Have you ever used an emulator?

I was going through my documents folder here at work and I found an old game I had started of pokemon silver when I was bored.

I remember a long time ago I had emulated Chrone Trigger and Tales of Phantasia as well when I didn’t have a PC that could play much of anything else.

So have you ever used an emulator?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

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I used a ps1 emulator to play my ps1 games when it broke. I have also used an old school game boy emulator and dos emulator for older games, i saw the other day its naughty

You don’t know these things when you are young.

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game boy sued an emulator site for having roms or something on it sometime in the last 12 months

Yep, I’ve used a couple of emulators. From NES, SNES, Sega Megadrive/Genesis,to PS1 & 2. I played most of Final Fantasy 8 using an emulator - it wasn’t 100% perfect but certainly more than playable. The Sega one was in some ways better than the real console in that you could save your game state and use it like a quicksave/quickload

I used emulators to play pokemon games back in the day.

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I build a mame cabinet back in the day…

Do you have pictures?

I never completed it, and while I did get more done on it than pictured, I think this is the only photo I have.

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I always wanted an arcade cabinet

Bump

My brother had booked his vacation to take his son to hockey camp this week, which is cancelled due to you know what. He cleaned up his garage and got my old mame cabinet up and running


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Awesome!

Nowadays, if you’re too lazy to build your own emulator collection you can just hit the Internet Archive…

https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

https://archive.org/details/consolelivingroom

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

https://archive.org/details/classicpcgames

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I don’t know if it’s frowned upon but I recently came across this site (vimm) that serves all my emulation needs so I can play games I never had access to. It’s got links to emulators, full colour manual scans, every game for each console listed ever released in North America and more. The one downside being that download speeds can be a bit slow, but it’s free and there are no ads or 20 pop ups to navigate through the get something so I can’t complain.

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I recently discovered that the Blade Runner adventure game is now compatible with ScummVM, the best adventure game emulator in the world. So I dug up my old CDs and I have to admit, that game still is amazing!

I also prefer to play all my classic Sierra Quest games through ScummVM, and with the recent Humble Sierra Bundle, I went all legit. No more grey areas in my library :grin:

ScummVM started as an emulator to run Lucasarts adventure games based on the scumm engine (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion). Classics like Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Full Throttle, The Dig and Day of the Tentacle all play flawlessly.

You can choose to add graphical filters to the games to smooth out some jaggies, or play in the original low resolution. You can also emulate some older sound cards to give it the authentic 90’s sound, or use general midi sound fonts of your liking to make these old games sound like they have full orchestral sound tracks.

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In case anyone is interested Cemu (Wii U emulator) got a new update for the Vulkan API recently that makes a massive change to the performance of games. Before the games would stutter a lot while playing while it was caching shaders and this made some games pretty much unplayable. The new update has introduced asynchronous shader compilation and this makes everything a LOT smoother. I don’t understand what it actually means but what it seems to do is instead of loading the textures as you play it loads them in the background and then they pop in when ready. So the first time you see something there might be lots of missing textures but the next time it happens everything will be there.

I’ve tested this with a bunch of games and I can now get a consistent framerate where I couldn’t before. Games like Smash, Mario 3D World, Donkey Kong now run at a rock solid 60FPS and more demanding games like Xenoblade Chronicles X or Zelda BotW can now stay at a very smooth 30FPS (on my PC, I’m sure better PC’s will be able to maintain 60 as well)

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The thing is, (for me) emulation has always just been a hobby and a “let’s see if I can do it” kinda thing. I haven’t ever really played a game through an emulator. I also don’t really know anyone who really played a game through an emulator to actually play it.

So who here has fired up and completed a game through an emulator and spent countless hours in its world the same way you would on the native platform?

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Yes - I completed Soul Calibur on null DC, when i became nostalgic to play it again and that was the only way to play it again unfortunately .

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I played most of FF8 using an emulator, it did look a bit funny with the 3D model characters receiving anti-aliasing (which didn’t always looks so great) and the backgrounds looking pixelated due to them being lower res. But it was certainly playable.

The 2D games work well when it comes to emulation though.

Also did a replay of Chrono Trigger on my laptop using the SNES emulator. Didn’t finish it because the laptop got stolen though :expressionless:

The Sega Genesis emulator games had the advantage of save states - so if you ran out of lives you could just reload the save game and carry on, rather than starting all over again.

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I finished Zelda 1 on Visual Boy Advance, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask on Citra (3ds emu) and Twilight Princess HD on Cemu.

Currently working on finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X before Xenoblade Chronicles DE comes out at the end of the month. Also busy with Paper Mario Thousand Year Door on Dolphin (with custom texture packs).

Citra and Dolphin both also have save states which is great. No need to look for a save point can carry on from wherever you are.

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I finished Monkey Island 1 and 2 on ScummVM before the remasters were a thing. I also did the same with Indiana Jone and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. I have tried, and failed to finish Maniac Mansion.

And I am currently busy playing Blade Runner, hopefully to completion :wink:

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