Game Emulation: Now on a 'Droid near you!

[achtungexplosiv]

The gamer war of Consoles vs PCs has been around since the earliest days and that is a topic worthy of a post in itself. By the mid-90s, the cost of a console was peanuts compare to the cost of a PC that could run games and in general the two markets preferred a different spectrum of games. Of course, the PC gamers didn't want to lose out on anything tasty the consoles could produce and so Emulation was employed to allow software written for specialist consoles to be run on computers.

Software that Emulates game consoles in order to play ripped versions of the games on other formats, most commonly PCs, took off in the 16-bit days and was predominantly focused on the SNES, with other consoles such as the NES, Game Boy and Megadrive coming along fairly soon afterwards. A peripheral named the Super Magicom was built in order to rip the SNES game ROM files onto floppy discs that could then be read by the emulation software on a PC. All you needed was a reasonable joypad and you were set.

With the advent of home internet, acquiring the rom files to run through an emulator was child's play and it meant you could have access to a huge catalogue of excellent games (and a plethora of rubbish) for nothing without having to buy a new console either. Naturally, this is game piracy and there's been long-running wrangling of exactly what you are and are not allowed to copy, rip, emulate etc. Is having an emulator containing a ripped copy of the console's BIOS to play ripped copies of the games piracy when you actually own the console and the game in the first place? What about backups? As a SNES owner with at one point a considerable library of games, was I pirating by also having those games on an emulator on my PC?

Anyway, plenty of competing emulation programs popped up at the end of the 90s, each with their own way of organising everything from sprite layer display to save games. The biggest names included NESticle for the NES, (Kega) Fusion for the Megadrive and other Sega systems and as the next generation of consoles took off, emulators for the Playstation started to pop up as well. This was made easier by the fact that some fo the developers of the systems were making notes to allow for easy emulation later on; this most notably occurred with the Nintendo64 and lead to the likes of Project64.


For the SNES, the eventual winner in the race was the Snes9x series which had the best performance in terms of correctly replicating the S-SMP sound system, Mode 7 scaling and additional chipsets that were included in special game carts (such as the Super FX chip and it's successive iterations as seen in Starfox, and the DSP maths co-processor as seen in Super Mario Kart). I tried plenty of others in my time (an honorable mention goes to ZSNES) but in the end the most complete and least buggy version I found was Snes9x, and knowing the original cart versions of the games meant I was particularly keen-eyed/eared for emulation errors. Snes9x is still going strong today, in fact.

Retro gaming and Smartphones

All of this brings me to here and now. I got myself a shiny new Android phone recently and in a frenzy of app hoarding I went after a good SNES emulator. I was pleasantly surprised to find several free versions available through the Market. After trying out the rather awful SNESlator Lite and discovering it didn't work with 90% of my ROM collection, I was pleased to uncover Snes9x EX. I'm still getting the hang of a touchscreen for the D-Pad controls but aside from that it's great. It runs fine with the games I've tested and whilst the sound reproduction could be better, a crappy mobile phone speaker isn't giving it a fair chance in the first place.

And now if you'll excuse me, Secret of Mana shall be keeping me sane on the tube ride home...

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I tinkered with ZSNES many years ago in an attempt to play the first two Front Mission games. Got it working but then didn't play with it! Maybe I should have another try with Snes9x?

As to piracy I'm of the generation who want shiny boxes and manuals. But there are many old games that are just unavailable to buy. I think it's fair to rip them.

[achtungexplosiv.livejournal.com]

Yes, when a game becomes simply unavailable any more, is it really depriving the company of money to rip and distribute it? Or if the games are on battery-backed up carts and the batteries fail: Nintendo used to run a system whereby they'd replace the internal betteries free of charge if you send them the cart but they ceased doing that for SNES games years back, unsurprisngly.

[quilluck.livejournal.com]

The one thing for me about emulation on ipod/smartphone is that it is not the best way to control. so for the most part I prefer to play turn-based games that doesn't require speedy reaction times.

Snes9x/ePSXe is the main reason I got a gamepad back in the day. Got tired of using WASD and an odd collection of other buttons for the remaining triggers.

As for if it is piracy or not.. that is a tough one. Personally as long as you have the console/cartridge that is fine. At the same time, the SNES, and its carts, is becoming older and older and they are slowly starting to become unusable for a variety of reasons. Time is a bitch.

[achtungexplosiv.livejournal.com]

I never managed to get ePSXe working. It still eludes me to this day and given how cranky my old Playstation has become, I'd like to be able to play my games somehow...

Now I'm going to go and check what PS emus are out there for Android.

[quilluck.livejournal.com]

It requires quite a bit of fiddling, and individual games needs other settings or even other plugins to work. Could see about giving you a quick little tutorial on it :)

[achtungexplosiv.livejournal.com]

Ugh that doesn't sound too user friendly. How come it's so fiddly?

[quilluck.livejournal.com]

'Tis what it is. Can't really tell you exactly why, but I am guessing because the emulation of the console is a lot more complex than say a NES or a SNES.

[achtungexplosiv.livejournal.com]

Well it doesn't look too hopeful for PS1 emus on the Droid. Even the best rated ones have a lot of complaints about it simply not working (and they're paid to boot - I'm not interested in paying for an app that half the reviews says doesn't actually work).