What do you think is the future of emulation?

[petran79]

Main worry was using emulation to play current games.
But apart from Nintendo Switch, the other consoles proved much harder.

Currently we are into ps5 life cycle for example and Ps4 emulation is just starting to improve, while ps3 emulation is still the main focus. So there is no prospect of Sony taking measures. Jailbroken ps5 are another issue, more relevant to piracy than emulation.

Xbox One virtualisation is still on the beginnings, probably due to lack of interest, Microsofts draconian measures, lack of exclusives and plethora of multiplatform games

So hopefully Nintendo now will simmer down, since a functional Switch 2 emulator is still years away on the horizon. They'll have to worry more about Jailbroken switch 2.

Also if there is an emergent Switch 2 emulator, it will likely be developed underground nowadays

 

[χKai]

is that your manifesto

because i can get behind it if it is

Maybe I'll make it my "About Me" when I finish refurbishing my page after I hit Level 6

 

[Psychonara]

is that your manifesto

"Mario Bros. & its consequences have been a disaster for the human race..."

 

[Stingy Perry Stingy Perry]

As long as there is the means to do so emulation is here to stay.

 

[Geocide]

If the internet dies, then the world will stop

And thats not a joke

Even though this is off-topic, I completely disagree. The world would continue, but things would go back to how it was pre-1970s. Don't underestimate people who will come up with ingenious ways to get things done when restricted.

At the very least, I would welcome the death of the current internet because the real internet of old was laid to rest around 2014. The internet as I knew (growing up with it in the late 90s on 56k) it took its last breaths once advertisers turned the internet into the digital billboard it has become (and is completely unusable without an adblocker), which was truly around the turn of 2010ish.

What you are witnessing on the internet now is a shadow of a shadow of even the internet of the 2010s.

 

[TheSoulWalker TheSoulWalker]

FPGA is the future of Emulation, getting hardware capable of playing the games as intended with modern hardware and not flawed capacitors and chipsets is a godsend for the scene and preservation as a whole.

 

[Franz_Thieppel]

Display emulation.

It's great to have good software and FPGA emulation but the unique look of CRTs is integral to the experience in my opinion.

Shaders are a big part of it but recent developlents in beam racing, BFI as well as leveraging the advances in modern displays with better contrast (to properly emulate shadow masks) are just as important.

 

[pinetreeneedle56]

This is more of a question about piracy than about emulation itself. Emulators are not illegal, as much as the big N pisses and moans about it. At least, as long as there isn't copywrite protected code being used in said emulators (that IS illegal).

As for the ROMs themselves, that is a whole different can of worms. But, at the end of the day, piracy will always win. As long as there are digital archivists on the internet, there will always be people preserving history, whether the companies hate it or not. New websites will always pop up, and there are always websites popping up in areas where copyright laws can't reach them (though DDoS attacks are still a thing, and are often what is employed to take these websites down, like what happened to archive.org a while back). I know of one particular website that popped up years back, and though they changed names at least once (that I know of), their current iteration is amazing. They also host the hShop, which has been an absolute boon to 3DS software preservation (I believe they have achieved 100% preservation).

The problem is that you have to stop using google as a search engine because google is literal dogshit trash-tier garbage as a search engine now (and has been for over 8 years now). Stop using google search. Use other search engines (startpage is a good one, and though duckduckgo has turned into trash as well, it's still a million and a half times better than google). You will find ROM content eventually, and it's never going away.

Now, if you want my two cents on emulation in general...

Hardware emulation is the future, at least for the first 6 generations of console gaming. Though, let's be honest here: the first 6 generations of video games are really the only ones worth worrying about (even though I fully support data archiving of everything; I just don't find the gen 7-9 console gaming experience and library to be all that impressive or impactful, but that could also be due to my age

Spoiler

and severe depression

). Hardware emulation breaks wide the dam of accuracy of game consoles that nearly all software emulation can't truly replicate. Imho, accuracy should be the #1 thing emulators get first, and then work on the bells and whistles from there. And yes, I know how hard that is, which is why I don't dog on software emulation whatsoever for not being as accurate as I'd like. Which is why I was so happy that hardware emulation has not only become a thing, it's thriving with the immense success of the MiSTer.

As long as there is demand for these older ROM libraries, there will always be these websites where you can grab them. They just have to hide themselves better now due to the use of weaponized DDoS by these corporations who don't want to compete with their older libraries (because then the lie is exposed that the modern video game industry is healthy; which it isn't). Private, closed communities have started becoming popular again. More websites and communities are starting to go back to how things were in the 1990s and 2000s with completely closed off communities where quality control is easier to maintain, and even more websites are going the completely sealed off route unless you know someone who is already in the community, a la BakaBT (this is showing my age here because I was there before they completely closed off their website to outsiders), and that one BEMANI HDD dump community that loves to shit all over the poors (and hates when their hdd dumps inevitably get leaked because they are actual assholes and aren't dumping these hdd's for archiving, but for the status of having something they shouldn't and laughing at the people who don't have what they do; yes, they are this petty).

Just keep your ears low to the ground, and if you haven't already built a home NAS to perpetually save all the ROMs you can, then you really need to start investing in one that is both redundant and can handle bit rot. Because with just how much worse the internet has gotten in the past 5 year (after basically losing the old internet back in 2014ish when games journos got exposed for their decades of lies and opened up pandora's box, ruining it for everyone afterwards), there may come a time where you can't even get on the internet without some form of ID. (We really are turning into a cyberpunk nightmare, just without all the actual cool aspects of cyberpunk...)

Offtopic, but do you think searxng is also a good replacement?

 

[ShirabeAkatsuki]

Hopefully there’s a future.

 

[GorgioTheThird]

Handhelds. That's it. That's the future of emulation. Handhelds requires refining processes that continue to evolve and refine what gaming is going to become and be capable of. ARM is proving to redefine the possibilities of smaller and more capable hardware.

They are affordable, portablewith ARM gaming they are proving to be pretty flexible, and they are accesible.

 

[Bootyfan]

Front ends+ tablet+telescopic controller (tablets running Linux, if/when Google shuts down side loading entirely)

Handhelds are nice but anbernic is turning them into quarterly novelties like funko pops. Watching companies try to go for dual screen emulation is painful.

 

[Retro Doomer]

In the Future well companies like Nintendo will probably go on a Exterminatus or at least try to and Emulators will vanish and pop up again like weed.
Also they will improve over time looking at Ps3 and perhaps Ps4 Emulation on the future legally of course with our own Roms.
Companies also likely will try many more legal battles against emulation and hopefully fail but lets be honest even if they managed to bribe the judges and outlaw Emulation in each and every country emulation won't die.

 

[skramz]

as long as i can play pokemon emerald on my psp i'm okay with whatever happens

 

[Robert Robertson III]

Improved compatibility for phones on emulation

 

[Michael Frank]

Me.
I am the future of emulation.
I've been emulating most of my life, and gaming for all of it.
I've built an incredible collection of ROMhacks, bootlegs, prototypes, and rare games and mods.
And I will continue to do so, until the artform dies..

I am the future.
View attachment 129654

I like your words, robot man.
But in all sincerity, for me the future cannot be brighter, hell, we are getting recompilations of games nowadays, look at those mario 64, starfox and BOTH zelda games pc ports, it's incredible, i've seen things that in a early age i would never had believed true, but now i feel hapiness, because i've seen this community blossom with mods, hacks, and even ports that i would have never imagine could be done.
I'm happy, and that's what matters for me.

 

[χKai]

I like your words, robot man.
But in all sincerity, for me the future cannot be brighter, hell, we are getting recompilations of games nowadays, look at those mario 64, starfox and BOTH zelda games pc ports, it's incredible, i've seen things that in a early age i would never had believed true, but now i feel hapiness, because i've seen this community blossom with mods, hacks, and even ports that i would have never imagine could be done.
I'm happy, and that's what matters for me.

And it's only been getting better; the full decompilations have opened up literal worlds to the gaming community, allowing for things like Zelda II Remastered to add more to an existing game while fully maintaining it's physics and game feel. Add that to the amount of ports, rereleases and collections of the modern gaming era, and we have exponentially more options than we would have ever dreamed decades before.

 

[marky]

The thing about ROM sites is that when one goes down, several others pop up. There's nothing to worry about here.

The bigger issues here are the development of emulation, game protections, and possibly, in the future, a complete shift to cloud gaming without downloading physical files to your PC or console.
At the moment, some consoles on certain platforms have virtually no choice when it comes to emulators, because there is only one or none at all. For example, despite the popularity of smartphones and Android-based retro consoles, when it comes to PS2 on Android, we only have Aethersx2 and its fork, Nethersx2.
We do not have an emulator for the first Xbox on Android, even though it could easily run on consoles such as Retroid Pocket 5.

It has been eight years since the PS3 was discontinued, and RCPS3 currently only runs 70% of the library correctly. Xbox 360 runs even less, and it will soon be ten years since production ended.
And with Denuvo and ‘always online’ games, emulation of these titles may be impossible.

 

[Mr. SyS]

A never ending cat and mouse game and that's being idealistic. If personal computing ever dies and everyone gets herded to the cloud it's over for good. Our cyberpunk future? Used. Hold on to what you've got.

 

[Ikagura]

The more we go on the less there are games that I really want to play.


I'd be curious to emulate the PS5 solely for Astro Bot and the PS4 for BloodBorne.

 

[Bakuma1997]

Only thing i know for certainis that Emulation can't be truly defeated, yeah, a emulator can be axed, but as long as there is a man with a PC another two will take its place, aside most people can program by themselves and taken down means nothing in Internet, where stuff stays

 

[newageretrohippie]

The future of emulation is data hoarding, as all the classics take up less than a terabyte, and it's easier now than ever to find old roms.
Given enough time, all these games will become public domain, but hardly anyone will even remember them by then. Kind of like old obscure theater plays and black and white movies.
There's something to be said for entropy. Data hoarding didn't help the library of Alexandria either. Just imagine what it must have felt like for the ancient nerds who, in the span of 2 to 4 centuries, gathered, indexed and cared for all the texts in there. I suppose there's no point in thinking too hard about what has been lost.
What actually worries me is that good crt televisions will become pretty hard to come by, long before emulation becomes obscure, yet my backlog keeps growing larger...
On a large enough timescale any such point is rendered moot. Imagine being that one weird monk who specialized in transcribing ancient Persian war songs and held very strong opinions about obscure Neo-Babylonian children's tales...View attachment 129436

that's a good point about crt televisions. i was able to obtain a CRT manufactured in 2022 off aliexpress, but it is black and white and it needs repair. my mom has a 200x walmart CRT that she couldn't get rid of, and i was so glad. it's such a treasure. Also i have a 2001 Dell VGA monitor made by samsung in korea that is just as HD as any other HD screen. (1600x1200 makes the cut)

I don't know if we have lost the art and technology of the CRT in 2 short decades, but we should find it again. They are beautiful devices.

 

[tselinoyarsk]

In the future, we could potentially see emulation of older titles as antiquated or even obsolete. People who were using or would have used an emulator previously, may prefer decompilation/recompilation instead.

 

[Ikagura]

In the future, we could potentially see emulation of older titles as antiquated or even obsolete. People who were using or would have used an emulator previously, may prefer decompilation/recompilation instead.

That will be a weird world but that'll be the logical step forward since emulators are still limited to the hardware it's trying to emulate.

 

[Michael Frank]

And it's only been getting better; the full decompilations have opened up literal worlds to the gaming community, allowing for things like Zelda II Remastered to add more to an existing game while fully maintaining it's physics and game feel. Add that to the amount of ports, rereleases and collections of the modern gaming era, and we have exponentially more options than we would have ever dreamed decades before.

EXACTLY my point, hell even some fan ports are better than emulating the source, Zelda II, Mario 64 and Star Fox 64 case in point, and even the modding community isn't far back, when you can make the pc ports of Sonic Adventure and GTA's look like their console originals.

 

[gastd]

That's a difficult question I have no idea whether something like this will have a future because it's not entirely legal.