Emulator Complacency

It’s not an unyielding will that makes us interested in most things pre-now, it’s just the well established reason of this reason: games created before last week are still good fun. But it’s flim-flam to drive the point that it’s just about gameplay. Does a Mega Drive emulator look the same on your 15” TFT as it did via stolen hours on the family TV, replete with iffy RF lead? Sputter-butter!

I spend more time tweaking the controls on my maimed-up MAME cab, or trying my best to alter the aspect ratio of xSnes9x on the Xbox to match the original console, than actually playing the games. And when I'm not carefully configuring, I'm creating for myself a false youth based around obscure Japanese platformers that I never even saw when posing as a child.

Not only that, I find myself becoming nostalgic about emulators themselves. I can't help but play Zelda on the SNESulator and hark back to the days when they didn't have layering sorted out properly, and sometimes it would rain when you were inside. Sometimes I wonder – will it come to a point that these emulator idiosyncrasies are emulated themselves? Clearly, no.

Rain is good, I like it – but it’s unlucky to open umbrellas indoors.

It's a delight to be able to show my proto-wife games played by hands of the ‘80s. She's recently got into Super Mario Kart via SNES emulation on the Xbox and watches Bowser, Princess Toadstool and party rushing along in their speed chairs, merrily swearing at them. And that's just on the title screen.

And I think Princess Toadstool loves me because she can't stop winking at me from the podium. About 60Hz of love, I'd say.

In sweet assemblage every blooming race.

But!

After all the config, it's still not quite the same. Very good, but different very good. Cosseted by the luxury of saved states, my playing style is now far too relaxed. In fact you could say it’s become a characteristic. Torn away from the comfort of an emulated console version of a game and thrust in front of a MAME cab to play the original, I’m dead within seconds. That’s okay, though – I’ll press the Player 1 coin button and give myself a few more free credits. Hmm – just like the real thing, then.

The chronic guilt I suffer just to try to entertain myself is at times unbearable.

These filters look a bit like the Atari sign.

Don’t know – I never use elaborate graphics-filtering to make an emulated game seem newer than it is. There's something inherently healthy about pixels and 2D bitmap graphics in their rawest form. You never find yourself mentally questioning a side-on shoot-'em-up thinking: that ship is just like a flat piece of paper moving along another piece of paper. But when I see a boulder in a PS2 game I always think it's hollow and has no real weight, just like when you see a boulder in a film that's just painted polystyrene.

Does this make sense to you? And does it get compounded every time you see something get too close to the screen and the Z-clipping lets you see right up the inside of someone’s arm?

If you don't feel this, then I envy you.

JUNOSIX, May 2004.

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