Emulators: Good or Bad?

[Gold Man]

Hey guys, figured I'd toss this up there. I'm betting a few of us play some of our games via emulators (I know I play some SNES games via my iPad), however I just wanted to see what you guys thought about them. And perhaps, suggest a few good ones for me? I've heard of a few emulators for playing GameCube/SNES/NES and what not, but just wanted to see if you knew any for the other consoles, like PS2 and Xbox?

Anyways, feel free to post your opinions!

[{PLA}gdh92]

I use Dosbox for some old games but most emulators (or at least the free ones) don't support 3D graphics so they're no good for gaming, Getting late 90's games to work is very difficult...

I know there's some legal problems with emulators but I like that they let you play games that aren't available anywhere else especially if I have the CD/floppy but cant play it on a new PC.

[Sereja]

I've tried emulator for PS2, and it's not works for me, so I do not like it.
I think, emulators, have a very serious issue: seems they can't recognize any pirate discs.

[tirpider]

I like my old atari 2600, SNES, and Playstation emulators.
Pirating the games isn't really an issue for me cause I own all the carts for those systems that I liked anyway.
For the PS that means only one disc (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.)

For the really old consoles (NES/SNES/SEGA) it is handy to not have to drag the cables and stuff out of the closet (after figuring out what box it's in.) I see no harm in them.

The trouble is getting the timings and controlers set up so that you are actually emulating the experience and not just hacking around with wasd controls. Sometimes you can buy adapters, sometimes you have to cobble together a serial interface by hand. I've yet to do anything with my PS2 dual shock on a PC that didn't feel completely different than using it with the PS2.

For my atari EMU, I just put it on my Nintendo DS. I'm so used to d-pads that one of the old hard plastic joysticks  wouldn't be fun for me. I think the name of the emu I use is Stella DS, which is just a port of Stella which has pretty much been the 2600 emu for decades.

For the SNES, I use ZSNES (1.51... from 2007... haven't needed to update it so I don't know if there is a better one.) I use it for Gradius III. I have a few others, but even when I had it hooked up to the TV, It was that or Super Mario. For this one, the Emu is really cool cause you can set up things like auto-fire which lets you play in new ways.

I haven't touched the PS emu in so long, I forget what it's called. My old PS controllers are dead, so I had to use the PS2 Dual Shocks and an adapter. I'ts meh, but way better than the keyboard. I remember seeing the folder when copying stuff over... don't remember if I actually kept it or not... No big deal though. My only PS game works on the PS2 and that's still connected to the TV.

Tech-wise, I love the idea of implementing old hardware via software. It just makes sense and helps preserve the games from the old machines by giving them a new life. Legaly, it's one of those fun things that can get folks in trouble and lead you through shady places on the net while trying to source heavily licenced things, like BIOS files. For that reason, I would avoid all things sony or apple (unless you want to get all geeky and dump your own roms off your old console

Which leads invariably to the granddaddy of all emus. MAME. It does a huge number of arcade systems. And it does them all pretty well. Again, the image files (called ROMS because they are dumps of ROMS from the arcade boards) are generally licensed and not legal to own or operate unless you own the board (or at least the chips.) And if you have all that, it would be way cooler to refurbish the cabinet than to just run it on a pc. So many people have worked on MAME... I used to read through their changelog recreationally, just to see all the names.

And DOSBox is just awesome. It's making games from my generation playable, so of course I dig it. I believe they ship preconfigured copies of it with some of the stuff you get from GOG.com.

If you grew up with the Comadore Vic20, then there are tons of tape and cart images floating around the public domain, and all the EMU's I've seen for it are solid. I gave up on playing with it because I need more than 8k ram to program these days. (Less than that if you account for the system.... )  (Oh. and there is the C64 as well..)


But to the point....

I think emulators are good. The guys coding the emu's are usually quite generous in sharing their info, and are playing a massive role in preserving our gaming/computing heritage.  Kids get ahold of them and start hoarding roms as though they are actually going to play all the thousands of titles someday (be real.. most these old games sucked) but since were talking about stuff that hasn't existed on the market for decades, I don't think the hoarder kids hurt anything.

I looked for a PS2 emu the other day and found one (PCSX2) that claims theirs can run SWBF. Didn't try it though cause I have no way to dump my PS2 BIOS and I don't go to "those" kind of sites anymore. (yes, if you are downloading a PS2 BIOS set, then you are on a stolen software site.)

I have no clue if the XBox is emulated yet or not. It should be, since all it was was a chopped up PC running chopped up windows. I'd be more interested in putting a quiet fan and decent dvd drive in mine. Sounds like a shop-vac when you power it up.

[Gold Man]

Thanks for the opinions guys. I actually just now tried running Dolphin (a GC/Wii emulator), and it runs alright. Tried playing a Call of Duty, I got 3 frames a second! I'm thinking I might try Star Wars: Bounty Hunter though (heard lots about it), so I hope it will work successfully! If it doesn't, then I'm done with PC emulators (until I get a new computer that is).

[Ultimo]

u use an emulator to play Pokemon Crystal on my phone...
which I don't really need anymore because I bought an original copy of Pokemon Crystal.

Only paid 30 bucks for this rare beauty. <3

[SleepKiller]

Emulators are perfectly legal and great pieces of software for playing old games. Their are a few things you can do to make your legal emulation experience illegal.

If the emulator requires bios to run downloading it off the internet or getting it from anywhere else but from your console is illegal.

Downloading ROMs or ISOs of games. Doing this is piracy, plain and simple. You need to rip the games from your own cartridges/discs.

But wait SleepKiller is it really that bad to download NES/SNES/N64 ROMs? They're all consoles that aren't on the market any more so who is getting harmed? Actually you can buy a lot of old games still from sources such as Virtual Console on the 3DS, Wii (This one has a fantastic collection of games to buy.) or Wii U. Do the right thing and buy it from them.

[Gold Man]

Emulators are perfectly legal and great pieces of software for playing old games. Their are a few things you can do to make your legal emulation experience illegal.

If the emulator requires bios to run downloading it off the internet or getting it from anywhere else but from your console is illegal.

Downloading ROMs or ISOs of games. Doing this is piracy, plain and simple. You need to rip the games from your own cartridges/discs.

But wait SleepKiller is it really that bad to download NES/SNES/N64 ROMs? They're all consoles that aren't on the market any more so who is getting harmed? Actually you can buy a lot of old games still from sources such as Virtual Console on the 3DS, Wii (This one has a fantastic collection of games to buy.) or Wii U. Do the right thing and buy it from them.

Spoken perfectly. I tried playing some GameCube games off of Dolphin, however I had an awful experience. Call of Duty was running 3 frames a second, and Bounty Hunter needed 60 frames to run effectively (it ran at 30). So, I uninstalled it all. It's official, no matter what game I try to play, regardless of the system, I cannot run anything other than SWBF on this darned laptop!

[aeria.]

Emulators are great things. If I play with an emulator, it's likely going to be GGPO or SuperCade as I'm primarily a fighting game player.

They're essentially MAME but with amazing netcode. It's even tolerable to play against people overseas. GGPO's netcode even got implemented into a few commercial games on PSN/XBLA/Steam. Really great stuff if you want to enjoy some classics.

I'm down with playing some fighting games.

[{PLA}gdh92]

Spoken perfectly. I tried playing some GameCube games off of Dolphin, however I had an awful experience. Call of Duty was running 3 frames a second, and Bounty Hunter needed 60 frames to run effectively (it ran at 30). So, I uninstalled it all. It's official, no matter what game I try to play, regardless of the system, I cannot run anything other than SWBF on this darned laptop!

I don't know which emulators you're using but some have an option to use more of your CPU and often come set quite low.

[Gold Man]

I don't know which emulators you're using but some have an option to use more of your CPU and often come set quite low.

I was using Dolphin, a widely popular GameCube/Wii emulator. And yeah, it was eating up my graphics card like 90! I couldn't even force it to swap to my CPU! I might try my luck with another console's emulator, but that won't be for a while, not since the way Dolphin handled on here.

[{TCE}Call-of-Duty]

I have a GB emulator on my phone, I own a GB and the games I play on it so no big issue for me, but SK is right to make emulators legal, you need the console and the games you play on the emulator

[aeria.]

I have a rather good experience with Dolphin. Moreso than PCSX2. Twilight Princess is fantastic in 1080p.

I've dumped most of my gamecube/wii games to try on dolphin. While there's varying degrees of success, the games that do work look absolutely great.

Unfortunately, it does need a desktop CPU to work well. Most laptops don't cut it and emulators don't take advantage of the GPU. My Sandy Bridge Pentium did a really good job with Dolphin 3 and that's a 60 dollar CPU. If anyone is interested in dolphin, try it on a desktop.

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As far as legalities go, IIRC the only law that's relevant is the copyright law. Nowhere in US law have they stated that the development of computer/console emulators or using them is illegal. The BIOS of a console is also copyrighted software so keep that in mind. ROM hosting websites have been around for so long simply because the copyright holders aren't prosecuting and if they are, you know those roms will be taken down. A lot of the games available the publishers don't have the rights to anymore and/or is not profitable to re-release. As much as I would love to play SF Alpha 3 online on my xbox 360, the potential playerbase is too small  for the licensing and development costs. GGPO fills in that void with an excellent piece of middleware. Is it plausible that everyone imported the original arcade machine and dumped the software onto their PCs? I doubt it. But Capcom knows it's tough to prevent emulation from happening and would rather leave it alone.

Take a look at the N64 emulator. Is it legal for me to never own the console yet still legally dump a cartridge I own? You bet. You own that cartridge. That emulator doesn't require anything from the original N64. What you do with the software copy you own is up to you, including running it in Project64.

Now let's look at the PS1/PS2 emulators. They require the original BIOS from the original PS1/PS2 to operate. If you got that BIOS from online, that's the same thing as downloading a game ISO from a rom site. It's copyrighted software. If I wanted to play Street Fighter Alpha 3 with the extra characters exclusive to the PS1 and there's no way I can purchase a modern copy a SFA3 (it's not on PSN, XBLA, or any PC store), you know I'm going to run it on an emulator. And I'm not going to hack my PS1 just to play one game.

As for as age of console goes:
If it was viable to emulate the PS4 today, of course it would impact the sales of the console. That's probably where emulation can be bad. But as far as legacy consoles go, Wii included, emulation really is probably the viable option to play classic games in its original form without hunting for the original console and copy of the game. It's not going to negatively impact sales of games to the point where people are being sent to court anytime soon.

[Roxas]

I use PCSX2 to play Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy X, and the n64 emulator to play Pokemon Stadium and Bomberman 64. Sometimes I play Star Wars: Pod Racers but well...it's doable but not the best in terms of controls. Besides consoles I usually play modded versions and original versions of Pokemon. I don't like the NDS emulators though.

If the console is old and it's harder to get things, I have no problem downloading them, especially if I actually own the games but no longer have the console.

[aeria.]

I'll just mention that Bomberman is probably the most fun you can have with 3 friends. If you want a simple game to run on an emulator and pass the time, Bomberman's the way to go.