Opinions about emulation

[Rtype84]

I've never used emulators before but I was interested in giving it a go. I have a friend that uses his PC but I have also heard of people using a wii or an xbox. I've read up on using my xbox because I don't really play it and I was just wondering if anyone here has done it and what your thoughts were on the two and emulation in general. I'm leaning towards xbox but haven't completely decided. The consoles I would most like to emulate are sega saturn and turbo duo.

[Duke.Togo]

I did a soft mod on my Xbox to mess around with emulation and XBMC years ago, and it works just fine. The problem to me is that the controller is pretty terrible for playing classic games.

[SirPsycho]

I did a soft mod on my Xbox to mess around with emulation and XBMC years ago, and it works just fine. The problem to me is that the controller is pretty terrible for playing classic games.

You must have tried to play Colecovision games with this.

[img width=700 height=591]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Xbox-Duke-Controller.jpg[/img]

[Rtype84]

Luckily i don't have that controller. That thing looks giant!

[Izret101]

If memory serves the center jewel is larger than an Eisenhower dollar.
[img width=531 height=370]http://cdnec1.fiverrcdn.com/photos/1167600/medium/fiver2.jpg?1352342795[/img]


Chances are if you check your local craigslist you can find quite a few modded systems already chock full of EMUs and ROMs.
I have also been lead to believe that the process was relatively easy.

That being said i would personally go the PC route.

[Duke.Togo]

The process is ridiculously easy using the MechAssault method if you can put the save on it.

[Boshamp]

I did a soft mod on my Xbox to mess around with emulation and XBMC years ago, and it works just fine. The problem to me is that the controller is pretty terrible for playing classic games.

You must have tried to play Colecovision games with this.

[img width=700 height=591]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Xbox-Duke-Controller.jpg[/img]

This thing was a PAIN. Ole' Duke gave me carpal tunnel in about 6 hours. ha ha Good memories seeing frustration on my friend's faces trying to play Halo with it.

[GrayGhost81]

I got on a kick of "backing up" Dreamcast games a few years back and in my travels I burned discs full of pretty much every game for each console. The only one that doesn't have a great emulator on DC was SNES, but it's pretty much my go-to when I want to play NES and especially Genesis since I got rid of all my Genesis stuff.

The downside of course is that the controller is almost as bad as the hamburger pictured above.

[Zthun]

I've never used emulators before but I was interested in giving it a go. I have a friend that uses his PC but I have also heard of people using a wii or an xbox. I've read up on using my xbox because I don't really play it and I was just wondering if anyone here has done it and what your thoughts were on the two and emulation in general. I'm leaning towards xbox but haven't completely decided. The consoles I would most like to emulate are sega saturn and turbo duo.

Sometimes, the emulators give a better experience than the original console.  For example, PPSSPP lets you play PSP games on your TV and actually up-scales the pictures without you having to purchase an expensive adapter.  The Wii has a similar feature on the PC with the Dolphin emulator.  Sony uses emulation on the PS3 to play PS1 games.  There are some nice benefits with emulation. 

However, there are several problems with it:  TVs, Controllers, and Compatibility. 

Generally, the TV problem is minimal if you don't care about light gun games.  Modern TVs and monitors will not support this older technology, and unless you can hook up your PC/System with emulators to an old tube CRT TV or monitor, then you have to give these games up.  It's not a huge deal for most people, so this is minor.  You can still play the games while using a mouse as the gun cursor but that takes the fun out of a light gun game.

The controller problem can be solved using usb adapters that you find on eBay, but that only works for PCs.  If you're going to be using the XBox for emulation, you're pretty much stuck with the XBox controller - which, as others stated, is shit for some of the older games.  Microsoft buttons are very different than Nintendo and Sega buttons, so your Saturn games probably won't feel quite right when you play. 

The biggest problem for me (and hence the deal-breaker for me) is compatibility.  I've played games that have choppy graphics, bugs that weren't in the original version, sound oddities, and software slowdown.  Most of the older emulators pre N64 are fantastic and will play 90% of the consoles library without a problem.  It's once the industry moved to 3D that the problems started and no emulator can truly match the original system. 

The above all pertains to software emulation.  Hardware emulation, on the other hand - is absolutely fantastic and is my personal choice when picking the emulation option.  Hardware emulation tricks the original consoles to read the games from their carts, cards or drives without the need for the original media, so you can store all your games on an SD card and just select them from a menu (or load a different game onto the SD card). 

When dealing with cart based systems, you'd be looking into flash carts.  The actual games themselves aren't emulated - they play through the original hardware by an actual cart that is programmed to flash the game into memory. 

For CD and DVD based systems, you're looking into ODEs (Optical Disc Emulators).  For example, GDEmu lets you swap out the GD-Rom drive in your Dreamcast with a SD card reader.  The dreamcast thinks it's reading from the GD-ROM drive, but the actual data to the console gets fed through the SD card. 

Honestly, I would always recommend hardware emulation if you can afford it.  The boards and chips are pricey, so it's not available to everyone.  You can expect to pay around $100 for any flash cart; ODEs will run you anywhere between $100-$300 depending on who is selling them.  You can go the software emulation route, but you won't have as good an experience, and from my personal experience, the only emulators that are fully fleshed out are the ones on PCs.  Console based emulators generally have more bugs than their PC counterparts, and the experience isn't as good as the original consoles. 

[bombatomba]

I'd like to add something else: Emulation of hardware when one no longer owns a functioning system, though with legal software in place of ROMS.  For example, I can no longer play either my Sega CD nor Turbo CD games, though with the help of Kega and Magic Engine (respectively), I can continue to play Sonic CD and Final Zone II (?) when I want.  There is also DOS emulation, which is pretty much a necessity if you want to play old PC games and don't actually own a system that will run them. 

The process is ridiculously easy using the MechAssault method if you can put the save on it.

I've been wanting to do this for a while now, but so I can play my Xbox Morrowind with loading times less than a minute.

Sometimes, the emulators give a better experience than the original console.

My favorite example of this is the PSX emulators.  After a bit of fiddling one can get interesting results, especially with some of the later polygonal games.  In the past there was some issue with legality due to needing an original BIOS to run the emulator, but recently PCSX has come packaged with a functioning emulated BIOS that plays all my games.  Very nice.  Makes getting screenshots for PSX games a million times easier.

[Duke.Togo]

Good luck with Xbox Morrowind. I tried several times to complete this game, but always ran into bugs that would cause the game to grind to a halt.

I've been ogling some of the screenshots from a PS2 emulator running FF XII. It's pretty amazing what some of these can do.

Also, plenty of emulation is done on the consoles themselves: compilation discs, arcade ports, backwards compatibly, virtual console, etc. Heck, the RetroN5 is a hardware emulator.

[Zthun]

I'd like to add something else: Emulation of hardware when one no longer owns a functioning system, though with legal software in place of ROMS.  For example, I can no longer play either my Sega CD nor Turbo CD games, though with the help of Kega and Magic Engine (respectively), I can continue to play Sonic CD and Final Zone II (?) when I want. 

Honestly, I think this method is worse experience.  It's faster to read off the hard drive than it is to read off of a CD (unless I'm misinterpreting what you're trying to say).  It would be much better to rip the disc to an image and just load from that.  Trying to load from a disc has always been awful when I've tried it. 

But if you're going to use ripped images, it would be better to rip your own discs.  Most of the groups that rip games and offer them up online hack and modify the disc images.  Some remove the sound and do other crazy stuff to reduce the size of the image.  If you want a 1 to 1 copy, you will almost have to do it yourself.  There are some groups that will do perfect rips, but generally that's pretty difficult to tell unless you are either a part of the group or are pretty deeply involved in the ripping scene.

[bombatomba]

Good luck with Xbox Morrowind. I tried several times to complete this game, but always ran into bugs that would cause the game to grind to a halt.

I've been ogling some of the screenshots from a PS2 emulator running FF XII. It's pretty amazing what some of these can do.

I think I clocked in 300+ hours on the Xbox title back in 2004, so much that when I finally faced the final boss it took less than a minute to kill him.  Towards the end I stopped selling items to the Mudcrab and ended up storing everything in those big pyramids scattered throughout the landscape once I learned that you could transport between the strongholds after gathering the indexes.  Game was awesome, hampered only by the extreme loading.  I don't think I ran into horrible bugs in the GOTY edition, though I certainly did in the original edition.

I've seen those same videos and plan to sit down and finally play through it on a PS2 emulator for that reason.  Nuts.

 
Honestly, I think this method is worse experience.  It's faster to read off the hard drive than it is to read off of a CD (unless I'm misinterpreting what you're trying to say).  It would be much better to rip the disc to an image and just load from that.  Trying to load from a disc has always been awful when I've tried it. 

True in some cases, but in this case it's more about preservation of my original collection than anything else.  Plus, some emulators such as Magic Engine do not permit one to load disc images, but require you to own (or burn, I guess) the original disc.  Now, I do actively rip my own PSP discs. which not only makes most of the games infinitely more playable, but helps lengthen the battery life.  I seem to remember Midnight Club 3 taking somewhere in the neighborhood of two minutes to load a track, but ripped the game becomes magically playable.

[Guru]

I really enjoy emulating on the computer, as you have constant updated lists of games you want, and not just a console full of 10,000 games you wont play and most likely with a ton of bugs. But I got the OUYA for Christmas last year and it works as a great emulation machine. Controller isn't terrible, and there are emulators for most systems. If I play emulators on a system its usually the OUYA and it's a nice and cheap console to do so on.

[Zthun]

I really enjoy emulating on the computer, as you have constant updated lists of games you want, and not just a console full of 10,000 games you wont play and most likely with a ton of bugs. But I got the OUYA for Christmas last year and it works as a great emulation machine. Controller isn't terrible, and there are emulators for most systems. If I play emulators on a system its usually the OUYA and it's a nice and cheap console to do so on.

The only issue with the OUYA is that it only outputs HDMI.  That's not a huge deal if you're going to roll emulators using a HDTV, but if you wanted to hook up the console to an old tube TV, you have to get a converter.  The OUYA wasn't meant to do this and some people have reported that it looks OK, but anyone wanting to purchase an OUYA for emulation should be aware of this limitation.  If you don't care about light gun games, then doing it on an HDTV is not big deal as most emulators handle the upscale.