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.
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.
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.
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.
You can do some really cool stuff with emulation. I’m playing Fire Emblem Echoes Shadows of Valentia (3DS) emulated at 4x native resolution with a HD texture pack at the moment, and it makes that game really enjoyable. 3DS games in general benefit a lot from increased resolution you can do while emulating.
Plus these things like widescreen on games that didn’t have it, cheat codes, 60fps patches, fan translations, increased resolution, mods (Luminescent Platinum is so cool). It’s just such a neat world on top of just playing older games that you can’t purchase legally or conveniently anymore.
I emulate a lot on my phone so I have something to do when waiting around while out of the house. Even emulating Windows and DOS to play old PC games that work great with touch controls.
Just picked up a new FireTV 4k Max because I heard it was the perfect device for emulation, and it is. And fairly cheap. I had been running emulators on an older firestick but the new one has much better OTG support and will recognize USB storage without mounting via Adb. RetroArch and many other standalone emulators are available on the Amazon store so you don’t even need to sideload the apps anymore.
Ive tested up to PS2 and barring a few known titles it’ll run pretty much everything. N64 included.
Amazon have stated they plan to drop Android on their sticks in the future, and switch to their own OS which I doubt will support these kinds of uses, so grab one while you can.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can’t wait for the MM decomp and similar Ship project there. I’ve never played and and I’m holding out on that and all the great modern tweaks it brings over existing emulation.
I have a Homebrew Wii that I got set up about 10 or so years ago. Homebrew Wii can run lots of stuff. With emulation, it plays any 2D Nintendo game really well. I haven’t tried N64 emulation on it yet, but I imagine it’s pretty good.
Then it has hardware support for the entire GameCube library.
Basically Homebrew Wii can play every Nintendo game up to its own generation.
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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 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
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.
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.
Switch
Really?
I would’ve expected 3DS at most
3ds runs perfect, even at 2x or 3x resolution.
Switch will depend on your game a lot more.
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.
Fuck any article that tells you what you SHOULD be doing.
Even worse, it’s a video
You can do some really cool stuff with emulation. I’m playing Fire Emblem Echoes Shadows of Valentia (3DS) emulated at 4x native resolution with a HD texture pack at the moment, and it makes that game really enjoyable. 3DS games in general benefit a lot from increased resolution you can do while emulating.
Plus these things like widescreen on games that didn’t have it, cheat codes, 60fps patches, fan translations, increased resolution, mods (Luminescent Platinum is so cool). It’s just such a neat world on top of just playing older games that you can’t purchase legally or conveniently anymore.
I emulate a lot on my phone so I have something to do when waiting around while out of the house. Even emulating Windows and DOS to play old PC games that work great with touch controls.
I enjoy Space Crusade under DosBox, it’s a very slow game but suits touchscreen pretty well :-)
What apps do you use to emulate Windows and DOS on Android? And what games? I guess any point and click game could work fine.
Wine and Magic DOSBox.
SimCity 2000 and Masters of Orion get the most play for me.
Shout out to the PPSSPP folks, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of FFT WotL and Tactics Ogre on my android tablet.
I once spent a 2 week holiday playing an R-Type and Metal Slug game-athon using MAME.
10/10 would emulate again.
Just picked up a new FireTV 4k Max because I heard it was the perfect device for emulation, and it is. And fairly cheap. I had been running emulators on an older firestick but the new one has much better OTG support and will recognize USB storage without mounting via Adb. RetroArch and many other standalone emulators are available on the Amazon store so you don’t even need to sideload the apps anymore.
Ive tested up to PS2 and barring a few known titles it’ll run pretty much everything. N64 included.
Amazon have stated they plan to drop Android on their sticks in the future, and switch to their own OS which I doubt will support these kinds of uses, so grab one while you can.
Son, I’ve been doing it since 1998
So good that even Steve Jobs promoted it in one of his keynotes.
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.
Bleem!
I was thinking nesticle, but yeah
It took me way too long playing games to realize what the cursor was back in the day lmfao.
Thanks Shitman!
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.
Been using Lemuroid recently, as well as Dolphin
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.
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.
Woah, thank you for this tip! I haven’t heard about this project.
Can’t wait for the MM decomp and similar Ship project there. I’ve never played and and I’m holding out on that and all the great modern tweaks it brings over existing emulation.
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
I have a Homebrew Wii that I got set up about 10 or so years ago. Homebrew Wii can run lots of stuff. With emulation, it plays any 2D Nintendo game really well. I haven’t tried N64 emulation on it yet, but I imagine it’s pretty good.
Then it has hardware support for the entire GameCube library.
Basically Homebrew Wii can play every Nintendo game up to its own generation.