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GDC 2016 - Emulation as a means to save gaming history http://dynamic-designs.us/d-dforum/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=768 |
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Author: | ObiKKa [ Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:59 pm ] |
Post subject: | GDC 2016 - Emulation as a means to save gaming history |
Thought I'd put this GDC 2016 speech article up here just so everybody here can read it and to show that we all really appreciate some of the heroes of the video game preservation culture - the emulator programmers and designers; and the translators and romhackers of old games that have never been released in certain regions for certain languages (ie. the English language). Though the archivists and companies re-releasing old games must not go un-represented! Official presentation session page here. Spoiler! :
I also found this article linked from a cut-out box at the article of the above's main topic of interest with the GDC 2016 speech. Well this old 2015 article about a speech by The Internet Archive's Jason Scott suggests to do what's known as "Workplace Theft". This studio that Frank Cifaldi works for is called several things: Digital Eclipse, Backbone Entertainment, and various former brand names. They made a Mega Man Legacy Collection with the first 6 Mega Man titles for the modern platforms last year (2015). They also previously did the famous Sega Genesis Collection and the Midway Arcade Treasures series on consoles. They also remind me of Night Dive Studios who are doing a lot of efforts to preserve old PC classics for the modern computer systems such as System Shock and even a remaster of it. Lovely November 2015 interview with them here. Company overview: http://www.mobygames.com/company/digita ... ftware-inc http://www.giantbomb.com/digital-eclips ... /3010-532/ (New info) http://au.ign.com/companies/digital-eclipse-software (New info) 2015 Gamasutra articles about Digital Eclipse's newly stated aim to start preserving old gaming classics: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2381 ... ht_now.php (March 5, 2015) http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2454 ... _games.php (June 8, 2015) http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2519 ... ations.php (August 21, 2015) From what I've read in the Gamasutra features and what Frank himself has said it appears that he and some other people's focus is more in preserving the games for people to play TODAY and TOMORROW rather than aiming for a 'cycle-accurate emulation' method, which Frank says is a phantom thing. To quote below: Quote: "Cycle-accurate [emulation] is a phantom we'll be chasing for decades...we're nowhere near that," he said. "Given the modern hardware, we're really pushing it as far as we can to deliver a product that people can actually download and play." It's an echo of what archivist Jason Scott said at GDC earlier this year: games are more readily appreciated for their historical and cultural value when they're easily available for future generations to play and study. Digital Eclipse is using their Eclipse Engine to run old games they preserve on modern and future systems. Eg. The Mega Man Legacy Collection presumedly uses an interpreter which is using the source codes. Feel free to voice out your opinions here, though make sure to read some of those brief Gamasutra articles as well as the Polygon article(s). I do like the theory that they're making it easy for us to play the old classics today and that they're legal in an easily accessible way. |
Author: | ObiKKa [ Thu Apr 07, 2016 1:06 pm ] |
Post subject: | Re: byuu - The State of Emulation, Part IV |
byuu has put out yet another new 'The State of Emulation' piece just 4 days ago, on April 4, 2016! It's Part 4 and it's very relevant to this thread considering the title here! So this thread is the perfect place to post it here. He predicts a troubling future for SNES emulation, says the complexity of it is "just going to keep soaring"! Bonus: byuu probably would be very happy with me putting all these links up here even though he may never visit here, ! http://byuu.org/articles/ (Has just the new Part 4 blog post, not the older parts.) See other people's opinions on byuu's possibly too overestimated dreaded prediction on future SNES emulation, that would supposedly make the higan less popular to the users at the reddit thread.
* Not only that but late last month nocash has also included support for that famous SNES-CD peripheral from the brief collaboration between Nintendo and Sony, that was never released commercially, in his no$sns v1.6 emulator/debugger! So not only will future higan releases include SNES-CD support but another competing emulator already has got it! I've actually found links to the older Parts of byuu's The State of Emulation series. Since they're all so disparately situated over the Internet and needs good Google searching I really feel that it'd be best to put it all up in this one neat place for easy previewing! https://lobste.rs/s/qx2ejy/the_state_of ... ion_part_4 (via Screwtape on ~03/04/2016. "Every so often, he writes an article describing the state of the art of SNES emulation; you might also be interested in reading archived copies of part 1 (2004), part 2 (2007), and part 3 (2010). This is the latest instalment.") Wayback Machine archival of byuu's older homepage with many article links with his opinions including on Emulation. All preserved provided you access them through the Wayback machine prism. Also old bsnes page here and Emulation page here - both have some good article links written by byuu.
Emulation: Hardware or Software? (Copyright © 2004 byuu) Part 2: 2007-08-05 - The State of Emulation, pt. II byuu's former homepage Part 3: 2010-08-01 - The State of Emulation, Part III byuu's former homepage ubuntuforums 'Thread: The State of (SNES) Emulation, Part III' (By dfreer. August 2nd, 2010.) * Third-party media coverage: State of SNES Emulation - 2010 (SnesCentral's article and comparisons of all the well-known SNES emulators. Old feature by: Evan G. Last updated: September 16, 2010 but still relevant.) Accuracy takes power: one man’s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator (by Byuu - Aug 10, 2011 1:00am AEST. You probably saw this one.) Why Perfect Hardware SNES Emulation Requires a 3GHz CPU (BY WESLEY FENLON ON AUG. 10, 2011 AT 6 A.M.) 16-bit Time Capsule: SNES Emulator Makes a Case for Software Preservation (BY WESLEY FENLON ON MAY 17, 2012 AT 9 A.M.) byuu's addendum blog article: "bsnes :: Why Accuracy Matters" (2011-02-28). * SNES emulation accuracy coverage: http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources.html - Check the SNES accuracy tests here. Oh boy, this website is even more up to date covering ALL consoles and almost all computing platforms [No Fujitsu FM-Towns, ) up to today's generation! Check this cool SNES emulator accuracy tests with even more details and explanations here; Emulation Accuracy overview here. History of emulation (90's & early 2000's) here. Pros, cons & comparisons of HLE/LLE and their future outlook here. This brutally honest PSX Tests page shows that ePSXe almost reigns king for the most part but you must read the second paragraph which says that emu only targets those tests at the expense of accuracy. So on that count Mednafen is still probably the best PSX emulator for good reasons. |
Author: | ObiKKa [ Thu Apr 07, 2016 6:49 pm ] |
Post subject: | Re: byuu - The State of Emulation, Part IV |
Phew, after you're done with checking the above post regarding byuu's blog posts and all things emulation accuracy-related let's cover a little bit about some of byuu's writings in his latest 'The State of Emulation' post, eh?! It is split into 7 sections but I don't expect to cover them all here, some of which are already covered before in older articles - I only just want to show you some of the things worth philosophizing over. Many things he wrote about are just mind-numbingly complex!
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Author: | ObiKKa [ Tue May 03, 2016 11:57 pm ] |
Post subject: | Re: GDC 2016 - Emulation as a means to save gaming history |
I came across this huge feature - 'Video Game History Casebook' written in September, 2011 by the writer who's done Part 1 of the F-Zero game series' history as mentioned elsewhere here. It's called the Video Game History Casebook and it's all about the documenting of games, when they were released, who made them and multiple so on and so forth's. The writer at least has put up huge lists of old and modern web-links in different categories on the first page. So you can have a look if you like to know more about how to research video game history. |
Author: | ObiKKa [ Mon Jun 20, 2016 11:28 pm ] |
Post subject: | Re: GDC 2016 - Emulation as a means to save gaming history |
Came across this fairly technical, but not long article from SNESCentral's Twitter feed. It's called Current Game Preservation is Not Enough (6 June, 2016 - 13:59 — Eric Kaltman). I think Eric gets into the nitty gritty about how suddenly the 'network-contingent games' (perhaps referring to the multiplayer games and online-only games) are now that much more harder to preserve essentially. Spoiler! :
And there's this presentation talk from the GDC 2016 conference in mid-March 2016 about the meaning of emulation and video game preservation. Oh, it looks like the one posted about in the original post up above here. This one is a 1-hour long video talk by Frank Cifaldi, covering many cool topics along and is very snappy with loads of media contents. At Gamasutra, writer John Andersen had written several old sometimes multi-paged articles on lost game data and preservation from 2006 and mainly between 2011-2012. OH! In other news, byuu this month has released version 099 of his higan emulator, which now removes the performance & balanced cores, instead leaving just the accuracy core of the SNES build. If you check SNESCentral's Twitter feed now they've been revealing in multiple tweets over the few months this year that they've been uploading byuu's scans of all SNES & SFC carts to their website. That's so lovely! So you can check them by going to each game's page and clicking on the links under the Box Information sector. But they're still far from done - less than halfway as of this month - June 2016! |
Author: | ObiKKa [ Tue Aug 09, 2016 3:01 am ] |
Post subject: | Re: Playboy article: "...One of Gaming’s Dirtiest Words..." |
Well, well. byuu had tweeted about a new article that appeared at..., of all places, Playboy's website!?!? http://www.playboy.com/articles/lets-ta ... -emulation (By Steven Messner. July 22, 2016) A long article with several screenshots and a couple sample videos of emulation's prowess, it mainly focuses on the Dolphin emulator! * Also in another news, byuu has also updated higan to v101! If you check the forum thread on it there's a link within where he explained that he's given a nice speed boost to the various games on the several different emulator cores in his higan software by updating their scheduler cores (whatever that means) with new wizard-level maths (at least I'd think so)! Also again, if you read on the front page, he's also created a fairly technical tutorial to the stubborn database groups on how to preserve the firmware of the SNES games, not just the ROM data themselves. He's always writing new stuff about how important game/system preservation is. Whenever there is a critic it seems that he's always got the facts and answers for everything everytime! |
Author: | Recca [ Sun Aug 14, 2016 10:40 pm ] |
Post subject: | Re: GDC 2016 - Emulation as a means to save gaming history |
Indeed, I've always seen emulation as more of a way to preserve old games and media in general rather than for the purpose of piracy. Especially as far as abandonware goes. You can't really even call it piracy if these games are so old and nearly forgotten. For newly released games, sure it's piracy, but not for decade old ones. No one's losing going to starve because of lost profits on games that have been off the market for incredibly long periods of time now. Marketers are interested in selling their new products, not archaic things that most people don't even know about anymore. Besides, a lot of people actually try to buy the games if they really enjoyed them. Not to mention that some games never were even released in English such as Villgust, Seiken Densetsu 3, Star Ocean or Bahamut Lagoon. Edit: I've discussed this a bit further in another post (bottom one): http://www.dynamic-designs.us/d-dforum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=753 |
Author: | ObiKKa [ Sun Aug 21, 2016 6:46 am ] | ||
Post subject: | Re: GDC 2016 - Emulation as a means to save gaming history | ||
Wow, mmm. This is a new Genesis emulator on Windows? I've never heard of this before. There are 3 good Genesis emus on the PC I know of before this one. But, ALREADY, the programmer or whoever is working on it is saying that this one is MUCH more accurate than the two old emus GENS-GS & highly popular Kega Fusion??? These two are good but too old and not very accurate compared to today's advances in emulation. And just as similar to the Genesis-Plus-GX. Wow. But I totally hate Genesis-Plus GX because you'd need a frontend like the bulky Retroarch, designed for Linux systems mainly (but also works on Windows & Mac PCs), which has an awful, clumsy KB-driven interface (designed for TV. No mouse cursor!) & you can't see any easy controls config screens! So this one, BlastEm, is off to a promising start then... And play some good, old platformers and RPGs, sweet! So we'll probably hold this WIP emulator in a high light along with byuu's excellent BSNES/higan (SNES emulator) for ease of play, accuracy & practicality on the various computer systems! Check the Features list - it also HAS an integrated debugger, which sounds like good news for any romhacker wishing to test translation patches on the Japanese ROMs! Probably much neater and easier than having to collect 3 different tools just to test them as it currently stands for a while. But byuu also said that he's been working on adding the Genesis core into his higan build in the near-future, I'm sure. http://www.emulation64.com/view/2666/Bl ... -released/ (News covered on Monday, August 08, 2016) Quote: BlastEm has the goal of being an extremely accurate Genesis emulator while still running on relatively modest hardware by using advanced techniques. Currently it meets neither my accuracy nor performance goals, but those goals are pretty high. Speed and accuracy should be sufficient for most purposes. It runs at full speed on an old first generation Intel Atom and can run Sonic 2 at around 600 fps on a Haswell desktop using a single core. To my knowledge, it is the only emulator besides Genesis Plus GX that can properly display the "TITAN 512C FOREVER" portion of Titan's Overdrive demo, and the only emulator besides Exodus that passes all 122 of the tests in Nemesis' VDP FIFO Testing ROM and can properly display "Direct Color DMA" demos.
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Author: | ObiKKa [ Wed Oct 12, 2016 11:15 am ] |
Post subject: | Re: GDC 2016 - Emulation as a means to save gaming history |
Oh man, when I recently checked the emucr webpage for a while this month I noticed that the venerable Snes9x emulator for SFC/SNES was nearing a major v1.54 update. And now it's finally appeared just yesterday! This is great news as it was like 5 years ago when the v1.53, which suffered from many hacks to get the last 20 or so SNES games working OK, was released to the public - that was in April 26, 2011. higan builder & romhacker byuu and romhacker & tool-builder FuSoYa have helped with this version. http://www.emucr.com/2016/10/snes9x-v154.html https://sites.google.com/site/bearoso/ (Oh, it appears that one of the authors has got the latest version of this emulator in various platforms on his tiny page. Much easier to download from there. ) Some of the major changes include increased accuracy, rewind support, even bps soft-patching support, restored 64mbit ExLoRom map (Should excite ddstranslation working on his vastly expanded Fire Emblem 4 ROM hack! This emulator often gets ports for mobile devices.), added xBRZ filter (Thank you) & CG meta shader support (Ooh), extra aspect ratio options, mute sound when using turbo mode (May help with grinding in JRPGs I think) & added hotkey for fast forward toggling, reduce overdraw (?) & improve performance, detecting joypad changes, added quit hotkey, drag & drop support for movies (Wow! How does this work?) plus many other fixes and additions! Snes9x Git changelog: Spoiler! :
* Edit (20/10/2016): Version 1.54.1, a minor bugfix release, is out now. http://www.s9x-w32.de/dl/ (You can get the various official builds from 1.52 to the latest here.) http://www.s9x-w32.de/dl/testbuilds/ (Test builds) |
Author: | Draken [ Sat Oct 29, 2016 5:02 am ] |
Post subject: | Re: GDC 2016 - Emulation as a means to save gaming history |
I really wish they had updated the MacOSX version of the emulator. It seems pretty neglected |
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