Early Video Game Emulation was Weird 

...and this is what I get for buying a Scott The Woz DVD from Wish.

I remember when PS2 emulation was like single digit framerate for like the longest time until there was a huge leap after it got multicore support

I was a teen in the 90s and got pretty into the emulation scene, and boy was it funny to play early SNES emulation: missing colors, no transparency, and occasionally completely screwed-up sound.

I've been around since the beginning of modern emulation. I was there when nesticle dropped and still remain friends with Hellbent. UltraHLE was mind blowing and I had some great conversations with realityman. I even got really close with Randy from Bleem and I'm credited as a QA tester in the Bleem software package that was sold in stores. Great video man.

The joke of loving emulation with Scott's background was genius.

Games releasing on a single platform back then wasn't due to programner skills. Programmers back then generally had to be more versatile than they are today. It was because much more games were developed in house, and third party developers often had exclusivity agreements.

I've been following emulation since 1999. It's been interesting to see how even emulators like Snes9X have evolved to shift from HLE (high level emulation) and using tons of hacks, to LLE (low level emulation) to simulate hardware accurately for near flawless compatibility.

Emulation is what got me into retro gaming. It basically keeps games alive. For example, earthbound would just be an unknown snes title from the early 90s if people couldn't play it via other means. I know Nintendo isn't making money of that file I downloaded, but they sure as shit aren't seeing a penny off that copy off ebay.

Ahh, the year 2000 and discovering the world of emulation with Nesticle. Was really exciting to be able to play the old classics.

In addition to Nesticle and Genecyst, there was also the similarly horribly named "Callus" which did Capcom CPS1 emulation. What I feel bears special mention about these emulators was that they were heavily optimised in assembly in order to hit native speeds on modest hardware at the time. Emulation in the early days was merely proof of concept - the idea that a PC could do Mario at 60fps WITH SOUND was a pipe dream (pun not intended.) But naturally when a challenge appears, so too do people to take up said challenge and while other emulators could claim the titles of being first, Nesticle is the one that I say really deserves the accolade for being so accessible. Snes9x was an arguably better piece of software than ZSNES, but ZSNES ran on toasters where S9X needed you to spend more money. Similarly Bleem was a masterwork in optimisation. Running playstation games at full speed on commodity Win9x hardware was a sight to behold. Nowadays we burn CPU cycles for accuracy because we can and we want it to be as close to the real thing as possible but back in the 90s, final fight in callus was a lot more playable than in mame and well, accuracy is nice but playable is better.

I remember PS3, WiiU, Switch, and Xbox360 emulation going from essentially a malware campaign, with emulation sites having banners atop their homepages telling users that emulation for those systems does not exist yet, and anyone saying they have a working emu for those systems is lying / scamming. And then it seems like a year later we had absolutely wild developments on emulation for those systems and now owning those consoles is totally unnecessary.

Bleem had something even more crazy, namely, Bleemcast, which emulated Ps2 games on the Dreamcast. You could buy their discs in stores. I remember seeing Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo 2.

great video my friend! i just downloaded the ps2 and GC emulators this weekend and having not played with emulators since 06-07 I was fucking blown away how well they run on my mac mini. Me and my buddy had a blast playing battlefront 2 on the couch splitscreen, in smooth 1080p with our ps5 controllers. I've spent more time playing emulators and old games than my PS5 for a couple months lately and I'm having WAY more fun. Keep up the videos!

Bleem even had a Dreamcast port! Yup, you could play some PS1 games on the Dreamcast! Even Gran Turismo 2 ran pretty well and looked better than on the PS1!

What a memory... Playing WaveRace 64 with 3dfx splash screen as intro. Epsilon & RealityMan, thanks for your work. We love you....

Thumbs up for the Scott emulation

I wish all emulators had to adopt the Bloodlust Software naming formula. Then we’d have the Philips STI, and the Nintendo Gamepube

One thing I think you failed to mention that probably is the reason for Nintendo's attitude towards emulation (and why emulation these days is pretty cut and dry) is the licensing of emulators. Nowadays these great emulators are open source, often GPL. This means that evryone can contribute to *ONE* project and if Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or another company wants to re-release their old games for modern hardware, they could just use the open source emulator to run their old games. Back in the day, emulators were either closed source or if the source code was public, it was released under a no commercial use licence. This is why emulation is so heavily associated with piracy, because back then piracy was pretty much the only use emulators allowed under their licence. Companies couldn't use the emulator to sell *THEIR OWN GAMES* (something that bit Capcom in the backside when they released the Capcom Home Arcade) Retroarch still hold onto this attiude (despite licensing their code under the GPL which explicitly goes against that licence Retroarch are good at violating their own licence but that's another story)

Scott the Woz on the real hardware vs Scott the Woz on the slow inaccurate emulator.

Awesome video!

Fantastic video with really great production quality, thank you :3

Hey this is a good channel Good video,I remember those days,I remember trying all those emulators back in the day when they first come out.

Thanks for the video. That “hey y’all” at the start emulates Scott the Woz.

Great channel, glad to be a part of it so early. Definitely will pop off

NO$GMB allowed me to play Pokémon Red, Gold, etc. Thanks to ZSNES, I could play Super Mario World and enjoy the Donkey Kong Country games. KGen let me enjoy the Sonic games. VisualBoy Advance opened the door for my favourite games ever (like Golden Sun, Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire, etc.). I owe a lot of my enjoyment as a kid to emulators.

Nice vid mate love it

Hey Logan...its Logan...thanks for making this video, i've been emulating for that last 20 years and it blows my mind most people don't know how to do this

Hi Logan keep up the great work! Sincerely, the Guys at Mac Yak!

Subscribed! I love emulation.

The OUYA was at the time a nice emulation device IMO especially with built in touch pad support on the controller face.

No mention of Connectix Virtual Game Station?? I played PSX games on my original iMac with that. Didn't even own the console and I was able to enjoy Jet Moto 3 and Castlevania Symphony of the Night thanks to that emulator. They were likewise driven out of that business by Sony's legal shenanigans, though. But that company made great emulators in general. They developed Virtual PC for the Mac, and Microsoft eventually bought them out to get that software.

NESticle & Genecyst were Awesome! I was the 80s/90s nerd of the group: Nesticle was on everything, I also learned how to Hardwire 4 controllers to the Parallel Port!

Great video! Im glad i found this channel

First time seeing your channel! I loved it and subscribed keep up the amazing work.

Informative and entertaining, very well made video!

as someone who was there when it was new it was pretty amazing to play any game up to PlayStation at the time. Finding a comfortable controller was tough though. The gravis ultrapad was finicky but then the Microsoft Sidewinder pad made it to USB so that offered most of the buttons necessary. But then someone made a USB dongle that converted your PlayStation controller into a gamepad for the PC and boom - the best emulation experience until companies started making recreations of official gamepads. One of the reasons why I started collecting physical games was because of the inaccuracy and feel. But for a while, a modded OG xbox could play up to n64 and that was all you needed.

Oh man the way you shoved that optical drive shut hurt my heart bro 😔

You got my sub within the first 20 seconds

Thumbnail drew me in… excellent video you’re going to go far you’ll probably surpass me before you know it ❤️ keep up the good work and you have a new subscriber 👍

Glad I found your channel

Surprised to see you dont have more subs! Great content :) subbed

Emulation was such a good invention

This is such an interesting video, so well-made that I couldn't believe this is from a channel with only 1.9k subs. Remember me when you are big!

I remember selling floppy disks at school with the GB emulator + a couple of games that would fit.

Nesticle and Genecyst were my best friends when I had my 486 (my first PC, about 20ish years ago) things have come a loooong way. Nice history and summary

Nice vid, subbed.

You forgot to mention that an emulation scene did exist already on the Amiga before Windows 95... PC-Task, Shapeshifter, AmiMasterGear, Gameboy68000...

GOOD VIDEO, SCOTT WITH BOWL HAIRCUT. THANK YOU MUCH

I love emulation!! I can't get enough of it!! Sometimes I just download a bunch of emulators and roms for different systems just to prove that I can play those games, and then I never end up doing a full playthrough because I'm too busy messing with literally every other game in the series on every console it ever released on (like I've been doing with Zelda recently) I think I might have a problem o.o

The first emulator I ran was a windows (x86) emulator on my Silicon Graphics machine. That was so bizar. Then later I myself wrote a simulator to run PDP-11 software on the DEC Alpha. Rather out of necessity because we’d lost the code base after 12 or 15 years and we wanted to replace the massive PDP-11 since we brought in two massive GS140s that could both fit in that same rack. Doing that for the PDP-11 was straight forward. It has a very clear and limited instruction set. And we didn’t use the disk subset only a host of serial ports, it was a measurement and control system. So implementing that on Unix in the emulator was trivial. I think the whole project took me 4 weeks. I recall that getting the software of the PDP-11 was the trickiest part.

I used to run your typical emulators, but basically stopped after I modded my OG Xbox with CoinOPS which includes a vast library of games complete with normal console games and even raw dumped arcade ports... saves a ton of time just having everything all in one bundle.

My first NES emulator was nester in 1999 and I first found out about emulation from a gaming magazine.

When I first discovered mame i was blown away! It was almost 20 years ago and i couldn't believe i could play all those amazing arcade games on my PC

Didn't necessarily have to use the Playstation CDs with Bleem! because the creation of ISOs and mounting existed at the time.

I love rpcs3 for playing my completely legal copy of rock band 3!

loved the intro, instant sub

i wouldn't have got into video games if it wasn't for emulation, my family couldn't afford stuff so being able to play a lot of mega drive and super nintendo games o gens and snes9x was really good, then there was pj6, visual boy advance, these were great times

1:27 hilarious detail is that like your example, final fantasy VII, is one of the few games that DID get a windows release back in the day! :P xD

In before Nintendo sends you a cease and dissist.

1:31 Bloodlust Software NES Emulator

Early emulation fascinates me, considering how archaic hardware, software and the internet was in the mid 90s.

Sub earned. Such a quality video. You seem to be a great a t fit for video.....and speaking. Well done.

You almost being Scott scared the shit out of me

Nice vid lad

I love emulation! I always say that if a game isn’t readily available/reasonably priced, you should emulate it

Thumbs up for the ushanka! ⚒️

A few inaccuracies here, in 1997 people were using windows 95 and Bleem eventually wan the lawsuit via an appeal. Bleem was owned by the major company called Connectix and never went out of business due to the court costs they just got tired and sold all of the Bleem assets including an upcoming successor to Sony as a settlement between both Sony and Connectix

I first played through Super Mario 64 on my Windows 98SE machine back around 2000 or 2001…Corn64. It would only run in a tiny window, so small I couldn’t even read the onscreen text. lol

damn, Scott is looking diferent today

"You don;t even need a PC!" Immediately shows a handheld PC 🤣 I knew most of this information already but still a nice watch.

FunCoLand sold copies of Bleemcast! They were a series of discs designed to run one specific PlayStation game on Dreamcast, i.e. the Gran Turismo 2 version of Bleemcast! would only run Gran Turismo 2. The disc had to first be loaded upon startup, then the original game swapped in. What fun times those were. When Sony threatened to pull all Sony products if FunCoLand continued to sell them, I remember them still carrying Bleemcast! but just stopped advertising that they carried it. I was a very curious kid and would ask all sorts of questions to the staff who I'm sure thought I was a little weirdo. Anyway, great video!

Man, I remember playing Pokemon gold back when there was no English version out yet through emulation with a very early English patch applied. I also played some GBA games through emulators as well because we couldn't afford a real GBA at the time. I remember when I finally got one I was shocked at the true speed that the games actually ran at and realizing my PC at the time was really struggling to run the games. Good times.

The nocash emulator was used by some licensed developers, and was said to be the sole reason they were able to implement some of their features.

That was a great history! Well done. Although none of the strikes me as "weird."

Bleem was basically identical to playing on the console for most games.

I remember being 10-11 years old and downloading zsnes... Transparencies didn't work, sound emulation was wack, didn't support CX4 chip... good ol days

At 6:28 you mention "somewhat legal status". Can you go into detail on why you feel it's "somewhat" legal?

Didn't the nocash Gameboy emulator (NO$GMB) come before Nesticle?

You forgot to mention the totally WILD moment when Steve Jobs showed commercial Playstation emulation on a G3 iMac at WWDC back in 98 or 99...

"hey y'all" got the reference

0:45 that is a great idea for an rom hack LOL

I remember when bleem was being sold I bought a copy before they were pulled from stores

Oh my god zophars still exists... I used to go there as well back then it was a site a found around a little afterwards around 2000

I emulate my games in mobile devices, currently the s23 ultra. Not only can it emulate too the ps2 and switch now, but with sex you can play these games upscale wired or wireless on any tb and monitor with any controller. It's just insane. And you can do. Everything else on it too. Currently use a switch pro controller on my s23 with wireless dex

Bleem! was way way too ahead for its' time. Also, I like how it required you to have PS1 CDs in order to play them instead of an ISO (which, at the time, was hard to come by).

Imagine all the missed opportunities after NES-ticle... Gene-tal. P-Snes.

I still remember an early translation of Final Fantasy III (NES, Japan) specifically stating in game text, “DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME IN NESTICLE” when playing on a Pentium 1, in NESticle. Either the translation was borked, or it was truly incompatible with it as the translation got progressively worse as you played and became symbol gibberish.

I think my most played Emulators are Dolphin for Windows, My Old Boy! and My Boy! for Android. I kind of want to check out the Orange Pi 800 and check out Retro Arch with Android 12. I love Keyboard PC'S. ❤😊

Callus/RAINE/ZSNES/Magic Engine/Bleem happy memories 😊

a cool thing about Bleem was the Dreamcast port, allowing to play PS1 games (the actual legit cd) on a rival console displayed with better graphics than PS2 own native backward compatibility was amusing

My first experience was in the early 2000s when i found a PS1 disc on the street. It just lay there, so mine it was. I figured out quickly that there was this PSEmu Pro and it was an absolute TORTURE to get it to run semi reliably but hey i got that disc running. What was it? I think some Ridge Racer, i don't remember. I quickly moved onto Breath of Fire 4 and played a good chunk of that. Soon after, ePSXe came out and that was much smoother and less finicky. EJ's GPU plugin was one of those things that especially impressed me, reaching full speed in software rendering on a Pentium MMX 200 laptop.

good video

Nesticle and GeneCyst were pretty amazing back then, but I feel like you're skipping a bit. In the early to mid 90s, there already were emulators to play Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Gameboy games on your PC.

Funny thing is depite being significantly better than consoles at games since the mid 90's Pc gaming never really took off till the 7th gen, by 2004 sure you had half life 2 doom3 and a few other but thats really all you had EVERYTHING was on console then for whatever reason in 2006 all of a sudden devs started making games on pc then using the dev kits to port them after the fact leading to a huge rise in games available on pc. I should note valve making steam a requirement for half life 2 and the very existence of steam in general absolutely helped spear head this movement. Now in the year of our lord 2024 people at large are finally starting to move over to gaming pc's realizing theyre a wiser investment over console ironically killing the pc market by driving up prices 100% which is infact not an exaggeration infact its an under exaggeration the number is closer to 129%

Well, Dolphin's in hot water now, since they kinda hard-coded the Wii Public Key into the emulator

If you loved the name of that first emulator mentioned. There was a GameBoy one whose full name was Really A Pokemon Emulator. It tastelessly went by its initials.

I just got a great deal on the Eglobal Cheap Portable Mini PC i7 from Ali-Express. It has VGA for a 4:3 ratio Tube Monitor along side HDMI.

Seems like not too long ago I was playing MAME and NESticle

1:29 FF VII was released in PC in 1998, so I think you need another example, maybe the different version of MechWarrior 2?

I first discovered emulation with no$gmb a free gameboy emulator and pokemon red and blue in 1998