General Emulation Discussions

[Dogg Thang]

But those other games aren't gone. They have been preserved. This is what I was saying about the difference between game preservation and people just wanting them. If you play old games you aren't automatically a game preservationist. If an emu site goes, the games don't vanish from existence. It just means that lots of people who feel they have a right to access anything that exists for some reason have a harder time getting them. Yeah it's a shame that older, effectively unclaimed games get caught up in it but again I'd just come back to the point that we don't have some inbuilt right to access.

[endo]

It's also something I've considered, but I checked the rules and they say:

- Do not provide links to Iso's, Roms or any other such "warez" . Do not advertise iso's,roms or any other such "warez" for sale in the trade forum. Failure to follow these simple rules will result in a ban.

There are roms for sale on the forum right now.

- Do not actively seek sources for Roms, Isos or any other such "warez" via other members of the forum or Bordersdown itself, we will neither accept nor tolerate any attempts to ask for or provide information which results in the theft of someone else's intellectual property, and such actions will result in an immediate ban.

- Similarly, any members found providing information which could be used in any illegal capacity are subject to an immediate ban. If you are unsure, please ask a mod before you post.

I think it's time the rules were revised, because things have clearly changed.

"Any members found providing information which could be used in any illegal capacity are subject to an immediate ban". This rule is particularly broad and is technically broken all the time. According to that rule no discussion of modding, emulation, etc. should be allowed, because any information on those subjects can be used in an illegal capacity.

I also remember when the mods would get very twitchy around any rom-related discussion (and magazine scans, in particular, used to get them in a tiz), but that's clearly not the case anymore.

[Neon Ignition]

It's not that they'd be gone (the internet effectively makes it hard that they ever would be), just that it potentially shows the disregard to those considerations companies may have when making decisions on these things. It's interesting as well how Nintendo clearly has a position on this but really places limited resources as there are many obvious alternate sources they don't pursue as they aren't that aggressive on it really even though they are more so than others it seems.

In terms of people wanting them or feeling entitled to them, there's certainly an element of that especially in more vocal circles of the web but if they disappeared overnight completely the majority who download them wouldn't care in a meaningful way - downloading them more because they're available than through a sense of having any rights to do so or entitlement to it. Like, if someone finds a £5 note in the street, they have no right to it but they'll probably pick it up all the same but at the same point don't bemoan that they don't find them on a regular basis. There's certainly hardcore rom people but I suppose in this analogy they'd be the bank robbers

[Dogg Thang]

There's certainly hardcore rom people but I suppose in this analogy they'd be the bank robbers

Or the historians collecting out of circulation bank notes.

Your point is correct though. To go back to your Ferrari, of course we'd take Derek's Ferrari. But we don't feel we have some right to a Ferrari and complain that they are just sold too high so we should take one anyway. So I guess it's like taking Derek's Ferrari because it's on offer but maybe getting too used to having access to Ferraris... or something. I think the main point is that Ferraris look nice.

[Neon Ignition]

And it's a compliment to Ferrari I guess, think of all those roms for games out there that are being made available for free to download... but no-one wants to

[Colin]

Given Roms/Isos of the older games most people download are taken from sites, torrents etc that are publicly releasing them for use then downloading a ROM doesn't hurt the original games maker in the same way stealing the Ferrari from Derek at number 43 doesn't harm Ferrari as a company. The company already made its money and has no association with that direct specific item once the private owner purchases it in terms of money making.

Except of course they do. They'll continue stiffing Derek for as long as he has his car with vastly overpriced servicing and parts which he'll need to suffer in order to maintain his full main dealer service history in order to retain value for resale. And so will the next owner, and the next, and the next.........

[Brad]

When Nintendo sourced a ROM from the net rather than ripping their own I stopped caring about them losing money over people not paying for their work

[importaku]

While technically it’s their game to do so it does come across as very hypocritical.

[Neon Ignition]

Boss: "Hey, what are you doing on that rom site?! You're supposed to be making the textures for Galaxy 2!"
Employee: "I... err... I'm working on a Mario Collection!"
Boss: "What?! How dare you, that's not your job or what you've been tasked to do let alone the costs to the project"
Employee: "Umm..." *slips GPX into desk drawer* "... we.. could... put a rom on a disc for $40 for no cost"
Boss: "You... hmm, tell me, ever thought about a management role?"

[Neon Ignition]

I'm going to assume that regarding the original intent of this thread that emulation of any kind is fine to discuss as long as nothing goes pro-piracy in the way we've been discussing over the last day or two (i.e we can discuss emulators for more modern or current machines but cannot provide links, information etc that directly connects to the distribution or endorsement of pirating new/current releases)

I query that because a new video has come out for Yuzu, the Nintendo Switch emulator, and its progress is staggering. To make it clear, no-one's going to be playing copied games via this as it's a very long way from a usable state but considering the age of the machine it shows impressive skills on behalf of the coders:

[Sketcz]

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, I probably did since I retell it quite often, but... Games companies WANT you to use emulators and ROMs for old games. At least they want journalists to do so when taking screens and writing articles. I recall a long time ago that ToyThatKills, who I think is a mean-spirited and somewhat unthinking jerk, went on Twitter and tried to get me fired as a freelancer from GamesTM because I openly stated that I used emulators to take screenshots for the 30+ versions of Ancient Ys Vanished that exist, for a massive article I wrote on the series. You know, rather than buying 30 antiquated personal computers in order to attempt some sort of direct S-VIDEO screen grab, I just emulated them.

Anyway... Putting aside his rather disgusting behaviour.

Games companies specifically told journalists not to take direct video grabs. At least they did back in 2006, when HD and HDMI grabbing tech wasn't that great, and stuff like the PSP required an entire desktop machine to take grainy interlaced S-VIDEO screens. Once PSP piracy took off and you could use homebrew to dump a raw internal grab of whatever you were playing, PSP screens improved dramatically.

This was also the era where compilations started to get bigger. A whole bunch of compilations by Atari, Taito, and of course the massive Sega Mega Drive compilation. That was on PSP and PS2, I recall. I still vividly remember Sega emailing me and saying to only use screenshots from a Mega Drive emulator on my workstation, rather than directly grabbing from PSP, because the grabbed screens looked like dog****. On the PSP itself it actually looked really nice and crisp if you selected the correct pixel ratio (I never reviewed the PS2 one, which I only recently discovered was not that great). The difference between seeing the PSP screen itself, seeing S-VIDEO grabs of the PSP, and seeing emulated screenshots, was startling. The emulated shots of Mega Drive games looked almost identical to the actual PSP, whereas direct PSP grabs were incredible awful (grainy, washed out, blurred, and with weird interlacing problems - which manually correcting would result in loss of detail).

I also recall a PR lady coming into the office to show some arcade retro compilation on PSP, and nervously trying to be sure that I really, really liked the compilation, because I was the retro guy, and pleading that we use emulated shots to make it look as good as possible. I felt kinda bad. There's only so much you can do with something made in 1982. I think she probably got commission based on review scores or something. But they definitely told us to pirate their games via emulation on a Windows computer. While everyone else in the office got Macs, I was specifically given a Windows PC because I covered retro via emulation.

Nintendo were less hands on, and I never really dealt with them. But for the Wii they also wanted emulated screenshots so their Virtual Console would be seen in the best light. Despite the fact the UK releases were 50Hz. I recall for the Wii launch issue I forgot to disable the screen flickering in a NES emulator for one particular games I was screen-grabbing, and hoped they wouldn't notice.

Same again with the Ancient Ys article. Yes, I had screenshots for every single Ys game ever released. Yes, I emulated all of them using ROMs. And yes, Falcom most definitely wanted it that way, because all they were interested in was making sure they had lots of positive publicity for the latest game they were releasing.

So while Nintendo might piss and moan about you downloading ROMs as a public user, they and every other single retro company very specifically prefer emulated screens when discussing re-releases. At least they did when I was on the beat.

As a hilarious aside, some modern reviews were forced to be done via piracy because the publisher couldn't be arsed to send out review copies. I think it was Max Payne 2 where they didn't bother, and the review was a pirated version. But that wasn't my department, so I might be remembering wrong.

[Leon Retro]

So while Nintendo might piss and moan about you downloading ROMs
.

I think it's a case of Nintendo flexing its muscles and trying to protect its properties. But it's not like anyone is going to try and make a Mario, Yoshi, Kirby game without Nintendo's permission. Even if you make a homebrew game featuring a Nintendo character, Nintendo will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

So all this "using roms is piracy" talk is nonsense really. The only relevant thing from a business point of view, is people trying to make money from copyrighted properties. People just loading a rom of an old game on an emulator for a bit of fun doesn't hurt anyone.

When I think about Nintendo and how it treats YouTube videos and deals with emulation, I just think some weasel sort of person at Nintendo is just finding ways to make a name for themself at the company. I think everyone at Nintendo should have better things to focus on. The use of intellectual properties for financial gain without having permission being illegal, is a moot point that has nothing to do with someone booting up Dr. Mario on a NES emulator.

[Neon Ignition]

Decided to have a little browse and see the state of various, less commonly mentioned emulators:

Supermodel (Model 3 Emulator)





RPCS3 (PS3 Emulator)





TeknoParrot 1.5.0 (Sega Lindbergh Emulator)





CXBXR (Xbox OG Emulator)

[Leon Retro]

TeknoParrot 1.5.0 (Sega Lindbergh Emulator)

CXBXR (Xbox OG Emulator)

I hope I will be able to get After Burner Climax up and running.

I've been hoping for Xbox emulation for years, seeing it's PC architecture. Would be cool if games like PGR2 could be played online again.

[Asura]

I've been hoping for Xbox emulation for years, seeing it's PC architecture. Would be cool if games like PGR2 could be played online again.

You might struggle with that particular one. PGR2 and some games like Amped 2 didn't use the "regular" Xbox Live functionality; they used an expanded version of it based upon the "XSN Sports" system, which is how they were able to have loads of different leaderboards and expanded functionality. These were shut down before the rest of Xbox Live v1, and would probably need someone to reverse-engineer their server support.