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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020

I'm old enought that I experienced everything from the Atari VCS/2600 onward with physical hardware, which (a) is really hard/expensive to find and (b) makes the emulated experience less enjoyable. Do people who never had the original devices feel the same way or is this an old person problem?

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Other way around for me, I've experienced a lot of the original hardware but actually find the emulated experience more enjoyable. Things like save states, upscaled resolution on 3D games, customizable controls, online netplay for games that only had local multiplayer etc. Also in recent years some emulators have implemented features like rolling back one or multiple frames to do an input before you actually pressed the button, leading to lower input latency than the original hardware (can't remember the name of this feature at the moment).

A lot of games and gameplay depends on timing; I can, given an Arcade joystick, over 35 years after I first played it, still play msx nemesis round and round without dying. I tried improved/enhanced versions and they messed with the timings; that killed a lot of nostalgia for me personally.

If I have muscle memory of a game (like pretty much any Mario game) I'll tweak things until the input latency is as close to the original hardware as possible, but otherwise I've found that it greatly improves the experience.

The rolling back technique you describe is often used for network play to hide the network latency ("rollback netcode"). When I first read about it I thought about using it to fix high emulator input latency, but never got round to it.

A quick search suggests that emulators do something slightly different called run-ahead. This is simpler because it only has to cope with a fixed latency. The graphics displayed are consistently a fixed number of frames ahead of the game state. For every frame it saves the state, runs the emulation forward a few frames, displays the frame and reverts the state.

Like you, went through all of that as well; I liked it so much that I started buying old computers in the 90s (when many of these were cheap or even free to pick up); I have well over 1000 rare ones and I regularly try them (they are pretty robust; I even rarely have capacitor issues). Although I enjoy the real thing more (joysticks, especially Arcade with 2 buttons, are so much better for me than modern ones); I like handheld emulators, simply because they work everywhere. I cannot take my msx, zx spectrum or vcs 2600 on the road with me and with an emulator handheld device I just bring everything, including the dev environments.

But I agree; when I really want to feel nostalgic, I take a c64 with tape rec and load a game. Sit very quiet after the load command as any movement makes it fail and you can rewind and restart the 20min game load. Somehow it feels very relaxing to me.

I'm old, but I missed out on a lot of the original systems back in the day.

I have been slowly rectifying this by obtaining old systems and playing the games on flash carts, on original hardware, on a CRT.

I generally prefer it to emulation. That true zero-lag feeling of real hardware is such a treat. But emulation is cool too. Sometimes, save states make the experience 100x more enjoyable.

It's like music. Generally I listen digitally, but records are really fun in their own way too. For me it's not really a war between the two.

I much prefer original hardware, but not necessarily in the original state. My consoles are RGB modded, and I make use of flashcarts and things like PS-IO.

I also experienced them all first hand. I remember being blown away by my friend's dad's brand new Pong game in about 1976. I still have quite a bit of old 8-bit and newer hardware stored away (I've even got one of the earliest five C64's currently known). Truthfully, pulling the old hardware out now is not nearly as satisfying as running an emulator. When I want to relive, say, my teenage days playing Amiga mod disks while I did my homework, it's a pain in the rear to get the old Amiga 2000 up and running, while it is a matter of seconds to fire up the emulator. Last time I dug out my Sun 3/80 and tried to boot it, it led to a weeks worth of repairing hardware, finding a modern compatible AUI ethernet adapter, digging up the old sunos4 install files, and getting it all installed.

I find the opposite myself. I have a load of old hardware including my original SNES from when it was released but I find myself playing an Anbernic RG351MP far more. It’s portable, plays games well enough that I can’t discern from the original, things like scraping original manuals, preview videos and ratings makes it a really nice browsing experience and retroachievements it’s a really fun new addition to old gaming experiences I’ve had. Retro emulation is really a lot of fun these days.

I also experienced the games on the real hardware but last time that I tried to emulate them purely for nostalgia reasons I didn't notice anything wrong with emulation.

I ended up with a stack of 2600s a few years back. I used to go to estate sales, (for older people that had died), and almost universally they had a 2600 with a box of games. And I would give the organizers $10 and walk out with the whole thing. NESes common too. Would recommend giving estate sales a chance if you live in the USA.

It's an objective fact that paddle games from the 2600 have never been, and I believe never will be, emulated properly. On original hardware and a CRT TV, it feels like your physically touching the paddle on the screen through the paddle. The lack of lag is insane.

2600 stuff in particular is cheap and easy to find.

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