Remember
good old days of gaming, when there were only 5 pixels in protagonist and your imagination could turn them into a heroic figure of Schwarzenegger proportions? When enemies and heroes were distinguished by colour and you only needed one button on joystick? Well times have changed and technology has moved on. Pulling my old Commodore 64 or Atari out of back of cupboard and setting them up often takes more time than nostalgic pang lasts. I’ve also noticed that some of my old disks are starting to age and become corrupted. Enter Internet.The wonderfully technologically gifted and giving Internet populace is out in force in their attempts to preserve older side of gaming. Remakes and Emulators for almost any old machine can be found around Internet. Emulators act as a layer between old software and new hardware allowing modern PCs to run programs that such hardware was never meant to see. Commodore 64, Amiga, NES, Master System, Arcade Machines and more have all been emulated and necessary programs placed online for download, usually for free.
Emulation is not a new idea. I had a hardware emulator for VIC20 that plugged into back of my Commodore 64 and allowed use of older VIC20 cartridges with new hardware (I never actually owned a VIC20 or any programs for it but that’s another issue). Emulator popularity has been fading in and out for many years, only coming into many people’s attention with release of Bleem!, a Playstation emulator for PC that was released while PSOne still held a dominant share of video game market. Bleemcast (a Playstation emulator for Sega Dreamcast) soon followed causing one of more interesting video game legal battles as Sony fought to have emulator shut down. However, emulators have a strong following and very active user base.
Emulators are easy to find and download. Simply search for system you want and add word emulator to end (e.g. “SNES Emulator”) and you’ll probably come up with a lot of hits. Be slightly wary as some emulator sites will either be false links or may contain pornographic ads. Setting emulators up to run is usually fairly straightforward and there’s a fair chance that you’ll be able to find some documentation and help. Some of newer systems require a BIOS image to be installed with emulator. This is to get around legal issues raised by Sony in Bleem! legal battles by requiring you to be in possession of a Playstation BIOS (and hence, presumably, a Playstation) in order to play games on your computer. Making a BIOS image to load into your computer will most likely be beyond your technical expertise, but a quick check of your console’s case will reveal file you need to get and then it’s as simple as searching internet for a BIOS image that matches BIOS you already own.
Of interest are PC emulators now available. Windows no longer has very good support for older DOS-based games so there are a few emulators out there now to emulate DOS environment. DOSBox (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/) is probably best known of crop. There are also game-specific emulators such as ScummVM (www.scummvm.org) or DOOM Legacy (http://legacy.newdoom.com/) that focus specifically on certain games and hence are able to improve experience for those particular titles.
