I miss the style of games from Japan

Saturn.

 

The main appeal of original hardware over emulators for me is visual. Emulated games, for retro platforms at least, don't look right.

 

It's all in your head, unless your talking about putting the cartridge in the system. Just get a converter, use the same controller, and a nice Arcade VGA card. Most good SNES emulators suppport 15khz output, so the picture quality is pristine -- as good as it can get.

Arcade VGA -- they rock.

 

If you've got a nice setup with a 15khz monitor for lowres games and authentic controllers - maybe it's an alternative if all you want is to play games or you don't have access to your collection for a time.

But that's not what 99% of all emu-kidz do. They download a bunch of ROMs and emulators, play it on their 19" TFT-monitor with smoothing turned on and call it retro. And they think they were the real smart wiz kids for not having to pay for it, which is pissing me off the most about those fucktards
But in the long run, I couldn't just play ROMs and call that a hobby. I need the haptic feel about games, reading manuals and all. Half of the fun comes from looking at covers and sometimes discovering a relic from the past.
A couple of weeks ago, I bought Mizubaku Daibouken for PC-Engine and it's got the reg-card - and it's been filled out. By that I could track back the game until 1993, when 14-year old Miyako Usui bought the game in Tokyo at a local game shop while also owning a Famicom, Super Famicom and another platform. It cost her 7300yen, she'd like to see some F1-game ported and was looking forward to PC Genjin 3.

I love that shit. Collecting the real deal is the way to go...

 

^What he said. I know it's all in my head, but emulators are no substitute for the real games.
And it was also annoying when all the little kiddies bragged about their ROM collections. You've got a collection of stuff anyone can download for free? Great, give yourself a pat on the back or something.

 

I have a major mental block when it comes to paying for hardware expressly to run emulators. It makes sense for arcade games where each board can cost hundreds or even thousands each, it's a massively cheaper alternative and the end result is almost indistinguishable. For my SNES games, though, I'd rather just slap in the cart and switch on the set. If I have to invest in the Ultimarc card, a USB adapter for each platform to get the right controller, then wire and configure all that on a PC (that is hopefully both quiet and suitably powerful, and that needs to boot up each time I want to play some games) and a bunch of emulators (many of which have their own little problems and idiosyncrasies, assuming the OS doesn't), then... what's the point? Fucked if I'm going to put in that kind of effort to play what is only a mostly-accurate imitation of Super Mario World.

On the topic, I was using emulators last year to capture some gameplay footage. Even without the capturing going on there was noticeable input lag. I had to mess around for ages to fix it, and now I can't even remember what I did. Again, for the price of a rare and valuable arcade PCB it's worth playing around until things work right, but it's hard for me to make the same argument for SNES games.

A final problem, that I'll concede is entirely my own - my past experience with emulators is that I just don't play games properly on them. It's the same to a lesser extent with flash cards. Once I have everything for free I tend not to give games the time they deserve.

 

If I ever brag about anything gaming related (other than a maybe high score, or kicking the shit out of someone in versus) you have permission to kick me in the cock.

Well, that's what the Arcade VGA was made for (hence, the name). It's a bonus that it works with console emulators though. Most people know I'm not afraid of expensive hardware, either arcade or console. But buying/playing everything is simply not in the cards for me... way more so than arcade, since a lot of it is simply unavailable (and space is crazy premium in my hood), but I also don't have a lot of time to dick around w/ collecting. I know it's fun for some people, but it has passed me by.

You are right about some quirks in emulators. No question, they are there. I've found them minimal at worst though, in the long running projects. I don't think I'd ever be able to decide on any one system I want, but my emulation machine gets as much attention as my consoles do (which is unfortunately not much these days).

 

Emulators are okay to get a 'feel' for a game. To me, it is akin to previewing and album on Spotify before deciding to purchase it for real.

It just feels a bit wrong. Not necessarily in a moral sense, but like ave says, you need the feel of opening the original case, admiring the artwork, browsing the manual, and turning on the real system and experiencing it the way that the creators expected you to experience it..

 

I use SSF pretty often to try if any new Saturn games I get actually work, since I don't have my actual Saturn here right now. Although X-Men vs SF refused to work on SSF, but worked on the Saturn...