by Harvey on Sat Mar 10, 2012 6:35 pm
I had been running/interested in running various emulators over 10 or more years? But not much in the last 5? years.
When I first started, it was with the Mame emulating the classic coin-op videogames of the 80s' - and the PCs then (early 90s') just able to run these at so-called full speed. I got interested in Atari 8-bit emulation - first with XFormer then Atari800win - and was pleasantly surprised at being able to run a slideshow of some of my old Atari artwork/drawings - though I had no means of transferring files from 5.25" Atari diskettes to PC - and had to rely upon a helpful contact, doing that for me.
Because I was into the videogames consoles (Megadrive and SNES) - I was of course interested in emulation of those machines - although I always had my SNES console. When the Nintendo 64 was emulated - that was a major breakthrough at the time - when a fast PC could emulate this still available console at full speed. Mario 64 seemed to run perfectly fine. If you are into videogames - you can't ignore the various groundbreaking videogames - no matter what console or platform they are on. There is good reason why consoles had the better games on them, than say - on the computers. If you never played Super Marioworld - a Nintendo SNES game - you are missing a masterpiece.
Anyway emulation was a way to visit or revisit the various computers/consoles/etc that you always heard about and never really played. For example I recall only briefly seeing a Vectrex running in a store - and it was nice seeing this complete all in one console running nice vector graphics. Running the Vectrex emulator almost gives you the same experience.
I did test out an Atari 800 emulator running on a friend's Dreamcast console - Sega's last videogame console. I tested "Hawkquest" on it, and it seemed to be running as if it was on an Atari, with no problems - I used a PC keyboard plugged into it.
I should make up a list of videogames - which are 'must to be experienced/played' - that should be of interest to those who want to be videogame designers? and such like... Innovation and breakthroughs being key words..
Harvey