Emulation

When I was in uni, I was part of a student art club that put on exhibitions in the campus gallery. We decided to do a tech-themed show, so all the art had to contain some digital component or comment on technology. So I decided to make my own short game using a cracked copy of NESMaker someone published online.

Anyway, I really wanted to give it an authentic feel, and it just so happened that a buddy and I found a CRT on the side of the road that looked to be in OK shape. We hauled it back to my place, plugged it in, and sure enough, it worked. A few cracks in the glass here and there, and the built-in DVD player was broken, but I think it added to the charm.

About a week before the show, I’m furiously putting together assets and trying to program a few enemies, along with making sure the controls didn’t hard lock if you moved left (ha ha). I was able to get the game to a playable state, and now needed to find hardware with a component input that also had NES emulation capability. I didn’t want to use my personal laptop because there wasn’t any security at the gallery, plus purchasing an HDMI to component adapter seemed dubious quality-wise. I had an old hacked PS2 slim with Free McBoot but the NES emulator available at that time didn’t support the mapper for my game. I thought I was going to be SOL for the exhibition.

Just my luck, a few days before the show, I stumbled across a port of retroarch for the PS2. It had a working NES core (which technically how they figured that out was beyond me). So fingers crossed, I loaded retroarch onto the memory card with the NES core, plugged in my USB with the game, and booted it up. It worked. And mind you, retroarch had JUST been ported to the PS2.

The exhibition went great and a lot of people liked my game (it was a side scrolling shmup that took place on campus, at night. I couldn’t program music to save my life so I took the midi 3AM theme from GCN animal crossing and slowed the tempo down, which was perfectly creepy/melancholic).

In retrospect, it seemed like divine timing, but that random developer out there really saved my skin, and enabled me to share a cool piece of art that I made with other students. I suppose they thought some other people might have had a use for retroarch on a PS2, as useless as that might seem in today’s age.

So yeah. Retroarch is cool. Sometimes complicated, sometimes bad, and not meant for everyone and everything, just like any software. But if you love video games, and it can play them okay enough, does it really even matter?