Is It Legal?

[eridium]

No. You see, when SCO won its lawsuits against Novell, Red Hat and IBM, Linux was declared illegal to use in the US without paying a large license fee to SCO Group. Open source was also declared analogous to digital communism and communism is bad, mmmkay? So that's also illegal in the US.

SCO lost.

SCO vs Novell

 

[WizardStan]

SCO lost.

SCO vs Novell

I'm pretty sure that was the joke

 

[Exophase]

Like non-integer scalling ? (kidding)

Of course, most people are using LCD TVs so they too get non-integer scaling a lot of the time. Of course, the difference here is that you have some leverage as to how to scale, instead of just being subject to whatever your monitor does.. which can also add a bunch of lag.

 

[Prometheus]

When asked purists will either claim that the emulation experience always entails glitches and incompatibilities regardless of the platform and the game, or more often they'll retort "it just is" without wanting to defend it.

That is plain silly, of course.

It's a pain when those things happen with a game you happen to like, and if it's sufficiently bad enough it can be a bit off-putting - if it isn't, though, personally I'd just shrug it off. But yeah, stuff like that tends to be the exception, rather than the rule.

I read an interesting thread on AtariAge somewhat relating to this, once. There were some points for and against emulation of certain titles that I personally found rather interesting to read (although because a number of them were both a bit before my time and were games I haven't played, I couldn't really do much more than read about it). Unfortunately I didn't bookmark it, but I'll see if I can find it if you're interested.

I think the real advantage is mostly psychological when the game actually does play about the same (which is an awful lot of the time), while emulators actually do offer a lot of tangible advantages..

I have no doubt that it is mostly psychological, and no doubt that a lot of it is also highly subjective (such as cases where sound emulation isn't quite there yet*). Personally, I'm not arguing against emulation in any way, anyway. :lol:

That said, I think there can sometimes be a bit of a blurry line at least as far as stuff like control goes. Of course, in some cases you can use a USB joypad adapter, which alleviates that as long as it works properly. (I have yet to find an N64 one that will allow for the pulling off of the loop and turn moves in Star Fox 64, however. These are essential to the game at points and are pulled off by pulling the control stick and pushing a certain button at the same time - if anyone knows of one that actually allows for this, I'd love to know. )

*It's not really related to the rest of the post, but the music thing reminds me of an anecdote about a review of a late Game Boy Advance game that I read at the time it was released. The European release came first for this one, so I'd been playing it for weeks before the review showed up. Anyway, the reviewer complained that parts of the music sounded strangled and odd, and if memory serves they marked the game down for it. The thing was, this didn't occur on an actual Game Boy Advance, where the game sounded really rather good - it was a known emulation problem with that title at the time.

 

[Exophase]

It's interesting that you mention GBA, because in my experience music often sounds better in GBA emulators than on the real thing. This is especially the case if you're listening on the weak and tinny mono speaker, but even if you use high quality headphones you still get pretty poor audio quality due to the 8-bit internal mixing, PWM output instead of a real DAC, and probably fairly poor analog filtering chain.

For DS it can be even worse - the mixing internally is 16-bit but the output is only 10-bit, so you throw a lot of fidelity away where a DS emulator can easily avoid this.

Where emulation fails it can be a problem. What bothers me is the people who say that emulating will always be inferior, without even trying a given game in a given emulator first.

 

[Prometheus]

It's interesting that you mention GBA, because in my experience music often sounds better in GBA emulators than on the real thing. This is especially the case if you're listening on the weak and tinny mono speaker, but even if you use high quality headphones you still get pretty poor audio quality due to the 8-bit internal mixing, PWM output instead of a real DAC, and probably fairly poor analog filtering chain.

It's been a long time since I even used a GBA emulator, myself, as to be honest I tend to keep my Game Boy micro close to hand anyway, so I can't comment there.

The game in question was Mega Man Zero 4, for what it's worth. When it was first released, in emulators (and by extension in that WinAmp plugin for playing GSFs, whose name I forget) its guitar samples, most noticeably in the first level, sounded utterly horrendous. (Another similarly affected game, but one less known outside of Japan, was Klonoa Heroes - Star Medal no Densetsu, which the last time I heard its audio emulated had some bizarre issues where everything would go completely out of time/sync after a while.)

Where emulation fails it can be a problem. What bothers me is the people who say that emulating will always be inferior, without even trying a given game in a given emulator first.

Yeah, that is pretty daft. My only big emulation-related gripe nowadays is the SuperFX chip, purely in relation to Star Fox and Star Fox 2, incidentally (the timing is off in both of them, last I tried - it really spoils these two games, and it makes the first one too difficult to play at times; BSNES almost nails it, but it was still way out in Snes9x when I last checked). That said, I'm not going to whine about it - I'm sure one day the emulation of it will improve.

 

[MichaelXX2]

How's the SFX emulation in ZSNES?

 

[ahahah]

Is the OpenPandora legal in the US? Thx.

to have a gun toy at home is not illegal, but to use it to make a hold-up in a bank is illegal.

you can transpose this example at many objects...

 

[CPUnltd]

How's the SFX emulation in ZSNES?

as far as I remember, sound was great in zsnes (used it on 32bit linux) it's my personal fav for snes emulation... and should be legal, as I don't recall the need for any illegal files in order to simply run the emulator (minus the questionability of ROMs.... with the exception of homebrew)...

 

[ledow]

How's the SFX emulation in ZSNES?

as far as I remember, sound was great in zsnes (used it on 32bit linux) it's my personal fav for snes emulation... and should be legal, as I don't recall the need for any illegal files in order to simply run the emulator (minus the questionability of ROMs.... with the exception of homebrew)...

I think he might have been referring to SuperFX, the 20-something MHz custom Nintendo acceleration chip that was bundled in some games (e.g. Yoshi's Island) and needs to be emulated (at significant host-CPU cost) in order for those games to work. ZSNES has the code to emulate SuperFX and DSP-1 as well as some other chips that some games used but it really kills your emulation speed when playing those games. Chances are that if an emulator can EASILY get 60fps on ordinary games, then playing things that need the SuperFX chip *should* be "playable" (i.e. 20fps, possibly) or better.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Haven't you seen Terminator 2? You can empty cash machines with an Atari Portfolio, you could probably crack Fort Knox with a Pandora. Just being on this forum puts you on Interpol's watchlist.

If only Goldfinger had one of those. h34r:

 

[skeezix]

Exophase -- purists will go for 'the real thing' because it is 'better', and they'd be right in many cases; but its the simple balance -- jhaving carts or carcade machines takes a lot of space, for a 'better experience' per game (ie: the _intended_ experience) versus the emualted (and liekly inexact experience.) Mind you, one coudl argue the merits of having dozens of games in pocket, rather than forking out quarters and having to have a football field to store the equivilent game stock. Both are good

But to wit -- you cannot _Really_ emulate some things, such as the feel of the keyboard on a C64, or the vector display on an Asteroids machine, or the QBert 'knock' sound made by a hammer in the cabinet. Sometimes you need the CRT glow and the hum of the machine to get the intended and right feel. Other times its just nostalgia (and nothing wrong with that.) Some times you need the click-drive in the Amiga, or the grindy load noises it made, or the annoying delay it took to load from floppy to RAM.. sometimes thats part of the experience You can't emulate a Wico batstick, not yet!

Too pure is no good; I've got a Clay Cowgill multi-jamma so one cab can flip betwene a couple pcbs and maybe even works without shorting out; in the same cab, I've also put in a PC PCB so I can have it boot up straight to MAME with a nice frontend, and I gotta admit, its pretty damned appealing .. fire it up, but on my arcade monitor and arcade controls in a real arcade cab, thats pretty compelling, not having to switch PCBs and wiring harnesses, or even to switch MVS carts And of course emulation .. I spent too many hours writing cpu cores for emus in various languages and assemblies not to love it, of course .. I'm both someone who loves the real thing, and loves the convenience of the emulation. To me..

... you gotta have both.

Big toys, for big boys.

jeff

 

[Exophase]

You can't really emulate some things, but that doesn't mean you can't really emulate anything. Not everything is imprecise in the same way, and ultimately you can keep getting closer and closer and you can keep substituting more and more of the original input sources, output sources, and peripherals until you get what you want. I don't have a problem with preferences, but I don't like it when people are snobs about it. When they have superiority complexes over it. When they've made up their minds without even trying the alternative. Sometimes getting used to a new way of doing something is a good way to program new pleasure triggers into your brain.

That said, when I was a young teenager emulation was the exciting thing for me. To me emulation IS my nostalgia. But anything done out of love for nostalgia is bound to eventually wear thin because time marches on and nostalgia doesn't stick.

 

[Mjlink]

You can't really emulate some things, but that doesn't mean you can't really emulate anything. Not everything is imprecise in the same way, and ultimately you can keep getting closer and closer and you can keep substituting more and more of the original input sources, output sources, and peripherals until you get what you want. I don't have a problem with preferences, but I don't like it when people are snobs about it. When they have superiority complexes over it. When they've made up their minds without even trying the alternative. Sometimes getting used to a new way of doing something is a good way to program new pleasure triggers into your brain.

That said, when I was a young teenager emulation was the exciting thing for me. To me emulation IS my nostalgia. But anything done out of love for nostalgia is bound to eventually wear thin because time marches on and nostalgia doesn't stick.

+1
if i have to turn down the sound. If there is no sound, i can go without, ie Berzerk on MAME.

If the gameplays well, music can be substituted accordingly.

Peace & Pandora,

Link