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thechariotrider · 1 year

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An Introduction to Emulation

There are a lot of really cool old games, but actually playing them can seem quite difficult. Fortunately, there are tools available that make old games much more accessible. The most powerful, by far, is emulation. If you have ever wanted to learn how to play classic video games that aren't available on modern platforms, this post is for you.

TLDR: Emulation recreates old hardware (like game consoles) using software, allowing games to be played on modern systems. It's an incredibly cool technology that, while it has some minor downsides, is overall an important tool for preserving game history and enabling new game experiences.

What is the issue?

Game companies don't always make their older titles easily playable on modern hardware. There are so many important, influential, and fun video games released on older hardware that can't be bought on any modern platform. In fact, game companies sometimes go out of their way to remove their titles from modern storefronts. After Bandai Namco released Dark Souls Remastered in 2018, the original version of Dark Souls was removed from Steam, presumably to encourage people to buy the newer, shinier, more expensive release. Game history is important, and it's incredibly rewarding to engage with. Unfortunately, if you limit yourself to what is only available through official channels like Nintendo Switch Online, Steam, GoG, Xbox, Playstation 5, you will miss out on a lot of cool games.

Games are often designed to operate on very specific hardware. Games made for the N64 can't run on a Sony Playstation, and vice versa. Even on PC, a platform which is generally much more customizable, games can be made obsolete through software updates and new operating system releases. Software's dependency on hardware makes it harder to access as technology progresses. Because of this dependency on specific hardware, it takes a non-trivial amount of effort to keep games "up to date", and often companies decide it isn't worth the effort. I can still read books from the 1500s because fundamentally, they are just words and those are easy to bring to modern formats. Film too is relatively easy to keep functional. As long as you have a device that can run mp4 files, you have a lot of options with regards to how you watch a movie (even if those files have to come from an unofficial source). This isn't to imply that lost media and preservation challenges don't exist for books or movies, but the fact that I can easily access books that are several decades old, but many influential console games released even in the past few decades aren't playable on natively modern hardware says a lot. Fortunately, we have a solution. Emulation

What is emulation?

Emulation is software that performs the same function as hardware. Put simply, it lets games designed for one platform run on another. For instance, Dolphin is an emulator designed to play GameCube and Wii games. Dolphin runs on Windows 10 and 11, and allows you to play GameCube and Wii games on PCs. Emulators can be designed to recreate pretty much any piece of hardware. There are emulators recreating handheld devices like the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, Java phones, and Playstation Portable. Other emulators are designed to run old PC games designed for Dos, the Amiga, or Commodore 64. There are even emulators designed for modern systems like the Switch. It should also be noted that emulators aren't exclusively used on PC. There are emulators designed to run games on Android phones or modern consoles. Every emulator is different, coming with its own set of features, requirements, and drawbacks.

It should be noted that most emulators also require ROMs or ISOs. ROMs and ISOs are the file type most commonly used to store game files. If emulators are a virtual recreation of hardware, ROMS and ISOs are virtual recreations of the software that would be inserted into the actual hardware.

What all can I do with emulation?

Emulation is a powerful tool that could be used for a variety of things. Most obviously, emulation is excellent for playing older games. While they certainly can do that, they can also do so much more. For instance:

Emulators make it much easier to play old games on the go: I can't carry a SNES with me everywhere I go. It's big, requires a bunch of cables, and I probably won't even have a TV to play it on. However, I can always bring my laptop with me. I have a SNES emulator installed on my laptop that lets me play SNES games anywhere. If I have a few moments in between classes I can boot up Front Mission, Tetris Attack, or any other SNES game I want. As if that wasn't enough, I also have NES, GBA, and DS emulators on my laptop, taking up very little hard drive space. Convenient!

Emulators let you customize your control schemes: Most emulators give you a lot of choice in how your controls are set up. For my laptop emulators, I simply use my keyboard because I don't want to carry a controller around with me. But, if I wanted to, I could plug in my Switch Pro Controller, or any other controller to play these games. This feature alone has some non-obvious advantages, such as...

Greater accessibility in control schemes: For people with physical disabilities, who might be unable to comfortably use a SNES controller, emulators allow them to relatively easily substitute the original controller for one they find more comfortable to use. This makes the emulated versions of classic games far more accessible than they would be on original hardware. As with all disability infrastructure, adding considerations for disabled people helps everyone, and a great example of that is...

Customizable controls are great for challenge runs: All sorts of interesting challenge runs become possible with emulated controllers. Have you ever wanted to play Link's Awakening with a Dance Dance Revolution pad? Well, set up an emulator and map its controls to the dance pad and you are good to go! You can't do that on an original Game Boy!

Save States let you bypass unfair nonsense: Old games sometimes have a reputation for having a lot of cheap deaths, and some definitely live up to that expectation. Some emulators come with save state features that essentially take a snapshot of the current game state that can be returned to at any point. If an upcoming platforming section has a lot of precarious jumps with impossible to dodge enemies, you can make a save state to go back to that challenge instantly, instead of having to replay the whole level again. Very nifty! Also, some emulators have rewinds, which serve a similar purpose.

Fast forwarding saves time: Some emulators let you increase the game speed, allowing you to bypass slow sections of a game. My friend Harry who runs the Video Games Are Bad YouTube channel recently released a video talking about how the speedup feature on his Seam Deck GBA emulator that made the experience of playing classic GBA Yu Gi Oh games much more enjoyable because he could skip the opponent's long turns. For JRPGs, games with cutscenes, or many other games, this is a great convenience feature

Emulators bypass region locking: Many classic console games were only playable in consoles from the right region. Japanese Playstation games could only be played on Japanese Playstations. While it's certainly possible to bypass this restriction on original hardware, it requires you to modify the console's internals in a very technical and easy to mess up process. Emulators bypass this entirely, making it easy to play games from other regions and see all of the differences between versions of the game.

Romhacking and Translation patches: Beyond playing games in their original form, emulators make it possible to play romhacks, mods, and other alterations. Translation patches allow players who don't speak a certain language to play games that didn't receive official translations. Famously, Mother 3 was never localized for a North American release, and to this day hasn't seen an official English translation. Fortunately, the game's very passionate fans translated the entire game to English, allowing tons of Mother fans to finally play the third, and best, entry in the series. Romhacks are similar, but instead of being used for translation purposes, entire game mechanics are altered. With romhacking, designers can create fan campaigns, edit game balance, create jokes, and many other things. Romhacking is a world of possibility that lets games be experienced in new ways that would be difficult to experience on original hardware.

Speedrunning: While the rules surrounding emulators obviously vary from game to game, some speedrunning scenes (especially those for handheld games) use emulators for their runs. Without emulators, some games would be much harder to speedrun, and would have smaller scenes as a result.

And more!

What are some Downsides of Emulation?

Clearly, emulators have a ton of advantages, even if you have the original hardware. However, for as great as they are, and they are pretty great, there are some downsides worth considering when using emulators.

System requirements: Emulators function by recreating hardware through software. Doing this takes a certain amount of the host machine's CPU power. For older systems this usually isn't a problem, but the more recent and complex an emulated machine is, the better your machine needs to be to smoothly run the emulator. Naturally, it's a lot easier to emulate a Playstation 5 than a Playstation 1. If your computer isn't powerful enough, there might be some emulators it can't run. I personally haven't run into this myself, but its something to keep in mind.

Finding ROMS and ISOs can be tricky: While emulators themselves can usually be downloaded easily, ROMs and ISOs are a different story. When searching for ROMs, some people come across sketchy looking websites that are filled with ads and give the impression they could give you a virus, and some of these sites very well might. This isn't to say that there aren't ways of safely obtaining ROMs and ISOs. In the past, there was EmuParadise, a quite extensive ROM library that was safe, however following a legal threat from Nintendo the site had to remove the ability to download ROMs. MyAbandonware is a pretty safe site and is my go to for PC emulation, but doesn't have much in the way of console gaming. The Internet Archive also is pretty safe, but might not have everything. In the future I want to make a post detailing ways of safely obtaining ROMs and ISOs as that is a nuanced issue, but for now know that there are safe downloads online. ROMs and ISOs NEVER come in the form of EXEs, so never run an EXE downloaded from online. Beyond that, it never hurts to do a quick google search about the site in question to find other people's experiences with the site in terms of safety.

Emulators aren't always 100% accurate: Because emulators are recreating hardware with software, it isn't always perfect. Some games don't run exactly as they would on original hardware. Textures might not appear properly, in game mechanics might be a bit wonky, and there might be some visual issues. For older systems, these kinds of problems have been largely ironed out and these emulation issues are extremely rare, but they pop up from time to time when emulating more modern systems. In my years of emulator experience, I have only encountered serious emulation errors once. Fortunately, most emulators are in continuous, open source development so visual issues often eventually get fixed. Even if the game does have some problems, a flawed, visually imperfect game is better than nothing at all.

Isn't emulation illegal?

Some people might be hesitant to get into emulation because they feel it is illegal, or that it's essentially piracy. This technically isn't the case. In 2000, Sony sued Connectix, who had recently released the Virtual Game Station, a commercial emulator for the Macintosh. The Virtual Game Station was designed to only play legal games. Players had to insert the Playstation game they wanted to play into their computer in order for the emulator to work, meaning the emulator didn't inherently enable piracy. Regardless, Sony sued Connectix, arguing the emulator infringed on their copyright and stole Sony's Playstation code. However, the court ultimately sided with Connectix. While their software did recreate the function of the Playstation, it did so with its own code which had been reverse engineered from Sony's hardware, meaning that Connectix didn't violate Sony's copyright. Sony v. Connectix established the legal precedent that emulation was entirely legal, and this has born fruit for modern game companies. Many PC games released on Steam and GoG run off DosBox, an emulator that runs Dos games. These releases come from the current rights holders and are entirely legal, even though the games use emulators. For more evidence of legal emulation, look no further than the Wii Virtual Console or Nintendo Switch Online service, both of which are commercial emulators.

While emulation is legal, the sharing of ROMs and files without permission from the copyright holders is illegal. As such, downloading ROMs from the internet is technically illegal. However, there is certainly a case to be made that, while it isn't always legal, it can be ethical to emulate classic games. If I wanted to legally play a GameCube game, I would have to go online and buy a used copy online. Depending on the popularity and rarity of the game in question, used game discs can cost anywhere from dozens to hundreds of dollars. Buying used games and the hardware to run them can be extraordinarily expensive and would put many games out of the financial reach of many individuals. It's also important to note that none of the money spent going to buy these used games is actually going to the developers who made the game.

In general, I'm actually not a huge fan of piracy, especially for indie games. My rule of thumb is that if a game can be purchased on modern hardware, I won't use emulation to play the game. I only use emulation to play games that are out of print and impossible to buy legally in a way that supports the developers. Unfortunately, there are tons of games that I can only realistically experience through emulation, and in that case I feel no guilt for doing so. I can't deny the developers a sale if they aren't selling the game. Further discussion of the ethics and legality are interesting, but might be best approached in a post of their own.

Conclusion

Emulation is an incredibly cool technology and one of the most powerful tools in the fight to preserve gaming and its history. Emulators can be complex, and in the future I hope to write further blog posts detailing the intricacies of emulation in more detail, laying out emulators I recommend and discussing other emulation and game preservation topics.

If you have any questions about emulation, game preservation, or any related subject, feel free to ask.

Have a good day.

#game history #game preservation #video games #gaming #emulation #guide #technology

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