what if this person works for the entertainment software association, and would feel a moral obligation to turn themselves in if they ever committed an act of piracy (via cdromance)
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For posterityās sake I also come at this discussion as the guy who, as documented on this forum, once got an Archive.org acquired .exe of Arcturus: The Curse and Loss of Divinity to just barely sort of run on their modern computer, which included iirc changing my operating systemās region to Japan during the install
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seems unlikely
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what if this person is being held at gunpoint by gabe newell
Sorry everybody I think my inner Seanbaby came out there for a second
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Inner Seanbaby Therapy
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what if this hypothetical person deciding between steam and cdromance is seanbaby
Question Too Stupid For The Ask me anything (me = forum) Thread
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maybe this should be merged into a new threadā¦
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āLikeā this post if youāre literally Seanbaby in real life and you lurk the insert credit forums
is it problematic if me, a mexican woman, all of a sudden change my english as a second language accent from the imitation of an american accent that i learned due to proximity to an imitation of an australian accent?
i just thing that itād be more fun to speak like an aussie
@aussies
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I say go for it!
ā¦just, donāt trust characters from American TV/Movies as your reference. They pretty much always get it hilariously wrong.
Iām thinking about Robert Downey Jrās performance in Natural Born Killers. Lordy.
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Thanks for the input everyone. I lost the argument but I think thereās something here about ease of use vs. ease of leaving oneās comfort zone. I recognize āan emulatorā means a bunch of different things and because this community has deeper understanding i.e. a fuller picture of just how many video games are out there and how many of them donāt run well in emulation, itās easy to forget that playing only the most popular stuff (forget about Shining Force II, Iām talking about Nintendo games, Mother 3, Final Fantasies, Silent Hill) can be accomplished in fewer steps than those it takes to create a Steam account and launch a game. And in the case of a fan translation:
Prepatched files are right there. I learned how to apply an .ips patch back in the day because thatās what you had to do, but thatās no longer necessary for the most popular games. I specified cdromance because āgetting a .ROM or .ISO somewhere online, any website, torrent or direct downloadā is a much more ambiguous proposition. If it were still necessary to take a Web 1.0 approach to finding games I would concede the point, but it isnāt. PCSX2 and Dolphin work immediately with an Xbox controller.
I was thinking about my mom in particular, who understands Windows File Explorer and how to use an internet browser but dislikes learning new programs. Everyoneās mom is different but I think mine would have an easier time with cdromance, provided someone told her about it in the first place.
The notion that emulation is hard in 2024 I suspect has more to do with an ingrained sense of wrongdoing/discomfort with the legality; the story as told by those of us who learned how to download games outside of vimm and cdromance, where/when it was more difficult (the big green DOWNLOAD button, pop-ups, finding a new site for every game); and not knowing how to manage files in a desktop environment (especially younger people who arenāt being taught how to use the computer in the same way we once were).
Of course this all started when a friend claimed that a hypothetical third person who would rather play the remake of Silent Hill 2 on PC than figure out how to play the original āhas a pointā about the latter being way too difficult to even consider doing. If you donāt already know how, sure, learning anything new can take time. But people who play video games learn new menus and abstract systems of interaction all the time, including how to use Steamāisnāt that what an emulator is? This particular thing, especially to someone who already deals with the idiosyncrasies of buying and running computer games from commercial vendors (I canāt figure out how to get Deus Ex or Max Payne 1 to run and I bought those on Steam! I have to ādisable multithreading,ā what? That didnāt work?? Pathologic 2 doesnāt have native controller support???), is not very complicated. I donāt care what version of what game someone wants to play, but I have doubts about justifying that particular decision on that particular basis, thinking there are other psychological forces at work.
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Is it easier to softmod a console or build a new gaming PC for someone whoās never done either before?
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The reason I chose Steam was not that it is fewer steps or somehow easier, itās that Steam exists in a familiar paradigm. Most folks are used to signing up for a service, entering their info and credit card, then having a list of options presented. Iām thinking something like Netflix. Itās all self contained and once you are in you donāt leave the app to make your choices. Now Steam is more flexible and customizable than Netflix, but the idea is similar - sign up, pick your movie/game and start.
Emulation isnāt more difficult, but the process will be much less familiar for most. Just the idea of going to one place to get the emulator and another place to get the ācontentā is enough to turn people off.
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Something that is happening in emulation that I think most people here donāt care too much about, but that could be a big deal for this hypothetical person, is in-browser emulators. You can go play an emulated mario on any number of vaguely sketchy websites. Archive dot org has plenty of games you can just play. If you want to play translated Mother 3, you donāt have to download stuff, you just search āplay mother 3ā and go to the website.
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such websites were my gateway into emulationā¦
something i shouldāve mentioned previously:
iāve tried guiding two friends through the process of installing retroarch, and while my unfamiliarity with windows (iām a mac user, they were both on windows) undoubtedly hurt, the process still took longer than iād expect installing steam would.
(if openemu existed on windows, though, itād be a lot easier)
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The best part about trying and failing to set up Retroarch was definitely going online for help and receiving anything but from its most active and therefore worst proponents.
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Steam gets my vote simply because I almost never have to use the command line to get a Steam game running
Edit: Obviously thereās levels to it, though, and in that way itās sort of an impossible question. Like playing Celeste is easier than emulating Persona 3 is easier than uncapping the frame rate in Dead Rising via hex editor is easier than getting analogue controls working in Sega Saturn Baroque is easier than getting a doujin shooter released in ā02 running on Windows 10 lol
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Iāve just had to do a clean Windows install -please kill me- and in the process I found Ludo, āāa minimalist frontend for emulatorsāā. it can be a bit fiddly but itās visually simple, much better than the mess of programs I had before, and it mostly works right out of the box.
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