schlang wrote:jmrydholm wrote:That's my problem- I freely admit no one single computer will meet all of my gaming expectations or needs and now I have 3 retro rigs, plus 5 consoles and 4-5 portables. Might have more. I think my wife is threatening to burn my closet and apartment living room. 🤣
But it's so worth it, isn't it? I love working with and tweaking the original hardware.
actually I would never again trade my ZNES against the real SNES 😉
In terms of the gaming experience alone, emulation is sometimes better all around (nostalgia aside), but in other cases it can still fall short of an ideal set-up using real hardware.
For one thing, many emulators still have some problems or inaccuracies compared to real hardware (or compared to certain model variants of real hardware), but several are very close to being ideal. Kega Fusion is among the very best examples, though it lacks some of the features other emulators support, it's also one of the most accurate console emulators out there.
Between ZSNES and SNES9x, you've got some nice emulators too, but the latest builds of both still have trade-offs between them and some drawbacks.
You also have cases like PSX, where emulation is almost perfect in every way (due to the way the hardware and API function in the Playstation) as well as well above average enhancement options for higher resolutions and filtering. (actually changing the way the game is rendered rather than just applying 2D filters to the completed frames, all possible due to the way the PSX hardware and software works -a few other platforms allow for this too, as seen with Dreamcast emulation)
Fastforward, slowdown, and save states are great to have too, but aside from really annoying games (long load times, unskipable cutscenes, poor/no save features, or such), I'd generally still prefer playing on real hardware if it's practical. (monetary expense and space to set things up are limits there too)
There's also the other issue of emulators not working well on certain hardware set-ups for odd reasons. (DOSBox and several NES emulators refuse to work properly on my dv9000 Vista 32 laptop . . . they will all work, but tend to take several minutes to boot up and -in the case of NES stuff- end up thrashing if I multitask at all)
Then there's the issue of having powerful enough machines to run the emulaton properly. (this would include certainly late gen games run in DOSBox, though that's not really a problem anymore either . . . at least, it wouldn't be on a decent low/mid-range modern desktop build these days -which I'm currently not using)
There's also the use of emulators for homebrew programmers/developers, but that's another story. 😉
In any case, for PC gaming I'd still prefer running most on real hardware (preferably on a win98SE rig for DOS and Win9x specific software) and resorting to DOSBox for the handful of problematic timing-sensitive games I might be interested in.
Playing around with old hardware builds is a separate matter in this case, rather than trying to build machines optimized to a specific set of games. (I'm more interested in just seeing how well certain -possibly obscure- set-ups run things, benchmarks, game performance, etc)
Space is a limiting factor too, and right now I'm probably looking at 2 retro builds: a fast general-purpose win98SE box (probably Celeron/PIII based) and another to play around with testing old socket 7 stuff (variable configuration) . . . and that would also imply at least 3 towers in total, since I'd want a decent modern build too.