Here's another classic

This is another classic post I did on my old blog. Its an opinion post on the state of video game emulation. If anything, it is MORE true today than when I first posted it.

Posted 2005-11-19

What happened to emulation?

I remember Back in 1996 or 7 when I first got into emulation. Retrogames was the absolute best site there was There was a new MAME release every month or so, and rom sites were all over the place... and now, despite huge advances in xbox emulation, the ENTIRE community seems to have dried up. Its like everyone who actually were interested in emu's just got bored and hung up their joysticks. Now don't get me wrong. I'm sure emu authors with that kind of challenge probably have REAL jobs, and I know that there was pressure from certain copyright groups that shut down alot of the ROM sites.

I do remember, however a certain elitism formed right about when the CPS2 Emu's started showing up. Oh, we won't allow the emulators to play any games newer than 2 years old. MAME still keeps to this as far as I can tell. And many of the authors and web admins also adopted this policy. And then it was not "kosher" to discuss these games, or compiling your own emu to play these games. Yet the dumps still existed. SOMEONE was playing these games. Come to find out, that despite their high and mighty comments, many of these authors thought that if an arcade game was older than 2 years that somehow, that was enough time for the game to be considered fair.

The problem with this thought is well documented on the abandonware site Home of the Underdogs (The underdogs). Her thought is that if the company is no longer making money off of the game, that its probably ok to post. She does not however say that it is not piracy. She makes it very clear that TECHNICALLY it violates patent law. She just says its more for posterity. The emulation community is different. They seem to think that if the magic 2 year number is up than its ok for them to download roms. I Mean who REALLY has a PCB for EVERY game that they play on an EMU? NOBODY! FACE IT, EMULATION USERS ARE PIRATES!!! I'm just not sure I get the piracy, and "only-kind-of-piracy" thing down. You're still pirates, what does it matter if you play them or not. Sure you can SAY don't play them but WTF do you have to code that into your emu's? I mean do you REALLY think that that is going to protect you from Nintendo or Sony? NO WAY.

I really think that that kind of argumentative mentality really led to a decline in the popularity of emulation. I don't see why emulation would all of a sudden just go away. Hopefully it will come back, but almost every emu site I know of are never updated anymore.

Maybe the internet itself is just dying.

Depressing.