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Early Video Game Emulation was Weird

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Emulating video games is a pretty cut and dry thing these days – there’s usually just one (or maybe two) great emulators for a system that are as easy as downloading off GitHub and throwing in an ISO file… but it wasn’t always like that. The current emulation scene is only a mere imitation of the chaotic and rapidly progressing ecosystem of the late 90s and early 2000s. So I decided to talk about it.

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In case you didn’t catch it, the cringe opening was a poor @ScottTheWoz reference

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44 Comments

  4. Emulation was part of my life, not by choice, GBA and DS games like Pokemon and Mario I got to know only by Piracy and Emulation. Today I barely emulate it now.

    (If you consider suspicious PS2 DVD's, I'm still a pirate. GTA 5 in PS2 vibes)

  10. 4:27 it wasn't unfortunate that the rise of video games emulators brought with it a rise in video games piracy, because it's thanks to that piracy that now we have preserved most of the games for every old platform for future generations to play, without depending on buying them for the first time or even again on a virtual console only for the right to download it being taken away after the console gets deprecated by the manufacturer.
    It also isn't unfortunate because, a lot of the people that pirate games couldn't afford them on the first place so it's not like the company is loosing money. this is even more real in 3rd world countries, where people can't afford to pay hundreds of thousands in the local currency just for the console.

  12. Man, I remember playing Pokemon gold back when there was no English version out yet through emulation with a very early English patch applied. I also played some GBA games through emulators as well because we couldn't afford a real GBA at the time. I remember when I finally got one I was shocked at the true speed that the games actually ran at and realizing my PC at the time was really struggling to run the games. Good times.

  13. The first emulator I ran was a windows (x86) emulator on my Silicon Graphics machine. That was so bizar. Then later I myself wrote a simulator to run PDP-11 software on the DEC Alpha. Rather out of necessity because we’d lost the code base after 12 or 15 years and we wanted to replace the massive PDP-11 since we brought in two massive GS140s that could both fit in that same rack. Doing that for the PDP-11 was straight forward. It has a very clear and limited instruction set. And we didn’t use the disk subset only a host of serial ports, it was a measurement and control system. So implementing that on Unix in the emulator was trivial. I think the whole project took me 4 weeks. I recall that getting the software of the PDP-11 was the trickiest part.

  17. A few inaccuracies here, in 1997 people were using windows 95 and Bleem eventually wan the lawsuit via an appeal. Bleem was owned by the major company called Connectix and never went out of business due to the court costs they just got tired and sold all of the Bleem assets including an upcoming successor to Sony as a settlement between both Sony and Connectix

  18. I love emulation!! I can't get enough of it!! Sometimes I just download a bunch of emulators and roms for different systems just to prove that I can play those games, and then I never end up doing a full playthrough because I'm too busy messing with literally every other game in the series on every console it ever released on (like I've been doing with Zelda recently) I think I might have a problem o.o

  20. I remember starting with ok I forget some but Project64 was one of them…I had never owned a console at the time (my first one I owned was a PS2). Good times. If I can I'll try get the hardware and mod it (not going to do that with all/many but). I had problems with modding an Xbox so far..its either the TV I'm trying it on..or the game/method isn't working for me. But I'll get there one day!

  24. a cool thing about Bleem was the Dreamcast port, allowing to play PS1 games (the actual legit cd) on a rival console displayed with better graphics than PS2 own native backward compatibility was amusing

  32. I'm really not a big fan of your favorite emulators your were playing recently! I'm a SEGA fan so I really interested about SEGA Emulators especially SEGA Genesis emulators!

  34. I first played through Super Mario 64 on my Windows 98SE machine back around 2000 or 2001…Corn64. It would only run in a tiny window, so small I couldn’t even read the onscreen text. lol

  36. 1.: NOPE, UltraHLE did NOT work with any 'decent' gfx cards. ONLY VOODOO CARDS. 2.: Also nope. Emulators have nothing to do with the rise of piracy, you baby. Game piracy was a problem since the Atari 2600 days.

  37. I love emulating Nintendo games, they're great but I just can't spend money on an underpowered tablet just to play Mario party 276
    (not to mention the stupid online thing and cloud saves, thanks Xbox live for ruining every consoles online service!)

  43. If you loved the name of that first emulator mentioned.
    There was a GameBoy one whose full name was Really A Pokemon Emulator. It tastelessly went by its initials.

  44. My modded 3ds runs everything it can smoothly and its fun to play games like doki doki and super tux adventure on the go