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Emulation and the Video Game Industry
bshanks writes "Use of a Game Over: Emulation and the Video Game Industry is a paper which examines the business and legal consequences of emulators. The paper makes recommendations to video game companies on how to adapt to and profit from them rather than fight them." From the paper: " A decade ago, video game emulators epitomized the cutting edge of programming technology. Ten years hence, they are the subject of a heated debate over copyrights and the video game industry's future. Emulators, which provide conversion software that enables games to run on personal computers ("PC's") and other systems or platforms for which they were not originally designed, have become a staple among gaming enthusiasts. Several factors have contributed to the robust market for emulation..."
Don't they mean "Ten years thence..."?
Hence = from now.
Thence = from then.
Bleem ran on quite modest hardware by today's standards, Pentium IIs and less than 500mhz, with minimum requirements being 200mhz.
My own system runs Grandia from ePSXe very well. It's 1.5 ghz with 256mb of RAM, which is nowhere near top-of-the-line these days. If you've got something like that, or even a little less, you should be able to get it to work at full speed.
Grandia's the only game I've played with it so far. I'll be giving Final Fantasy Anthology a try before long, as well as Parappa if I can find it. I've been playing with keyboard all this time, which isn't much of a problem with Grandia or most RPGs. I haven't noticed lag, but I haven't been playing with a USB controller.
One of the problems with the emulator is that it has plugins for a wide variety of video cards, and you have to sort through them all to find the one for your system. You'll also have to get a CD plugin and a sound plugin for good sound. All these are free and downloadable, but it's a bit of work to get started. Most of these things have a barrelful of options and selections to make as well, which is good if you like to tinker, and bad if you're trying to figure out which of those dozens of settings is causing your game to freeze up after fifteen minutes of play.
One thing you can do with ePSXe is use a program like ISOproducer to create ISOs of your Playstation disks, then play them off the ISOs. I'm starting to do this with Grandia in order to keep my originals in better shape, it's simply too wonderful a game to risk losing as the years go by.
Ha! How many games can you say that about?