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Keatah

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Posts posted by Keatah

  1. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    I like emulators, but there's nothing like physically plugging in a cartridge. It's a part of the experience, much like the sound & feel of a coin going into an arcade machine.

     

    Some of the magic comes in the circuitry switching from an off-state to powered on. For brief microsecond you get all sorts of randomness and noise and garbled video as the power propagates through the board and circuits go from an off state to an oscillating state. It very quickly settles into 'the game'. This is known as the yerkeses moment. Not to be confused with yerkeses syndrome, which is a subset of OCD for collecting old videogame crap.

     

     

     

    Looks like a lot of emulation going on these days.

     

    Interesting.

     

    There is nothing interesting or surprising about it.. Emulation will grow in popularity if not by choice then by necessity - for the reason I previously stated about about degrading hardware.

  2. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    Yeh, I went through several of those phases. They come and go over the years. It's fun to sell the crap for more money than you initially paid. There's always a 'collector' ready to bite. Ultimately you'll end up with emulation, as will everyone else on the board. There will come a point in time the hardware is so rare (due to malfunctions and no replacements) that emulation will be the only thing left. Plastics and seals degrade, metal corrodes, electrolytics dry up, chip dies grow whiskers, joystick cables fray internally, repeated power on/offs blast electronics with spikes, manuals turn yellow, components fall out of tolerance, thermal expansion and contraction cause fractures in solder joints, switches get noisy, connectors get loose, flashroms experience bit-rot, no backup devices for console hardware..

     

    When your pc fails you simply move the data to a new one. You cannot do that with original hardware!

  5. Posted

    For all the folks complaining that emulation doesn't deliver the real experience, exactly what is the seemingly ineffable quality that is lost? Is it the physical presence of the old hardware and processor? Knowing you got a 1mhz cpu plugging away? The noise of the cart when you stuff it in the machine? The smell and feel of the old plastics? What *IS* it?

  6. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    somebody wrote--

     

    Then, consider the games. Obviously, you can pick out examples like Space Invaders 2 or Asteroids where it would be plain as day that you're running emulation. But what about more simplistic games like Pac-Man? Would someone really beable to tell? What advanced characteristics does it have that could possibly be distinguishable?

     

     

     

    I say--

     

    The code and timing is pretty much spot-on. But, the distinguishing characteristics have to do with the monitor refresh rates, crt phosphor masking, dot shape, color saturation and bleed, random electronic noise, less than perfect sound (hissing and electrical noise), crt burn-in, crt phosphor persistence.

     

    The only emulator I know that does a halfway decent job of emulating the 'crappy fuzzy output' of an old crt is the Atari 800 2.1.0 windsl emu. This is great! And If mame would pick up SDL for doing a low-quality crt then we'd all be a huge step closer to the arcade experience.

     

    You have got to see the noisy ntsc scanlines, the artifacting, the blurriness. Mame doesn't even come close..! And stella is too sterile too!

  11. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    It is always good to exceed the voltage a little, you have a 9v circuit, 16 is a healthy safe margin. And why not put a bunch of 'lytic caps in parallel to get up to your 8000uF or whatever. Look up the formula and do the math! It works.. That cap looks like a big-ass filter, so s'smore uF ain't gonna hurt. Lesser Farads would make for a most noisy 9v output!

     

    yahp.. goferit!

  12. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

     

    Yehp, I had a Samsing 204B Flatscreen 1600x1200 monitor, and it sometimes took forever to power-up. And in the process of doing so it would flicker and sputter and sometimes the onboard logic would lockup. So I figured Samsung used shitty components in this particular model. The inverter circuit had CapXon electrolytics, the cheapest out there. The caps were creating noise (or not filtering it out) and this caused execessive noise in the faraday cage housing the display interface chip. (the absolutely brilliant Genesis GM5766af-aa from STmicroelectronics, it has *the* best resolution scaling in the industry). In addition, the caps weren't letting the inverter oscillator firm-up, resulting in sagging lumen emission. The caps were swollen hard and bulging, and upon removal I found them to be a couple uF short of the looney bin. So I got some nice new shiney muscular Nichicons and put them suck'rs right in. You could feel the heft when I put leads in the pcb via holes during repair. My monitor is now slap-happy bright and spurts right up eagerly when requested to do so, to be sure. It blows bright pixels right in my face.. Colors once again ooze forth in copious amounts. I mean it powers up immediately. And the supply seems to run cooler than it did, even when new. Upon further research, CapXon had stolen the electrolytic formula but didn't get the whole jobber down on pat. A somewhat less common failmode of caps is pre-fail leakage. But these CrapXon caps deteriorated and got noisy and weak. Just like your old car.

     

     

    Howdy-har take charge of electrical filtration & pollution, take apart all your electronic stuff and inspect the caps. You get a bonus if you use a real DMM with capacitance functionality!!

  17. Posted

    Women will not date you on the merits of your game collection. If you are single and make it known you're a classic game collector your chances of bagging her are definitely lower. guaranteed. been there done that. Ask any woman!

     

    Don't go telling me ohh my wife, girl, squeeze loves it, they don't. They might humor you for a while, but they ain't with you because of it.

  20. Posted

    All that and no one remembered crashing systems and failing hard drives. :roll: I'm glad not everyone sees things this way or there wouldn't be an Atariage or ebay auctions full of games and accessories. I don't care about emulation. It's ridiculous to worry or talk about the so-called bit rot. What your talking about won't likely happen till were all dead and gone. That's not for us to worry about. And as for smelly :rolling: i don't want to know how you take care of your equipment but all of mine is in great shape and will last me long after emulation has been replaced with something else. Just another damn fad.

     

    Oftentimes we tend to denounce things we don't understand. I assure you, emulation is not a fad. It is a natural evolution. There is little profit in emulation. Many fads are born from the desire to make a ton of money fast. Or a desire to make a statement of sort. Emulation is neither. It is based on need. The need to have classic games preserved, the need to have them readily available at a moments notice. The need to keep them safe & sound in a nice spit-polished modern-day hard disk. There is absolutely nothing glorious or worthwhile to the betterment of humanity in worshiping cardboard boxes designed to attract your attention in such a way as to cause you to 'donate' some of your personal power to a large corporation by giving them money to buy their products. <- run-on sentence. Collecting boxes and hunks of plastic tells me you're stuck and narrowly fixated and that you can't see the deeper purpose of Emulation. Most collectors are so messed up in the head, they ruminate over and over apply self-importance to the oddest lot of things. Emulation let's you experience that psychotic rumination and keep it to yourself. It lets you be strange without having to tell the whole world you are! Well, I digress..

     

    Good usage practices would entail you have multiple backups of anything important, whether it be your EMULATION collection or your diary or digital photos. There's going to be a point in time when the last Atari2600 is turned off and it won't power up again. Emulation will be there to save the day. The "experience" of not 100% duplicating the original is as only as important as the person who remembers it. And emulation will allow a whole new generation to build those "experiences", if even in a slightly different way than the original. Imho, Emulation is the perfect balance between longevity and accuracy. There is a trade-off in everything.

     

    There is nothing so important that we can't afford to drop a few details here in there in exchange for preserving these games. After all, how do you preserve the arcade smell and ambiance? You can't really, unless you build another arcade from the ground up! How do you preserve the 80's attitudes. You don't really. All you can do is remember them.

     

    I have seen plenty of so-called 'clean' arcade cabinets, only to open them up and remove lesser-lifeforms and their makeshift dwellings.

     

    Perhaps bit-rot is not too big a problem. I suppose that was coined by somebody trying to make a name for themselves.

     

    All in all, when the last classic console dies, emulation will still be around. You can count on it!

  25. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    I would rather have 97% of perfection(original hardware) than 100% original hardware. As the virtual hardware will be around here for a far far longer time. And if needed, you'll be able to emulate the hardware which runs the emulators - as systems move away from the x86 platform, for example..

     

    Who cares about numbers and 6000 games in mame, or 10,000 for that matter, it's just a number. I have about 150 classics carefully emulated and configured. Yeh, that's a good thing.

     

    Emulation is the natural evolution. Emulation will be around when the originals develop hardware problems and plastic decay. Bit rot could eventually claim those systems. Cracked wiring, dried-up capacitors, plastic parts getting brittle. Everything! And now with the ntsc filters in place emulation is even closer to the 'dirty' non-crisp output of monitors or yore.

     

    We didn't have emulation then because we weren't able to build systems that could handle that. We need emulation more now than ever. Afterall, it is through emulation that the kids can play the likes of centipede and defender and gyruss and tempest and hundreds of other classics.

     

    Cost has nothing to do with chosing emulation over the original hardware. You see -- the time spent *correctly* setting up the emulators often is quite extensive. That time could be spent elsewhere making money. So while it is cheap on the pocketbook, on the surface, you will see it is anything but. Then there is the initial outlay of storage devices and a correct computer, with the correct software. So it's a matter of where you put the money, into buying hardware, or spending time setting up stuff. As modern business says, time is money!!

     

    I would rather not clutter up a nice stone and crystal house with rickety, smelly, gaudy, unreliable videogame hardware. That's for the garage experimenters and hackers. Emulation filters out the garbage and brings the essence of the games through. It reaches back in time and pulls the game forward to you today. And with every revision of emulator software, the reach is a little stronger, a little more complete. Anyone can go out and buy videogame consoles and cabinets, but not everyone can correctly configure emulation software and build a library that is accessible and comprehensive (in history, images, documentation, software, etc) Emulation is definitely high-class. Fine. Elegant. It is the way the upper-class experiences the classics. And rightly so!

     

    And last but not least, emulated games will not suffer from bit-rot, they won't deteriorate, colors won't wash out, cases won't turn yellow, monitors won't get weak.. And *ANYONE* can enjoy them, anytime, anyplace!

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