Emulation is a Form of Time Travel

Many of us have dreamt of time travel in some form or another. And why not? You could be an eyewitness at crucial historical events, perhaps even change them? But as we’ve seen from many sci-fi stories (and what are sci-fi authors if not a type of prophet?), the risks far outweigh the benefits. However, there is a form of time travel accessible to us that is completely, AFAIK, safe. I would argue that emulation is a form of time travel.

What is emulation? Well, the idea is to recreate a system of some kind, whether that may be a game console (the general use case), or even a computer system or sometimes peripherals. Emulation is the action; an emulator is the medium through which you practice emulation. The word ultimately comes from Latin aemulari, “to rival or endeavor to equal or excel one, to emulate, vie with” (Lewis & Short). Related tothe verb is the adjective aemulus, -a, -um, “emulating, rivalling, envious,” which, as a substantive (noun use of the adjective) means “rival.” Apparently it’s related to Greek ἀμιλλάομαι (amillaomai), “to compete, vie, contend.” So an emulator “rivals” the original it is trying to replace or recreate.

My first experience with emulators was the celebrated, although now very rudimentary, NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) emulator NESticle (RIP). It ran on DOS and, for the time, worked very well. I grew up with the NES and SNES, so I’d played the originals, but if you’ve ever owned a NES, you’ll remember that they were unfortunately not very reliable. Cartridges were finicky, and many of us had the collective hallucination that blowing on the cartridges would do anything but rust out the chips and ruin them with our moist exhalations. But when they worked, they were lovely, and I have many fond memories of playing NES games. I got mine at 5 years old, and fell in love with it immediately, especially the Mario games. So being able to play those games on my computer, with no bugs, no blowing on the cartridges? Sign me up! I remember collecting a few ROMs and reliving my memories of a few years earlier. ROMs (Read-Only Memory) are a “dump,” or copy, of the program data from a game cartridge, ideally an exact copy of the cartridge, converted to a file format that emulators can play. I remember ROM sites would always say “only download this if you own the game” – a very thin veneer of legality, a flimsy apotropaic if there ever was one. Nintendo has always had a reputation of being extremely litigious about their IP, and they still are these days, from what I’ve heard (I haven’t bought anything Nintendo since the 3DS XL, which I still have and love, although it’s collecting dust).

I remember a friend visiting and staying over, too, and while I eagerly made him watch me play through all of Return to Zork, he then did me the favor of introducing me to SNES emulation on the computer. He showed me Final Fantasy VI in SNES9X, and I immediately thought it was the coolest thing ever. I had a SNES and adored Final Fantasy IV, but had never played VI, and was enthralled. SNES games were a little harder to come by initially, and also didn’t emulate super well on the computers of the day (again, this was the early- to mid-’90s), but worked well enough. And keep in mind that at first I was only using the keyboard, since I didn’t have a gamepad. So Select & Start were [ and ], respectively, and I think I used Ctrl & Alt for A & B, at least for NES. SNES was much harder to control on a computer, unfortunately. So once I started getting into gamepads in the coming years, that made emulation far, far easier. I remember getting a dongle to convert my PlayStation (PSX) controller to USB, and that opened up a lot of possibilities for computer gaming.

Just about any system can be emulated, but with wildly varying success. NES, Game Boy, SNES, PSX, and PS2 are all very well-supported these days. Even Wii and GameCube emulation work pretty well via the emulator Dolphin. Newer systems can be emulated as well, such as PS3 and PS4, even Wii U and Switch, but I think they require far more powerful computers to do so. With my laptop I haven’t done much beyond PS2, but Wii and GameCube work pretty well, honestly. The idea is that devoted programmers will research how a system works, figure out what it’s doing at a low level, and recreate the system in computer code. Sometimes BIOS dumps are involved. I’m amazed at how well people have recreated these systems; most emulators are extremely successful at what they do.

Sometime in the early 2000s I started focusing on emulators that provided greater accuracy and fidelity to the original systems. A lot of the original emulators, such as NESticle, ZSNES, and SNES9X, mostly worked fine, but often used speed hacks or cut corners to make emulation run at a reasonable speed. In around 2004, byuu (later known as Near) released the first iteration of their SNES emulator, called bsnes. This emulator focused on absolute accuracy, as if one were playing on an actual SNES console, but on the computer. The tradeoff was that it required a lot of computing power for frame-perfect accuracy, unfortunately, unlike other contemporary emulators. But speed was not a consideration, it was all subordinate to accuracy. For the most part, my computers over the years could handle bsnes, and I loved the experience. bsnes eventually was forked numerous times, and there was even the multi-system emulator higan, which has now morphed into ares, which even supports things like Game Boy Advance and Nintendo 64! I still use ares for its bsnes core; it’s lovely. And puNES is my emulator of choice for NES, I really think it is one of the best.

All that said, back to my original point. Emulation is a form of time travel. Emulation allows us to preserve systems that may no longer exist in the real world, for whatever reason (hardware no longer extant, &c.), allows us to continue to play the games almost as if the console were still around. Emulators are a wondrous form of game, hardware, and software preservation. Emulation is also reviled, understandably, by hardware, software, and game companies, because it takes their IP and makes it available in a different context. They lose control. They would much rather sell you the same game, repackaged, on systems year upon year (I’m looking at Nintendo in particular), and to hell with preservation. It doesn’t matter, it’s all ephemeral, release it and forget about it and buy the next thing. If you liked it once, you’ll buy it again, surely. And people do, real “shut up and take my money” vibes, because sometimes it’s just easier. Emulation is not always easy (although RetroArch, inter alia, has made great strides in that realm), and often people find it easier to just buy the latest iteration.

But I have an argument: emulation may have a steeper up-front cost, in that you need to figure out 1) how to emulate something (the emulator; attendant BIOS/system data), 2) where to find the games themselves (most suggest dumping them yourself, but plenty of places across the galaxy that is the internet will share their dumps), and 3) how to use the emulator itself. There are a number more steps than just slamming in a cartridge or disc and firing up the console. And again, if you want to play the latest and greatest game, or even a re-release of an older game, great! Nothing wrong with that. But if you’re a purist, want to have the original experience, as close to it as you can get without the actual console, then emulation is the way to go. You can go back and play old, nigh-forgotten Atari 2600 games, or arcade games. Games on systems you’ve only heard about, or may have seen sparing pictures of. The hackers and programmers doing the work to keep these memories alive are archivists, protectors of knowledge that should be available to all. Emulation is a public service. Emulation is preservation. Emulation is pure, genuine love.

Thanks for reading, friends <3