Early Video Game Emulation was Weird

hey y'all Logan here you know I love imitations but in the context of imitating game consoles I think the term emulation is a bit more appropriate and as a proud member of the PC Master right so I'll highlight of my day was playing we fit without the Wii video game emulation has always been very intriguing to me it lets us experience games without some of the limitations of the original Hardware so you want to play an old title at higher resolution with custom textures well if you're lucky this is the best you can get from a PS2 but on an emulator that's no problem in case you've somehow managed to miss the memo emulators are basically pieces of software that imitate the functionality of different pieces of Hardware using Code rather than just plugging your GameCube around you can make your laptop pretend it's a GameCube and pray you don't get caught and this has been going on for quite a while now it's 1997 computers tend to look something like this they still sounded like I'm pretty sure my hard drive is dying and more importantly they were getting relatively Fast 3D accelerator cards and yearly advancements in processor technology meant that the PC was always going to be the bleeding edge compared to the consoles of the time it's also important to realize that markets for each platform be it the Nintendo 64 PlayStation or PC were really really different you didn't have all these multi-platform releases where one game basically worked anywhere a development team generally only had experience with the hardware they were making the game for so if they brought out a game for Playstation chances are that series was gonna stay on PlayStation one of the earliest free console emulators that works more or less the way you'd expect a modern emulator to work right now was bloodlust software's nestical which I sure hope is the only piece of software on Wikipedia with honor of having these words in that order originally released for dos and Windows 95 systems back in April of 1997 it offers a pretty decent NES emulation experience and an absolutely horror flying user experience the mouse cursor is a dismembered hand but as strange as the software that I will not be repeating the name of was it did what it was designed to do pretty well and more importantly brought emulation to a much wider audience just run the program load Ramen you're playing Super Mario Brothers SNES 9x was a similar project made by two independent programmers who are writing their own Super Nintendo emulators in the late 90s with their two projects eventually being merged to create a much more normal and feature complete piece of software than the last one and of course around this time there were plenty of other great console and arcade emulators in the works maim also starred development in 1997 to bring arcade games to the PC amongst plenty of other projects for systems like the Game Boy the dude who made the first piece of software I mentioned also Unleashed Genesis upon the world and even more disgusting Sega Genesis emulator that was apparently pretty decent for its time but in general it seems like Nintendo consoles were the most popular targets for emulation and within the next couple years things were really going to be heating up move on to January 1999 and a new Nintendo 64 emulator surfaces called Ultra hle and of course at the time the Nintendo 64 was Nintendo's main console emulator just usually took a really long time to build and release and when they did it wasn't that uncommon for them to take several more years to get to the point where they could actually boot commercial games but Ultra hle was a little different rather than imitating the behavior of the Nintendo 64's Graphics hardware and code a low-level approach which it was just slow and inefficient it just waited for the game to send a command to the Nintendo 64's graphics processor and did its best to translate those instructions into commands that regular 3D cards at the time could actually understand and this offered a massive boost to the emulator's performance because now the CPU didn't have to do all the work simulating the Nintendo 64 GPU as well the end result of this was a very performant if somewhat inaccurate Nintendo 64 emulator and if your system could handle it you could even run these games at a way higher resolution than the original 320 by 240 of most Nintendo 64 games just seeing Nintendo 64 games running on somewhat period correct PC Hardware is amazing though and I'm sure it was actually pretty incredible getting to see it in person at the time this was pretty big news because it was the first time in history that a piece of software had actually been able to compete with the console Hardware available at the time it said that Ultra hle did incredibly well on launch day but this came with its own set of problems a lot of people that were interested in playing these games didn't own a Nintendo 64 or the games let alone any means of actually dumping the games from official cartridges the rise of video game emulators unfortunately brought with it a massive rise in video game piracy of course people were already burning their own discs to play in modern consoles like the PlayStation for example but now they didn't even need the console itself to play the game meaning the barrier to entry was Far lower and the incentives were much higher naturally this caught the attention of Nintendo who threatened legal action against the developers of ultra hle who promptly discontinued the project and disappeared off the face of the Earth for a while a lot of other Nintendo 64 emulators followed some of which added support for the more modern opengl Graphics API that improved compatibility with more computers but if Nintendo 64 emulation in 1999 wasn't quite enough legal drama the bleam emulator released only a couple months after Ultra hle but as a commercial PlayStation emulator for PCs that was being sold in retail stores what is bleam I don't know apparently it was supposed to be the best little emulator ever made but to Sony was definitely a pain in their side an epic legal battle ensued bleem actually kept winning and Sony eventually ran them out of business after drowning them in court fees and threatening to Halt sales of Sony products to retailers that were stalking copies of bleam this didn't change the fact that it was still a really popular piece of software though and as a commercial product it was way more refined than Ultra hle basically all you have to do is put in the disk and start playing it works seamlessly doesn't need any setup and at the time that must have been very impressive I feel like bleam could have also been sold and used with better intentions as well since you actually had to use a CD in your computer's disk drive to play games but in the end it was already way more than enough for Sony to take action either way bleam and Ultra chili showed just what emulation was really capable of and they really helped to kick-start an online community centered around emulation and especially thanks to blame also helped to solidify the somewhat legal status of video game emulation that ultimately made projects like dolphin rpcs3 Xenia and way more possible since the late 90s the emulation scene hasn't only gotten way better I just mentioned dolphin which is something that I basically always install if I have a computer that I want to play games on because these older GameCube and Wii games scale up incredibly well at higher resolutions and it's good to know that you're preserving all these older titles as well and not to mention when you're emulating a game you don't even have to do it on a PC things like the steam deck are a wonderful piece of hardware and it does an incredible job at playing a lot of different games from even the more recent console generations to avoid the wrath of another game company that rhymes with minlendo I'm not going to be showing any of their games on the steam deck or talk about any emulators for the current generation system but I think there's still a good example of emulation be found in their corner of the Ring Nintendo is no stranger to offering emulated versions of their own games on newer hardware and in fact I'd say they're professionals that selling you the same thing over and over and over and over my favorite probably more recent example is the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection which was shipped with emulated versions of Super Mario 64 and sunshine along with a partially reworked version of Galaxy made to run well on the switch and honestly it's amazing to see these games running on what is essentially a seven-year-old smartphone all with upscale textures and control schemes adapted for the switch they feel just as good as native ports and I'm sure they were pretty proud of themselves for proving that Nintendo fans will in fact buy the same thing several times over and you can see examples of this kind of emulated backwards compatibility and a lot of other systems too the Wii and we use Virtual consoles PS2 games on the PS3 as PSN Classics and basically any older Xbox game on a new Xbox series console emulation gives consumers more Choice gets you more at your old game library and depending on how greedy your favorite doping box manufacturer is could even be used to make money for Developers so why do we still have to stream PS3 games over the internet Sony and that's pretty much it for this one I basically just wanted to have an excuse to talk about some emulation history that I thought was really interesting and why I think it's both a really cool option for experiencing older games and an important thing for the gaming industry as a whole so let me know what you think do you emulate your games and if so how was your experience if you want to chat you can also join the Discord link is down in the description and I'm pretty much done here so I hope you enjoyed the video and as always have a good one

Channel: Lowest Logan

Views: 54,185

Keywords: gaming, game console, emulation, mupen64plus, ultrahle, emulation history, video game history, video essay, nesticle, nintendo wii, nintendo switch, nintendo gamecube, nintendo wii u, nintendo 3ds, sony playstation, microsoft xbox, nintendo emulation, nintendo homebrew, wii emulation, gamecube emulation, dolphin emulator, cemu emulator, wii sports, super smash brothers, 6th generation, 2023, 2011

Id: 94y9_wTT7eA

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2023