squiggly wrote:I don't get why people shill for emulation so hard. It's utter crap 90 percent of the time. Number of times I have installed a game from GoG onto Win10 that works without major glitches = about zero. Every Steam and GoG forum for every retro game filled with complaints about how shit doesn't work.
The closest to a working emulator I have seen is ScummVM, except it's not an emulator it effectively is a remake of multiple games at once, and only a couple of dozen adventure games at that.
Personally, I found emulation to be the answer. When you say 'emulation' I presume you are talking about 'PC' only?
I was emulating Playstation1 games on P3/800 with ATi RagePro and running them at 800x600 back in 1999... better than any playstation could run them. NeoGeo, MegaDrive, SNES, N64... all being emulated on pre Y2K hardware... in terms of consoles (20 yrs+) they are all emulated pretty well... Saturn and Dreamcast being the only exceptions I can think of tbh (or at least the only consoles I wanted to be able to emulate but it wasn't up to scratch...fuck knows what they are like now?)
Amiga emulation has been pretty perfect for a number of years now (WinUAE even emulates what the drive sounded like o.0), and can emulate hardware which didn't even exist (A500 with '040 ??? o.0).... yet amiga hardware prices are through the roof currently?
So no, imo, emulation (in general) isn't shit and even if it was, I don't think it's the reason old hardware is getting expensive (Amiga?). Emulation can do things no old hardware can do, it can add functionality no old hardware ever could and these days, pushes games in ways there were never designed (save states, reshading etc). Maybe users who expect everything to be handed on a plate don't like it (generation snowflake? GOG exists for exactly this reason), but unfortunately they won't get answers by sourcing old hardware to run things. Granted perhaps some PC emulators are not great.... give it time.
squiggly wrote:I also like old hardware, but it's only 5% of the reason I did it - the reason I have spent thousands building old PCs is I want to be able to play 20 years of worth of the original and best era of PC gaming perfectly, the way they were supposed to run, every single time.
This has never really been the case since 486. Everything takes a little bit of effort, because every computer is different... now, then, and no doubt in the future. So simply using old hardware isn't going to remedy this (it has its own problems, and could be argued is a lot less compatible than it is today). The only thing that old hardware can really give is the 'nostalgia' feeling for those who experienced it (being able to get something that was beyond wildest dreams back then, drooling over magazine reviews/articles... and now I can own one!), or the for those who didn't, a little taste of what things were like. Nothing back then was compatible with everything, just like today... only difference is today, you are more likely to have something that can be compatible... because of software compatibility layers like emulation with enough spare CPU cycles to actually work. The only hardware you can guarantee to work with every game released for it would be on a console because consoles are sandboxed and not that expandable, so software written for it will always work with it (maybe why their emulators are much more consistent). This has NEVER been the case with a PC. Maybe another difference today is that you don't need to worry about min spec.. back when there was a very good chance (at least in my case) that a big box game I got in a shop wouldn't work straight away with my PC. People actually read the 'min spec' and took on board what it was saying.
squiggly wrote:And no, even WinXP games rarely work without issue on Win10 in my existence. Thankfully putting together a retro core 2 duo rig with a Radeon 5850 and winxp can be done for next to nothing - old pcs of this generation are literally being put out by the curbside where I live.
🤣, just like 486's were 20 years ago, junk, had for pennies, found everywhere. And in the future (10/20 years from now) people will be complaining about the prices of C2D when there are fuckall about... then some smart arse like myself will point out that in 2018... you could pick them up for pennies and they were everywhere. Personally I never thought 386's would ever command a premium... but hey, here we are!
Given the rise of low power multicore processing offered today.. in 20 years I would be surprised if we are still using x86... then all 32-bit compatible x86 cpus would be worth something (because few if any will be making them)... same way 68K/PPC stuff is today. Yes much more x86 hardware is manufactured these days... but it is still finite.