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While it started exclusively as an activity enjoyed by a small demographic of ultra-nerdy young people with knowledge of obscure websites, emulation has gradually blossomed over the past thirty years into something we all do regularly—often while obeying copyright laws. Without emulation, most retro games would be entirely inaccessible to all but the select few with the cash available to purchase pieces of decades-old plastic that are only increasing in price and decay. And would our little podcast even exist without emulation? It's a thought too terrifying to dwell on.

This week on Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Read Only Memo's Wes Fenlon, and Zophar's Domain founder Zophar (check out his YouTube and Twitch channels) as the crew discusses the many big moments from emulation's history—and how the subject has recently become more relevant than ever.

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Comments

Spencer

Media preservation across the board is a necessity.

Craig

Great episode that really hammers this point home. I’m getting old. Shout out to Zophar, If you are over the age of 35 and enjoy emulation, you know his name.

Astrogamer

Decent podcast but to correct you on the emulation on PlayStation 4/5. To start, in the late teens, Sony had some sort of internal group develop a PS2 emulator for the PS4 and this incorporated some modern features like trophies. They released like 20-30 of these including Jak and Rogue Galaxy. They are okay emulation However, when they brought it over to the PS5, it just runs wrong with regular crashes. That was it plus continuing PS now from the PS3 days. Then in 2022, they expanded PS+ to be a Game Pass competitor and made the highest tier Premium. This premium tier includes the rebranded PS now with a smaller library and a selection of PS1 and PSP games in a manner similar to Nintendo Switch Online. These games are native on both PS4 and PS5 and available for individual purchase but there are several shoddy parts like them originally using PAL ROMs for several games and weird glitches and slowdown. They've been updated so there's less bugs and most PS1 games are using the NTSC versions. However, the selection is still paltry with only 2-3 more games a month.

Leonard Martinez

It sounds quaint today but I still remember the feeling of awe and disbelief when I learned I could easily play non-computer games on my computer. When I first discovered it I think I stayed up all night trying every random system I had either not played in years or ones I never had access to as a kid. I still buy official retro compilations (if they're well made) though, so it worked out well for everyone in the end.

Komsomol General

Great cast today. BTW, the Xbox series X is amazing at emulation

Wood Duck [Legacy Edition]

Unlocked some core memories here! I must have been getting online and dabbling aged 11 in 2000 as I remember playing rom hacks of Pokemon Gold/Silver (I can only assume) before they released locally. Including all sorts of weird Pokemon names clearly translated literally or phonetically. Running NES games full-speed on a pocket PC my father had won in 2002. Only experiencing games like Secret of Mana at 3/4 speed and being blown away when I played a normal speed version years later. Save scumming Earthbound badly on my first playthrough so I was extremely under levelled and just relied more and more on critical hits/saves to get through to the end. And of course the ubiquitous "playing around with a cache of emulators and roms that somehow had ended up on the school computer lab network"

Jonathon

Really glad Virtual Game Station was brought up because it was somewhat unique in that the main platform was Macintosh. I saw VGS advertised in a software magazine and could convince my dad to spend 30 dollars on a disc compared to a couple hundred bucks on a console. My first playthrough of Final Fantasy VII was through emulation about a year and a half or so after the game came out. The sound wasn't perfect but it played really well and you could play the game at 480p, which made the polygons look really sharp on a computer monitor of the era. That was my first exposure to emulators and only after that did I realize there were emulators for other, older systems.

Gabriele Riva

The original pre-MAME Pacman emulator from Nicola Salmoria was called MultiPac ;)

Gabriele Riva

It's 2024 and I still haven't played a CPS2 game on its original hardware ONCE. Thank you CPS2 Shock team 🙂

Shrunken Shrine

You cannot overstate the cultural impact emulation had on countries that didn't (or still don't) have the economic or political situations to easily access what Japan, the US, and much of Europe had... and that's a lot of the world. The games that changed our lives because we could buy them in a store stood no less of a chance of changing the life of a Russian kid with a Dendy and a dozen dodgy knockoffs or a Chilean kid with a folder of Super Famicom ROMs they couldn't read but could still be captivated by. I will never believe emulation or piracy is inherently malicious.

Angel S.

Great episode! So much stuff we take for granted in the Internet era, emulation especially. Thanks for sharing all these stories!

Mark

I remember when I was a kid 20 years ago my older brother had a modded Xbox that could play SNES games and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Now I’m the same age he was then and experiencing the same thing on the Steam Deck but with Xbox era games. Time is a flat circle.

Stephen Maurer

This was a great episode that had me reminiscing about my youth and rummaging through huge folders of ROMs. More importantly, I was excited to learn that Zophar is a fellow Philadelphian!

Christopher Hughes

I was 16 in 1998, had an AST 486 at home, and my mind was blown when I realized I could download Nesticle and any NES game I could think of. I also used Alti Vista to search the web. The quick save capability gave me an opportunity to finally beat Ninja Gaiden. I was using some kind of improvised keyboard button mapping. That was not ideal but I made it work.

B. Traven

Please do an episode about ROM hacking!

Jeff Peterson

This was a great primer and broad discussion on the overall history of the emulation scene leading up to the recent events with Yuzu/Citra. Of course, with the broadness of the topic, it was difficult to dive into specific aspects. I'm excited to hear about the fan translation topic in a separate episode, with its high and low moments. I was hoping to hear more about the people behind some of these emulators. I know that people tend to stay fairly anonymous given the legal aspects of emulation so I can understand that some details may be lacking, but I figured that Zophar may have had some insight from his IRC days on what these people were like. One name in particular that stands out in my mind was Near/Byuu. Near (who may come up in the fan translation episode too) worked to make cycle accurate emulators, aka perfect recreations of hardware in software. Their "higan" emulator, which became "bsnes" is the first to achieve 100% compatibility of the SNES library. Definitely a big deal! RetroArch and LibRetro is another topic that merits discussion. It made emulation more convenient by combining multiple emulators into one program, but has an objectively terrible UI/UX for configuration and settings. However, it is most notable for running multiple instances of itself so that it can "run ahead" of input in order to reduce lag. All in all, great episode and I look forward to more about the topic in the future!

John Simon

There’s just something about playing NES games with a keyboard 🙂‍↔️ Also it’s kinda weird to explain to people that we once used to install plugins into Winamp to play NSFs - NES music files. ZD has a sizable archive of those

CapNChris

This was a fantastic episode and a great effort by Retronauts. Like videogames (of which emulation is am important subset), emulation also grew up as I did. I really enjoyed the reminisces about the early days of emulation and how wild it felt to play a NES game on a computer. I appreciate the recognition that emulation gave a proof of concept to publishers that fans are still interested in old games and willing to pay money for them. It took them a while to come around, but they finally did it. I personally have purchased FF6 remakes on more systems that I can remember.

Nuno Amaral

One of my favorite things to do in emulation, was to change the frame rate, making the games run substantially faster. It was kinda like training in the hyperbolic time chamber and worked wonders for my UN Squadron skills.

Lambda

Great overview! As someone whose ADHD brain resisted all attempts to figure out emulation until like five years ago, it's always interesting to hear people talk about the early days, when it really was a tremendous pain in the ass to get anything to work even a little. Which is why it's still so wild to me that Nintendo was able to get N64 emulators running only a single generation removed from the N64, for the purpose of a promotional tie-in disc, with Zelda Collector's Edition. People say the emulation isn't good and maybe it isn't, but as a kid I couldn't tell the difference (not having any access to an N64 probably helped) and as an adult I'm baffled at how it was even possible.

PosiVibez4evr

Such a cool topic! Fantastic guests and episode!