/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.8094786]

Why aren't game companies developing emulators for their retro consoles? They have the most complete documentation and the manpower to pull it off as perfectly as possible. Then, make it a subscription based service. Sure they'd lose some of their profit to piracy, but I doubt it wouldn't be enough to cover the development budget. Plus, they could benefit from the market reach.

[Anonymous No.8094802]

Uh, they do?

[Anonymous No.8094828]

>>8094802
>chinese ARM "console"
Can't they make a storefront, like steam or google play store? Also genesis emulation is virtually perfect, couldn't they emulate the saturn instead?

[Anonymous No.8094845]

>>8094828
>genesis emulation is virtually perfect
Genesis is one of the better examples of emulation that is definitely not perfect.

[Anonymous No.8094848]

>>8094786
Existing emulators are fine, fuck off.

[Anonymous No.8094849]

>>8094802
Game companies don't develop emulators; they just use emulators made by the community.

>>8094786
So many reasons. For one, no matter how much documentation you have, getting software emulation to perform well is a monumental task for anything more complicated than a SNES. They might have the manpower, but not the incentive. For two, licensing agreements. Nintendo isn't free to just re-sale any NES game because it was sold on NES, they have to re-negotiate with the owner, and likewise the game owners, if they wanted to release the emulated NES version and not a re-compiled version, would need NES copyright agreements. And why would they put any serious effort into that kind of thing when most people just emulate anyway. You can't sell Duck Tales NES to very many people, but make an HD remake and you have plenty of people buying.

[Anonymous No.8094851]

>>8094845
>Genesis
Very few good games anyways, Anon.

[Anonymous No.8094852]

>>8094786
>how do we compete with piracy? make our own premium emulator that's 100% accurate?
>nah just find one on the internet we can get away with using for free

[Anonymous No.8094857]

>>8094828
What you're describing literally already exists: https://store.steampowered.com/app/34270/SEGA_Mega_Drive_and_Genesis_Classics/
I doubt any of these titles sell well enough to be worth Sega (for example) spinning up their own "SegaNet 2.0" app or whatever when stuff like Steam and EGS exist.
That said, Nintendo killing virtual console was a mistake, although many retro games are available in standalone form on the retro eshop. Although I guess it wasn't a mistake from a business perspective if Nintendo can get their retard fans to re-buy games they already bought.
Also >buying roms

[Anonymous No.8094862]

>>8094786
Isn't that literally Switch Online?

[Anonymous No.8094867]

>>8094852
You should have emulated using a PC instead of buying this (or an actual PSX).

[Anonymous No.8094871]

also the other issue is, because of licensing concerns, corporate censorship etc,. having an up to date emulator and a full rom-set of whatever platform you want is ALWAYS going to be a superior experience to things which the companies can legally sell. loads of games are essentially unlicensable at this point because the publishers dont exist anymore or have gone through multiple subsequent mergers and splits

[Anonymous No.8094907]

>>8094852
How much is one of these now? Can you mod it to be a decent sbc computer at least

[Anonymous No.8094919]

>>8094867
>it's another useless mini console but it runs a freeware emulator nobody uses because it's crap and it doesn't even run the included selection of games correctly
Of course I didn't buy it. I don't know who would pick that up for full price besides clueless dudebros who played PS1 in college while smoking a lot of weed and wanted to remember the good old days for a few minutes.

[Anonymous No.8095016]

>>8094786
They're called Playstation Classics (not the mini console) and Virtual Console/Switch Online.

[Anonymous No.8095060]

>>8094786
The big three companies already do this and it's a fucking disaster compared to what fans have already accomplished over the years. Also, what's stopping you from buying officially-released classic games on digital storefronts now? I'll tell you, for what they're selling you, you can get a better experience for fucking free.

[Anonymous No.8095078]

>>8094862
>>8095060
>>8094857
>emulators of consoles that already have fully working open source emulators
What's the point?

[Anonymous No.8095086]

>>8094786
Kill yourself
>>8094828
Kill yourself
>>8094851
kill yourself twice

[Anonymous No.8095103]

>>8095078
Don't get me wrong (I'm >>8094857) I fully agree with you. I think there's value in say, stuff like M2's port of Virtua Racing to Switch, but for the most part I'm not interested in paying for 20 year old roms. Emulators are more convenient, free, and nearly always better than what the companies come up with.

[Anonymous No.8095190]

>>8095103
What they need to make are high speed and accurate saturn and N64 emulators. They have the documentation for them, and people should be free to play any ROM file they want by paying for a monthly subscription, like the virtual console.

[Anonymous No.8095221]

>>8094907
>$50
why? i thought everyone universally hated these

[Anonymous No.8095227]

Xbox has emulators of the previous gens for the newest Xbox.

[Anonymous No.8095232]

>>8094786
>They have the most complete documentation and the manpower to pull it off as perfectly as possible.
Actually, most Japanese up until the mid PS2 days would habitually throw away the source code after a game got released. Because
A) It was part of their culture as craftsmen and artisans to start over from scratch to build the thing better. They didn't really understand that the code was the tool moreso than the product.
B) Worries of company espionage would cause them to throw it away.

That's a major reason why the Silent Hill collection was such unmitigated ass, and a large reason why HD remasters/ports in general are handled by some third-party company and come out lacking in many aspects. It's some dudes trying to reverse engineer shit by hand.

[Anonymous No.8095261]

I mean... They literally do? What do you think Nintendo runs it's roms on? On Nintendo online or virtual console on Wii/wiiU/3DS? On nes and SNES mini?

[Anonymous No.8095267]

>>8095261
I have a friend who refuses to think of these things as emulation on the same level as downloading zsnes or some shit. No matter what I say, 'its different' so they always buy these nintendo re-release

[Anonymous No.8095382]

>>8094867
I bought 2 of them at $25 just for the controllers.

[Anonymous No.8095505]

>>8094849
this guy knows. license crap is nuts. it is why so many older games don't get ported. everyone wants to play them but the dev teams want to get payed. hard to make everyone happy at the table.

[Anonymous No.8095542]

>>8094786
Nintendo does. Their in-house emulator is called Canoe, and it's wildly inferior to both higan and modern releases of snes9x. Sony just threw PCSX-ReARMed on binned 4k fire stick SOCs that weren't up to spec, and put them in a chinese shitbox. Sega hired M2 to create a fairly slapdash genesis emulator, but still much higher quality than, say, what capcom has shit all over the scene with their emulated offerings.

[Anonymous No.8095685]

>>8094786
>Why aren't game companies developing emulators for their retro consoles?
What do you think Virtual Console was

[Anonymous No.8096492]

>>8094786
Because things everyone in the world except you knows about don't exist?

[Anonymous No.8096525]

>>8095542
>Sega hired M2 to create a fairly slapdash genesis emulator
You are correct, but I'd just like to point out that M2's emulator (M2engage) isn't just a fairly slapdash genesis emulator, it's actually fairly slapdash multi-system emulator.
It also emulates:
>various arcade boards
>Game Boy Advance
>Sega Master System
>Game Gear
>PC engine/TurboGrafx-16

[Anonymous No.8097459]

>>8094786
they make their emulators but are only for development purposes (watermelon games got one of sega for megadrive and for free yet fonize fucked everyone even sega even when the deal was "we give you the emulator but your game should be able to work on the sega megadrive collection for PC")
For example if some coder can port the emulators sony made for ps1,ps2,psp available on the firmware of ps3 you would get the best emu for those consoles without needing high requirements and would be accurate (just use rpcs3 to decrypt the firmware and then you would get all the emus)
Nintendo is the same nintendo made emulator for gamecube,DS,gba to port those games to newer consoles.

[Anonymous No.8097493]

>>8094849
I mean what do you expect?

>whoops we can't rerelease your favorite obscure SFC RPG because the publisher went out of business in 1999 and we don't know who owns it anymore
>even if we did we wouldn't offer it because we're trying to milk nostalgia from NPCs and unless your name is Kenji you didn't play this game when it was new and have no nostalgia for it
>besides, supposing we did rerelease it on emulation we'd have to translate it which takes time and money and then censor it to remove that transsexual boss in the Ice Dungeon because xe is an offensive trans people stereotype

[Anonymous No.8098960]

>>8096525
Good clarification, thanks anon.

[Anonymous No.8099003]

>>8094852
>tfw they already had pops/popstation which was pretty much their own excellent in-house emulator
>throw it all away for garbage
it hurts.