💾 Archived View for altesq.net › ~lelkins › posts › emulation-p1.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:29:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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ay mates! another nostalgia related thing, even if i wasn't born on those years when the games i mention got released.
these days i've been playing classic games from consoles like the nes, snes, gba, ds and many others through the power of emulation. actually, i've been using emulators ever since i was a kid on a windows xp machine, searching for "sonic 3 free download" or "mario games fun pc" or something goofy like that. i am surprised i never got a virus back then and i highly advise you to not do what i used to do. now i am smart and search on more known websites like vimm's lair. i also actually used to use emuparadise before the entire "free mario download english language not italian i am not mario" searching cycle.
it all started with a random video on youtube in 2009 from a channel dedicated to pc tutorials where it recommended some website with a list of emulators and crap (that website still looks the same as the time i used to use it. won't even say its name cause i won't recommend it as it's ancient and you'd be better off getting the emulators elsewhere), but i can't say the best way to start emulating, there's retroarch which is an alright multitool-like emulation program for many platforms, but performance may or may not be great compared to actually using the emulators it has (i tried playing ds games one time on retroarch and had stutters. now it doesn't have any. your mileage may vary, obviously!) and i already mentioned vimm's lair.
i literally played those classic games for free cause i can't get games where i'm from (or any game for that matter! except free games) cause i'm from the rural regions of my country, and because games in general are seen as a waste of money here due to piracy, like you can get a computer and just play hundreds and thousands of titles, but now i just do it to spite nintendo lmfao like come on they get angry for pirating mother 3 or another game that cannot be obtained or act as if you bankrupted their company for getting "Paper Mario [E].z64" with a side of fucking wario blast! i'll gonna wario blast my pants if i think about it for too long lmfao. it was a cheap and easy way for lil' me to have fun on the computer machine for hours, spent tons of time trying to comprehend super mario rpg and retrying mario and luigi superstar saga. performance back then was great cause i never tried out 3d games like ones from the n64 or playstation, and i was generally a mario fan (and a sonic fan i dunno how i do it) so i gravitated towards nintendo emulation.
emulation is NOT ILLEGAL cause it's considered reverse engineering and fair use or something thanks to court cases (just look up "sony vs bleem" or "sony vs connectix"), and no matter how many times nintendo says that emulation is illegal and any form of rom obtaining is illegal (including getting the roms from your physical cartridges or discs, i am not kidding!).
not only you cannot get roms legally, but the hardware you use to play the games on your telly will just soon break and rot and be so expensive to repair or be borderline unfixable, along with the fact that disk-rot exists, that piracy and emulation are just the only way to preserve those titles. it's also expensive to dump roms and not allowed by companies, too! companies like nintendo DO give you ways to play their old titles through modern consoles, but their catalog is so small that the only place they ever had a very large list of games to play was the wii, a console that actually lost that entire catalog of games due to the closure of its own shop (wii shop channel) on january 2019, and even THAT is small compared to something like vimm's lair or what emuparadise used to be. also, nintendo's emulation services aren't as good as the emulators that are made by fans (and are usually open source!), the only decent emulation service they made was on... the wii. and it still isn't as good as something like project64 or mupen64plus! and i used to use project64 when it wasn't open source!!
modern emulators can now run games on 60 fps and widescreen (and i don't know how to do those), have texture pack support to make games look better (i don't use texture packs, but the option is there!), can use any controller that can be hooked up on the pc, and with the power of emulation, you'll have many games that still hold up to this day, and if they have any issues, there are patches that make the game more balanced or fix bugs. so yea, i regret nothing.
stay tuned for part 2, where i'll show you the basics of emulation, as i sadly don't know how to do cool things like widescreen super metroid or hd mode7 super mario kart. bye mates, i'm off to play megaman 2!