The Blessing and Bane of Emulators

With age comes nostalgia, and having grown up on the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, there is a certain level of sentimentality for the games that defined me. Game system and software manufactures recognize this and have begun repackaging and selling us back our memories in the form of emulators and rereleased games. And while these […]
Super Mario Brothers 3 on the Nintendo Wii

With age comes nostalgia, and having grown up on the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, there is a certain level of sentimentality for the games that defined me. Game system and software manufactures recognize this and have begun repackaging and selling us back our memories in the form of emulators and rereleased games. And while these offerings make it convenient to take on Dr. Wiley or find that our princess is in another castle, there is something lost in the translation from dusty 8-bit consoles to modern gaming systems and high-definition TV's. It all feels just a little off.

I have been playing with emulators for around ten years now, mostly on the PC. It's been great being able to play all of my favorite old games again. When my son was born, I had dreamed of taking him on a video game history lesson through the emulators, starting with Super Mario Brothers 1-3 and onwards to other great titles such as Mega Man, Super Metroid, the Mario Kart series and any of the Final Fantasy RPG's. Then Nintendo announced the Virtual Console for the Wii and emulation caught the public's eye. Suddenly, millions of households had access to a fantastic library of old games that they could download and immediately begin playing. And we began to recognize that great gameplay shines through regardless of a game's vintage.

But while we get to play all these games again, are we really recreating the gaming experience? The 1980's were the golden-age of console video games and often the titles we were playing were pushing the hardware capabilities to previously unseen levels (example: compare Super Mario Brothers 1 to Super Mario Brother 3 on the NES). Additionally, the feel of the controller and the limitations of televisions at the time added to the charm. I played the NES on a 13" black-and-white TV over an RF modulator. Being able to hook the system up to the big color TV in the living room was a privilege bestowed only on special occasions.

The one glaring problem playing any emulator on a computer monitor or an HDTV is the quality of the picture: it's too good. These games were developed for CRT TV's which have physical properties that help make the images we fell in love with look the way they do. The picture is a little fuzzy, flickers some and the colors bleed a little. But most importantly, artists designed sprites with an understanding that RBG elements in a TV were not arrayed in a fixed grid. And blowing these images up on a 52-inch HDTV's leaves the edges too sharp, the color too bright, and graphics resampled in such a way as to distort those sprites. (A user on the NFG Games Forum had an excellent write up of this effect, via Gizmodo.)

In response to this problem, a group of Georgia Tech computer science majors were tasked to simulate the properties of CRT TV's in Stella, a popular open-source emulator for Atari 2600 games. Ian Bogost, the associate professor who ran the course, shared the results on Georgia Tech's Digital Lounge blog. In his article, you can see the difference that the student's Stella plugin makes when playing these old Atari games. In Ian's words, the elements he wanted his students to add - the texture, afterimage, color bleed and noise - are all present and look great. And I agree; it feels like what we'd expect if we were firing up an old 2600 on a vintage TV. The fantastic part of this story is that his team have returned their changes to the source code to the maintainers of Stella and that we'll see these as a configurable option in an upcoming release, and hopefully, in even more emulators.

Looking back to my Wii emulator experience, I was disappointed starting up Super Mario Brothers and finding there were no configurable options for 'enhancing' the images to look more like how I remember them. Purists may say that Nintendo and others did exactly the right thing by not including such options. Certainly I can hook my Wii up to an old TV and bask in it's phosphorus glow. But I think something is being missed as we play our old games on modern equipment. It's nice to see that others recognize this problem and are contributing solutions. Hopefully Nintendo and other emulator manufacturers will recognize this too and give us similar options.

In the mean time, I'll make do. And the kids can grow up with their own memories.