thoughts on emulation

[Slothy]

Another thing I want to say about emulation that I know I've mentioned before but forgot to be: it's essentially the only viable method we have to preserve older titles.

Major companies simply don't have enough interest in properly preserving their games for the future (see every HD release of relatively recent games where they didn't have final source code to work from, documentation was trout, backups had to be found that were half ruined, etc. for examples of what I mean and keep in mind those are largely PS2 games made in the last 15 years), no physical media will last forever. Some, even more recent CD based games, are at our past the end of their expected lives. If it weren't for peoples efforts in emulation I have no doubt we wouldn't have nearly as many games available in ROM or iso form and even fewer ways to play them.

Almost breaks my heart to think of how many games we might still have already lost.

I've found that Virtual Consoles and digital distribution have done a lot to nullify this trend, fortunately. It's getting harder and harder to find games that don't have some form of official distribution (or are older PC games that are officially abandonware and available on plenty of sites for free).

More well known games is agree with you. But there are entire consoles and large chunks of popular console libraries that aren't available as digital downloads and I'd washer most of them never will be. And I doubt it'll stop being an issue in the future. The majority of PSX and PS2 games really aren't available and probably never will be due to lack of interest and the difficulty that still exists in tailoring am emulator to every single PS2 digital rerelease.

And I'm the mean time, like I said, companies are just losing the means to port these games left and right. The HD silent Hill collection didn't have the compete source code backed up and had to try to finish it before porting (hence why it still doesn't work properly) when they did the HD release for the original Killzone I believe they stumbled on a backup of the code at someone's house if I'm not mistaken. And then they still had to spend a bunch of time figuring out how that original code worked because the documentation was so bad no one knew what a bunch of the object classes even related to anymore.

Game archival is a complete crap shoot outside of the emulation scene. At least they've got some consistency within a platform.