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Fumbling behind the virtual bikesheds We've been playing emulated games for so long now, it's easy to forget where it all started. Or is it...?We asked our readers to tell us what game they first played on an emulator. We expected it to bring forward a heady mix of nostalgia and tears. Our first reader duly obliged. I remember like it was yesterday. My mate James' dad had just splashed the thick end of £1500 on a top of the range DAN Technology Pentium120. We played Dark Forces and it was amazing. I still owned an A500 at the time and to me this was nothing less than a paradigm shift: gaming changing up a gear and zooming into the future. However, then he went into DOS and started rattling away an amazingly long line of text and numbers. 'What's this?' I asked. My brain could not get itself around this. How could a game the size and weight of a wardrobe that needed money and a dank, smoky environment to run, possibly work on a home computer? I had heard the term 'arcade perfect' banded about before: indeed Amiga Power used it in their Toki review, but the actual game?'
Commando must have been well over ten years old by then, but for some reason this archaic, simple game running perfectly blew my mind. We played it solidly for an hour. Then Bombjack, then Ghosts and Goblins. The finest LucasArts could provide in polygon pushing power was forgotten instantly at the sight of the Sphinx on Bombjack's first level. About six months later, The Alliance and Leicester floated itself on the stock market and I was offered shares as I had savings with it. I sold them straight away and knew instantly what I was spending this windfall on: A lofty brand new P200 MMX PC with a dial-up modem. See, that's what we were looking for. A wistful tale of happy memories of bygone days, brought home in stunning fashion due to the power of a modern PC. Let's have another... The first emulated game I played (I think) was Chrono Trigger. Mainly because I missed it first time round and the save state system on the emu was great. It wasn't even my computer, we (about 5 flatmates and myself) all lived in Mike's room as he a had tv and computer. People could play a couple of minutes in-between watching Big Brother or surfing for porn. It was great, the story was fantastic and the art was to die for. I got to a big volcano boss and then I got confused, and it was disgarded for Super Metroid and Super Mario World, both of which were aces. Ah. No euphoric outburst of nostalgia from ma5h, then... he just needed something to kill the time when the reality TV and porn got boring. Still, gets us back to the point: I was finishing off my college project - an interactive encyclopedia of arcade video games (this is when 'multimedia' was the hip new buzzword). Someone anonymously posted me a 3.5" floppy with Stargate, Robotron and Joust perfectly emulated on it. I was dumbstruck, almost in tears. After what felt like a lifetime of shoddy home conversions I had two of my favourite ever games running perfectly on my PC. Before long those emulations were re-packaged to become Williams Arcade Classics, complete with snazzy front-end and interviews. Despite the many wonders of MAME, still nothing has come close to the joy I felt that day.
I hear ya, fella, I hear ya. Bastard's made me cry. Who's next? Oh, it's I remember mine well. I was in the States, sitting on the PC, a little bit bored, and just had this urge to play Paradroid. I typed in "Commodore 64" and found Lemon 64, which turned out to be an enormous treasure trove (it had downloadable games back then). First, though, I was informed that I needed an emulator. And I only went and picked bloody CCS64. It's great, once you know how to use it, but it took me forever to get that thing set up. But by Christ, was it worth it. When I heard the burbling sounds of the Paradroid title screen, I let out a silly girly yelp of joy. It was like I'd opened a gateway, although I had no idea just how many gateways were still left to find... Yeah, I couldn't have imagined then just how cluttered my hard drive could get. Popular game, is Paradroid. The effort which people will put in to get it running is staggering. My first real experience with emulation was also Paradroid but on PocketPC. Bastard hard to make work, FAQ-this and mount-that and though PocketPC in the early 2000s was almost wilfully shitsquad, man was it worth the effort. I almost cried when the loading screen appeared and this very odd sensation of being pulled aboard that frigate came over me and I was right back there on deck battling for my survival. The simultaneous feeling of being 'home' in my memories and being alone in space and hated by emotionless killer robots was quite overwhelming. I was happy with that too - so I never loaded anything else and later, having moved over to a C64 emulator on my desk PC, I still only played Paradroid. It was as if that was enough to open the portal back to being a kid again, all I wanted was that safe and carefree sensation, so one little Influence Device's life became my own lifeline.
More likely, it was because Paradroid is awesome. It seems like everyone was keen to emulate the Commodore 64, too. certainly was... CCS64 + Bubble Bobble = oh look, the sun's coming up. There's nothing quite like pulling an all-nighter on a game. Although that bastard music must have caused a headache by about 3am. succumbed to the delights of NES emulation... although it needed someone to show him the light. In 1997, I found some friends at college who were into the same things I was, that being drinking beer, listening to music, dicking around with computers and playing games, mostly Magic: The Gathering. Sitting in my friend's room watching demos (he was very big into the demo scene and traveled every year to Finland to attend Assembly), he suddenly said oh hey, check out this thing, it's called Nesticle, you can play old games on it. He loaded it up and there was Super Mario Bros., bright as day. It was, I dare say, a transcendent experience, particularly for me, who as a child, had been forbidden to own a videogame system, so that the only look-in I got was visits to friend's houses, where I would invariably spend an hour waiting for them to die before being given "my go", whereupon I would overexcitedly plunge to my doom within five seconds and then reluctantly pass the controller along. That I could do this on my computer bought for schoolwork was all the more revelatory. I think he managed to get me out of his room sometime around three in the morning. How naïve was he? Everyone knows that schoolwork is the excuse you use to get a computer for games! Always has been. Thanks to , we took a time-out to remember the fallen heroes of emulation, those sites that provided us with the gateways to the classics. Until they were shut down for copyright infringement, that is. Dave's Video Classics was THE site I used to visit. Can people remember the others of the time though? Atmospherical Heights, Node99, PC Arcade and Zophars Domain are the ones can remember. AH was the place I got Sparcade from all those years ago.
Ah man, such happy days. How many of those did you leech from once you discovered emulation? And there were others, as was quick to point out: I used to go onto Dave's Classics almost every day. I remember one called JoseQ's Emu Views, which handily used to put the ROMs by version, so you could update only the new ones or the ones that had changed. The first emu site I ever went on was HuCard Hell. I grabbed so many ROMS from there. I actually sold my PC Engine collection when I realised how accurately it had been emulated. I really regret doing it now. Yeah, you see, much as emulation is a wonderful thing, it still doesn't quite match up to owning the original gear. Does it? It's been a splendid trip through time, recalling happy tales of gaming nostalgia. Let's wind up with something we haven't emulated yet... the Spectrum. How could we forget? couldn't... he went back to his Skool Daze...
There really was a sense of wonder at seeing a game fire up that I had not seen for twenty years, running exactly as it had on my Spectrum. And twenty years later, I still giggled when naming characters after my school chums and at writing obscenities on the blackboard. And while Skooldaze is a simplistic game and really not worth much more than a ten minute go to relive those good old days, BaktoSkool is still a charming game, still rock hard for me and still unfinished. It's got so much more going on in this sequel, with the added bonus of a girls school next door. Sadly it doesn't feature a girl prepared to show you her tits for a Toffee Crisp in the stockroom but it's got nearly everything else. Well, there you go. Who said gamers don't get girls? There were many more stories of wonderment and awe, but we just couldn't fit them all in to our limited space. But we know these few flashes in time will have struck a chord with many of you, and you'll all have similar memories of your own. With the current trend for companies to emulate their back catalogues on current-gen systems, we're all happily paying for the privilege of owning our favourite classics, and the companies that made them are rightly reaping the rewards. But if it wasn't for the likes of us, and Dave's Video Classics, these treasures may have been buried forever. We should be proud of what we started. March 2008
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