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Post #1
Yes, this is the thread for the rather fantastic practise of emulation.
Basically, emulation is having a system within a system. Nearly every system, whether it's a console or a computer, can be emulated. Personally I haven't actually bought a video game in over a year, because I simply emulate all my shit when I feel the urge to play something. Near enough any modern computer can emulate up to at least N64, and a high-end computer can emulate pretty much anything. There's even an emulator for Wii.
But why? Well, actually (said in a snobby hipster-esque tone), there are several reasons. In the case of consoles, emulation can be an improvement on the original experience. For example, when done on a high-end graphics card, Gamecube games can have more detail, clarity, and overall clearer graphics through an emulator than actually playing the console. You'll see details that are in the original game, but the console didn't quite have the processing power to display. And, for consoles such as PS1 and N64 which have 3D graphics but are choppy, most emulators have features that smooth the graphics and improve the colour clarity to give the appearance of a current generation game.
It's much more practical to emulate than to actually buy a system for several reasons. The physical presence of the system, although more genuine, also fills up a fuckton of space. Whereas any hard drive can comfortably contain several systems and their best games. A NES game is about 200kb, a GBA game is about 4 MB at most and a N64 game is about 40MB at most, with games like Mario 64 taking up little more than 8 MB.
And you can emulate rare or expensive systems. A Sinclair ZX Spectrum will set you back around £150 and a few weeks for shipping, whereas an emulator will take the best part of 10 seconds to install and is free. Or, if you're the masochistic sort, you could save yourself £400 on games like Caltron 6 in 1, Action 52, E.T. and Miss World Nude '96. But if someone was making me play these games, I'd pay them £400 to let me leave. And there's no clutter.
Jeez, the thought of having all these consoles and systems so readily available just gets my cock flapping. Where can I start?
I use http://doperoms.com/emulators/ to find my emulators. There's also MESS, which supports a fuck load of systems, but I can't get it set up for some reason, so I have no personal experience. However, single-system emulators are often better anyway, because they are dedicated to improving the experience of that particular system. With MESS, it seems as if they've just crammed every system you've never heard of into one package. DopeROMs also has a fine selection of ROMs. Just pick any game and download it. You can't really go wrong. If you don't like it, just delete it and pick another.
That's about it, I guess. Post any emulators you know of that are good, any good ROMs, anything.
EDIT: No one am post in my sexy thread? I exerted all my mental energy on its creation.
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Is this not illegal?
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Emulators are not.
Owning a downloading a BIOS of a game console that you do not own is, same story with ROMs.
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Is it legal to download a game for an emulator if you own it?
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ROMs are a legal gray area: If you own the game and download a ROM of it, it's perfectly legal. If not, it's illegal.
Also I have to agree with emulation being visually better. With emulation you can run at much higher resolutions compared to consoles, and have texture filtering, anti aliasing, etc.
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I think you can, providing you can prove you own the original.
Also, I'm rather curious about one particular issue. I own the GBA port of Super Mario Bros, but not the NES cart. Does that mean if I downloaded the NES ROM and played it, that would be okay?
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Yes.
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So does this mean if I downloaded the BIOS of a GBA for my Android phone (Gameboid), and I already have like.... 5 Gameboy Advances in my house, that means it's technically legal, right?
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Also, guys, I also collect consoles so most of my emulation is done legally. I have maybe 10 emulators total that I don't have the systems for, and they're all obscure ass systems that I wouldn't be able to find if I set my heart on it.
I also have 20-odd consoles which I bought, but use emulators for because I don't have the required cables/games/adapters/whatever.
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No. It's a different game legally.
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Welp, that's TEH FUKKIN GHEY.
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I'm not familiar with the GBA port, but if it's the same game just on a different console, it's still the same game. I've never liked the idea that just because it's on another console means it's "legally" different.
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Yeah, it's actually called the NES Classics port. I just thought because they probably changed the game engine or something for the GBA controls, but come to think of it the GBA has the NES controls but scaled down, so I suppose it is the same game.
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Legality of emulators and ROMs varies country-to-country.
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Emulators are best thing ever. I love 'em. I can't wait to JPCSP/PCSP to be finished so I can play my PSP games with much better quality and AA like Peace Walker.
Also when I tried running Futurama Game (Xbox) in VMWare
I knew this would happen
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Emulators on phones are the best thing ever. I love 'em
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Oh hell yeah. Playing GBA games on PSP is such a fun, because of their similar design.
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Oh awesome. Last I heard, the project was dead. Seems not.Emulators are best thing ever. I love 'em. I can't wait to JPCSP/PCSP to be finished so I can play my PSP games with much better quality and AA like Peace Walker.
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Also this is perfect example why I love emulators.
It makes MGS3 so pretty.Filtering with native resolution.
Filtering with 2x native resolution.
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That HUD looks horrible.
I never got a PS2 Emulator to run properly though.
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Oh hey, did anyone say
emulation? :buddy:
That's Wii, lads, running in 1920x1080 glorious pixels. :c00lbert:
SMBWii here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4861882/Scre...8-12-04-58.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4861882/Scre.../Wii/nsmb1.png
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Wow, how well did it run?
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The Wii can be emulated amazingly well, especially for a current-gen console.
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Last time I tried on my '08 dv5 it was pretty laggy...
Then again since I have a much better computer now, I may try again.
I bet my HD 5450 can do a much better job then whatever my dv5 had... Even if it is sub-par.
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It's a last gen console TBH. All it is a overclocked gamecube.
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Yeah, I guess so. Kind of impressive regardless.
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Hm, sweet. Can't wait for my desktop (8GB RAM, HD 6950, i7 2500k, 850w PSU, HAF X, P67A-UD7-B3). That fucker will emulate everything.
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Good luck with PS2 games though.
But that's mostly because the ps2 architecture makes it hard to emulate said console environment for complex PS2 games.
Oh the joy of various processor architectures.
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Yup, my i7-2600k along with Nivdia GTX 570 struggles to play some games with out a bit of slow down. Need to enable audio skipping otherwise it sounds so bad.
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Meh, I can skip a console. I'll be busy enough with the Wii, which should be okay, GC, PS1, and so on.
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The best thing is that I can use an XBOX 360 controller, which I prefer over the Classic Controller and Wiimote layouts for Brawl.Oh hey, did anyone say
emulation? :buddy:
That's Wii, lads, running in 1920x1080 glorious pixels. :c00lbert:
SMBWii here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4861882/Scre...8-12-04-58.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4861882/Scre.../Wii/nsmb1.png
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If only you could connect to the online services, as well.
Monster Hunter Tri on PC!
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Virtual machines also fall under emulation.
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Oh wow, I just forgot about this.
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I bet netplay plugins are in the works, there's one for N64 and it's great. Mario party 2 online erryday
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Mame 4 lyfe.
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Aww yeah, playing DOS games on my virtualized Win3.11 instance :frogc00l:
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No, connecting to official Wii online services is a bit different.
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If you mean x86 virtual machines you are wrong.
It's virtualization, not emulation.
Emulation creates 2 layers, one for indirection and one for translation for the host hardware.
With Virtualization, the guest machine is mearly isolated in memory and the instructions then passed on to the hardware with no translation.
You are only right if you are talking about PPC or ARM VMs on x86 or ARM or x86 on PPC, etc.
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I would barely call it current-gen.
It's more like an updated last-gen console.
Winner x 12
Funny x 3
Dumb x 1
Disagree x 24
Agree x 1
Late x 1
Artistic x 1
Informative x 1
Optimistic x 1
