#game emulation

[balketh]

Wow, nintendo must be fucking terrified of day 1 emulation on the switch 2. they shut down ryujinx, they're going after emulator videos on yt. switch 2 must be fully backwards compatible w/ switch 1, i.e.; the same fucking shit just juiced up a bit (so maybe their games won't run sub-30fps for fucking once). the fact that ryujinx on linux is STILL up on flatpack is hilariously telling. it's got nothing to do with principles. it's entirely profit-motivated.

they'll never learn tho. this kind of suppression never holds. they'll never stop folks doing the work. even denuvo didn't stop piracy.

remember, nintendo filed the patents they're trying to sue Palworld with AFTER palworld was released, AND got them expedited in the japanese legal system. that means they EXPRESSLY did so to sue Palworld. fuck 'em. fuck 'em to death.

pirate all nintendo games, even if you buy a switch 2.

[aquaseekerofdarkness]

Everything about this is iconic honestly.

[technoplanet]

[the-rat-k-ing]

broooo i need to get a headset with a microphone 😭😭😭

i wanna be able to say “HOLD IT!” to press people 😢

[misscaptainbear]

Today I'm messing around with some emulator stuff. A while ago I posted about wanting to write a visual layer on top of an existing emulator and scrape data from ram to render it with modern tech.

Well, I've got a first pass, shitty, alpha version working! Here it is on the first screen of some old game that can't be named. All the assets being rendered are hand-placed and designed by me to mimic the first screen of said game, and the player can move around the screen (the xy position of the player is driven from the emulator!) and can move to other screens that are crappy and not done and look like this.

The emulator seems good to go, but the interface between normal code and it needs a bunch of work, and then all the assets and stuff too. The player sprite is very placeholder-y, testing out the scale and the down-walk animation. Not sure how far I'll go with this, but I've been having fun messing around with it.

The art style was inspired by LuisMelon and their magazine-cover style, but honestly, I'm not sure if i'm capturing it quite right.

[castlespastels]

zo um

i keep zeeing unuzed paintingz that aren't zuppozed to be in my game

cuz like

?? did luigi alwayz have a painting in SM64 ??

my game keepz lagging 2 ,,

!! but thatz probably juzt cuz of my zhitty laptop !!

?? maybee i downloaded the wrong files ??

?? or zome extra onez on accident ??

i hope i didnt get a viruz =-[

[idios-maximus]

I don't care if this next sentence makes me an outlaw, but f- the ESA for screwing over game preservation for the sake of "legality" or whatever they wanted (don't know the details). NOT EVERYONE CAN AFFORD OFFICIAL HARDWARE AND COPIES! NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO RE-BUY THEIR CHILDHOODS! THERE ARE SO MANY GAMES THAT WOULD'VE BEEN FORGOTTEN WITHOUT ROM SITES! WE NEED THESE SITES, ILLEGAL OR NOT!

Okay, rant over.

[hedgypipes]

In case anyone uses GBA Video in the delta app:

Movies = Do Not Work and everytime you touch the icon, it takes you out of the app itself

TV Show = Are Okay and can work on it

[lou-is-a-shoe]

Me, 30 min into playing emulated N64: *crying* please god, why is it backwards!

Also me, another 30 min later: fuck it I’m buying an N64 controller, I can’t handle this shit.

[aquaseekerofdarkness]

Al’s cat attack in fma stray rondo (plus me setting up Ed’s attack)

Because tumblr won’t let me add more than 1 video per post, this is connected to this post in spirit.

[technoplanet]

[goblinbugthing]

figured out game emulation

christ WHY is it so LAGGY

like. this hurts to listen to. actual agony

[blueskittlesart]

i hope everyone in nintendo’s management department dies and goes to hell no matter what and i’m not kidding

[dragonflute]

for anyone who cares about emulation, unfortunately today we lost both yuzu (switch) and citra (3ds) emulators due to the lawsuit nintendo filed against the management that handled both emulators. this is a major loss for emulation as a whole. if you support emulation i recc downloading emulators that you may want to have in the future in the case that they get taken down in similar lawsuits

[misscaptainbear]

Emulation

I've been thinking about emulators a lot recently, since getting a retro-handheld and emulating a bunch of games. I'm having a lot of fun with it, and I've been inspired in various ways - I'd love to put together a project that integrates a lot more game improvements into an emulator. Here's some of those concepts:

(Pictured above, Phantasy Star 1 for the Nintendo Switch, showing emulated game and extras like maps and character healths)

(1) Extra-Textual Information

I've seen a few emulators dabble in this with varying degrees, and I always find it a treat. Some things, like providing things like maps or quests that the original game didn't track for the player (due to tech limitations) or more narrative-contextual things like character portraits or illustrations from the manuals. Shout out to the WanderBar plugins developed by Legends of Localization author, Clyde Mandelin.

(Pictured above, Seiken Densetsu/Final Fantasy Adventure showing emulated game and extras like enemy stats or item descriptions and illustrations from the manual)

Additions like this are important for many different reasons; more approachability to a wider audience (Truncated text like LIT3 from Final Fantasy 1 spring to mind), a richer more 'fulfilled' version of the game the artists and designers intended but couldn't represent, and accessibility features that allow differently abled people to enjoy games in an era that frankly didn't make much of an effort.

And, integration with existing walkthroughs wouldn't go awry, since older games sometimes require esoteric requirements to progress that are simply unreasonable to ask in the more modern era of game design. (Though opting in to these systems would be a necessity)

(Pictured above, a screenshot of an Ascii rendering of the title of The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, from GameFaqs. Ascii you can trust!)

Honestly, I could go on and on. Things from concept art to advertisements to additional media like the Link to the Past Comic would give a more fulsome and authentic experience.

(2) Modding and User Generated Content

Really, the above are only possible via community efforts, obsessively collecting data. Thus, the ideal system for this to work within is one that in open source and has robust and well-documented modding tools.

Having used Mesen and Project64 to mess with graphics and textures, this is really powerful, but also feels like a half-measure at times, as it's still restrained within the graphics capability of those systems, and often simply a 'resolution' slider.

(Pictured above, an unfinished Final Fantasy Mod replacing graphical assets with concept illustrations from Yoshitako Amano)

One thing that springs to mind is the implementation of the Diablo 2 Remaster; The developers spoke about essentially having an "API" to reach the important parts of the game's original implementation to then add extra (visual) information on top of. Things like 'player facing direction' can be added on to in order to rotate the rendered model and slerp it smoothly between those angles, something not possible in the original implementations.

Thus, the core of the game is preserved, with only the presentation changing.

This is mentioned for it's structure, obviously there's tons of labor that goes into these graphical assets that just aren't possible for a layman to create a games' worth.

(Pictured above, a comparison of screenshots of Diablo 2 and Diablo 2 Remastered demonstrating the rendering-level improvements)

(3) Creativity and Freedom

The two above points really imply this third one, which is a more collective ownership by the community. Something that a system like this would unlock is the ability to remix and remaster a game in a way that could be anything - respectful to the original intent, or a wild re-imagining of what the game might look like directed by you.

(Pictured above, the Boss Room from Legend of Zelda redrawn with a much higher fidelity pixel art)

(Credit to Zaebucca, apologies for reposting art without reblogging it properly. Link)

(Pictured above, a Dragon Boss Fight from Golden Sun redrawn as higher quality digital art)

(Credit to Sabbitabbi, apologies for reposting art without reblogging it properly. Link)

This sort of preservation-through-community is wildly important in an era of games that have been all but abandoned by their developers (if the studios in question still exist, even) and games that are profound in shaping the genres of their era are fading away; Something that the youtuber Nerrel has touched on in various videos of his.

(4) Actually Making the Damn Thing

There have been some previous work on things like this that I really admire, but haven't really seen (or weren't built for) widespread popularity in the larger gaming sphere.

(Pictured above, the dragon boss from Legend of Zelda, projected oddly into a 3D scene with a sword being thrown sideways at it)

One well meaning but obviously comedic attempt was done by Tom7 (Suckerpinch) on youtube, where an automatic system was programmed to 'convert' NES games to 3D. It's an interesting experiment but honestly proves to me that any automatic or AI assisted route is futile; that this would have to be hand tuned or developed.

A similar attempt to the above is the steam released 3dSen, which is really impressive but has similar pitfalls to other emulators described above - by systematizing the rendering, it imposes strange and unintuitive requirements on graphics that simply don't have to be constrained that way. This is caused by the automatic nature of the game (see water tiles below)

(Pictured above, 3DSen screenshot showing graphical problems when rendering water tiles)

So what the heck does the ideal system look like for this sort of thing?

The biggest parts of those (and I'm omitting a bunch of things, obviously) would be an emulator core with game-specific knowledge built in that's available to a scripting layer. The scripting layer in turn would interact with this and where appropriate interrupt the emulator's rendering to inject models, sounds, menus, etc.

The original game rom would not be distributed in any way, but could easily be md5 checked and verified for correct behaviour with the API. The Data Packs would ideally be a solid file (probably just a renamed zip lol) so they could be easily distributed and 'opened' by the emulator, instead of having to do tedious mod installation.

Within the data packs would be some sort of scripting initialization hooks and file organization such that resources are appropriately loaded and fed to the rendering system as needed.

Now, as for when I actually start working on this...? Whew, we'll see. But I'm hoping this resonates with some folks out there!

[bludermaus]

Holy sheez I just found a CD inside my house that I kinda forgot I had, it's from 2002 It's a Sega Genesis Emulator with almost 500 games along with it!!!

It has stuff from weird games like "688 Attack Sub" to "Phantasy Star 3/4" and "Flashback"!