Emulated vs. Original format?

[Alucard1191]

So, I've been having a thought. Since many of the newer retro emulator systems have things like save states and HDMI compatibility, they're looking more and more like the way to play your old games. I absolutely adore playing my old games in their original format on my larger CRT TV. But there are certain things that in modern times I just can't look beyond. I'm going to take 3 of my all time favorite games here as examples.

1) Shining Force, (Genesis) the battles are long, so saving states is really nice, but more importantly, if you look at a character's exp and see they will level up their next attack, you can save your state, execute the attack, see what stats you get. Not happy with what you got? Reload your state and redo the attack. There are times I'll do this 8 or more times for a character. The points you gain vary far more than you'd think. I've made characters that are traditionally bad, like Hans the archer or Arthur the knight, very good. Playing this on the standard genesis cartridge with no suspend option (which shining force 2 and 3 have) and the totally random leveling up is tougher for me now. I've grown spoiled.

2) Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, (SNES) one thing only: the Ancient Cave side game. This is my favorite side quest/game of all time. Especially the gift mode that you can pick your characters. The issue? It takes 4+ hours to complete if you're going to try a run to floor 99. It simply isn't possible at this point in time for me to dedicate that much time in a single block to that. Save states make it actually playable to me.

3) Ogre Battle, (SNES) Two things here, save states since the battles can take awhile, and the 2nd thing is the 'speed up' button on emulators like ZSNES. I can no longer stand waiting there for your units to move at the speed that they do. I simply do not have the patience to play this game at the speed it played in the early 90's.

Are there any games that people out there prefer to play emulated? Or is it original format all the way, who cares about convenience?

[JWK]

Most RPGs (and Strategy RPGs) from back in the day benefit from save states, no question. By the end of the 16-bit era, game devs had realized how tedious it was to grind for an hour, get destroyed by a boss and then have to grind that hour again and hope for a better outcome with the boss. Save points were much more logically placed by that point. But earlier in the 4th generation and all through the 8-bit era, save points were tough to come by. Emulation providing save states is beyond helpful and it can be difficult to go back.

I have *five* CRTs in my game room and only one HD TV. Obviously, I like old school gaming the way it was meant to be played. But as time goes on, emulation is improving and I’m astounded at how faux scanlines on systems like the Retro Freak and Retron 5 (and Scanline Generators used on real consoles) make older games look incredible on modern TVs. Don’t knock it until you try it; for about the last 6 months, I do nearly all my retro gaming emulated (Retro Freak console) on an HD TV with fake scanlines and it’s pretty amazing. Way better than I thought it was going to be.

[DrLitch]

I am emulation as a preference my end - for all retro games that happen to be compatable. You mention save states - that is the killer app for me (good also for abusing, game too hard, save the instant before and after the hard bit). Another killer feature with some emulators are graphical enhancements, your game will no longer look like #%^& on an HD TV for instance. Some games clean up better than others of course.

A welcome aspect of emulation is you do not need to have a very high end PC or laptop to do it. 1st-5th generation consoles, you can emulate with any random cheap PC or Laptop. Easily. 6th Gen consoles like Dreamcast, PS2 and Gamecube run fine with 4G of RAM and a recent i3 processor common with lower spec PC's (heck even the Pentium G4560 works if you are going to emulate at native resolution. It is 70bucks). You also do not need to empty your wallet on a GPU thanks to the data mining craze - those intel HD graphics work fine for the most part.

For responsible use of emulators, owning the original hardware and software is highly recommended