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I somewhat agree with this, save for in the fine details. Emulation is good until a point; often button response latency is off, audio is mixed incorrectly, an
by dleslie 5y ago
I somewhat agree with this, save for in the fine details.
Emulation is good until a point; often button response latency is off, audio is mixed incorrectly, and CRT rendering artifacts are not properly accounted for.
For instance, I keep a grey brick Gameboy around for noodling with LSDJ about once or twice a year. The bass response is just lovely.
There's a whole community that harvests and covets SID chips because emulation just doesn't nail it.
There's a retro gaming convention in Vancouver every year, or was before Covid, and there's a few crews of musicians with classic hardware. I recommend checking it out just to hear the difference analog hardware makes.
- emodendroket 5y agoThere have been so many advances in emulation that I would say a lot of this isn't true anymore. You can pretty much get next to flawless emulation of anything PSX and older (with much of the newer stuff more than good enough for playing even if not exact replica), and with runahead you can match or beat original device latency.
- dleslie 5y agoI've never seen a "CRT" shader that comes anywhere close to the quality of art representation of Neo Geo titles as my MVS and its recapped Wells Gardner. And those "scanlines" ones are just sad. To say nothing of my experiences with sound quality and input latency.
- emodendroket 5y agoWell the last paragraph is ignoring my point about run ahead I think.
- dleslie 5y agoI don't want to "beat" the device, I want to experience the device as it was intended.
- emodendroket 5y agoIt seems absurd to say emulation is worse because you prefer a slightly greater amount of input lag.
- dleslie 5y agoTiming is everything in old games, change that and you change the experience into something different. Not to say it's better or worse, but it's not the same.
- hulitu 5y agoTo this day only the expensive LCDs come close to CRT colours.
- kitsunesoba 5y agoAnd on the computer side of the fence, although modern machines are outrageously powerful, responsiveness is becoming something of an endangered species, but on early to mid 90s Macs it's the rule for all but the most demanding applications. Especially if retrofitted with flash storage of some kind, those old Macs often wait for you more frequently than you wait for them. And while the OS isn't great at multitasking, that could be seen as a feature — instead of tens of tabs and a dock full of programs open, you're forced to focus only on the 1-3 apps that can be open before classic Mac OS multitasking breaks down. I'm seriously considering setting up an old pre-OS X Mac of some flavor as a zen mode writing machine for this reason.