Emulation Vs. The Real McCoy

When I speak to others about collecting old consoles and games, I often get asked, "Why not use an emulator instead?"  Certainly, emulators with software both legal and not-so-legal is more convenient and easily accessible than scouring eBay, thrift stores and garage sales for 30-year old games.  But I still prefer it over downloading a bunch of files and hooking up a gamepad to my PC.   Hopefully you can understand why by the end of this post.

If you want to play a particular game right this very moment, you can't beat emulation.   Head over to whatever unsavory section of the internet you happen to frequent and get yourself the game(s) you have a hankering to enjoy.   Maybe a few minutes of setup; a few little tweaks here and an option or two there and you're playing, on your computer with either a keyboard or a control pad hooked into your USB port.  Or, if you're strictly legit, modern consoles like the Wii, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 offer classics for download at a nominal price per game.

Conversely, cartridges, discs or other media for those games you used to play may not be so easily accessible - especially for the more rare titles.  But when it's yours, it's really yours.  You can hold it in your hand, feel it, smell it, or sleep with it if that's your sick desire.  Most importantly, you can sell it.  Indeed many a collector will buy a title for the potential profit rather than enjoyment.  But discounting profit for the purposes of this article, many video game enthusiasts such as myself feel that everything from the label on the front to the PCB in plastic is part of the experience and digital downloads is nothing more than "smoke and mirrors" disguised as classic gaming.

Not Iron Mike.

Let's move on and assume that once you get past the tangible aspect of this debate, at the end of the day you're pretty much playing the same game.  Right?  Not always.  Emulation, as far as it has advanced, is still not always perfect.  Making your computer pretend to be a completely different computer is not an easy feat, as simple as it looks when you see the final result on your monitor.  Glitches present themselves either due to a bad ROM dump or bugs in the emulation software.  Legal emulation for consoles (either through retail package game collections or digital downloads) fare better but may be altered for various reasons, often legal (e.g. Tecmo Bowl without the licensed players or having to play Punch-Out! with Mr. Dream instead of Mike Tyson).

Emulators, however, still have their place.   Emulations preserves gaming history that may otherwise be lost to time as hardware gets older and begins failing.  Many gamers do also appreciate the ability of emulators to save your progress with older games that were long on difficulty but still expected completion in one sitting.  Emulation is also helpful for the purposes of this blog for obtaining screenshots without having to rewire my consoles.  Finally, special mention must be given to MAME (the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) for bringing home, almost quite literally, the arcade classics where collecting multiple arcade boards or cabinets would otherwise be impossible.  Of course, it plays best with real arcade controls in a cabinet - but that's a topic for another post.

However, at the end of the day, I'd rather be holding an original controller hooked up to real hardware to play  the old favorites.   But until I'm able to collect whatever "holy grail" I am looking for at any given moment, I'm happy to have emulation to fill the void in the meantime.