Yeeeah, since PS1 emulation has oh so many milestones yet to be achieved.
It does. PSX emulation is not in a very good state right now, though not as bad as the Genesis, Saturn, or Nintendo 64.
I will keep using pSX as long as it works on my OS, fading into obscurity or not.
That's your prerogative. I did not question that at all.
Your obsession with emus still being worked on becomes funny. Shit is old, but gets job done, works on Win7 64... what more do you want?
Oh - it's not perfect? Well, duh - no emu is. Pcsx2 is "being worked on" all the time, yet AFAIR didn't receive any major improvements in ~5 years.
It may work,
but how well? What exactly happens under the hood? Will it play every game I throw at it? Many emulators that reputedly "get the job done" do so with hacks for specific games. The result is that some games, typically the popular ones, will play pretty much as expected but other, less popular, games will run into all sort of issues, from graphics to timing. An ideal emulator should be as accurate as possible to the real hardware, so every game should play "out of the box", including the "hidden gems" and the obscure releases that may surface from time to time—this happens more frequently than you think and less accurate emulators are usually lost when they encounter them because they miss their usual crutches.
I know ne emulator is perfect, but that does not prevent me from reaching for it. I am an elitist and that means I want the best in life. Actually, despite many claiming to the contrary, we all tend to be. I see no reasons why emulators should be any different.
OMG, fuckers just fool around and suck money off rich kids with their smartphones. How horrible! They should KEEP UPDATING!!!1!!
Who cares - they coded some nice piece of software >10 years ago and still can get some money from it - kudos to them.
I do not trust an outdated emulator in general, and I simply find it dubious when it is only fueled by greed like ePSXe these days. If you have no problems with that, then again that shows the difference in our standards.
Well, I tested all my 180 PS1 games on both pSX and epsxe. All of them worked, with some problems in case of pSX. How many games did you test on Mednafen so far? Not that I don’t believe you, this emu looks p. dope indeed.
Not many, but I ran into a few extreme cases like Symphony of the Night that freezes during dialogs on pSX and ePSXe would refuse to run it in most cases, and when it would then I'd run into glitches. Yes, I am sure, that if I spent time fiddling with various plugins it could run in an acceptable way, but since I am philosophically against the plugin hell design and thus poorly enclined to waste my time with it, I prefer the easy way of running it in Mednafen that hasn't given me a single complaint.
That said, that's just one game. But I follow emulation news about that sort of stuff, and there are some people, far more knowledgeable than me on the inner workings of emulators, who test that stuff throughly. I am but a layman but I like to keep myself informed.
I'm not fond the philosophy...
Yeah - that seems to be the problem...
Closed source = bad. Open source = good.
Not updating your (even good) shit = bad. Constant updates (often pointless, let's face it – that’s how open source works) = good.
Multiplatform / various cores = bad. Dedicated emulators / cores only = good.
You miscontrue my opinion, with vehemency in general and dishonesty at times.
Though the majority of the emulators I use are open source, that's not because they are open source but simply because they have the qualities I seek in an emulator; that they happen to be open source is a complete coincidence; else there are a few closed source emulators that I use without losing sleep at night. I am not a blind follower of open source but I see its value for the development of emulators. In the case of an emulator, where accuracy matters, a closed source raise some questions, and if it doesn't then it should! Not all emulators make claims of accuracy, but some do, and in case of a closed source emulator one can only wonder why it is so. Does it have something to hide? Is it as accurate as it claims or does it use hacks? Also with an open source the rest of the emulation scene can benefit from it, and there are cases of emulators that benefited from each other's development. Assuming a very accurate emulator comes out but does not share its source, that means that the other authors must reinvent the wheel. Will that serve emulation in the long run? I don't think so.
And then there is the case for the future. I know you demonstrated here as well as many other times your affinity for homeostasis—I remember you clung to Windows XP for some time—but that is also something that matters. As you wrote yourself, no emulator is perfect. Thus it makes sense to see it improve. Nestopia is a very good NES emulator, one that manages to deal with the madness that is the NES mappers, yet its author abandonned it. It was very mature and reliable, and so I continued to use it for years, but there were still some bugs left and room for improvement. Thankfully someone else picked it up a few years later and continue where the original author had left it, fixing bugs and improving it. No need lose time reinventing the wheel and we all benefit from it, emulator authors and users alike. That wouldn't have been possible with a closed source. And that is exactly what happened with Kega: Steve Snake is considered as a great programmer in the emulation community, and Kega is a testament to that, but sticking to a closed source ended up hurting his work not once but twice: once when he lost the source and had to rewrite everything from scratch, and a second time when he abandonned the development for personal issues. You may say that the second only hurts us, the users, but a man becomes his work in time. The fact is that Kega is still good, and I still use it, but it is slowly sliding into obsolescence—there are some of these new obscure games recently released that it cannot play. One can only wonder the state of Genesis emulation now if he had released his source; I am pretty sure Kega would have continued to improve and it would have stimulated other emulators to appear. Instead people were forced, once again, to reinvent the wheel. pSX is another such case, and one that was so promising because it offered a more than decent alternative to the then already clunky ePSXe, and we know what happened there too.
There is also another reason to use emulators that are still in active development: bug reports. By using a dead emulator, you rob those still working for the future of emulation of precious test data. I know that not everybody sees it that way, but feedback is invaluable for developers, whether they practice open or closed source. Mednafen, to use it again, still evolves because of such data.
Now, I don't remember ever complaining about multiplatform emulators. If anything, one would think that open source would promote just that. My guess is that you conflated me with some other people without really reading what I wrote. The same way, I am not opposed to multicore emulators, just sceptical about them for the simple reason that 1) I'd rather see each core being worked on individually as their own project instead of ressources being shared or even wasted on many at once, with the possibility of some falling behind, and 2) having a same interface or system to service different cores may not be the most optimal thing in the world as I do not believe that one emulated system is another and this may lead to a lack of optimisation. That said, I use some of these emulators without problems and closely follow their development, welcoming the opportunity for them to prove me wrong. I would say that this is more of a preference on my part, but as it is often the case there is some rationality behind these preferences instead of mere blind passion. And I am open-minded enough to see the benefits they can bring.
In the end, I do not really care what you, or anybody else, wants to use, or the reasons behind it. But I do not see emulation merely as a way to play game but as a way to preserve games: I hold the belief that a work is its own best explaination, and so more than any books on the subject, an emulator like DOSBox does far more to preserve the history of video games than someone writing about them—although that too has its importance. And that's why accuracy matters when it comes to emulation. And that's why open source is fundamental to achieve this goal, for the reasons I wrote above. So use what the heck you want, but do not claim it is the best, especially if you can only defend it with what basically amounts to "I have been using it for many years and I do not see a reason to change it"—and that's when you actually care to have an argument and not simply rely on sarcasm and fallacies. Mind you, change for the sake of change is often pointless, but often there is a reason behind it, good or bad. If your only goal is to play games, no matter how well or bad they play, then use what you want and be content, but not everyone shares the same standards and there will always be people who, like me, will demand more, especially when it is already available.
