Comment by deltaryz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deltaryz | Hacker News Reader

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I address this near the beginning - and you are correct that there are some examples that can have a significant impact on the resulting experience of the software. Emulation is not a 1:1 recreation of the original experience including all of its intricacies. But I'm thinking extremely long-term here, far beyond "what our kids will think about the games we played". I'm thinking about what historians of the distant future could learn from our creations, due to how well they can be preserved compared to other forms of media. Ideally people would have an intuitive understanding that input methods and displays make a tangible difference in the experience, and that an emulator is never going to be a full replication of that - so that hopefully they can study and judge a piece of software with those differences in mind.

Technically this is true of anything that can be represented digitally, but software's interactive nature gives it a much more profound ability to represent our culture and elicit a strong and personal reaction in those who experience it.

I totally consent with this. However, doing as much as we can to reproduce the experience is of some importance. E.g., there has been a basic Spacewar! emulator in Java since 1997, but it only recreated the game on an abstract level, missing the intricacies of the display. Many, including myself, somewhat shrugged their shoulders on this. It has only been, since there have been efforts to recreate the display experience on a more or less analog level that the game is appreciated for what it is, a quite perfect beginning, not to the least for its esthetics. (Disclosure, the web emulation of the PDP-1 running Spacewar! is by me.)

Based on this experience, I'd say, there's need to constantly update emulators to the current state of technical media representation. We are never on the safe side… This will only become trickier as any original hardware and/or media recordings of the software running are lost. Much will be lost in translation, since software has context.

> there has been a basic Spacewar! emulator in Java since 1997, but it only recreated the game on an abstract level, missing the intricacies of the display

Did this version actually emulate PDP-1 machine code, or was it a purely mechanical clone? Because if it's the latter, then that isn't an emulator.

Either way though, Spacewar is definitely one of those examples where the hardware directly impacts the experience. This is also why I am saddened by the fact that the only truly good CRT emulation I've personally witnessed is from Super Win The Game!, and since I believe that game is closed source, it unfortunately cannot be repurposed for other games or emulators. Unless you happen to know of a particularly good reshade implementation or something.

For a game like Super Metroid, the "CRT experience" essentially boils down to "a greater sense of atmosphere and an enhanced sense of depth in some of the sprites". Does this arguably improve the experience? Yes. But the core experience of Super Metroid is not lost if you can't experience it this way - I would argue Spacewar does lose a core part of its experience without that iconic display, and I absolutely believe we should make an effort to preserve that experience.

Regarding the Spacewar! emulation: The original one was by Barry & Brian Silverman and Vadim Gerasimov (in fact, every PDP-1 emulation, including simH, is based on this code). The Java emulation was a bit clunky on average machines (this being 1997), but later they ported it to JS and the HTML5 canvas [1]. It does instruction level emulation of the original code, but doesn't emulate the specific display, thus having to clamp two frames into one and halving the frame rate. My version [2] built on this (with kind permission), adding further instructions and some enhanced fidelity in order to support a broader range of software. Also, there's now a more accurate screen emulation – well, as good as you could do in 2012 in a web browser on average hardware. Which is also of some importance for running classic "display hacks", which would otherwise just display a cloud of dots without much of a sense or meaning.

Generally, I like the media aspect and the material aspect of media, so I tend to put a bit of importance to this. Another aspect is the kind of artistic stroke in these media surfaces. E.g., Spacewar! owes much to the point plotting x/y display, combining both drawing and painted effects, e.g., for the explosions (these were known as painted displays for a reason). Maybe the most interesting video games in this respects are the early Atari coinops, which expose their internal construction in their compositions of counter-based video windows like Gothic architecture. (Something, which is missed as soon as there were bitmapoed graphics.)

We should try to preserve this kind of context. Not to the least, binary encoding is nothing without context – there's no clue to what this might be without external knowledge. (Is it a binary image, a music stream, a program, a data set? What is the compression algorithm used? What are the dependencies, on what kind of machine did it run? What was its purpose? Why was it worthwhile? How did it compare to other solutions? What were contemporary preferences?) There's actually an entire encyclopedia to go with every file. Preserving this will be a huge aspect of conservation, as digital artifacts pile up.

[1] https://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/

[2] https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar

[3] https://www.masswerk.at/minskytron

Edit, regarding

> "For a game like Super Metroid, the "CRT experience" essentially boils down to "a greater sense of atmosphere and an enhanced sense of depth in some of the sprites". Does this arguably improve the experience? Yes. But the core experience of Super Metroid is not lost if you can't experience it this way"

If there's some to "the media is the message", well, this was originally based on a study on the effects of projected media and the value attributed to it regardless of the content. So, yes, the specific mode of projection and the mode of bodily sync might be well the better part of the experience. However, the Great North American Video Game Crash (appropriately spelled and pronounced GNAVGC) may be still an argument to the extent that the contents still matters, at least a bit. :-)

>> "For a game like Super Metroid, the "CRT experience" essentially boils down to "a greater sense of atmosphere and an enhanced sense of depth in some of the sprites". Does this arguably improve the experience? Yes. But the core experience of Super Metroid is not lost if you can't experience it this way"

In all honesty I really have trouble buying the idea that a CRT is necessary to enjoy super metroid(or these old games in general). That's my favourite game, I grew up playing it on a snes, when we put the snes away after we got an n64, I kept playing it on emulators, the last time I played it I used an 8bitdo sn30 over Bluetooth on retroarch on my android phone, the game is the same. The atmosphere is the same, playing it felt the same, there was nothing 'missing' by not playing it on my snes on the old crappy TV in the hallway while my family walks back and forth in front of me.

Eight year old me would have been amazed and exctatic if he could have carried around and played the entire catalogue of 8,16 and 64 bit console games on a small computer that fits in my pocket using a wireless controller.

I've always thought of consoles as simply a means to play games. I love that there's hardware accurate emulators or even inaccurate emulators, that I have the ability to play these games on nearly any popular device that exists with graphical enhancements or using one of the many hacks or fan patches available. Being freed from the original hardware these games were developed for has allowed them to live on and be enjoyed in ways nobody back then even considered and for me that's far more awesome and exciting than trying desperately to recapture the exact look and feel of all these games.

CRT emulation of some kind is sometimes necessary to accurately render effects that were intended by the original artists. For example, this waterfall transparency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4QOHe4bOZc

Then there's the fact that a lot of early console artwork was designed to be output on a composite video cable instead of as separate RGB channels, so the crosstalk may need to be emulated to get the right color blending: http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/rgb_compare.html

(The reduced effective spatial resolution is often more of a detriment, so plenty of games do look much better in pure crisp RGB from an emulator.)

As indicated, this last section was meant to be read with a grain of salt. It's fair to debate the sensorical context of such a game and to assign varying degrees of importance to this, depending on individual perspective. But I'd also argue that a point like this may be made. E.g., early LCD games are generally not valued highly, while their bigger VFD cousins, which are probably not more complex, tend to be welcomed as charming devices, accordingly enjoying much better chances of preservation. Super Mario Brothers on a cheap NES-on-chip with a tiny built-in display (and several hundreds of games at the tip of your finger to switch to anytime, as well) makes it certainly harder to understand, why this could have been the fascination of an entire generation of kids.

Now we could argue that, for example, Alexandre Dumas' novels were for the most originally published as a series of episodes, which doesn't affect us, who know them only as books. However, it does matter to understand what this meant for some of the text strategy in those novels. And, since we still understand what this kind of publication is, we have indeed a chance to understand what this means. On the other hand, if a medium is entirely gone, it may be real hard to reconstruct this kind of context and it's meaning. (E.g., speaking of the C64, if you never have seen RF output on a customary consumer color cRT TV set, it may be hard to understand why Commodore switched from the rather elegant font of the PET to those blocky characters. Was it just for fancy? Right, it must have been so, since the 1980s loved bold fonts, weren't they?)

Surely, these are minor details, but they may built up to an extent, were it becomes hard to understand the worth of abstract code. In some cases, like Spacewar!, the threshold may be lower, in other cases it may be more robust, but I wouldn't dare to bet future history on this. I think, we still may require constant awareness and constant involvement in adapting resources like emulators. ("Who cares, it will probably still run in 20 layers of emulation" may be not enough.) But then, it may be just me with my interest into those kinds of media types.

However, for a beginning, we should come up with a format of ROM or media images, which includes the original instructions/documentation in a standard format. This may actually help quite a bit. (Compare the notion of ET on the VCS as the "worst game of all times", which only came to being in the 2000s, quite a while after the fact, and was based mostly on the fact that the game was now played without the instructions that would have been included with every cartridge. As I recall it, the most disappointing game on the system was the rushed Atari Pac-Man.)

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