Eek! Emulation! - Scott The Woz

hey y'all scott here well i've run out of physical goods to talk about in my apartment uh the bank repossessed everything else don't worry i'll figure it out next week i might slip the bank at 20. so i don't have anything left to talk about outside of who gives a i got eight minutes out of that so i think i'll turn to drugs piracy the gateway drug i'm playing mario 3 on my mac this time next week you'll find me in a ditch what do you do when you can't buy and or play a game anymore give up it's one of our two rights to buy video games and not to well that's fair enough but i just really want to play four swords adventures and i don't have a gamecube right now so maybe just this once i also killed a man emulation is often a word in the video game world with dirty connotations associated with it it's like the word gimmick that thing was forever ruined by the wii in connect for xbox 360. now people think it's a bad thing like everything in gaming is a gimmick when you get down to it an emulation is something that's been seen as a moral lazy pretty much everything under the sun but what is emulation well the star moral and lazy so your video game runs on specific hardware good for it an xbox game is made to run on an xbox but what if you want to bring that game to future consoles well you could port the game which is taking the game and translating it over to another platform to work there though that can be a long process different systems are different systems thus they can be incompatible so getting code made for one game console to run on another it can be incredibly tricky there's no getting around that so sometimes it may be more worthwhile and efficient to use emulation which emulates specific video game hardware via software on different hardware that was the last thing i told my parents before they kicked me out of course for more complex and newer games boarding is most definitely the superior and often only option you can fine tune the game to work perfectly on a new platform while emulation is more of a quick and dirty jack-of-all-trade solution for older systems it takes a while to figure out how to code a program that makes a game file think it's running on a game console was meant to work on which is why emulation is primarily used for games from older consoles ones that programmers have pretty much completely figured out at this point if you're bringing old-school nes sega genesis atari games to a new platform these games are so unbelievably simple why would you port them why would you rebuild them from the ground up just use a sega genesis emulator drag and drop the game files and presto here's 30 from a idiot emulation isn't always perfect things can go wrong because each game is created differently a computer program designed to mimic very specific hardware well that's what it's doing it's mimicking it it's basically fooling this game file into thinking it's running on a nintendo 64. so games that used unique effects and pushed the hardware a decent bit or had something special about them those are generally outliers for the longest time star fox yoshi's island super mario rpg these were snes games that were really difficult to emulate and it took a while to perfect snes emulation to play them properly via this method while our modern game consoles and computers are more than capable of running games from the sega saturn it comes down to figuring out how to emulate the system properly some of these consoles are still incredibly difficult to figure out does this look understandable to you so to wrap up the explanation how about an analogy emulation is like telling a teenager that grape juice is wine they might get drunk it just depends on how stupid they are well then what's the issues with emulation it seems like a go-to way to experience older games on newer hardware well for one the purity this was the main argument i heard growing up the idea that playing a classic game with an emulator it doesn't count if you play a game on anything but the original hardware you didn't really play it yeah the guys saying that also left the bathroom without washing his hands so something along the lines of playing an nes game on your computer you're not supposed to use the keyboard for these games yet nobody cares if you use a controller for computer games let's say something like the nintendo switch if i play zelda 2 on here it's not the same experience you're using a different controller you're playing the game in context that the game designers didn't even intend on you're not playing the game correctly hey i totally get it back in the day i downloaded super mario kart for the snes on the wii virtual console and after playing it i was just like well that definitely was the first mario kart alright i just couldn't see why many still held it in such high regards though later on i popped the official cartridge into an actual super nintendo and played with an authentic controller and it clicked everything just felt right the game was meant to be played this way and because of that it was way more fun i think playing old-school games like that with a modern controller can kind of give me whiplash like it makes me feel like man i could be playing mario kart 8 on this thing right now and instead i'm playing this piece of playing on the original hardware helps in understanding what the game is trying to achieve it allows you to immerse yourself in the context of playing the game as it was intended that's not to say i can't enjoy old games on new platforms far from it i prefer it it's so much more convenient it's just playing with the actual cartridge and system and controller it just feels right playing an nes game on switch makes me ask what the hell am i doing with my life playing an nes game on an actual nes with an original controller it feels like you're appreciating history it's like listening to vinyl sure it's more effort to do it that way but it feels so much more genuine however emulation does have a ton of benefits one being video output it can look a million times better than most conventional ways of playing on the original system uh yes i do like to see the game pixel perfect visuals it's so crisp now this is horrible for atari you ever play any of these atari compilations when they're in crystal clear hd and it just makes you realize how stupid you feel while playing these games guess when i'm playing with an xbox controller why yes i'm stupid these games can run on milk jugs there's no reason why they shouldn't be available on modern consoles though i still think they work best hooked up to an old tv with a fuzzy picture like a man this doesn't look right some games just work best with limitations like that when you're given all the options in the world to make super breakout your own it almost kind of ruins the fun in that game and that's how many people feel about the added bonus features that come with many emulators save stage you can save and resume wherever you want in the game you don't have to wait for a moment in the title itself it's a system-wide feature to save and the emulator holds your place and you can pick up exactly where you left off some consider this cheating i consider it an open relationship here's the thing do you really think most of the developers chose not to include save files in their games or do you really think they knew back then what an adequate amount of save points would be if they did have save files i think this is mainly an argument from retro gamers who feel games have gotten too easy these days but does that easiness stem from being able to save it's more of just something that deserves to be there like imagine a dvd player without a pause button because well you couldn't pause the movie in the theater so the fact these emulators include saving options that's not right you gotta play through the game as it was intended are you guys really acting like you never got help playing games in the 80s and 90s are you really acting like you didn't look at maps and guides and nintendo power acting like you didn't get help from friends on the school yard or use game genie to mess around with the games or input cheat codes bottom line if you don't want to use save states good for you but who the hell cares they're nothing but a good option to have though i think the main argument is about abusing them you can save your game right before a super tough part and just keep reloading that save point until you get it right hey to be fair if you abuse save states and use them constantly chances are you're gonna safe state yourself into a corner like you save that a part where a billion projectiles are already on their way to you and once you load at the same point bam oh i am scum i find myself using save states not because i can't do what the game is asking me to i just don't want to put up with its garbage i don't want to waste time playing through a bunch of levels i've already been without save states all over again just to get to one part of the game i have trouble with and that's a part of the game design if you have to replay levels but in many of these cases i'm not trying to beat the game for a sense of accomplishment i just want to beat it to experience it so i think save states are fine if used in moderation rewinding is for another staple of emulators is the rewind functionality being able to rewind from wherever you are to wherever you were who would use this this is pretty much an easier to use save state and was born out of the fact a lot of these retro games are just unfair yeah try saying that in court hey i 100 think this is being a bit cheap sometimes but my god it's so hard to ignore i'll play a game for a while before using it but then there's that one portion where i'm just like okay i beat everything up to this point i can obviously do it it's just let me use it to get past this and then i proceed to use it for the rest of the game it's so evil but it's such a nice quality of life improvement what about the fast forward feature the sega genesis classics collection has that helps me die way sooner you can consistently change and add filters and change how the game looks with emulation some people like the pixels all smoothed out some things like the pixels all smoothed out oh look at that a crt filter making it look like it's on an old tv i understand the value in something like this these types of monitors are what these games are designed for though filters like this feel very patronizing to me like what do you think i'm a idiot no i need the pixel smooth stretched widescreen mirrored image tv projection plus the crt filter can you tell i have standards button mapping you can change where the buttons are i think this is a feature that should be standard on literally everything like why do i have to hit the a button for this why not the x button why not the l button for christ's sake sure some games are fully designed around where the button is i remember heavy rain when the character would be in stressful situations where you had to carefully move between dangerous objects you'd have to hold multiple buttons in awkward places which really immersed me all right that's enough sucking heavy rain off some button placements just don't work for people especially when you're emulating a game from a different console that controller may not be up to snuff so being able to change that i think is important sure many of these additions may make the game feel less and less as it originally did but is that really a bad thing more often than not most emulation efforts give you solutions to play the game nearly just as it was always intended if not entirely if you don't want to play with save states rewind features widescreen any of that you don't have to but these features can only really help the games many times emulators can in fact reduce slow down increase frame rate enable 16x9 so you can see what the hell is going on here and of course that raises questions slow down stinks but that was how the game was made if you take the slowdown out of sonic 2 is it still sonic 2 might be a dumb question but what about for stuff like speed runs competitions using these enhanced versions should always be specified but at what point do these additive enhancements become too much the benefits emulators bring they would have been enough to make this version of a game its own separate game back then bottom line emulation seems pretty simple but the more you go down it there's hundreds upon hundreds of questions that have yet to get definitive answers and a lot of it is completely down to your own individual opinion like i think nintendo 64 games and widescreen look disgusting i don't like them but do i care that other people do and they only ever want to play nintendo 64 games like this no but so many people do it's like they get really mad if somebody says they beat mega man 2 but on an emulator they go no i beat mega man 2. what do nba fans get pissed off when they see somebody play on the playground who cares play games the way you want to play games and if that means playing via emulation on your fancy new controller with save states or if that means playing on the original hardware so be it there's nothing wrong i'm still in prison aren't i yes one of the biggest problems with emulation is the legality of it now the stuff i've been referring to up to this point have all been mostly relegated to official emulation games officially made available by the legal copyright owners on video game hardware nintendo's virtual console or nes snes nintendo 64 switch online services sega's various genesis collections sony's playstation 1 games on ps3 and vita and all the other collections and re-releases the mini consoles like the nesn s and es classic edition playstation classic sega genesis mini they all use emulation to provide you with an experience as close to the original games as possible mostly but that's not even half the story with emulation as most of it occurs on my worst freaking nightmare something happens on mac what are you talking about all those emulator features that i discussed it's completely up in the air if they appear on official video game consoles and most of the time they don't you're lucky if you get a crt filter emulators on pc are decades ahead and have been for a while you can truly do anything with them play fan games rom hacks use custom files to get farther in the game without playing you can toggle between dozens of options on the fly plus having choices you can pick and choose what emulator for what system you want to use and you can play any way you want games there are games everybody has their own rules for monopoly why can't super mario brothers 3 be the same i own this game i should be able to do whatever i want with it if i want the frog suit in world 1-1 that's my own business it's so frustrating with many official releases that they don't give you the options fan emulators give super mario 3d all-stars included emulated versions of super mario 64 and sunshine sunshine was put in 16x9 widescreen while 64 was still 4x3 which i still don't understand yes i don't like nintendo 64 games and widescreen but even i don't get this it's more than possible fans have been doing this for years just the option would have been cool it's all about control nintendo wants their experiences on their platforms to be a certain way it seems like they want playing a nintendo system to be like walking into disneyland like you've entered the world in nintendo do you want to toggle off bilinear filters they don't want that we're lucky we're at the point we are with them emulators themselves on pc aren't illegal but they're pretty much worthless unless you have game rom files to play on them and the only way to do that is to serve six to seven years this is the main crutch of bc emulation obtaining the games to play yeah by all means do it i'm sure the court would love to hear your story piracy that's the main argument you're downloading game files illegally to play on your computer what if i own a legal copy of the game then can i do it nope these are two separate copies owning one hose reel doesn't give you the legal right to steal another however who the hell cares most of these games aren't being sold anymore there's no official way to buy them the only method is getting a copy secondhand on ebay and that's not going to any of the original copyright holders it's an incredibly tricky thing to figure out so much of this is an illegal gray area or is in a specifically illegal area but you're not hurting any profits or anybody or anything by dabbling in it or is in a legal area but you can't do anything with it sure you can get an emulator but playing games on it no thank you but these emulators man even if you can play a legal copy of a game on a legal system easily emulators like dolphin can give you gamecube and wii games in far greater resolutions with new control options better frame rates it's difficult to look at this compared to the official completely legal method and really consider this better however we need to make things clear emulation on pc can be a nightmare you know how much work it took me to play the wii version of sonic colors on the pc enough to say you i'll buy sonic colors ultimate instead the amount of work required to get a lot of this running is ridiculous even the easiest ones the types of websites you have to go on to download roms are the ones my mom always warned me about after the time the emulator doesn't work and you don't know why and if anything it just goes to show that putting out simply emulated versions of old games on consoles officially it still takes a lot of work and while fan emulation can be outstanding at the end of the day i'd rather just officially purchase the games on the consoles when they become available by the copyright holders because frankly i'm too lazy and stupid to break the law and it makes it all worse that companies like nintendo are so hell bent on putting a stop to anything of this nature but you know what they have the right to do so they don't want their games to be pirated but if they don't want that off your damn games on your system nintendo re-releases their games all the time but they're mostly the same things over and over again what about the games that never get a re-release the virtual boy catalog or even more so that's a teleview games games broadcasted the add-on for the super famicom in japan only these games are only available for a certain amount of time have never been re-released and are preserved online through emulation and that's something emulation does and it does well preservation and the stance against emulation has hurt it significantly whether it's because the idea of emulation isn't the true experience that if you emulate games you're not truly playing them or the legal battles against them or just the fact that if an official video game re-release uses emulation it's somewhat frowned upon it doesn't matter emulation has a weird stigma when i hear that a re-release was emulated it usually is considered just emulation like it's a bad thing oh no this collection of games was merely emulated they were imported natively to the platform you do realize nobody notices most of the time i gladly welcome more effort but sometimes emulation works perfectly there's no need to go further than that and complaining about it is just another excuse to complain about some games no they just emulated it well that's not always a bad thing some remasters or remakes of games i'd honestly prefer it if they just re-released an emulated version of the original that way i know exactly what i'm getting emulation can be bad sometimes 100 there's kind of a one-size-fits-all mentality with it emulating a console well one game may work great for it others may not like i said even bad emulation most of the time people don't notice sun and jam on the sega saturn rebuilt the original genesis games from the ground up they fixed slow down and improved the games here and there but they primarily felt the exact same sonic mega collection used emulated versions most people never noticed i'm telling you now still doesn't stop sega from constantly putting effort into finding new ways to re-release sonic 1. am i the only one that gets kind of pissed off at the amount of man hours put into re-releasing this game oh the sega aegis version of sonic 1 is so much better than the version in the sega genesis classics collection it's the same damn game i normally prefer my games pretty stock i don't like to mess with the visuals or controls too much but that doesn't mean i think the option shouldn't be there for those who don't want that and while i prefer to play games on console emulation on pc is a situation where you can't really blame people for doing it it's the superior option in many ways and i'm worried that the stance against it just keeps it from being the asset it's meant to be this is supposed to help gaming to help more people experience it to help preserve it tell people play games the way they want to play them and companies going after stuff like this or people frowning upon official releases using emulation when it's completely warranted to use it it just keeps retro gaming way more inaccessible than it needs to be plus who the hell actually went to jail over downloading a rom at the end of the day just do what you want gotcha [Music] you

Channel: Scott The Woz

Views: 2,139,201

Keywords:

Id: FoNOwY_1ewE

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MayorSmore]

A FRIDAY EPISODE

[u/mcgood_fngood]

I can’t believe Mr. Virgin Wall actually made a video on this. I guess it’s topical since the whole NSO Expansion Pack controversy, but man, either way, this video ought to be interesting.

[u/kwickedbonesc]

So that’s why he got a pc. Mario sunshine.

[u/sugahpine7]

I love funny episodes a lot, but I love when Scott clearly cares about a topic and creates an incredibly informative episode. Still got some laughs from me though lol

[u/Traditional_Ad_7482]

the ending was completely unexpected and left me laughing.

[u/betacollector64]

Great video overall though Scott didn't cover dumping at all surprisingly

[u/B0b4Fettish]

Based Scott, as usual

[u/Dr_Masquerade]

Best Scott the Woz episode, don't @ me (actually do, I'm lonely)

[u/scottishdrunkard]

Ported games are like a nice date.

Publisher Approved Emulation is like hooking up with an escort.

PC Emulation is like having a quickie with a hooker in an alley.

All have the same result with different levels of comfort, and effectiveness. Emulation is great, it allowed me to play Knuckles Chaotix, and PPSSPP is amazing. The only questionable part is how you get the ROMs. Emulation itself was made legal thanks to the Bleemcast Lawsuit, but the games themselves had to be bought legally to achieve it. Emulation Good. Piracy Illegal.