hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0660.txt

Episode: 660
Title: HPR0660: An argument against emulators when retrocomputing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0660/hpr0660.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:32:31

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Hi, everyone. This is Trickster. I'm a long-time listener of Hacker Public Radio.
And with this submission, I guess I'm a first-time podcaster of Hacker Public Radio.
I wanted to talk about computer and console emulators, but not in the context that they're usually referred to.
Certainly everyone understands what emulators are. They allow you to emulate a particular old gaming console or computing platform without actually needing the hardware.
I want to talk about why you should not use them. And let me start by describing myself a little bit.
I'm the co-founder of MobyGames.com, which is a large gaming database, kind of like IMDB, but for video games.
So I'm a bit of a nut in that respect. I have about 30 consoles and old computers stuffed away in my crawl space.
And obviously, with that much of a collection, it's not just liking to own them.
It's a usable working collection. I bring them out. I hook them up. I have a CRT television and a CRT monitor that I connect them to, etc.
So I feel like I have a little bit of a history that I wanted to share. And why I think that if you're going to do any retro computing, you should strongly consider trying to get a hold of the real hardware.
Because as good as emulators are, they fall down in a couple of places.
One of the first things that somewhat obvious is that the graphics don't look quite right on an emulator.
And by the way, when I talk about emulators, I'm going to be talking about a console emulators like a click-o-vision or Atari.
I'm talking about other sorts of emulators like Amiga or Atari or PC or something like that.
Now some emulators are better than others when it comes to how much they emulate and how accurately they do so.
But just in general, I feel like there is a loss of history that you are, there's some history you're missing out on when you use an emulator.
And I think that you can certainly use emulators for utilitarian purposes like transferring disk images or very quickly researching something.
But I think that you owe it to yourself to at least try the real hardware at least once so that you can get a decent perspective on what the real hardware used to be like.
So let me go back to graphics.
A lot of emulators will simply display pixel for pixel of what the original machine displayed.
And that results in a very crisp image.
It certainly results on I think a lot of the sort of retro themed music videos and even a few internet cartoons and stuff like that.
We have this very hard edged, very big blocky pixel look.
But the thing is the real hardware wasn't like that.
First of all, the real hardware, we're talking about like a CRT monitor or a television.
Drew the image with a series of scan lines.
And what that meant was that there was an image of picture information followed by what looked like a blank line and then another picture of information and then another blank line, etc.
A lot of the original graphics for some of these computer games and consoles were created with that in mind.
The pixels also have sort of a softer, more analog fuzzy, rounder look to them.
They, if displayed on a television, they display through a series of phosphorus.
They're not this super perfect LCD pixel look that you get through an emulator.
And you know, I could go on and on the color gamut is different.
But actually in researching this a little bit, I was reminded of Ian Begoast's post where he tasked some college students to try to add this type of fuzzy emulation to Stella.
And so I'll have the link to that in the show notes. He has this nice post with before and after pictures of what a straight emulation of an Atari 2600 looks like.
And then what, you know, what it really looked like on a television.
And although I think some of the artificial fuzziness that that he's adding is a little too strong, like it's a little too noisy, it's still closer.
I think then what you would get out of a straight, you know, emulator image.
You know, another reason to try stuff on the real hardware in terms of graphics is that the refresh rate is not always compatible with the output devices that we have.
Your typical LCD is going to take is going to be either 60 hertz or 120 hertz or some multiple of that 240 hertz if you have a really fancy television or something.
And the sometimes the original games weren't that cut and dry and a lot of them were a lot of them were.
I'm talking about arcade games, for example, a lot of them were NTSC refresh rates, but there are a couple of really important ones that are not.
Like, for example, Mortal Kombat, which I'll refer to a little bit later when I talk about input devices.
Mortal Kombat has a refresh rate of 53 hertz, seriously, 53.
That's not merely, I mean, that's a prime number.
That's not, that's not integral or divisible to anything.
When you display Mortal Kombat on an emulator, it doesn't matter how good the emulator is, it is going to be inserting frames to make up for the fact that it has to map 53 frames per second onto a 60 frame per second device.
And when you're talking about fighting games like Mortal Kombat, you know, Street Fighter, et cetera, where some players have gotten so good that they can tie movements down to the individual combos down to the specific individual frame.
That will mess it up, that messes up the game.
It messes up your enjoyment of it, not may seem, that may seem like a very minor detail, but that's along the lines of what I'm talking about.
So again, it's helpful if you can get your hands on the original hardware to, to at least see what it looked like.
Now, along these lines, some emulators have gotten very good at emulating all the intricacies of the specific video hardware.
I think that the Commodore 64 emulators that are out there, certainly the Atari 2600 emulators.
I think the Win UAE, the emulator has come a long way, but there are some emulators that have not.
And there are some tricks that are used in some games.
I'm thinking, you know, some 8-bit games or personal computing games from the 80s that still don't look right on an emulator.
You know, the PC is sort of a unique example in that the PC was sort of a moving target.
It never really, a lot of platforms went away, like the Apple and the Commodore.
The PC didn't. The PC never really went away.
It grew into, you know, the Windows machines that we use today.
So whenever you encounter some sort of a graphical trick on an old, you know, CGA game on running on an 80-88 or something like that,
most emulators don't display it properly because, again, it was never a fixed target.
And it certainly is possible to emulate it perfectly.
I know that VGA has, emulation has come a long way in DOS box.
But some of the older standards like CGA, they haven't.
You know, I'm thinking of, in particular, there's a game, California games, the PC version.
Normally, a CGA game is limited to four colors at a time.
And it can switch through banks of these four colors by switching palettes.
California games would show more than one palette on screen at a time by switching it mid-frame.
The PC, though, has no circuitry to do this.
It's not like you could just, it's not like an Amiga copper where you could just say, hey, on this scanline,
could you please switch to a different palette?
So it was done manually through timing of the CPU.
If you have an emulator that isn't cycle exact, or if you have an emulator that does not emulate, you know,
down to the over scan and borders and stuff like that, exactly the video circuitry,
these tricks don't display right.
And so, you know, you get a messed up screen, you get a screen that has only one solid color or the wrong colors.
Another example I can think of off the top of my head is Super's Axon.
Again, I'm talking about the PC version specifically.
And I do apologize. I should probably have come up with lots of different examples here,
but the PC is what I'm most familiar with.
Super's Axon displayed the scrolling, does diagonally scrolling play field on CGA in a fairly genius way,
in that it utilized the cork of how CJA was implemented.
If you try to display video memory beyond the address space that is presented to you, it wraps around,
and it starts displaying memory from the beginning of the address space.
And this cork was exploited by the programmer of Super's Axon to move this diagonally, this play field.
There is no emulator that I'm aware of, even with rewritten CGA and Motorola 6845 routines and mess,
that can display this game properly.
You're only going to see it correctly if you have the original hardware.
So, there's another example.
Another good reason to seek out the original hardware is the input device.
What's missed, I think, sometimes is that some of these early arcade games
had entire input devices created for the game.
And if you really want to experience the game,
certainly sometimes to give you a better advantage in playing the game as it was meant to be played,
you need to be using the original hardware.
I'm thinking of things like Tron, for example, which had a control stick,
plus the fire button was a trigger on the control stick, plus a rotary dial,
think pong or something like that, where you could rotate all around.
So, it was kind of this precursor to, I should say precursor,
I think Robotron actually came out around the same time.
So, in order to properly move an aim in both Tron and also in games like Robotron,
you need to, Robotron of course uses dual sticks.
You need to actually have that interface.
And when you play that game in an emulator, if you've never encountered that game before,
and you try to play it, it's either very difficult or it seems very clumsy,
and you're not getting the full impact of what the designers were trying to convey.
Another example, for example, is Mortal Kombat.
Mortal Kombat had an X-like button layout.
It wasn't the typical, you know, all the buttons nice in a row.
It was like an X.
And then also in Mortal Kombat 3, they added a run button,
which is at the lower left of the button cluster.
And it seems like a very strange way to lay it out.
But they did that on purpose, at least in terms of the run button,
because your thumb was usually unused and landed right on that button.
So, you could use your thumb to run.
When you try to play this, you can certainly play this in an emulator.
You can remap the controls to the device you're using.
But some of them are going to seem a little weird.
And when you play it on the actual hardware,
you realize why they chose some of the combos button presses that they did.
It's because the buttons are close together,
or they make sense in a certain context.
You know, this extended to computer games as well.
One example, there may be, I think I remember either a pinball game
or some other game where there's just a definitive left and right.
And it uses the Alt and Caps Lock keys.
Now, go ahead and look down at any keyboard
that you're in front of right now.
The Alt and the Caps Lock keys are very close to each other
and one's higher than the other.
And why would you use that for left and right?
Well, on the computer I'm thinking of,
the original IBM PC5150 with its 83-key keyboard,
the Caps Lock and the Alt keys were at oppositions of the keyboard
on either side of the space bar.
So it made perfect sense that one would be left and right
or left flipper, right flipper, that kind of thing.
And you'd miss this when you, you know,
if you play stuff without that original input device.
Instead of talking about all of the different things
you could possibly missing, I'm going to center on just one,
which is the disk drive.
When you play in an emulator, you're missing the disk drive.
Why is this important?
Why is it so important that the win UAE developers added in the ability
to emulate very convincing lamb might add the sound of the disk drive?
You can do this.
You can go into win UAE and you can turn on the sound of the disk drive.
And it sounds like this.
You may be thinking, why is that important?
It's important because it represents a lot.
It represents that the machine is doing something
and when it's doing it, it's a single-tasking machine.
I mean, I'm just using something like, you know, the Apple
or the PC or whatever is an example,
not specifically the Amiga.
I know the Amiga could do things while the disk drive was going on,
but it's an indication of when the programmer chose to load data,
how long the data loading took.
And this can affect you in sort of a subconscious way.
You begin to associate things like, you know, anticipation
for something happening when you hear the disk drive going
if it's a game loading that you really like.
There are other subtle cues that you may pick up on.
Here's an interesting story.
I remember being able to fairly easily predict
if I was going to win a battle that I was about ready
to step into in wizardry or if I was about to lose it
or if it was going to give me a hard time.
And I don't know why.
I just got this really great.
Like, as soon as I kicked down the door in a dungeon,
I always seemed just within the first second or two.
I always seemed to figure out, you know, this is going to be easy
or I'm going to get my butt kicked.
Turns out I was taking cues from the disk drive.
Whenever there were more monsters to fight,
it had to load more graphical images.
And so I actually started picking up whether consciously or subconsciously
the head-seeking patterns of the drive,
you know, when it was loading more graphics or different graphics,
and that gave me the cue,
but whether or not it was going to be a difficult battle or an easy one.
This is all part of a visceral experience that, again,
you're missing if you're not using an emulator.
I think I've beaten up on emulators enough.
And hopefully I've planted the seed of, you know,
explaining why there are some old freaks like me
that collect all this hardware and stuff in our crawlspace
and have, you know, build sheds specifically
to house their arcade cabinets or whatever.
I think I've beaten up on emulators enough.
I think the emulator bashing should come to a stop.
Hopefully I've planted in your head the germ of, you know,
the kernel of an idea of why people go through the trouble
of collecting entire arcade cabinets, you know,
bidding on old computers on eBay, et cetera.
And rather, you know, instead of leaving
on a completely horrible negative note,
I thought I'd explain a couple of reasons why even diehards
like me still do use emulators actually really only
comes down to two reasons.
The first is multiplayer over the internet,
but the main reason I can sum up in two words is state save.
The ability to save an entire machine's state
and dump it to disk and then turn off the emulator
then later on, come back to it turn it on,
it is fantastic for things like Sega Genesis games
that take six hours to complete
and have no way of saving the game, no save points,
no codes, nothing.
You can also use state save and quick, you know,
the speedrun people certainly know this,
you can save state when you're doing good in the game
and then if you screw up, you can quickly restore state
and go right back to where you were.
So it gives a save game functionality to games that never had it.
Is that cheating? Maybe, but I would rather play a game
in an emulator with a fighting chance of completing it
and giving the people who designed it their due
and their respect, then, you know, tossing it
in the corner saying this is too hard, I'm never going to do it.
So why you shouldn't use emulators
and a few reasons why you should, I hope this has been relatively
useful again. This is Trickster and if you want to chat
about old games or anything at all,
please feel free to email me at Trickster at oldschool.org.
There's some x's and k's in there,
so I'll put my actual email in the show notes.
Until next time.
Thank you for listening to Hack with Public Radio.
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Thanks for watching.