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I can think of only one reason to own a game console: Games that are impossible to dump and emulate. So buy a Genesis so you can play Paprium.
Okay, okay, there's a second reason: consoles that aren't sufficiently cycle-accurately emulated (Such as the N64) where homebrew and romhacks cannot use deep hardware tricks that work on the hardware, but break on all emulators. Kaze Emmanuar has a running list of such optimizations, but he actively avoids using them because only the smallest fraction of the userbase actually plays them on hardware. Once Ares accurately emulates these hardware quirks, you have zero excuses to not ditch your console for good.
For everything else, remember that cartridges and CD's/DVD's are just antique low-capacity storage devices for ROMs. You can fit the entire contents of a "collector's" (read: Hoarder's) mid-life crisis Man Cave on a 24TB external Hard Drive. 1,000 ft^2 reduced to 3 1/2" x 5". heck, buy three drives so you have two backups, and you've only lost three more inches of vertical space in your house.
Game systems are now like the PICO-8: a series of hardware and software constraints you opt into in order to create art using limitations of a medium.
CRT Shaders, while not cycle-accurate to the devices they're intending to emulate, are good enough for most games, and it's only a matter of time before some sufficiently-autistic individual decides to dedicate himself to emulating these devices at a level where Bob from RetroRGB can no longer tell the difference. If you were a kid during the 2600-SNES Era, it's a guarantee you didn't play your system on an Aperture Grille professional Sony monitor; You played those games on a 10-15yo (at the time) Family TV that was plugged-in using the 75 Ohm RF input, if the TV was new enough to not just have 2 300 Ohm antenna screws. It was the only TV you had in the house, unless you were lucky to have a black & white 13" TV in your bedroom. If you had bad grounding in your house, you'd have to bend the video cable near the plug in just the right way in order to prevent ghosting on your TV or ensure a 10% more crisp picture. RCA Jacks? You mean those colored cables you plugged into your VCR before that VCR plugged into your RF port on your TV?
Compared to this, NTSC shaders are far better visually than the TV I used to beat half the NES catalog. It's downright adorable to watch kids born during the 4th and 5th generation of gaming complain about how bad CRT shaders look, because you're literally too young to know how truly accurate those shaders really are for most of us. If you yung'uns were honest, you'd admit that CRT Royale is better than every consumer television released during the Playstation/N64 Era, and it's not even close.
Input Lag, you say? Shut up and enable Run-Ahead and/or Preemptive Frames. I'm sure your Ryzen 5 7000-series system with a RTX 3070 will manage to keep up with such difficult and demanding hardware requirements in 2025.
So in closing, sell your man-caves while the market is peaking and convert to emulation. Spend your money on things that can't be emulated, such as gamepads and joysticks for the systems you like. Embrace gaming minimalism, so the things you own don't end up owning you.
Okay, okay, there's a second reason: consoles that aren't sufficiently cycle-accurately emulated (Such as the N64) where homebrew and romhacks cannot use deep hardware tricks that work on the hardware, but break on all emulators. Kaze Emmanuar has a running list of such optimizations, but he actively avoids using them because only the smallest fraction of the userbase actually plays them on hardware. Once Ares accurately emulates these hardware quirks, you have zero excuses to not ditch your console for good.
For everything else, remember that cartridges and CD's/DVD's are just antique low-capacity storage devices for ROMs. You can fit the entire contents of a "collector's" (read: Hoarder's) mid-life crisis Man Cave on a 24TB external Hard Drive. 1,000 ft^2 reduced to 3 1/2" x 5". heck, buy three drives so you have two backups, and you've only lost three more inches of vertical space in your house.
Game systems are now like the PICO-8: a series of hardware and software constraints you opt into in order to create art using limitations of a medium.
CRT Shaders, while not cycle-accurate to the devices they're intending to emulate, are good enough for most games, and it's only a matter of time before some sufficiently-autistic individual decides to dedicate himself to emulating these devices at a level where Bob from RetroRGB can no longer tell the difference. If you were a kid during the 2600-SNES Era, it's a guarantee you didn't play your system on an Aperture Grille professional Sony monitor; You played those games on a 10-15yo (at the time) Family TV that was plugged-in using the 75 Ohm RF input, if the TV was new enough to not just have 2 300 Ohm antenna screws. It was the only TV you had in the house, unless you were lucky to have a black & white 13" TV in your bedroom. If you had bad grounding in your house, you'd have to bend the video cable near the plug in just the right way in order to prevent ghosting on your TV or ensure a 10% more crisp picture. RCA Jacks? You mean those colored cables you plugged into your VCR before that VCR plugged into your RF port on your TV?
Compared to this, NTSC shaders are far better visually than the TV I used to beat half the NES catalog. It's downright adorable to watch kids born during the 4th and 5th generation of gaming complain about how bad CRT shaders look, because you're literally too young to know how truly accurate those shaders really are for most of us. If you yung'uns were honest, you'd admit that CRT Royale is better than every consumer television released during the Playstation/N64 Era, and it's not even close.
Input Lag, you say? Shut up and enable Run-Ahead and/or Preemptive Frames. I'm sure your Ryzen 5 7000-series system with a RTX 3070 will manage to keep up with such difficult and demanding hardware requirements in 2025.
So in closing, sell your man-caves while the market is peaking and convert to emulation. Spend your money on things that can't be emulated, such as gamepads and joysticks for the systems you like. Embrace gaming minimalism, so the things you own don't end up owning you.
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