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Emulation 101: Classic Gaming on the PC - Keita Iida |
Now we can. Boot up a game of 2600 Yars' Revenge on your
Pentium PC at full screen, with sound coming out of the speakers via your
Sound Blaster sound card. No cartridges. No dusty old game console or bands
of video interference. No broken controllers. No humongous arcade cabinets
taking up valuable space in your living room, to the dismay of your
significant other. And all for free -- so long as you have a PC or a Mac
(there are versions of emulators available for Amiga, Atari ST and
others, but we won't get into that). Sounds too good to be true? If you
have the Stella emulator and ROM images of your favorite games, you can
play the classics on your keyboard via the computer programming magic of
Emulation.
For the uninitiated, an "emulator" in gaming terms refers to the
replication of the hardware of a gaming machine, computer or coin-op via
the use of software on a computer. If the emulator works properly, a person
can run a "ROM image" (a diskette-stored copy of cartridge game data) and
play the game just as it looked before, but even better -- there's no video
interference to speak of, and the picture is as clear as anything else on
your computer's monitor.
Until recently, the only hitch was that there was no single program that
allowed you to play every old game for every old console: most emulators
were (and still are) console or computer-specific in nature, and a number
of skilled coders have successfully been able to emulate classic video game
systems and computers from the Atari 2600 to the comparatively complex
Commodore Amiga. That's quickly changing, however, with the release of such
multi-platform emulators like MESS, MAME and others. Anyhow, if you download
an emulator for a specific gaming platform and find the binaries of the games
that work with the unit, you can then play that platform's games on your
computer! Best of all, the vast majority of emulators are freeware and thus
are available for download from various web and FTP sites. On the coin-op side,
emulators for both specific individual classic coin-operated arcade video games
and even multiple arcade games have even begun to appear, so gamers can now use
their PCs to play arcade-perfect versions of Pengo,
Mr. Do!, Donkey Kong and Space Duel.
Other multi-format emulators have already begun to appear as well.
Various emulators have been available for free downloading for over two or
three years, but early attempts at emulating machines such as the Commodore
64 and the Sinclair Spectrum computer were hampered by the limitations of
386-based computers which were running the emulators. It was more effective
to fire up the old C-64 than it was to play the games at half of their natural
speed via emulation. A combination of advancements in computer technology
and an increase in knowledgeable programmers have spurred the advancement
and viability of emulators, and the recent explosion of interest in classic
video games has provided inspiration for many programmers who were looking
for a challenge that was both rewarding and fun. Lax enforcement of
ten-year old Coleco and Atari copyrights have made it possible for ROM images
of virtually every classic game to circulate freely on the Internet, and as
a result, we are now quickly reaching the point where playing Superman on
an Atari emulator is virtually the same as popping the cartridge version of
the game into the Atari 2600 for an all-night gaming session.
Several hobbyists who still program games for classic game systems have
also benefitted from the emulator boom. Kevin Horton, for example,
did the bulk of the testing of his Colecovision game Kevtris
using the ColEm Colecovision emulator. If he had been forced to develop
the game through old-fashioned means, he would have had to copy the game
data from his computer onto custom-designed battery-backed RAM cartridges
in order to test the game. Instead, it was possible for him to pass the
data via the Internet to a number of game testers who then tried the game
on ColEm, saving considerable time and money in the development process.
Is there a downside to emulators? Strictly speaking, distributing or
selling game ROM images of actual game code is illegal for the vast
majority of games. Even downloading the ROMs and playing them in the
privacy of your own PC is considered technically illegal if you don't own
the actual game, athough companies such as Smith Engineering (makers
of the Vectrex) have given permission for Vectrex vector titles to be
circulated freely so long as no profit is made on their distribution.
More likely than not, however, games you remember will still be the
property of their publishers or developers, and even though legal action
against a hobbyist who passes on a ROM image to a friend is unlikely, the
possibility exists that a company interested in profiting further from a
game title might take action to stop the distribution of games to which
they lay claim. We've already begun to witness the crackdown by the
Interactive Digital Software Association (ISDA) of major emulator sites
which had ROMs available for download. We cannot advise you that game
copying is legal, moral or even socially acceptable, so it's something
you'll have to decide on your own time.
For those interested in some of the finer emulators currently available
for major classic home video game systems, we've provided a list of the
better PC-compatible programs. Due to the sheer number of emulators out
there, we're not going to begin to try and cover them all. And we're
restricting ourselves to the coverage of classic-era machines. For
wide-ranging info on emulators for such consoles as Neo Geo, SNES and
PlayStation, check out some of the finer general
emulator information sites.
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