Rekrul wrote on 2011-06-09, 06:23:
Why would anyone go through all that work to get Monkey Island to play in DOS when you can just use ScummVM?
I can't fathom why anyone would ask this kind of question, but let's see if we can close the gap of 'not understanding' here.
(Sorry for replying to an old post, but probably as much as the poster here just HAD to ask, I just HAD to answer..)
There are probably various reasons, but for me, they would include things like:
1) Authenticity factor. ScummVM is great for what it is, but it's not everything. Just like playing a truck simulator can be great fun, it can't replace the feel and authenticity of driving an actual truck in actual traffic in the real world. ScummVM is always 'fake', even though you can somewhat customize its resolution (which is a big plus), it doesn't give you authentic VGA, MCGA, EGA or Amiga screenmodes. For example, try running the demo 'Dope' on any emulator in a modern PC; you will never get it to scroll smoothly, but on a real DOS PC, the Complex-logo in the beginning does scroll incredibly smoothly indeed.
We can talk all day about authentic resolutions, Hz-rates and beauty of old CRT monitors and the varying brightness (and by this, I mean light amount, luminance, whatever you want to call it, where TFT monitors often seem a bit dim by comparison, but it depends on the monitor as well), how pixels look like in a real CRT monitor compared to a boring, old TFT monitor, how there's no real black in modern monitors (though my knowledge is about as obsolete as the original question), and how older computers and cards produce the pixels on the screen in quirky ways in conjunction with the CRT monitors, resulting in things you just can't emulate or see on a modern display device)..
..but we haven't even mentioned SOUND.
If you have tinkered with all kinds of older computers and systems as long and as much as I have, you must have realized that emulated sound is pretty much NEVER the same as the original. Not mentioning the interference quirks and other things like that, even purely 'sample-based' stuff can sound a little different. I was astonished to realize just how different Super Famicom musics sound in an emulator/player on a PC from what they sound on a real Super Famicom. I knew about SID chips, as they have an analog component, which can't truly be 'emulated', only perhaps 'interpreted' or 'simulated', but I started pushing my nose into things it never entered before, and came to the conclusion that emulation is always somewhat off, even if it sounds 'perfect' at a .. what's the aural equivalent of 'glance' anyway?
For a tiny example, when people program emulators and sound engines, they of course try to get it to be as faithful as possible, but people are lazy and don't usually want to reinvent wheel, which means that vast amount of emulator sound engines do not accurately emulate the authentic square wave, but they just use some mathematical square wave formula to create it (what's the difference, it sounds 'the same' anyway..), or they just grab some pre-defined square wave so they don't have to create it from scratch.
However, even an old magazine (1980s, I think) shows an oscilloscope reading of BBC Micro's square wave, and behold! It's NOT exact square!
It's slightly 'curved' and deliciously curvy-looking. I will bet 20 dollars that if you take almost any BBC emulator and put it to play that same exact note, it will produce a different-looking, way more 'perfect' square wave.
These may seem like little details, but they ACCUMULATE.
ScummVM, as I mentioned before, is great for what it is, but to re-create your childhood experience as authentically as possible, it, as any emulator, WILL fall short of the real thing.
Now, this should be obvious without saying it, but when you play real OPL2 or OPL3-version of ANY DOS-game with good enough musics, 'The Secret of Monkey Island' being a good example, the emulated version does not quite reach the same authenticity. When you compare emulated soundwave to authentic OPL2/3's same wave, you may notice interesting differences.
a) The emulated waveform is more 'robotic', meaning it's straight, without any weird fluctuation. The authentic has interesting 'waving' volume-sweep that doesn't disturb the sound, but makes it sound more 'lively' or 'living' (for the lack of better terminology)
b) The waveforms are often 'reversed' for some reason. The more robotic, more 'stable'-looking (and thus colder, robotic, unliving sound) waveform has reversed visuals! Where the authentic waveform 'looks to the right', the emulated waveform 'looks to the left'. I have no explanation for why this is, it's just something I have observed.
So you never get the same authenticity from ScummVM or any other emulation, which means that the REAL THING is always going to give you a deeper, more living experience, especially due to the 'real sound'. Heck, even MT-32 that's excellently emulated by 'Munt', sounds a bit more interesting on a real system.
You see, real systems at least back in the day, were not perfect machines, perfectly designed and robotic, which is what emulation strives for. They had 'faults' or 'quirks', they had 'bad design' which actually becomes a treasure, because it makes the authentic things have more personality, and thus it's way more fun to use them.
This means that a real VIC-20 square waveform is visually and even aurally distinquishable from a real OPL2/3's one, which looks and sounds different from a real C64's waveform, which sounds and looks different from Atari 800 XL's square waveform (probably the most honest 'perfect square' of the bunch, but still not as boring as the emulated one you see in every emulator).
Now, if the real machines' square waves ALL sound and look unique, quirky and different, and most emulators use 'perfect square' (why bother emulating something to this extent, if the perfect square functions just as well for most people?), you can maybe start to realize the importance of authenticity.
This is just a small example of one little detail I have observed, so if you can take all this and then extrapolate it to encompass EVERYTHING that has to do with the user experience of 'authentic DOS PC' versus 'ScummVM', maybe you can realize what I am trying to say and how MUCH there is and can be that is very different, and taking everything into account, how VASTLY DIFFERENT the experience is with authentic system versus even the most perfect emulation in the world.
2) Feeling. This doesn't really require explanation, but it's a very different feeling to compose a song on an authentic OPL3 in the wee hours with the crescent moon visible through your window and crickets chirping away in the background, while you track away in some forest cabin, than just using some cheap VST-instrus to lazily put together some 'epic' 80-channel song during the daytime in an city office in a high-rise building with phones ringing and.. well, you get the idea.
Emulation is great, I am always ready to praise emulators and people that make that magic possible, but there's just MORE FEELING with an authentic system.
When you pixel away on your real Amiga and create some exciting picture, the viewer of that picture can feel the difference. If you just use an emulator, it's just not the same.
I could list multiple examples, but you probably get the idea by now - many people have reported that there's an incredible feeling when they play great games on real Commodore 64 versus when they play those same games on an emulator. As I said, this doesn't really require much explanation, just a mention.
3) Achievement/accomplishment. When you just push a button to make everything happen, you don't get any experience of accomplishment. Anyone can do it.
When you fill the night with expletives still echoing somewhere deep in the akashic cavernous body, just to get the cables set up correctly, and then move on to battle with drivers, different hardware incompatibilities, IRQ settings, memory limitations and unexplainable errors, and after all that toil, research, hard work, sweating puddles on the floor out of sheer frustration while gnawing your teeth with absolutely maniac look on your face, you actually get something to work..
.. the feeling of accomplishment, I can tell you, my friend, IS THERE.
What is the better feeling - just clicking an icon, selecting something and clicking play and everything always working, OR the accomplishment I just described? Which would you rather feel before you start playing?
4) Fun. It's just more fun to toy with old computers and considering everything I already explained, you just can't go beyond a certain edge with emulators of any kind, not even ScummVM. It takes you far, but it doesn't take you all the way there. Considering the authenticity, feeling, accomplishment and experience of success, it's just so much more fun to use a real system to do something like this. There are reasons why people still use real machines even though they could easily emulate almost anything these days.
There's also the reason of 'something might work better'. It took a long time before good Sega Saturn and N64-emulators emerged, but even PS2-emulation is still a bit imperfect (though as I said, my information is obsolete, so take this with some salt particles).
With real Sega Dreamcast, Virtua Tennis 2's loading text scrolls absolutely smoothly. Good luck making that happen with almost any emulator.
5) Independence. Do you really want to tie everything to our operating system? What if it crashes and then you have to reboot, now you can't play. Doesn't bother the DOS machine if your main PC crashes, you can still keep going, because unlike ScummVM, it's independent of your main system. Whatever your main system does, whether it's lag, freezing, crashing or some other problems that might interrupt your play, your faithful authentic system that's separate from your main system, can still keep going.
There are so many reasons, but I have to stop somewhere. I hope I convinced you and answered your question by just scratching the surface a little bit like this. I am a bit surprised that no one else wanted to give you a proper, more thorough and real answer, but there are good reasons for using a real system.
Bonus reason:
6) To see if it can be done / for no particular reason. It can be 'self-humorous' to do something that can be seen as obsolete, useless, etc. just to see if you can do it. For example, you can decide to use the Commodore 16 palette to see if you can draw something that looks like anything, and then view it on your real Commodore 16. It serves absolutely no purpose, you can do 'better graphics' with less strict/quirky palette, but sometimes it's just a very human thing to do something just to see if you can do it, or just 'for giggles' (I don't care about the smelly part of that saying).
We are, after all, not robots. We don't always have to do what's 'optimal', we don't always have to just do 'what's expected'. We are living human beings, allowed to just do 'whatever' sometimes, without any particular reason. I can get great internal satisfaction EXACTLY from the fact that what I do has no purpose or point to it, not even the satisfaction I get from it. I can just take a shoe and flip it around. No point, no purpose. What could be more human than that? We have to sometimes do something 'crazy' anyway, otherwise, we become NPCs, predictable corporate automatons or grey beings with no soul, in other words, crazier than I would ever care to be.
As Kramer once put it; 'Why go to a park and fly a kite, when you can just pop a pill?'
Think about that, and I am sure you will understand.
