by marurun Thu Aug 20, 2020 10:07 am
I'm going to argue there are important advantages to original hardware. But whether those advantages are at all compelling is 100% personal opinion.
First, while not all graphic designers were as conscientious, the good graphics folks designed their pixel art for CRTs. CRTs have a certain amount of pixel blur that can help smooth lines and blur colors, especially when there's dithering and gradients. Many pixel artists of the time took advantage of this. Further, CRTs change resolution extremely rapidly, and a few games relied on this as well. The Sega Genesis and to an extent the Saturn as well counted on CRT blur to make the "screen door" effect look more like transparency, similar to how CRT blur smooths dithering. So between smoothing pixel edges and blending colors, much pixel art is designed to look its best on a CRT. Emulators have a variety of filters to help, well, emulate this CRT filtering, but it's very hard to get that looking correct, and the more advanced the filter the less likely a lower-power emulation box can use it, leaving some folks stuck with crappy filters instead.
Input lag is another issue. While it doesn't present a problem on PC-based emulators running on PCs (usually), it definitely presents a problem on the Mini consoles and even on collections on Switch, PS4, and Xbox. Essentially, the most common and accessible emulation options for most people introduce additional input lag as part of emulation. Additionally, if you don't have an extremely low lag TV or monitor, your modern HD TV is also introducing lag. That means games won't feel as responsive, making it harder to play many of the games well and changing the feel of the action. Despite hyperbole to the contrary, I haven't found any games on any of my mini consoles to be truly unplayable, but I have found them to feel different, and to their detriment.
Last, and certainly not least, is that software emulation is truly not cycle accurate. This is probably the nit-pickiest point. I think there's a strong argument to be made that for many games and most players cycle accurate emulation isn't truly necessary, and I agree. But even though emulation these days is more than adequate enough for casual play, those who want to go for speed runs and records really need cycle accurate emulation. Basically, the lack of cycle accurate emulation means that many aspects of the game may have subtly different timing or behavior. Again, not an issue for most players, but for a few that is a problem. Music is one of those things most often affected by inaccurate emulation and cycle timing. The Sega Genesis in particular for some reason often suffers in emulation. The PC Engine also is often emulated slightly incorrectly, resulting in the noise channel being too loud. Those timing and behavior issues can also cause some games to fail altogether, requiring emulators to incorporate a bunch of special fixes and conditional hacks to ensure difficult games using undocumented chicanery will be able to run. This is why many people are really interested in FPGAs (hardware-based emulation), because you can essentially re-create the behavior of individual circuits and chips with more accurate timing. Emulators can also cause unpleasant surprises for people developing homebrew software, because they'll design and program a game doing most of their testing in an emulator, and then find that things don't work quite right on real hardware.
So yeah, software emulation, including mini consoles and console collections, are absolutely good enough for most players, even most players on here. But everyone has their own preferences. I think we shouldn't denigrate players based on how they prefer to play. I like to own original hardware and play on a CRT when I can, but I also like the convenience and accessibility of the mini consoles and modern console re-releases and collections. We're all extremely lucky that we have so many options for just how to play these games. We can pick the solution that's best for each of us.
