Seems like a waste to obfuscate away the emulator, when the emulators have fantastic features.
Not to mention it’s pretty inefficient if you want to store your game collection on a NAS device or something.
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Do the emulators come with simulation of a suitable screen type, these days? There’s a bunch of retro graphics that really don’t make sense without a certain amount of CRT fuzz, or scanlines, or other artifacts.
Yup. Even back in the 90’s, there was a variety of options. Mostly they were Meh as I recall on NES emus of the day, but where they really shone was the Neo Geo ROM’s. Or maybe NeoRageX just did it better than everyone else, I dunno.
7-to-13-year-old me is back in town!
Since GOG games are all DRM free, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a copy from GOG, illegally uploaded to the site.
I have to admit I’m a little surprised to see Boing Boing promote pretty much a straight-up warez/abandonware site like a.) It’s something novel and b.) It’s something legal.
Which isn’t a moral judgment, or whatever. Just honestly surprised.
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I did a quick check on one game that I have already bought, the MD5 for the GOG DOSBox executable is different from the one on this site. The configuration files are different too.
I don’t think anything is from GOG, but rather they’re both taking the same sources, sort of. The GOG stuff is, I believe, largely based on community emulation solutions that they looked at, replicated and polished up a bit, so they’re going to look similar. My understanding is GOG, in some cases, contacted rightsholders for games formerly seen as “abandonware” and asked to sell the games, since they had gone to the trouble of getting them to work on modern machines it was just free money for publishers. So it’s possible some of this stuff started out “abandonware” and now isn’t. But the whole notion that games by still-existant publishers is “abandonware” has been rather transformed by GOG showing that with emulation wrappers, it’s possible for old games to have profitable second lives.
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[quote=“Ryuuga, post:22, topic:103535”]There’s a bunch of retro graphics that really don’t make sense without a certain amount of CRT fuzz, or scanlines, or other artifacts.[/quote]DOSBox comes with a standard set of pixel scalers. There are fancier filters (including CRT simulators) in unofficial builds. I think they’re also in RetroArch, which includes a DOSBox “core”.
I think i’m done with games nostalgia. Play a few of these and two things become apparent…
- They’re nowhere near as good as your memory of them.
- They are punishingly hard.
Give me modern gaming any day.
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I kind of agree, but nostalgia is an easy thing to enjoy. Sometimes I just want to play a game I already remember and already know.
Oh, i get the appeal of 5 minute jaunts down memory lane just don’t go in expecting much i guess. I also support modern updates of old games like the really quite excellent pac-man championship edition or the upcoming sonic mania. A lot of it seems like nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake when so many old games are absolute garbage, as evidenced when they play them on go 8 bit.
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Also, especially if you are running Windows, running executables downloaded from sketchy sites probably isn’t a great idea. Roms are safer assuming you’ve gotten your emulator from a legit site.
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Although it is interesting how few of those games (based on the Wikipedia summary) are actual 8-bit games but are more commonly from the 1990s or even later and hence from 16-bit or later systems – I think real 8-bit games have held up better than most later games because many of the graphics are abstract. Probably nothing has aged as badly as mid-1990s 3D graphics.
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Oh you mean the show name? Yeah, i have no idea why it’s called that since they play games from all eras. Again it’s just nostalgia catnip.
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