Tech Talk: Emulating the ’80s, ’90s

If you’re a child of the ’80s or ’90s, you probably remember the feeling of wonder you got the first time you played a game on your Nintendo or Sega. For some reason, those pixelated graphics and the chunky digital sounds and music just seem to hit a bit differently than even today’s modern hyper-realistic graphics and audio. Perhaps it was the way it allowed our imagination to run wild, maybe it was the art style, maybe it was because we hadn’t yet allowed ourselves to become jaded to the wonders of technology.

As time progressed, graphics got better, and those 2-dimensional bitmaps on our TVs became 3-dimensional graphics on a big screen LED monitor, but somehow it just wasn’t the same.

For me, I was always using either a Nintendo, or Sega (or later a PC), and I always felt like I was missing out when some other system had a game I wanted to play, that I just couldn’t get my hands on, but I resigned myself to never being able to play.

Now, 30-plus years later, a time machine of sorts is available, in the form of high-fidelity emulators. Essentially, these are programs that allow you to replicate video game consoles, or older computers, on a modern machine, and play games or run other programs from days gone by.

It’s a fact that some of those old classic games really were great, even by modern standards, and there’s a reason they became classics. Other games might seem clunky, but bring forth feelings of nostalgia.

One of the most common and easily accessible emulators is called DosBox — it’s a free program that lets you run old DOS games on virtually any modern computer — PC, Mac, or Linux. With just a few tweaks, virtually any classic DOS game can be run on a modern PC. If you don’t feel like messing around with a while bunch of settings, some gaming platforms like Good Old Games (GOG.com) allow you to purchase and run classic games preconfigured, right out of the box, for just a few dollars. There’s a huge library of classic games: Wing Commander, Warcraft, King’s Quest, there are literally hundreds of classic titles available on that platform, some for less than $4, most for less than $10, a mere fraction of the price of a brand new title, and they’ll run on almost any system from the past 10-plus years.

Other emulators can run ROMS of classic Nintendo games. FCEUX is free to download and supports almost any Nintendo video game ROM, so you can play classic Mario Brothers like it’s 1989 all over again.

If you don’t feel like downloading programs and doing all of that work, major retailers and online stores have classic gaming consoles available for a fraction of a modern gaming system, for Nintendo, Sega, Atarin, and more. Often, these come with built-in game libraries and also support for any cartridges you may have lying around in the attic. They make a great Christmas present if you know someone who likes video games, and they can open up a whole world of nostalgic gaming for younger people as well, with a very low cost of entry.