I ask because I decided to try out PCSX2 for the first time in many years today and was blown away by things like the resolution scaling.
When I first started using emulators having save states and the ability to rewind in GBA blew me away.
I am wondering what features, added by emulators, you really appreciate or would make going back to the original console difficult? Are there any emulators you’d highly recommend to a friend who is into retro gaming but never really tried out emulation?
Are there some emulated consoles that don’t quite have the feature set of the native experience? For example I haven’t tried out Xenia but I know a bit about the history of 360 emulation and why it’s lagged behind (Modern Vintage Gamer I believe has a decent video on this I’d link if I wasn’t on mobile). Is it missing some key or quality of life features?
Thought this could be a fun Friday discussion for this community
We’ve got some good examples of emulators, so I’ll share some examples where the originals are better.
DC, DS, 3DS, and WiiU (especially) because of the inability to give the dual-screen experience that these consoles offer.
Yes, the DS and 3DS can emulate the touch screen with your mouse, or maybe even a touchscreen monitor. But your controls are still going to be on a separate device the majority of the time.
The DC has its VMUs, which were often doing something related to the game you were playing. In Sonic Shuffle (Mario Party but Sonic and cards instead of dice), it actually showed your hand. It was an interesting mechanic, because players could choose cards from ANY player’s hand…and the VMUs were the only way to see which card was what.
The WiiU would probably need to be able to emulate onto a tablet for a lot of the games that utilized it well to work as originally intended.