Hi Grant, It can be different stroke for different folks. For many, it's the layout, feel, and sound of the keyboard, joystick, buttons, etc. There is a huge market for early "clicky" keyboards with non-linear actions (keys somewhat resist pressure until a threshold is passed, then they allow full travel) - some are going for thousands of dollars ... each. For others, it's the graphics on a real, honest-to-goodness glass tube TV or monitor, smeary color blocks, bleepy-bloopy sounds, and all. It may make no sense to some people, but crystal-clear digital graphics on an LCD display look nothing like the originals on glass tubes, and yes, we have a couple of 27-inch analog TVs with both VHF and NTSC inputs.
A big problem with emulators that attempt to be all things to all games, as was pointed out, is that there are timing issues when not running on native hardware that's not multitasking with a million things being spawned and generating interrupts that the emulator has no way to predict and account for accurately. Many games depended on the predictability of the hardware to perform certain things behind-the-scenes that fail running in emulators. Then, there's the problem of the timing being different from platform to platform with wholly different hardware, OS, and other application interactions. I was the first in the U.S. to receive a Raspberry Pi (March 22, 2012, from the first batch of 10,000) and established one of the first Raspberry Jam enthusiast gatherings in the world, at the Computer History Museum. We've been running the emulators for the Pi, and while they're fine for showing what the games were _like_, they aren't the _same_, and we have all of the original game software and hardware right there to compare. I've gotten hundreds of Pii (as in the plural of octopus is octopi) since then, as they really fulfill the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and they've been given to students where I teach, as well as kids participating in after-school activities. All the Best, Jim On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 9:51 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > On 12/21/18 1:07 AM, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote: > > no, emulators will not cut it > > Would you please expand upon that? > > Are you saying that things like a Raspberry Pi running RetroPi (I think > that's the name) don't suffice / satisfy as the real thing that they are > emulating? > > Or are you including things like the new retro consoles that original > vendors are coming out with? (The palm sized SNES from Nintendo comes > to mind.) > > Do you have any idea why these newer things are not cutting it? > > I've also had great success with running '90s era games in DOSBox on > what ever computer happens to be handy. Does that not work at all for > you / your crew? > > > > -- > Grant. . . . > unix || die >
