if retroarch weren’t the main emulator people say is the go-to one to do the thing, i probably wouldn’t have picked steam, but as it is, yeah, steam is just like, one of many online storefronts where you buy the thing then have the thing, whereas retroarch is a godawful horrible mess with a terrible ui and requires Tweaking in the way that most people don’t want to do
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you don’t go to steam to download a computer!!!
What I’m hearing is if I had limited the scope of the poll to “download just the standalone PCSX2 program and Silent Hill 2 from cdromance, forget Retroarch, cast Retroarch out of your mind” I might not have egg all over my face
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i mean to be fair pcsx2 is full of gnarly tweaking too! i picked retroarch just as the main one but steam is generally: 1. buy game, 2. play game.
whereas emulation is a word cloud of steps including getting the right emulator, finding the rom, maybe you need a bios so you gotta find that, put it all in the right folders, tweak the emulation settings so it runs right, possibly get the controller settings right, etc etc
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hey all,
I’m trying to switch off of using the phrase “retro gaming”.
I think “classic gaming” is more descriptive, but I’m also playing VIRTUAL HYDLIDE, not sure if that’s a classic.
What descriptive phrase do you all use to subvert mainstream phraseology?
Maybe I should just get to the point and say I am a SEGA SATURN gamer by omission to quickly communicate where I stand.
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this might not be what you’re asking exactly but whenever coworkers ask what kind of books, music, movies etc. i’m into i’ll usually say “artsy fartsy stuff” or “freaky shit” then pivot the conversation to their own interests lol
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Yeah in that context I say games no one talks about or has ever heard of.
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Vintage gaming? I don’t actually use this because I’d be the only one doing it lmao. Please join in, everyone.
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Antique gaming
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I study the classics
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I just say old games but I also hat talking to most people about games because liking videogames means different things to different people. Occasionally I’ll be introduced to someone and it happens that they enjoy games and it’s almost always a variation on they only play PC RTS games or they like COD or Madden or something. I have nothing to do with those types of games so it’s about as useful a designation as liking movies or music.
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One thing that I would like to add about the emulation thing is that even for those knowledgeable it can be a headache, so familiarity doesn’t really bridge the gap between emulation and Steam. I’m fairly tech literate(proof: I know how to do stuff to the router other than reset it) and had a lot of issues with emulation recently.
I recently reinstalled Windows and I was wanting to play Baroque for the monthly gaming club. After doing the various steps to get everything running on Retroarch I couldn’t get the game to run. I probably spent at least 40 minutes trying to diagnose the problem, changing settings, redownloading cores etc. until it dawned on me what the problem could be: maybe the BIOS is incorrectly named and so the emulator doesn’t recognize it?
Had I not had a random hunch the already large amount of wasted time and frustration could be astronomical. There’s a lot more room for things to go very wrong and require diagnosing with emulation.
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what do you say when a coworker asks if you play games?
- i emulate games from cdromance
- i buy games on steam
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voters
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i would NEVER let a coworker know i play video games
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This sounds like a very natural conversation that a human would have.
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tell your coworkers you’re big into cartridges. Imports, mostly.
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I usually mention generically that I play some video games as well as table-top games. Most often I end up talking about board games because those are most likely to be what they’re familiar with. For video games I may talk about RPGs, strategy games, or occasionally other games. Usually if any platform comes up, it’s the Switch.
I don’t think I’ve ever talked emulators with a coworker. Maybe Steam has come up a time or two.
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i thought the joke would have been more obvious. though perhaps my sense of humor is too “underground”…
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I used to have a job at a grad school/research institution kinda place that is not accesible by public transit so they had their own bus service. meaning every day i got onto a bus with a ton of my coworkers and the worst thing in the world was when someone sat next to me and asked me about the game i was playing on my psp/3ds
it got worse if i was playing a ps1 game on the psp or snes game on the 3ds
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For my part I have had many more problems with Steam than with emulation. The aside about Max Payne and Deus Ex in my above post was true—I still have no idea how to get those games working correctly. Controller support for Binary Domain is messed up. G String’s audio was broken for two years. SCUMM adventure games on Mac do not scale correctly and make the menu inaccessible (unplayable). Halo 3’s campaign multiplayer doesn’t work. BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger’s framerate is locked to 29fps. etc. This doesn’t even go into how obnoxious stuff like Easy Anti-Cheat or per-game account creation/management can be.
I hold none of this against Steam because it’s a miracle to have all these different games built for different hardware across decades under the same roof and working on hundreds of unique hardware and operating system permutations, but what I’m trying to say is: it strikes me as handwaving the tinkering required to use one platform (the one you pay for!) while in some cases (that of my friend, not anyone in this thread) rejecting the other platform outright for the same reason. Why think immediately of emulating a Saturn game and a console-specific controller within famously fussy (and unnecessary) frontend software instead of how easy it is to get a GBA game going on a portable install of mGBA?
My rosy view of emulation: at a friend’s place a few months ago I took his Macbook, downloaded the latest version of PCSX2, created folders for games and the BIOS (look at how clean this page is), got OutRun 2006 and Raw Danger and Silent Hill 3, plugged in his Xbox controller, and it all worked “out of the box.” He was playing within 5 minutes.
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dude i actually struggle with this page lmao
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