There is no doubt that emulation is crucial for historic preservation. The question is: what exactly we're preserving?

The famous MAME emulator approach is to emulate arcade games circuit by circuit: a no compromised and time-consuming approach for the sake of emulation accuracy. Replicating the original hardware via software is fully legal - what's not is running the exact software these machines were running in the arcades.

Final Burn instead offers a set of speed hacks for some emulated games: instead of cloning how the hardware works, speed hacks approximate just what the hardware did resulting in faster but less accurate emulation. Final Burn, together with more speed-hack emulators, is the fortune of many Chinese hardware producers since allows to cheap portable console and desktop arcade machines to run great glories from the past - even a dozen of different systems on the same machine.

Okay. Not without one or two copyright infringements - but probably not in the motherland, which lived few turbulent years of video game bans.

Emulation of old games is not a problem at all today: there are a lot of solutions that work on common and even cheap machines - copyright apart. Even if you want to play by the rules there are official version of these knock-off consoles, which accurately resembles the original hardware but are limited to play just a few games of a single system-Unsurprisingly enough the thirst of retrogaming is so unstoppable that you can even break these limits with few hacks and turn these games back to their original cheap console glory and play more systems.

The need of preserving old games and the desire of playing them again burns. We're using all the software tricks and mastery we know to make hardware immortal. We are even mimicking the original shapes to make their ergonomy immortal. But that's not enough.

Old school pixel art was built for make use of old CRT displays imperfections and that's why most of the emulated games graphics looks dry on LCD displays. And even the audio is not the same: music and sound effects coming from the old speakers built-in into arcade cabinets sounded warmer than the one coming from modern sound systems. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg.

Experiencing old school gaming without its defects is like judging history without considering its context: we're just making up an alternate history.But fear not: there probably is no solution. Even if SEGA tried hard and used virtual reality in order to bring you to your old bedroom we can just give a glimpse of what old school gaming looked to newer generations... and a frustrating stripped down one to oldsters, now filled with preconceptions and fake memories.

Oh, sorry. I was missing the point.

We can emulate the people we respect tearing their life apart and trying hard on cloning it. Or we can fill our lives with speed-hacks and reach their same goals as fast as we can, even if the result isn't accurate. We can be a cheap copy their shape and then hack ourselves to be multiple persons. But that's not enough: even if we can fake our reality to be closer to our mentors', we're just dry interpretations of them which is missing the context.

The best we can do is to be their alternate history, which frustrates the oldsters and disappoints the youngsters. Inevitably becoming a brand new and ever-changing individual in the process - hoping to be badly emulated in the future.

Plot!

This time I've ported a Chip-8 interpreter, which was used on 1970s 8-bit microcomputers, using the Wright! Engine. Yeah - a Chip-8 interpreter described by a JSON file. While it's a pretty raw implementation and I've built-in just a few public domain game ROMs, this last but two entry is very important: the whole Wright! project has been inspired by years of emulations... and I'm closing my own circle with a true one.

On the game selector menu use UP/DOWN for changing game and the A BUTTON for playing it. Every game has its own controls but most of them are using UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT and the A BUTTON. Hold down A+B for a while to go back to the game selector.

(Want to share something? You can find me on Twitter!)

Install / Add to home View game sources ...or play it online below!