Early Video Game Emulation was Weird
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- 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
...and this is what I get for buying a Scott The Woz DVD from Wish.
lol xD
"Mom can we have Scott the Woz?"
"No we have Scott the Woz at home."
Scott the Woz at home:
Scatt the wiz
I remember when PS2 emulation was like single digit framerate for like the longest time until there was a huge leap after it got multicore support
now we have the bloody thing running on phones
@@NeoTechniRIP AetherSX2
Played Evangelion 64 on a PC in 1999 at like 6fps.
My benchmark test on new computers in the mid to late 2000s was to see how fast a ps2 emulator could run. Never very good because the only computers i could jave access to were never that great to begin with. Emachines and HPs mostly
@@evelin1006 apk:
I was a teen in the 90s and got pretty into the emulation scene, and boy was it funny to play early SNES emulation: missing colors, no transparency, and occasionally completely screwed-up sound.
Yes, I remember finding SNES ROMS and emulators back in February 1999. I got to play the translated ROM of FF5, and it was one of the best times of my life.
The "no transparency" bit was really bad when dealing with titles like Chrono Trigger and the future domes. You had to either know to press 5 to disable that layer, or fork out money (or trust a download for) Scitech Display Doctor
@@jamesrusselleriii8284 wow, I forgot about CT's fog effect; I just remember spending hours in the Ship's Graveyard in FF5 because all I could see was the water layer, and disabling that just left a black screen.
The first emulator I remember trying out was ZSnes 0.4. The first game was Megaman X. I had a top of the line pc at the time, and it was still a little choppy and there was no sound, but 12 year old me was beyond ecstatic.
I've been around since the beginning of modern emulation. I was there when nesticle dropped and still remain friends with Hellbent. UltraHLE was mind blowing and I had some great conversations with realityman. I even got really close with Randy from Bleem and I'm credited as a QA tester in the Bleem software package that was sold in stores. Great video man.
that's so cool. always intrigued by that part of the computing & gaming history
Hey thank you for the kind words! Unsung heroes of the gaming scene as a whole in my opinion. I appreciate it :)
Games releasing on a single platform back then wasn't due to programner skills. Programmers back then generally had to be more versatile than they are today. It was because much more games were developed in house, and third party developers often had exclusivity agreements.
Thanks for watching! Yeah I probably could have worded that better. Development kits were also typically huge expenses for studios which could maybe limit the amount of hardware they could learn how to use, but as you mentioned, the third parties pretty much lived and died on exclusivity agreements.
It was mostly due to the fact that while you could write code in C for a lot of old systems, it's inefficient compared to assembly, especially with the compilers back in those days. The boxes had so little juice that you wanted to squeeze every ounce out you could so most games were programmed in assembly. As assembly is literally making CPU-specific calls, porting a game was often making an entirely (or mostly) new version of the game that behaved as similarly as you could to the original version.
You just couldn't use Unity and sell half finished ports that were generated by the engine.
@@vadnegru yeah but that said, programmers back then would be adaptable to different systems and each one was simple enough to be able to program to a data sheet on bare metal if you wanted. I'm thinking back before 5th gen I guess. But nowadays people use pre made engines like unity just to deal with the incredible complexity of systems these days. You have programmers who work on game engines but there's more specialisation, you tend to either be a game dev specialising in some engine or someone who can work on developing a game engine.
@@JohnSmith-sk7cg By the mid 90s asm wasn't really used that much in games. Hell, even the Megadrive and Amiga had several games programmed in C, albeit mostly those games that needed a quick turnaround.
It was exclusivity more than anything. Besides, the N64 and PS1 were both MIPS based machines.
I've been following emulation since 1999. It's been interesting to see how even emulators like Snes9X have evolved to shift from HLE (high level emulation) and using tons of hacks, to LLE (low level emulation) to simulate hardware accurately for near flawless compatibility.
❤❤❤
The joke of loving emulation with Scott's background was genius.
Scott the Woz on the real hardware vs Scott the Woz on the slow inaccurate emulator.
In addition to Nesticle and Genecyst, there was also the similarly horribly named "Callus" which did Capcom CPS1 emulation. What I feel bears special mention about these emulators was that they were heavily optimised in assembly in order to hit native speeds on modest hardware at the time. Emulation in the early days was merely proof of concept - the idea that a PC could do Mario at 60fps WITH SOUND was a pipe dream (pun not intended.) But naturally when a challenge appears, so too do people to take up said challenge and while other emulators could claim the titles of being first, Nesticle is the one that I say really deserves the accolade for being so accessible. Snes9x was an arguably better piece of software than ZSNES, but ZSNES ran on toasters where S9X needed you to spend more money.
Similarly Bleem was a masterwork in optimisation. Running playstation games at full speed on commodity Win9x hardware was a sight to behold.
Nowadays we burn CPU cycles for accuracy because we can and we want it to be as close to the real thing as possible but back in the 90s, final fight in callus was a lot more playable than in mame and well, accuracy is nice but playable is better.
The story behind these emulators and the pure passion their programmers had for the hardware and the platforms as a whole is what really makes them so interesting to me. Balancing accuracy for speed and getting these things running on such (now archaic) slow chips will never cease to amaze me. Thanks for watching!
Callus was great as was NeoRage! It was so great playing arcade games from just a few years ago in the late '90s.
Nesticle was so optimized that in 1997 even the bottom of the barrel PCs being sold could run it full speed. A 66 MHz 486 could run it full speed with sound!
The graphics card was somewhat ironically more important. Today with 6th gen console emulation the graphics card isn't that important, just as long as it's recent enough and you stick to native resolutions. Any iGPU will do the job. The CPU is more important.
I’d just like to say as someone who beta tested all 3 of the aforementioned emulators and was around during all of this, my teenage self thought the names were clever at the time. ;)
I also was around back then, and Bloodlust's emulators were magic.
ZSNES did wipe the floor with SNES9X at athe time, but at the cost of compatibility; especially transparent effects in titles like Chronotrigger (a problem that continued into N64 emulators with Bomberman 64 being a particular problem).
Ahh, the year 2000 and discovering the world of emulation with Nesticle. Was really exciting to be able to play the old classics.
Emulation is what got me into retro gaming. It basically keeps games alive. For example, earthbound would just be an unknown snes title from the early 90s if people couldn't play it via other means. I know Nintendo isn't making money of that file I downloaded, but they sure as shit aren't seeing a penny off that copy off ebay.
I would have known about it since I bought it at Best Buy when it came out. Still have it.
You dildos should have been paying attention back then.
Bleem had something even more crazy, namely, Bleemcast, which emulated Ps2 games on the Dreamcast. You could buy their discs in stores.
I remember seeing Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo 2.
*ps1 games not ps2 :p
@@costadinoverI was about to say, Bleemcast would have had to do something like reverse emulation to play PS2 on DC
I remember PS3, WiiU, Switch, and Xbox360 emulation going from essentially a malware campaign, with emulation sites having banners atop their homepages telling users that emulation for those systems does not exist yet, and anyone saying they have a working emu for those systems is lying / scamming. And then it seems like a year later we had absolutely wild developments on emulation for those systems and now owning those consoles is totally unnecessary.
You're right that happened FAST too, even for the newer systems. Glad we're getting past that point with the Switch and PS4 as well. Thanks for watching!
@@LowestLogan dude FOR SURE, your content is WAY excellent
I wish all emulators had to adopt the Bloodlust Software naming formula. Then we’d have the Philips STI, and the Nintendo Gamepube
My personal theory is that they named it NESticle in an effort to discourage people from telling normies about it. It probably helped it fly under the radar a bit as the only people likely to talk about a NESticle would be people in the know. It remains my favorite NES emulator for times when I'm not running either proper hardware or my Mister.
great video my friend! i just downloaded the ps2 and GC emulators this weekend and having not played with emulators since 06-07 I was fucking blown away how well they run on my mac mini. Me and my buddy had a blast playing battlefront 2 on the couch splitscreen, in smooth 1080p with our ps5 controllers. I've spent more time playing emulators and old games than my PS5 for a couple months lately and I'm having WAY more fun. Keep up the videos!
Hey thank you so much!! And that's truly the beauty of emulation - getting to re-experience those classics, potentially way better than they ever could have been on the original hardware. I appreciate it :)
@@LowestLogan its awesome and i love that dope people like yourself are out here making hilarious and informative videos educating the noobs like myself in this world. i also love how active you are in your comments section, makes your channel that much more special. can't wait for the next one my friend!
@@pathynes4835 I really appreciate it!! Thanks again :)
Bleem even had a Dreamcast port! Yup, you could play some PS1 games on the Dreamcast! Even Gran Turismo 2 ran pretty well and looked better than on the PS1!
What a memory... Playing WaveRace 64 with 3dfx splash screen as intro. Epsilon & RealityMan, thanks for your work. We love you....
Awesome video!
Wait first Hrutkay Mods and now you Sean?? I feel like I'm clickbaiting all the vintage Mac enthusiasts a little with my thumbnail LMAO 😭
Thank you so much!! Love your videos man!
@@LowestLogan How could I not click on a title like that 😂
One thing I think you failed to mention that probably is the reason for Nintendo's attitude towards emulation (and why emulation these days is pretty cut and dry) is the licensing of emulators.
Nowadays these great emulators are open source, often GPL. This means that evryone can contribute to *ONE* project and if Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or another company wants to re-release their old games for modern hardware, they could just use the open source emulator to run their old games.
Back in the day, emulators were either closed source or if the source code was public, it was released under a no commercial use licence. This is why emulation is so heavily associated with piracy, because back then piracy was pretty much the only use emulators allowed under their licence. Companies couldn't use the emulator to sell *THEIR OWN GAMES* (something that bit Capcom in the backside when they released the Capcom Home Arcade)
Retroarch still hold onto this attiude (despite licensing their code under the GPL which explicitly goes against that licence Retroarch are good at violating their own licence but that's another story)
Thumbs up for the Scott emulation
Emulation was such a good invention
Right up there with microwaves and the Internet lmao thanks for watching!
It was good while it lasted, then abominations like the XBox came out and didn't really even need emulation as they were mostly just regular computers with a gaming interface.
FPGA is where it's at, at least for consoles that are old enough that the logic can fit onto affordable FPGA chips.
Hi Logan keep up the great work! Sincerely, the Guys at Mac Yak!
Haha appreciate it so much!! Hope you're doing well!
Fantastic video with really great production quality, thank you :3
Haha thank you so much!! I appreciate the kind words :)
Thanks for the video. That “hey y’all” at the start emulates Scott the Woz.
NO$GMB allowed me to play Pokémon Red, Gold, etc. Thanks to ZSNES, I could play Super Mario World and enjoy the Donkey Kong Country games. KGen let me enjoy the Sonic games. VisualBoy Advance opened the door for my favourite games ever (like Golden Sun, Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire, etc.).
I owe a lot of my enjoyment as a kid to emulators.
Absolutely!! It's just so cool to have them as an option to experience those titles even better than the original hardware might have been able to provide. Thanks for watching :)
No$GMB helped me out a lot because coming from a poor family I could not afford real gameboy. And that emulator would run on my dad's pentium 133.
I always say "No shit" in my head, not "no cash". You had to pay for that emu too....................
@@anonamatron The free version was fine, though it could only emulate GameBoy Color for 5 minutes.
Ah, No$. Maybe if you'd taken all the effort you put into wacky DRM schemes and ranting about pirates, and instead put it into fixing the bugs, you'd have done better...
The OUYA was at the time a nice emulation device IMO especially with built in touch pad support on the controller face.
as someone who was there when it was new it was pretty amazing to play any game up to PlayStation at the time. Finding a comfortable controller was tough though. The gravis ultrapad was finicky but then the Microsoft Sidewinder pad made it to USB so that offered most of the buttons necessary. But then someone made a USB dongle that converted your PlayStation controller into a gamepad for the PC and boom - the best emulation experience until companies started making recreations of official gamepads. One of the reasons why I started collecting physical games was because of the inaccuracy and feel. But for a while, a modded OG xbox could play up to n64 and that was all you needed.
Great channel, glad to be a part of it so early. Definitely will pop off
Appreciate it! Thank you for the kind words! :)
Funny thing is depite being significantly better than consoles at games since the mid 90's Pc gaming never really took off till the 7th gen, by 2004 sure you had half life 2 doom3 and a few other but thats really all you had EVERYTHING was on console then for whatever reason in 2006 all of a sudden devs started making games on pc then using the dev kits to port them after the fact leading to a huge rise in games available on pc. I should note valve making steam a requirement for half life 2 and the very existence of steam in general absolutely helped spear head this movement. Now in the year of our lord 2024 people at large are finally starting to move over to gaming pc's realizing theyre a wiser investment over console ironically killing the pc market by driving up prices 100% which is infact not an exaggeration infact its an under exaggeration the number is closer to 129%
There's a reason for that. It was purely because that was about the time that PCs hit critical mass for students where the cheap computers were generally capable enough for decent games and in the hands of a bunch of people with free time.
This is such an interesting video, so well-made that I couldn't believe this is from a channel with only 1.9k subs. Remember me when you are big!
Haha thank you so much! I really appreciate it!
Dude, you want a man to remember you when he's big? That's pretty gay.
4:25 "The rise of video game emulators brought a massive rise of video game piracy..."
This is not quite true.
Massive video game piracy existed long before emulation and even consoles, particularly in the PC space with the copying of floppy discs.
1:27 hilarious detail is that like your example, final fantasy VII, is one of the few games that DID get a windows release back in the day! :P xD
No mention of Connectix Virtual Game Station?? I played PSX games on my original iMac with that. Didn't even own the console and I was able to enjoy Jet Moto 3 and Castlevania Symphony of the Night thanks to that emulator. They were likewise driven out of that business by Sony's legal shenanigans, though. But that company made great emulators in general. They developed Virtual PC for the Mac, and Microsoft eventually bought them out to get that software.
I loved Connectix VGS, used it a lot even though I owned an actual PS1. I would install the emulator on my highschool computer lab PC and run my disc on them and my classmates were dumbfounded about how i was playing PlayStation on pc🤣
Hey Logan...its Logan...thanks for making this video, i've been emulating for that last 20 years and it blows my mind most people don't know how to do this
Hey Logan thanks for watching! I appreciate it LOL, yeah it is amazing how underground emulation still kind of is. I love getting to show someone a Wii emulator or something running for the first time too, it's always such a mind breaking thing for them :)
In before Nintendo sends you a cease and dissist.
"hey y'all" got the reference
Thumbnail drew me in… excellent video you’re going to go far you’ll probably surpass me before you know it ❤️ keep up the good work and you have a new subscriber 👍
GREG!? Dude I just about jumped out of my seat when I saw the notification, no way! I love your videos!! Thank you so much for watching LMAO, it means a lot!
You’re welcome bud if you ever need anything Just reach out to me
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)
Great video! Im glad i found this channel
Hey thank you so much!! I'm glad you commented! :)
@@LowestLogan ik y'all small UA-camrs need it
I love emulation! I always say that if a game isn’t readily available/reasonably priced, you should emulate it
People selling classic retro games for any more than 30 bucks is disgusting. The second hand market has decayed into a withering husk. Games that people bought in clearance bins are being flipped for profit. What a world. Nobody sane should ever buy in to that market. Privateering games is the last bastion of fun in this cruel world.
I remember selling floppy disks at school with the GB emulator + a couple of games that would fit.
NESticle & Genecyst were Awesome!
I was the 80s/90s nerd of the group: Nesticle was on everything, I also learned how to Hardwire 4 controllers to the Parallel Port!
TBH, I kind of miss serial and parallel ports, but then again, these days there are a bunch of cheap boards that can do the same sort of stuff, but easier and a lot more reliably.
Hey this is a good channel
Good video,I remember those days,I remember trying all those emulators back in the day when they first come out.
I still remember an early translation of Final Fantasy III (NES, Japan) specifically stating in game text, “DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME IN NESTICLE” when playing on a Pentium 1, in NESticle. Either the translation was borked, or it was truly incompatible with it as the translation got progressively worse as you played and became symbol gibberish.
That's not related to NESticle, that just meant it was incomplete.
Nesticle was really hacky. It had lots of compatibility problems and potential bugs to improve speed. Things like "this will break if a game does XYZ, but I don't think any game does that", then you get a ROM hack that does...
It was very much made to run the most popular games at full speed on old PCs, not to have wide compatibility.
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.
As someone who writes code I know it's hard to come up with names for projects but I'm sorry that is just stupid
But of course, thanks for watching :)
@@LowestLogan Actually got two things wrong.
The full name is "Rather A Pokemon Emulator ?", and it is an emulator of the Neo Geo Pocket (Color).
Still, it goes by its acronym.
@@xdonthave1xx Oh all good haha. Still a mind bendingly disgusting acronym, bad take from that dev lmao
@@LowestLogan Just wanted to be accurate in case anyone was interested in either preservation or a Neo Geo Pocket emulator.
Though in the latter case, there are much better and still active ones available.
I love rpcs3 for playing my completely legal copy of rock band 3!
LMAO absolutely RPCS3 is awesome!! Thanks for watching :)
@@LowestLogan dolphin too
You forgot to mention that an emulation scene did exist already on the Amiga before Windows 95... PC-Task, Shapeshifter, AmiMasterGear, Gameboy68000...
0:45 that is a great idea for an rom hack LOL
Imagine all the missed opportunities after NES-ticle... Gene-tal. P-Snes.
I'm pretty sure there was a P-nes emulator at one point.
And they had Genecyst. I like yours though.
anonamatron likes Clint Hobsons Gene-tal.
Yes - I'm that immature.
You forgot to mention the totally WILD moment when Steve Jobs showed commercial Playstation emulation on a G3 iMac at WWDC back in 98 or 99...
Hope to cover virtual game station in another video soon! That was absolutely wild lol, thanks for watching :)
"You don;t even need a PC!"
Immediately shows a handheld PC 🤣
I knew most of this information already but still a nice watch.
LMAO I suppose I could have shown a little bit better of an example. Hopefully the point still comes across though :)
Thanks for watching!
I first discovered emulation with no$gmb a free gameboy emulator and pokemon red and blue in 1998
I think Nintendo Switch emulation is a good thing.
Nintendo doesn't own a monopoly on running switch code and neither should any of the other console manufacturers.
Buy the games first though. It's not difficult to mod a switch and dump them yourself.
Oh man the way you shoved that optical drive shut hurt my heart bro 😔
At 6:28 you mention "somewhat legal status". Can you go into detail on why you feel it's "somewhat" legal?
Thanks for watching! I was a little vague there. The entire process is completely legal and above board; companies shouldn't have any leverage to put a stop to the projects. Unfortunately the very recent case with Dolphin is an example where it seems like litigation is going to be a reasonable route since they had a very small bit of Nintendo IP, but there would also be a very easy resolution to that. Nobody should ever be able to tell you that you can't write, use, or distribute a piece of software that runs the media of a piece of hardware given that it does not include any of the intellectual property of the company that made that hardware. Hope that clarifies things a bit :)
I used to run your typical emulators, but basically stopped after I modded my OG Xbox with CoinOPS which includes a vast library of games complete with normal console games and even raw dumped arcade ports... saves a ton of time just having everything all in one bundle.
My first NES emulator was nester in 1999 and I first found out about emulation from a gaming magazine.
First time seeing your channel! I loved it and subscribed keep up the amazing work.
Hey I appreciate it!! Thanks so much! :)
GOOD VIDEO, SCOTT WITH BOWL HAIRCUT. THANK YOU MUCH
Subscribed! I love emulation.
Oh my god zophars still exists... I used to go there as well back then it was a site a found around a little afterwards around 2000
Surprised to see you dont have more subs! Great content :) subbed
Haha I appreciate it so much!! Thanks for watching :)
Nesticle and Genecyst were my best friends when I had my 486 (my first PC, about 20ish years ago) things have come a loooong way. Nice history and summary
@@damionmanuel890 well some people were broke-ass poor and could only afford to buy a 486. My brother had a fucking AMD Athlon because he had a steady job. I didn't so I had an ancient pentium. Check your privilege bruh
Early emulation fascinates me, considering how archaic hardware, software and the internet was in the mid 90s.
Back then it was mostly actual emulation, but, I'm not sure that the consoles are as distinct from regular computers now as they were back then. Real consoles back in the day were set up to give you very little hand holding and the code was able to run as close as possible to the hardware. The result was that you'd often have to handle stuff yourself rather than relying on included code to do things for you. It's a large part of why early consoles were able to play games that would choke a computer. One of John Carmack's early feats was making 2d scroller games work properly on a regular computer.
i wouldn't have got into video games if it wasn't for emulation, my family couldn't afford stuff so being able to play a lot of mega drive and super nintendo games o gens and snes9x was really good, then there was pj6, visual boy advance, these were great times
0:01 logan the woz
You got my sub within the first 20 seconds
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
Bleem! was way way too ahead for its' time. Also, I like how it required you to have PS1 CDs in order to play them instead of an ISO (which, at the time, was hard to come by).
And the Bleem disc was copy-protected so it was hard to make a copy...
Informative and entertaining, very well made video!
Much appreciated! Thanks for watching :)
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
love having to watch unrelated mariones videos without dearrow on having to be distracted by the absolute coal thumbnail
Well, Dolphin's in hot water now, since they kinda hard-coded the Wii Public Key into the emulator
Yes not a smart decision to do. But I'm sure they're working at fixing that now.
Maybe they make it so you have to input your own code. Seems like an easy fix.
I'm surprised there's not a legal allowance for putting a means to decrypt into an emulator. It seems equivalent to the legal precedent regarding printers trying to lock out third-party ink cartridges by embedding some copyrighted code.
@@gblargg Case law on this is relatively new. Many of the rules are based on when carts were the normal way to get games, and the games which are encrypted are typically much more recent. Which is a shame given how many are DRM protected, but out of print and not available for purchase really anywhere.
Callus/RAINE/ZSNES/Magic Engine/Bleem
happy memories 😊
I played so much WWF Wrestlefest on RAINE.
Nice vid mate love it
damn, Scott is looking diferent today
The nocash emulator was used by some licensed developers, and was said to be the sole reason they were able to implement some of their features.
When I first discovered mame i was blown away! It was almost 20 years ago and i couldn't believe i could play all those amazing arcade games on my PC
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.
I remember being 10-11 years old and downloading zsnes... Transparencies didn't work, sound emulation was wack, didn't support CX4 chip... good ol days
FunCoLand sold copies of Bleemcast! They were a series of discs designed to run one specific PlayStation game on Dreamcast, i.e. the Gran Turismo 2 version of Bleemcast! would only run Gran Turismo 2. The disc had to first be loaded upon startup, then the original game swapped in. What fun times those were. When Sony threatened to pull all Sony products if FunCoLand continued to sell them, I remember them still carrying Bleemcast! but just stopped advertising that they carried it. I was a very curious kid and would ask all sorts of questions to the staff who I'm sure thought I was a little weirdo.
Anyway, great video!
Would have loved to show Bleemcast!! Such a cool piece of software. Thank you for watching :)
Didn't necessarily have to use the Playstation CDs with Bleem! because the creation of ISOs and mounting existed at the time.
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.
I think my most played Emulators are Dolphin for Windows, My Old Boy! and My Boy! for Android. I kind of want to check out the Orange Pi 800 and check out Retro Arch with Android 12. I love Keyboard PC'S. ❤😊
When UltraHLE launched I already owned a Doctor V64 for dumping N64 games and playing the resulting ROM files on original N64 hardware without the cartridge, but that was never the issue for people who didn’t. Think about it: most people playing VirtualGB, NESticle, Genecyst, MAME, SNES9x, etc typically didn’t dump their own games either. The issue for UltaHLE was that it required a 3Dfx Voodoo card. Even once Glide wrappers were a thing, most PCs didn’t have the required 3D accelerator… or had some crappy ATI Rage/Rage II or whatever that actually ran SLOWER with their special versions of Mechwarrior II or whatever and didn’t support OpenGL anyway (Direct3D Glide wrappers came later).
Though I was able to play any N64 ROM flawlessly on the original hardware using my V64, I ran out and got a Diamond Monster Fusion z100 Voodoo Banshee card and upgraded to a Voodoo³ 3000 AGP immediately at-launch just so I could run UltraHLE. Of course, I also realized that my computer was now WAY more powerful than any game console on the market so I ended up becoming a huge PC gamer too. ;)
OK, I realize now that what you meant was that people were now pirating a current-gen console and weren’t backing up their legally obtained games to emulate. Regarding commercial PlayStation emulation though, I’d argue Virtual Game Station was a bigger deal than Bleem!. It came from a company already experienced with commercially emulating Windows on a Mac or MacOS on a Windows machine… and they did everything right. Microsoft ended up buying Connectix for the whole VirtualPC thing.
Doesn't matter when, there will always be a way to find that excuse to upgrade ;) Thanks for watching! Having the Doctor V64 must have felt like a really cool investment once you were able to emulate the games.
@@LowestLogan though UltraHLE was impressive and it was cool to play Mario 64 in high resolution, N64 emulators didn’t get good enough to truly be an alternative to original hardware for more than a few games until after the console was obsolete. You had to do all sorts of hacks… like you might play all the way through Ocarina of Time only to find the bridge to Ganon’s Tower never appears. Sure, you could hack your way in but you could hack your way to the end too so were you really playing that way?
I used UltraHLE for stuff like boundary breaking to see inside the guard tower across the dam in Goldeneye (from a deleted mission where Bond would’ve used a boat). There was a hacked version for Adaptoid support (emulated game interface directly with original controller and real accessories) and some fixes that also let you move the camera with the keyboard number pad.
That Adaptoid was also pretty cool. You could even backup Controller Paks or dump GB/C games using the Transfer Pak! The drivers just put a folder on your desktop and you could then drag and drop.
loved the intro, instant sub
Haha thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed it :)
You almost being Scott scared the shit out of me
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
lol glad to see how far we've come though :) thanks for watching!
I emulate my games in mobile devices, currently the s23 ultra. Not only can it emulate too the ps2 and switch now, but with sex you can play these games upscale wired or wireless on any tb and monitor with any controller. It's just insane. And you can do. Everything else on it too. Currently use a switch pro controller on my s23 with wireless dex
It's amazing how capable portable devices in general are for emulation right now. Thanks for watching!
Nesticle and GeneCyst were pretty amazing back then, but I feel like you're skipping a bit. In the early to mid 90s, there already were emulators to play Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Gameboy games on your PC.
There was lots of cool shit before Nesticle. Nesticle was really good, but there were lots of things back then. I was so into it back then.
Really, before NO$GMB? How did you learn about them- in usesgroups? I wasn't aware of much before a buzz started to grow around NES and Gameboy emulation.
Pasofami and the GB emu from Marat Faizulin comes to mind. Nesticle was a 2nd wave. Good days visiting the Node99 site and Zophar's Domain.
Bleem was basically identical to playing on the console for most games.
I love emulation, when it runs the games correctly and at a playable speed.
I think my first emulator experience was a DOS emulator for my Amiga. It was really only capable or running text based stuff and small CGA games at a slow speed. My first good emulation experience was with a ZX Spectrum emulator for the Amiga. It would only load games in .SNA (snapshot format), but it seemed to run them well on my slightly accelerated system.
When I got Windows 98, I was amazed that I could run NES and even arcade games. I never did get UltraHLE to work though. And even now, N64 emulation still doesn't run everything.
As for Dolphin, I've heard many times that it has low system requirements and runs great on "low end" systems. Well, I have an old, not very powerful system, and Dolphin runs like crap. I have to disable the audio to get playable speed out of it. On the other hand, PCSX2 will run manay games at playable speeds for me. Most run slower than normal, but many games are fast enough to be playable. I played through all of Burnout 2 with it.
w for the amiga, that's definitely a platform I want to look into at some point! Mod tracker music is also a really interesting part of that era that I personally have a ton of interest in :)
Dolphin can be an interesting situation, it definitely likes single threaded speed. I have gotten it running passably on a 750ti and older FX series AMD CPU but I would consider that the bare minimum, newer hardware definitely offers a WAY better experience.
Thanks for watching!
@@LowestLogan When the Amiga came out, it was incredible and put Intel systems of the time to shame. I loved it. Then I watched Commodore sit on their butts and not upgrade it, other than faster processors while the IBM world came out with VGA, then super-VGA. By the time the AGA models came out (which was initially promised as an upgrade that would be available for existing machine), the writing was on the wall. I knew the Amiga was doomed when I saw an ad for Wing Commander in a magazine and it said "MS-DOS screens shown". Although it did eventually come out for the Amiga, it ran like crap on the base model and the graphics were much more dithered than the DOS version.
The Amiga was great for original games, but ports from other systems often suffered.
I used to download Mods, but I never understood how to make it. I'd load a Mod file into a tracker and notes would be playing while long batches of 00s scrolled up the display. What I heard, never seemed to correspond to any of the numbers. I had a tracker type program for the C64 and it was the same situation. I understood graphics much more than audio.
I have an OLD system, so that limits me to running an old version of Dolphin. I've only tried a few games, but 1080 Avalanche is a slideshow unless I turn off the audio. Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee still stutters, even with the audio turned off. In comparison, Burnout 3 in PCSX2 runs at about 60-70% speed with the audio. In fact, if you turned off the music and showed it to someone who'd never seen it before, they might think that was was how fast it was supposed to be. The God of War games seem like they're running at around 80% speed. I know many people would consider that unacceptable, but I see it as playable.
Of course there are some games that are too slow to play, like Spider-Man 2, which has to be run in software rendered mode (in the versions I can use on my old system), and Gran Turismo is a slideshow. Robotech: Battlecry lags a little when there's a lot going on in the city levels, but runs fine otherwise. Auto Modelista and Godzilla: Save the Earth both seem to run at full speed.
PPSSPP works great for me and I found a single (compatible) game I can't run at full speed, although I do occasionally need to tweak the settings.
Note that I'm not trying to render the game in 4K resolutions or anything like that. Normally, I only use 2x native resolution for PS2 games, and 2x to 4x for PSP games. Gamecube was at native resolution.
1:29 FF VII was released in PC in 1998, so I think you need another example, maybe the different version of MechWarrior 2?
This is true but that version was a pretty involved port that was made by a different team. Good catch though! Thanks for watching :)
I actually didn't mean to insult you. It was just what a I felt at the time. You have good screen presence. Look, i'll admit I was abrasive. There are just alot of youtube channels doing similar. You're doing a good job, sorry I was rude. I'm just from a run of people that expect more, and I want you to excel. I will note, going full vengeance on any insults, probably not a great idea. Your presentation and editing was good. No, really good topic, that's why i watched it during my lunch break. Cool topic. Again I really just wanted to point out errors to help. Not a bad video, just I feel you need to dive a hair deeper. No hate, no rage. Hell. i'll give you a subscribe and see what you do later. Calm down bro. You seem cool.
Sometimes I'm a prick. Actual apology.
And I'll admit that I came on a lot more aggressively than I needed to lmao. It's difficult because I have been making videos for a while (not related to gaming, I have other channels than this one) where the criticism has been far worse. After a while, it's easy to start to assume and look for the very worst in people and naturally, as a creator, you start to feel apathetic. I respect the thought put into making a follow up, don't put yourself down as a prick, it takes a lot more than one to reconcile like you're trying to. I apologize for my part in it as well and I hope you have a good one.
Glad I found your channel
Welcome aboard! I appreciate it :)
Little nitpick, the Steam Deck is a PC in handheld format. :)
Sub earned. Such a quality video. You seem to be a great a t fit for video.....and speaking. Well done.
Hey thank you so much!! I appreciate it :)
Love this channel
Back in the day, it was hard for the 486 systems to running NES, even GB emulators.
But Nesticle ran great on my Cx486DX2-66.
I was playing emulated games before the N64 was even a thing...