All of this “modern” gaming has passed me by to some degree. Like in many aspects of my life, I am stuck in the 80’s like the Brady Bunch movies except later. A couple of years ago, I found out that free emulators can let you play most any console game from back in the day. I have a Commodore 64 emulator which was my first computer love. I use it mainly for experimenting just like I did when I was 9 but I screw around with some games as well.
However, my original Nintendo emulator gets some serious use as a gaming machine. I still choose to believe that Tecmo Bowl is the finest game released on any platform for reasons that are hard to articulate unless you play it for an hour. I am not even a big sports fan but this simple football game has what it takes. Tecmo Super Bowl is also great but despite being a more sophisticated sequel, just barely misses that certain something.
So, do we have any regular travellers to a simpler time here?
My boyfriend has an Xbox and an Xbox 360. I’ve tried to play his games (like Halo), but I cannot get used to the controls and I get dizzy. He modded his Xbox (shh!) and put on a ton of Nintendo and SNES emulators so I can play Zelda and Mario all I want. I definitely prefer older video games.
I use DosBox a lot. It keeps getting improved with each release–several years ago, I would never have been able to play Wing Commander Privateer in it. Now I can do so easily. And it emulates all the memory properly, so I didn’t have to sit there and mess around with freeing enough EMS and XMS to play a game like Privateer.
We may or may not, depending on legalities which are a gray area (emulator ROMS are fuzzy gray colored), have a setup like Chum’s boy; if we did we’d have epic Xevious and Galaga/Galaxian/etc days. Zelda and Castlevania and all that, too.
I don’t think emulators themselves are a problem. They are usually reverse engineered versions of defunct consoles. Computer science students often build them as part of a project and put them out for all to use. You can just google for X emulator and there are probably several. Read the reviews to find the best one for you. The only (slight) problem is usually configuring the joystick and maybe the sound. All modern computers are ridiculously more powerful than the original systems ever were so I doubt there are any spec problems.
From there, you have to come up with your own ROMS (images of the games). This usually falls under the category of abandonware although it is theoretically possible to create your own from old cartridges. Lets just say that Google is a big help on how it acquire these. All common consoles have pages dedicated to it.
I nearly became an emulator user. Doesn’t count, I know. But, a friend recently acquired such a thing to emulate Sega Genesis’ Nobunaga’s Ambition. He wished to share, but my mad-ass kompyootaur skillz are sorely lacking…
I am the world’s most clueless and incompetent gamer. When I started working on The Uninvited, it ran natively on my Mac SE. It took 3 generations of Macs and two cheatsheets discovered on the internet (the first one, merely consisting of clues, didn’t do the job; a decade or so later I gave up and found a total spoiler guide) and of course by then I was running it in vMac, a Mac Plus emulator.
Time to beat game (required total-spoiler cheat guide): 14 years
I did make it through Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets though, and in less than a year at that, so maybe I’m not totally a lost cause?
A lot of my friends play Super Smash Brothers on Project64, an N64 emulator. I much prefer Super Smash Brothers Melee myself, but since my Cube is currently at school,…
I play Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse on my NES emulator at least once a week. And Golden Axe, Sonic & Knuckles, Castlevania: Bloodlines and Splatter House 3 get re-played every once in a while through the magic of [del]time travel[/del] Kega.
MAME for arcade games, and NESticle for NES games are my favorites for those platforms. I cant remember what I use for SNES. I dont emulate PS1 or N64 games b/c I’d rather buy them for cheap.
For the life of me I couldn’t get my wife to show an interest in computer games (aside from Sims 2 and titles like Theme Hospital)
Then I downloaded an emulator package that had all the English games from the Snes/Genesis generation and before and now we play together all the time much to my joy.
Please if anyone knows some good two player games that aren’t fighting games or racing games aside from Mario Cart I’d LOVE to hear any recommendations. Thanks in advance.
You can buy a general-use controller at any computer shop for $15 or less. These days, most computers won’t have much problems recognising it, it’s mostly plug-and-play. Otherwise, simply mapping the keys to the keyboard works just as well for me.
