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The Joys of Emulation

Thursday August 24, 2023

The other day my coworker was blown away when I told him I can get any old fighting game he can think of on my laptop within a few minutes. He asked if we could play Marvel vs. Capcom, so I fired up FBNeo, configured our controllers, and we had a good ass time. He said “I remembered there being more characters” and a few more minutes later we played Marvel vs. Capcom 2 with Flycast. Later on I was wondering if most people that play video games don’t know how to emulate stuff. Do they even know what emulation is? Do they just have no idea that millions of good ass games are just waiting to be played for free?

Quick disclaimer: If you think emulating games is wrong, you can suck my dick from the back. Stop licking Nintendo’s boots for 5 seconds and think about how hard you’re getting fucked.

I guess my perspective is warped because I learned about Project64 when I was like 10. I excitedly told my mom that I can play every N64 game for free. She said “Oh that’s great. More video games.” Within a few hours I was looking up Xbox emulators. I got a Sega Model 2 emulator just to play Sonic the Fighters. I played everything with the keyboard, even Conker’s Bad Fur Day multiplayer. I get that everyone wasn’t a little nerd like me, but I figured everyone who likes games would at least know a nerd that would show them all that shit. In middle school a teacher called me the drug dealer of video games because I put Project64 and a bunch of ROMs on kids flash drives. I got some shitty N64 emulator on my friends iMac. It didn’t let you fucking save in the free version. Mac retards will forever eat shit.

My other coworkers were talking about games they played when they were young. Every game is a vague memory. These games are basically not real anymore. The only chance of them reliving one of them is if they buy a remake/remaster/rerelease from a digital storefront for way too much money. These game studios need to add some really crazy shit to convince me not to just emulate the original version of a game on my computer in widescreen at 5x native resolution with a modern controller and achievements. For free.

You don’t have to endlessly tweak settings or have a whole ass computer that only exists to emulate games. Just download ZSNES and Super Mario World. You’ll figure out the rest from there.