Monday Tip-Off: Original Hardware or Emulation?

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on whether it’s better to play retro basketball games on original hardware, or via emulation.

My first foray into emulation actually happened around 1994, though I wasn’t too familiar with the term or concept back then. I was trying to get Commander Keen – a legendary platformer and true classic of vintage PC gaming – to run on an Archimedes Acorn desktop, using an official DOS emulator. I wasn’t nearly as computer savvy as I’d later become, so I failed in the attempt. I had more success a few years later when I was checking out one of the early Super Nintendo emulators for PC, which was also DOS-based. I recall feeling underwhelmed though, especially with the lack of audio.

These days, emulation has come a long way, to the point where the emulators for many consoles can mimic original hardware near-perfectly. Not only that, but they also have other enhancements including save states, media capture, visual filters, and so on. That’s led to some debate among retro gamers as to whether it’s preferable to play on original hardware or simply rely on emulation. Needless to say, the latter does raise some ethical and indeed legal questions, but assuming that you can play a game you own on the original hardware or an emulator, which method is superior? As far as the virtual hardwood is concerned, for me, it depends on my needs at any given time.

I’m a keen collector of basketball video games – as I’ve previously demonstrated – so it is my goal to obtain as many original, legal copies of titles as possible for the consoles that I own. I have those consoles set up and switch between them on my TV, allowing me to easily play games on original hardware. There’ll always be something special about that, because it’s an authentic experience. The games are in their original state – aside from the resolution of a modern TV, of course – with no artificial enhancements or features that shouldn’t be available. No save states, no hacking without a physical device…it’s just the original games as they were made, and intended to be played.

With that being said, there are times when emulation is preferable. Obviously, I can’t connect my Super Nintendo to the internet and play NBA Live 95 with Dee on the other side of the world. With a SNES emulator however, Parsec makes that possible. While the PS Rewired project has allowed us to connect and play NBA 07 on original PlayStation 3 hardware via unofficial servers, restoring online support for NBA Live and NBA 2K is a long shot. Once again though, emulation can step in and allow us to revisit PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and even Xbox 360 titles together via Parsec. In short, emulation makes it possible to connect with others for retro basketball gaming.

There are also times when, for the sake of convenience, I’ll use an emulator when I’m playing solo. It’s much quicker switching from one image to another via a menu, and I’m not messing around swapping and connecting different cables to my TV. Storage space for saved data is also less of an issue when it comes to emulation. With my PS2 for example, I only have a few memory cards on hand, and aside from the unofficial 16 MB card I own, they can only hold 8 MB of data. With the PCSX2 emulator, I can create dozens of virtual memory cards, and switch between them with the click of a button. Other emulators likewise overcome such limitations with storage media.

Content creation is where I’ve really found emulation to be useful. For any console I own that has HDMI output – Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 – I can simply hook it up to my Elgato HD60 capture card. I also have a splitter that bypasses HDCP, so I don’t have to worry about disabling and re-enabling that setting. With older consoles that use composite video output – that’s the red, white, and yellow cables – hooking them up to my Elgato is challenging. It can be done, but for the best results, you do need to have a good upscaler. I haven’t invested in one at this time, which makes it tougher to get high quality video and screenshots from old consoles.

To that end, if I’m producing a video or writing an article about a game released on the NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, or PlayStation 2, I’ll fire up the appropriate emulator to get footage and screenshots. At some point I’ll look into picking up a better upscaler as it would be fun to capture authentic, high quality footage and screenshots from the original hardware, but for now, emulation gets the job done. Mind you, I’ll admit that I’m sometimes concerned about properly representing the games in the media that I capture. Enhancements and limitations alike can stand in the way of authentically capturing a game, and I worry that that lack of accuracy detracts from the content.

Furthermore, emulation isn’t always a viable option. Although console emulators have come a long way since I first dabbled with them in the late 90s, there are still some issues with game compatibility. Some games will boot, but aren’t really playable due to visual glitches or a poor frame rate, which naturally makes it very challenging (if not impossible) to capture gameplay screenshots and footage. For example, NBA Street and its sequels on PlayStation 2 don’t run at a smooth 60 FPS on PCSX2. They work well enough to snap a few screenshots for an article, but a video feature isn’t feasible. Project64 has similar issues with the Nintendo 64 version of NBA Hangtime.

Then you’ve got games such as NBA Jam by Acclaim – also known as NBA Jam 2004 – that will boot on PCSX2, but doesn’t display any text or selectable options once it reaches the main menu. As such, when I wanted to include a short clip of the game in my NBA Jam 2010 retrospective, I had to make do with hooking up my Elgato to my cheap upscaler, and cropping the footage accordingly. It was fine for a quick clip like that, but if the retrospective were about that game, I’d want the footage to be much higher quality. It’s the main issue that’s been holding me back from producing video retrospectives about NBA Street, NBA Street Vol. 2, and NBA Street V3 for the PS2.

It’s possible that there are some workarounds I’ve yet to find, such as tweaking the settings, or enabling different plug-ins and fixes. It’s something that I’ll continue to experiment with. Some of the emulators are also receiving periodic or even regular updates, so it’s quite possible that a new version will feature increased compatibility. This is the challenge of emulation, and I admire the people who are working on those various emulators. Even though modern gaming PCs easily outpace those consoles in raw power, they all had unique proprietary hardware that’s challenging to emulate, to say nothing of achieving full software compatibility with their entire game libraries.

Still, emulation has undoubtedly helped me to capture media in situations where it’s been difficult to get high quality footage from original hardware. It’s also useful for playing games that never saw a PAL release. My PlayStation 3 allowed me to finally import college basketball games, and a couple of Xbox 360 releases were surprisingly region-free, but generally speaking, I can’t run NTSC or NTSC-J games on original hardware. There are ways to physically mod consoles so that they’re region-free, as well as some firmware hacks that I’m aware of, but I’m hesitant to tinker with that; especially when emulation can bypass the regional restrictions of original hardware.

A couple of examples from my collection are the Japanese versions of NBA Live 2002 and NBA Street, both of which feature Michael Jordan on the cover. Now, both of these games are great collectibles without being able to play them, and the games themselves are identical to the PAL copies that I own (aside from being in Japanese, of course). Still, it’s fun to be able to check them out, which I can’t do with a PAL PS2. PCSX2 also allows me to play the Japanese-exclusive NBA Starting Five 2005, which was one of my favourite pick-ups. Of course, without an English translation or knowing Japanese, navigating the menus in that game takes some trial and error!

Clearly, there are benefits to emulation. However, even ignoring some of the issues with compatibility and accuracy, it’ll never fully replace original hardware for me. Obviously, there are some more recent consoles that aren’t being emulated yet – or at least, those emulators are still in a very primitive state – but I’m also not about to ditch my older consoles that do have viable emulation. As I said, there’s something special about the authenticity of playing on original hardware. The act of popping in the disc or cartridge, the lack of any hacks or enhancements, and even putting up with longer loading times, takes you back in a way that emulation – for the most part – cannot.

Of course, if we’re talking about getting old PC games to run, then it’s DOSBox, virtual machines, nGlide/3Dfx wrappers, and other compatibility fixes all the way! That’s far more convenient than keeping multiple desktops on hand. It also makes it easier to capture media than if I was playing on a separate PC with its own operating system. Furthermore, while DOSBox and virtual Windows installations technically are emulation, I haven’t noticed any glaring examples of inaccuracies. If anything, using the workarounds to run old games on a newer rig allows me to max them out in a way that I wasn’t always able to when I was playing them on an older machine.

And so, my answer to the question of original hardware or emulation is resoundingly “both”! If I’m creating content and I need media that I can’t capture in high quality from original hardware, I’ll opt for emulation. If I’m looking to connect with Dee or someone else from the community on Parsec, then it’s basically my only option. If I’m playing solo however, or if there are any issues with performance or compatibility when it comes to a particular game, then I’ll eagerly fire up the necessary console to get my fix. This is a situation where if you have access to both, there’s no need to choose one over the other. Whichever solution suits your purposes is the way to go.

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