Emulators I Have Loved And Lost: The Definitive Review

Always. Be. Emulating

As part of a surprisingly warm response to my piece on the NEC PC-Engine, I was reminded that like many others I was only able to fully explore its catalogue thanks to emulation. From the mid-1990s onward, vast landscapes of videogaming were opened up to the masses in a folk movement of unbelievable cultural generosity. Where previously you needed considerable amounts of money to tour the various formats of the 1980s, you could now do it all on one machine, thanks to a galaxy of distinct emulators with different strengths and weaknesses, sometimes reaching double figures for particular platforms. I have talked about this quite a bit in the past, but it’s worth revisiting as we move into an increasingly unified emulation culture, where vast monolithic gestalts seek to bring the entire scope of videogaming’s past under singular umbrellas. The 2015 grand unification of M.A.M.E. and M.E.S.S. brought the 8-to-16-bit canon into a single structure and while this has enormous benefits for standardisation, it does mean we lose a little touch of that Demoscene-adjacent flavour that lent the emulation scene a certain identity. In some respects, the original 90s vibe has been lost, particularly when you consider that the most common encounters with emulation these days are via glossy front-ends for Chinese emulation devices and Raspberry Pi builds, or the professionalised menus for legally-legitimate retro devices. It’s kind of depressing to see wonky folk charm steamrolled into UX-optimised frictionless interfaces much like any other media, so let’s use that as an excuse to waffle out a list piece about my history with the emulators of the 1990s and beyond.

1. A ZX Spectrum Emulator Running on an Amiga that I saw in March 1993

During a tragically doomed venture into the glorious world of playtesting, I witnessed something I could not believe. The publisher I was working for had in-house artists, who used Amiga 4000s and Deluxe Paint.¹ One day, I saw Chuckie Egg running on one artist’s machine and I was immediately confused. Was this a pixel-perfect PD remake? Why would anyone make such a thing? But then the artist pressed a key and a menu appeared. A long one, full of Spectrum game titles. He selected one and after a little while, the game popped up and started running. It immediately dawned on me that the Amiga was pretending to be a Spectrum and lo, I had seen my very first emulator in action. My mind was blown into smithereens at this realisation, although knowing it was an A4000 meant this new universe of wild possibilities remained out of reach for the time being. But my mind was now open to the possibility, so perhaps it would only be a matter of time before I’d be able to play any ZX Spectrum game at will. But even on reflection, it feels bonkers that my first taste of gaming emulation was seen on such an exotic platform. It turns out that the Amiga had played home to emulators for some time, with the earliest arriving in the 80s. The Spectrum and other 8-bit machines were well served under the post-AGA fold, with this 1997 article by CRASH legend Simon Goodwin giving the full run-down. In some ways, it’s fitting that just at the critical point where Doom etc were launching the PC to ultimate supremacy, I’d discover the past’s future on a machine that was already doomed. Weirder still perhaps was that Amiga emulator UAE would be running very comfortable A500 emulation on average PCs within four years.

2. CCS64,1995 (?)

“Jesus Christ Be Praised” is in the ‘about’ window for Per Håkan Sundell’s landmark Commodore 64 emulator, which I think I must have got via a 14400 modem² from an actual BBS sometime in 1995 or ‘96. I remember it coming with an accompanying download with a few games in there, and it took ages to download both. For me, this was pretty much a religious experience as seeing Commodore 64 games running on our home PC was a pretty fucking spiritual communion with my one true god. Per, along with Ron Birk, had spearheaded SID emulation on the Amiga a few years prior, which I previously mentioned was instrumental in keeping my love of the 6581 Sound Interface Device burning through the early 90s, right up until emulators were able to seamlessly run music alongside the gameplay. In those early years, I’d often forgo sound to get the video running more smoothly and it would be a few years later, around the time that VICE had matured and I had the hardware to handle it, that the experience was complete. Naturally, for SIDs themselves, I used SIDPlayer - but this would have been around 1997, when I remember getting full web access at home for the first time. As such, CCS64 marks the end of a particularly gestational era in emulation, as the arrival of the web in the homes of ordinary people brought about an absolute explosion of emulators and ROMsites, marking out the likes of CCS64 as stalwarts from the old frontier. Post-web, I’d be plumbing the depths of the Arnold FTP like an absolute madman and sites like World Of Spectrum would follow in its footsteps, much to my eternal delight and gratitude.

3. Magic Engine, 1997

1997 was a truly seminal year for emulation. It was the year that Nicola Salmoria released the first version of M.A.M.E., and also the year that David and Cédric Michel released Magic Engine. Being the first PC-Engine emulator I’d ever seen, it was the first time I got to see PC-Engine games in action, with the real bonus being that Magic Engine ran incredibly well on our home PC. I think I did have frameskip³ on initially, but it ran with full sound and gave a pretty solid 30-40 FPS display. As my R-Type compatriot Spencer Kingman pointed out, Magic Engine was the gateway to the magical world of NEC’s wonder-machine for the vast majority of its fans, underlining just how absolutely vital emulation is for spreading and preserving videogame culture⁴. I did diss Magic Engine a bit for being a premium emulator that fell quite a bit short of 100% accuracy, but I neglected to mention that it nonetheless brought me hours upon hours of absolute joy. For Spencer, the PC-Engine’s suite of superb arcade conversions brought him those games well before M.A.M.E. had made them playable. My eternal and undying love for Parasol Stars started in 1997, thanks to those two French brothers and the console emulator that emphatically demonstrated how it should be done.

4. Sparcade, 1998

M.A.M.E. launched in 1997 primarily as a Namco emulator focused around the Pac Man PCB, but by 1998 had dramatically swollen to become the definitive all-encompassing arcade omnivore it remains to this day. But back in the late 1990s, there were various projects working on arcade chipsets that hadn’t come under M.A.M.E.’s gaze, either through obscurity or through lacking the emphasis on accuracy that M.A.M.E. sought.⁵ One such family was Konami’s mid-80s range, which of course included the Gradius series. However British hero Dave Spicer got them all running in his multi-board project, Sparcade. Having been utterly romanced by Salamander and Nemesis, I’d only seen the third Gradius, Vulcan Venture, as glowy, scanlined screenshots in 8-bit gaming mags. Sparcade ran it, and ran it beautifully.⁶ I was thrilled, as it marked the expansion of arcade emulation in the full-on 16-bit era, signalling that so many more iconic machines would be entering the fray shortly. The magnificent Callus would bring Capcom CPS-1 games into playable status, letting me bash through the likes of Final Fight and Strider like a grinning lunatic, and the sheer thrill of getting to play these rarified beasts in the home, as the literal arcade games we’d lusted after as children, was almost indescribable.⁷ Sparcade was the clarion call to me that not only was emulation here to stay, but that the gradient of PC hardware capabilities drew a curve where, for the first time, I could see that eventually everything that I never got to play would eventually be available to me.

5. Kawaks, 1998

If you needed more proof of how miraculous 1997-1998 were for emulation, the arrival of Kawaks brought true exotica into the reach of everyone. For me, it was the first time I got to play Neo Geo games at home. The AES had been the 16-bit lust object to end all 16-bit lust objects, but in period those colossal game ROMs and equally colossal prices meant they were never going to be in my hands. Kawaks changed all that, quite a bit ahead of the Neo Geo’s full integration into M.A.M.E. This coincided with the growth of CD burners and a friend turning up at mine with three CDRs that, as mentioned previously, are now sacred artefacts in my gaming collection. Thanks to his work’s leased line and the then stupendous download speeds it offered (probably a scorching 512kbs!), he’d managed to blag the complete ROMsets for the Megadrive, the SNES and the current set for Neo Geo. Kawaks was the emulator that I used to tear through that CDR, and along the way I discovered the intense delights of Metal Slug, Pulstar, Last Resort, Thrash Rally, Windjammers, The Last Blade and one of my platform favourites, the gloriously quirky Twinkle Star Sprites. Sadly, the CDR didn’t contain the brilliant hori shmup Blazing Star or the later King of Fighters games or the mind-bogglingly lush Garou - Mark Of The Wolves, but having the catalogue up to 1997 was more than enough. Much like the PC-Engine, emulators like Kawaks⁸ were literally the only way most of us could access Neo Geo outside of the scant few MVS machines that may be in fruit machine dens and city pubs. I’d argue that 90% or more Neo Geo fans from the 90s came to the machine through emulation and given the prices, even back then, for the consoles and the games, it’s easy to see why. In this respect, emulation becomes a vital leveller and democratising force, broadening experience of the culture within the culture itself.

6. ZSNES 1.337, 2001

Yes, I picked this version of ZSNES for the peerless release number but also as it marked the retirement of zsKnight from the project he spearheaded that, for my money, provided unbeatable Super Nintendo emulation and an absolutely killer UI that remains an all-time favourite. I’ve mentioned previously that in the early days of SNES9X, I’d suffered single-digit framerates in an attempt to get going in Final Fantasy IV and gave up. That was until the hubbub around ZSNES in 1998, in combination with a CDR of the US SNES romset, got me delving through the Super Nintendo archives with quite some fervour. Previous to ZSNES, I’d been hammering Genecyst, a grittily functional Megadrive emulator from the same team as NESticle and Callus, and voyaging through its NTSC-JAP catalogue with much delight. Doing the same for the SNES was more delightful still, given the time I then sunk into the likes of Link To The Past, Front Mission, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV and V. Along the way there was plenty of fun with Final Fight 3, R-Type Third Lightning and Cybernator, although I had an extended and profound romance with the sublime combo systems of Ninjawarriors Again. I’d exercised quite a bit of my shmup addiction with Genecyst (and latterly GENS) to play Thunderforce III, Hellfire and revisit teenage favourites Super Shinobi and Golden Axe, not to mention putting hefty chunks of time into Gunstar Heroes and Bomberman ‘94, but it was ZSNES and that run of incredible RPGs that cemented the idea in my mind that emulation on PC was undoubtedly the superior way to learn about any gaming system. I do absolutely adore original hardware on CRT displays, and I always will consider that the supreme experience, but to really get a grasp on a platform’s totality, the specialist emulator and the full romset simply cannot be beaten.

7. Viva Nonno, 2002

Arriving seemingly out of the blue, and well in advance of M.A.M.E. coming anywhere near close to decent System 22 gameplay, Viva Nonno brought 60 FPS Ridge Racer 2 and Rave Racer emulation to PCs, reputedly thanks to the use of dynamic recompilation. This technique differs from traditional emulation by taking machine code instructions from one platform and dynamically recompiling the instructions for the native hardware it’s running on. This takes quite some horsepower and having Viva Nonno arrive in the post-GHz era seemed extremely fitting for the new millennium, particularly given how spectacularly smooth the output was. Suddenly, we had ultra-smooth, ultra-fast Ridge Racer on average PCs and it was absolutely joyous. Viva Nonno was quickly joined by PSX2 as a DR-based PlayStation 2 emulator and Yabause for Sega Saturn emulation. To bring us up to the modern day, dynamic recompilation apparently helps PlayStation 3 emulator RCPS3 run smoothly on X86 hardware.

8. Visual 6502, 2009

When you’ve had quick-and-dirty recreations of chipsets and realtime instruction translation bring you the good shit, there’s only one direction that remains - component-level physics simulation. To that end, the toweringly magnificent Visual 6502 saw out the first decade of the 21st century with a true bottom-up reconstruction of an entire 6502 microprocessor. It’s as complete a recreation as you can get, and as such defined the true gold standard for emulation in its most complete sense. From this philosophy stems the entire FPGA approach that started (pretty much) in 2004 with Jeri Elsworth’s astonishing C64DTV and brings us up to MiSTer and its M.A.M.E.-like omniverse of anything that can have its silicon logic symbolically squeezed into the platform’s DE10-Nano chip. This component approach steps beyond the notion of emulation and into simulation, where undocumented quirks and features simply come ‘for free’, rather than having to be added to an emulator as part of a database of special-case wonkiness. The real deal here, of the complete recreation of every component in a system, represents a colossal task that we can effectively consider near-infinitely open-ended. Machines like the PlayStation 4 or XBox One (and naturally their successors) have graphics hardware that while similar to consumer PC cards, manage to have their own peculiarities that need to be accounted for. Ensuring complete accuracy with a component-level model represents a data storage task that’s colossal just to catalogue, let alone attempt to recreate and run with modern processors. Thus, the component-level dream that Visual 6502 realises sets a bar so high, we can consider it's aim as drawing out a final destination for all computers, and one we will likely never reach.

I find it oddly heartwarming that emulation, particularly of 8-and-16-bit machinery, is now so trivial that the most basic smartphone can emulate the first three decades of videogaming without breaking a sweat. The modern landscape, which sees such a wide variety of open-source solutions and widely distributed ROM repositories, has effectively insured our culture against erasure, and pretty much all in a truly open, free-of-charge sensibility that defies the demands and whims of the prevailing capitalist system. I have written several times in the past about how utterly vital emulation is against the machinations of corporate interests and the ravages of time on aging hardware. Only this week, I found my Commodore 64 has developed a serious hardware fault. It’s probably the PLA or the kernel ROM, and perhaps I should count myself lucky that I can get replacements for both. But even if I couldn’t, I’d still be able to play anything I wanted to because of the work undertaken over decades and decades by people who loved that machine and its games. And really, that's the greatest thing about the entire endeavour. The premium side of it, the commercialised aspect, will always leave me feeling slightly uneasy given how much has been released for free, and how it’s actually the open source side that sets the real standards for accuracy and quality. And it pleases me no end that emulation retains that countercultural edge, that adjacency to piracy and the Demoscene. Yet it balances that mystique with its near-academic credo of preservation for all, a grand act of soaring magnanimity that seems vanishingly rare in the modern age. I often write about my generational sense of great fortune to have ridden the wave of progress over four decades of videogaming and seen so many dreams fulfilled and expectations succeeded, and the course of emulation in the 1990s is absolutely a part of that fabulous ride.

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1. Seeing that Amiga 4000s routinely sell on eBay for £1000+ for just the base box, I do have to wonder what happened to that company's 10 or so 4000s and 20-odd 1084 monitors when it switched to PCs. The idea of them being dumped in a skip upsets me almost as much as the time I was visiting a developer deep in the X360/PS3 era and saw a herd of ten or so PSTOOLs shoved behind a door. SCEE had apparently forgotten to reclaim them. I asked if I could have one, was told yes, but forgot to take it!

2. Consider this: that's 14,400 bits per second. Considering the average broadband speed in the uk is supposedly 69 megabits, that's a glorious 4,000 times faster than our modem in 1995. Spare me your sympathies though; heads back in the 80s were trying to get by at 2,600.

3. Frame skipping was the best way of getting decent playability out of emulators when your machine wasn't quite up to the task, which worked by cutting the number of frames the emulator had to render. In combination with disabling audio to lighten the load, I'd gone as deep as frameskip 4 on some consoles in the early, sub-400MHz days, as this would give you a serviceable 15 FPS on an 60Hz NTSC machine. I could mark the improvement in emulators and the increase in my machine's power by how close to zero I got my frameskipping.

4. As mentioned previously, PC-Engine ROMs were fairly small, clocking in under 512 kilobytes for the most part, meaning you could often squeeze 3 or 4 games onto a 1.44 megabyte floppy. By this time, I had a PC in my room but the modem-connected machine was downstairs in my Dad’s lair, so moving emulator ROMs and JPG pornography (Richards Realm represent, yo) involved a lot of floppy disks.

5. For a fun journey, look at M.A.M.E.'s release notes archive and see what's been added with each version. At the time, it was hugely exciting to see it grow so fast, so quickly. It felt simply wonderful to suddenly have such vast chunks of history become accessible to all. I’d sometimes be downloading ROMs before new M.A.M.E. version had been officially released, such was the fervour. It was yet another component of 90s gaming culture that galloped with such staggering momentum that I unbelievably thankful to have seen it happen.

6. There was a funky version of Sparcade that somehow beefed up the audio for Vulcan Venture and made the soundtrack absolutely bang. Being something to do with the channel volumes or the audio chip emulation, it must have been some off-key hack as the studious implementation in M.A.M.E. lost that extra sonic pizzazz. Much like the previously-mentioned time that Double Dragon came to M.A.M.E. at a beautifully smooth 60fps until the driver was made fully accurate, sometimes the M.A.M.E. philosophy misses the joy of inaccuracies making the ride a bit more fun.

7. It was something of a mini-Zeitgeist in the ‘90s that the combination of flagrant illegality, free spirits and cultural snowballing were leading to explosions of joy and delight across all aspects of our youth cultures, what with the whole discovering dance drugs and raving for 12 hours straight - another thing I did a lot of during the 1990s.

8. I must give a big shout-out to Final Burn and Raine as cult emulators that offered great stuff before M.A.M.E. took them over. I was kinda delighted that my first Chinese retro handheld had a contemporary version of Final Burn on it.