we bought picrelated with our first PC in 1995 or so, played a bunch of DOS games like Rise 2 with it, as well as NES games (NESticle).Console controllers were definitely always a step ahead, I fucking wished I had something as good as the PS1 controller on the PC, but there were always controllers good enough to play games from the last console generation.
>>12763801I think my friend had this controller and it was pretty shitty, the dpad was drifting like a bitch. Pretty miserable thing for a young man to watch the calibration dot stuck in one corner in the Windows gamepad configurator.
>>12763096Idk I remember project64 around 2008 and it worked fine apart from having to use some sort of sixaxis program to get PS3 controller to work with it
It's how europoors first experienced Chrono Trigger
>>12763106>i don't know anything about the early days>but some """golden age""" was great for poor children such as myself
>>12763096Getting to play Abu Simbel Profanation on my 386 was pretty sick.
>>12763096i remember n64 emulation working better than playstation emulation on low end computersnow it's the oppositecurrent emulators require more processing power. this is why they'll recommend you use an outdated version of snes9 when emulating on a raspberry pi for example
when i play on my raspberry pi 2 i use these emulatorsi have never had a problem with pcsx rearmed despite it not being the most accurate. i have beaten like 20+ ps1 games with it
>>12763096I remember playing all the megaman games sequentially on my dad's laptop which was in his room. I went to get a drink and came back and walked in on my parents. I didn't know what sex was so was very confused. It was only recently than I put it together. I got passwords off of the Mega Man Homepage which is still around and has got to be the most beautiful web 1.0 site I've ever seen. I miss old web design so much.
