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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
It's not a terrifying thing, as such, but it does say something about the progression of computing and its continued miniaturization that you can fit the entirety of the library of software available for video game consoles up to the Playstation or so on a piece of flash memory that will cost you about $20. Maybe you need the $50 version. That's still half as much as the Odyssey cost (if you bought a Magnavox television with it), and one-sixth of the cost of most consoles of this era. As the consoles of those times slowly stop working (as they inevitably do), there is the possibility that those pieces of software, and the games made for the consoles, will similarly stop working. Cultural touchstones for a generation or two would disappear, possibly with the ability to play archived games if you should happen to have a touring console exhibit or something like it available in your space that you wanted to visit and pay the admission for. Or if you have something like the Living Computer Museum and Labs near you, perhaps you can take a trip up every so often and interact with the technology of yesteryear. But even there, sometimes the original technology is failing, like the power supplies, or the parts needed to reconstruct a drive no longer exist and the corporation that made them has long since gone out of business.
Luckily for all of us, so long as someone has the original hardware in a working enough state, or if the systems are documented well enough and that documentation is available, it is sometimes possible to extract all of the necessary data to recreate the operating system of a console or computer, to rebuild and create new peripherals that will work with old machines, or to completely virtualize a system so that it can be run inside a completely different system. Similarly, catridge and disc ROM data can often be read off the chips or discs and stored in a file that can be read by a program built to do just that and recreate the experience of yesteryear using hardware and technology of today's day and age. Put mildly, emulation is fucking awesome and allows for the capture and recreation of a lot of the history of computers and games.
Some emulation hardware is geared toward people who have the original software cartridges, but the machine they played them on no longer functions. This is pretty normal for systems older than the original Playstation, especially for those of us who used things like the Game Genie, where we didn't realize there was additional stress being placed on the machines, such that they would stop working unless the Game Genie was present, first, and then they would stop working at all. Here's the Hyperkin offerings for retro controllers and systems, designed to take the original cartridges and play them as if they were on original hardware. Pretty neat, if you still have your collections of cartridges handy and want to go at it with as close to the original controllers as possible.
Things that aren't strictly emulation, but are also meant to help evoke the muscle memory of previous gameplay sessions thought a similar feel and button placement are offerings from places like 8bitdo, whose controllers might look and play similar to those of yore, but are not actually those things, because that would be infringing. (They also sell adapters such that you can use your more modern controllers in retro system settings, or play retro games with modern controller layouts. Some things turn out to be a lot easier to do when you have more buttons to hand. Some turn out harder, because replicating the paddle analog controller for an Atari 2600 on keyboard or gamepad is difficult.)
For the most part, though, emulation of both hardware and software is done by software these days. For any given system that needs emulation, a software program exists that can boot the system, feed it instructions, and interpret and translate the results of those instructions to the system surrounding the emulated system. Because the emulating system has to set up the entire environment, load in the data, and perform a significant amount of translation work back and forth between the emulated system and the system outside, there's a significant horsepower increase needed for most emulation. The later the system is, the more power is needed to reconstruct the system an run it at an appropriate speed. In addition to that, some systems need to have proprietary components available to use, like the console's BIOS transformed into a computer file. The best kind of emulation is able to take as much advantage of the emulating system's hardware as possible, passing translated instructions coming from the emulated system to the components specifically meant to do those operations and feeding the instructions back in. Consoles have always been computers, of course, although not necessarily general-purpose ones, but each successive generation of console is much more like a general-purpose computer, or a multifunction device, or runs an operating system in conjunction with a computer or mobile device, which might make it easier for their emulation if the chips that are used for processing, video, input, and the like are mostly the same as their computer counterparts. Of course, there are always other complications as well.
As it stands, most systems through the Nintendo Wii have rock-solid emulation available for them, assuming you have a Windows PC with sufficient power behind it, and often multiple choices for emulators, and there are apparently good working efforts for the Playstation 3 and work being done to develop a Wii U emulator as well. That's one generation behind the current set of consoles, which is pretty impressive work for developing emulation of those architectures.
Of course, many people aren't interested in buying or upgrading their PC to the point of having enough processing power to emulate very recent game consoles. (Some people are, of course, because, as one might guess, being able to emulate a system on another system usually means its more reliable when played on that system compared to the original. Especially in the PS3's case, where it was pretty prone to malfunction not that long after its introduction. Or for those people who didn't buy a Wii U when it was available, but may have received games for it on the anticipation that others would, or had, bought the system. Or they're interested in replaying many of their favorites in a DOS environment, which hasn't existed since Windows XP. So you can do things like set up an emulation environment for everything up through the Nintendo 64 on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer), where the Pi will set you back all of $35, or if you get the Pi 3, you can transform it into a Steam remote-play device, or if your Steam PC has an nVidia graphics card, the embedded port of Moonlight Game Streaming (which mimics a protocol nVidia put in place for their SHIELD devices) will work for all forms of Raspberry Pi to stream Steam to another place and allow for control of the game that way. (PS4s have a native streaming application for Windows, and I'll bet XBox is pretty easy to stream to a Windows PC as well.) For people just interested in returning to the games they played when they were younger, on systems that they had when they were younger, but don't work now, emulation is really important. It's not quite perfect, though, as I don't think there's been an emulator for the Sega Genesis that implements the "push the reset button" trick for X-Men. That might have that particular part of the game patched out or otherwise bypassed.
Emulation gets used commercially as well, I suspect. A lot of games that are available on platforms such as Steam now that were initially released for other game consoles are probably the original releases for those consoles (or Updated Re-Releases of the same) that have been wrapped in an emulator that silently runs when the app is launched. And sometimes companies themselves re-release an emulator of their own with a select amount of games, like the emulator that is also an Atari joystick to provide input for the games. Or the miniature versions of the NES, SNES, and Playstation 1 that contain an emulator and a selection of ganmes to play on that same emulator. We hope the increasing use of emulation for commercial purposes means a certain amount of contribution back to the projects that are used, if it's an open-source emulation scheme being used.
There is, of course, one thing that has to be mentioned when talking about emulation, and that is that it's not illegal, as best I can tell, to build a working emulator, so long as there isn't any proprietary materials distributed with said emulator (the distribution of those proprietary materials, of course, would require finding some other sourcing method if you don't have the tools to dump those proprietary bits of code into a blob that the emulator can read), but the distribution of the things that can be played on the emulator is various shades of "nope, not legal at all" to "might be arguably legal if you own the thing already, in its original form, and the system that you owned it for isn't being manufactured or repaired any more." This is why persons who are looking for software to run on their emulators generally have to exercise their Web search skills to find places that have the software and then download the software to their own machines, and they assume all the risk of such actions themselves and possibly running afoul of the copy protection schemes or other things that are put in place to try and detect the presence of emulation or of unauthorized copying.
It's still really cool, however, to see old games brought back in such a way that they can be played in their original form, in something close-ish to their original environment, while that environment was constructed completely on a different platform that it might only know peripherally about.
It's not a terrifying thing, as such, but it does say something about the progression of computing and its continued miniaturization that you can fit the entirety of the library of software available for video game consoles up to the Playstation or so on a piece of flash memory that will cost you about $20. Maybe you need the $50 version. That's still half as much as the Odyssey cost (if you bought a Magnavox television with it), and one-sixth of the cost of most consoles of this era. As the consoles of those times slowly stop working (as they inevitably do), there is the possibility that those pieces of software, and the games made for the consoles, will similarly stop working. Cultural touchstones for a generation or two would disappear, possibly with the ability to play archived games if you should happen to have a touring console exhibit or something like it available in your space that you wanted to visit and pay the admission for. Or if you have something like the Living Computer Museum and Labs near you, perhaps you can take a trip up every so often and interact with the technology of yesteryear. But even there, sometimes the original technology is failing, like the power supplies, or the parts needed to reconstruct a drive no longer exist and the corporation that made them has long since gone out of business.
Luckily for all of us, so long as someone has the original hardware in a working enough state, or if the systems are documented well enough and that documentation is available, it is sometimes possible to extract all of the necessary data to recreate the operating system of a console or computer, to rebuild and create new peripherals that will work with old machines, or to completely virtualize a system so that it can be run inside a completely different system. Similarly, catridge and disc ROM data can often be read off the chips or discs and stored in a file that can be read by a program built to do just that and recreate the experience of yesteryear using hardware and technology of today's day and age. Put mildly, emulation is fucking awesome and allows for the capture and recreation of a lot of the history of computers and games.
Some emulation hardware is geared toward people who have the original software cartridges, but the machine they played them on no longer functions. This is pretty normal for systems older than the original Playstation, especially for those of us who used things like the Game Genie, where we didn't realize there was additional stress being placed on the machines, such that they would stop working unless the Game Genie was present, first, and then they would stop working at all. Here's the Hyperkin offerings for retro controllers and systems, designed to take the original cartridges and play them as if they were on original hardware. Pretty neat, if you still have your collections of cartridges handy and want to go at it with as close to the original controllers as possible.
Things that aren't strictly emulation, but are also meant to help evoke the muscle memory of previous gameplay sessions thought a similar feel and button placement are offerings from places like 8bitdo, whose controllers might look and play similar to those of yore, but are not actually those things, because that would be infringing. (They also sell adapters such that you can use your more modern controllers in retro system settings, or play retro games with modern controller layouts. Some things turn out to be a lot easier to do when you have more buttons to hand. Some turn out harder, because replicating the paddle analog controller for an Atari 2600 on keyboard or gamepad is difficult.)
For the most part, though, emulation of both hardware and software is done by software these days. For any given system that needs emulation, a software program exists that can boot the system, feed it instructions, and interpret and translate the results of those instructions to the system surrounding the emulated system. Because the emulating system has to set up the entire environment, load in the data, and perform a significant amount of translation work back and forth between the emulated system and the system outside, there's a significant horsepower increase needed for most emulation. The later the system is, the more power is needed to reconstruct the system an run it at an appropriate speed. In addition to that, some systems need to have proprietary components available to use, like the console's BIOS transformed into a computer file. The best kind of emulation is able to take as much advantage of the emulating system's hardware as possible, passing translated instructions coming from the emulated system to the components specifically meant to do those operations and feeding the instructions back in. Consoles have always been computers, of course, although not necessarily general-purpose ones, but each successive generation of console is much more like a general-purpose computer, or a multifunction device, or runs an operating system in conjunction with a computer or mobile device, which might make it easier for their emulation if the chips that are used for processing, video, input, and the like are mostly the same as their computer counterparts. Of course, there are always other complications as well.
As it stands, most systems through the Nintendo Wii have rock-solid emulation available for them, assuming you have a Windows PC with sufficient power behind it, and often multiple choices for emulators, and there are apparently good working efforts for the Playstation 3 and work being done to develop a Wii U emulator as well. That's one generation behind the current set of consoles, which is pretty impressive work for developing emulation of those architectures.
Of course, many people aren't interested in buying or upgrading their PC to the point of having enough processing power to emulate very recent game consoles. (Some people are, of course, because, as one might guess, being able to emulate a system on another system usually means its more reliable when played on that system compared to the original. Especially in the PS3's case, where it was pretty prone to malfunction not that long after its introduction. Or for those people who didn't buy a Wii U when it was available, but may have received games for it on the anticipation that others would, or had, bought the system. Or they're interested in replaying many of their favorites in a DOS environment, which hasn't existed since Windows XP. So you can do things like set up an emulation environment for everything up through the Nintendo 64 on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer), where the Pi will set you back all of $35, or if you get the Pi 3, you can transform it into a Steam remote-play device, or if your Steam PC has an nVidia graphics card, the embedded port of Moonlight Game Streaming (which mimics a protocol nVidia put in place for their SHIELD devices) will work for all forms of Raspberry Pi to stream Steam to another place and allow for control of the game that way. (PS4s have a native streaming application for Windows, and I'll bet XBox is pretty easy to stream to a Windows PC as well.) For people just interested in returning to the games they played when they were younger, on systems that they had when they were younger, but don't work now, emulation is really important. It's not quite perfect, though, as I don't think there's been an emulator for the Sega Genesis that implements the "push the reset button" trick for X-Men. That might have that particular part of the game patched out or otherwise bypassed.
Emulation gets used commercially as well, I suspect. A lot of games that are available on platforms such as Steam now that were initially released for other game consoles are probably the original releases for those consoles (or Updated Re-Releases of the same) that have been wrapped in an emulator that silently runs when the app is launched. And sometimes companies themselves re-release an emulator of their own with a select amount of games, like the emulator that is also an Atari joystick to provide input for the games. Or the miniature versions of the NES, SNES, and Playstation 1 that contain an emulator and a selection of ganmes to play on that same emulator. We hope the increasing use of emulation for commercial purposes means a certain amount of contribution back to the projects that are used, if it's an open-source emulation scheme being used.
There is, of course, one thing that has to be mentioned when talking about emulation, and that is that it's not illegal, as best I can tell, to build a working emulator, so long as there isn't any proprietary materials distributed with said emulator (the distribution of those proprietary materials, of course, would require finding some other sourcing method if you don't have the tools to dump those proprietary bits of code into a blob that the emulator can read), but the distribution of the things that can be played on the emulator is various shades of "nope, not legal at all" to "might be arguably legal if you own the thing already, in its original form, and the system that you owned it for isn't being manufactured or repaired any more." This is why persons who are looking for software to run on their emulators generally have to exercise their Web search skills to find places that have the software and then download the software to their own machines, and they assume all the risk of such actions themselves and possibly running afoul of the copy protection schemes or other things that are put in place to try and detect the presence of emulation or of unauthorized copying.
It's still really cool, however, to see old games brought back in such a way that they can be played in their original form, in something close-ish to their original environment, while that environment was constructed completely on a different platform that it might only know peripherally about.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-15 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-15 09:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-15 07:26 pm (UTC)we hope, but we do not expect, because capitalism
no subject
Date: 2019-12-15 08:54 pm (UTC)