Items tagged with emulation
Did you see our post a couple of days back about how you can now buy a Steam Deck straight from Valve without a reservation? (That's true, by the way; you can pick one up right from their store page and have it in a week or two.) In that post, we embedded Valve's YouTube video for the announcement, and while we...
Read more...
A popular community-maintained chart, ranking performance in Sony PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3, has beckoned a new flagship CPU to the throne. AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X has elbowed past the incumbent Intel Core i9-12900K to become number one in the ‘S Tier’ class of processors for fast-paced PS3 fun.
The new AMD Ryzen...
Read more...
The PlayStation 3's Cell Broadband Engine was fairly unlike any other processor. It had capabilities that make emulating the system surprisingly demanding, even for modern hardware. As we've reported before, the AVX-512 SIMD extensions help with this quite a bit, but Intel cut off support for the instructions in its...
Read more...
Were you around for the heyday of Windows 98? PC gamers were slow to adopt Windows 95 because the conventional game design paradigm of talking directly to the hardware was a big no-no in the new operating system. However, in the not-quite-three years between the release of Windows 95 and Windows 98, both PC hardware...
Read more...
The AVX-512 instruction set has had a bizarre history. Originally introduced with Intel's Xeon Phi processors based on the "Knights Landing" design, it later found its way into the company's server processors starting with Skylake-SP in 2017. The first consumer processors to include AVX-512 were the laptop forms of...
Read more...
Let's recap: it's 2022, and the vast majority of displays in the world refresh at 60Hz or some multiple thereof. Aside from some fancy gaming monitors—which usually have the option to refresh at 120Hz as well as their native 144Hz - 200Hz, or whatever—basically everyone has settled on the 60Hz standard for now. It...
Read more...
The PlayStation 2 stands as one of the most successful game platforms of all time. In fact, it is actually the best-selling game console of all time, moving over 155 million units in total. It has a massive library of more than 3800 games, and many of the biggest franchises of today made their debut on the PS2.
With...
Read more...
Are you ever sitting at your Nintendo 64 thinking, "I wish this game were wide-screen and higher fidelity"? Well, today is your lucky day, as The Ship of Harkinian has been released! Named after King Harkinian, a character not mentioned in the original Legend Of Zelda games, the open-source project allows fans of the...
Read more...
It is not often a new device complete disrupts the console market. The last one to do it was the Nintendo Switch. While it does not seem like it, Valve's Steam Deck is more akin to a console product than a PC product, despite supporting and playing PC games and running PC software. It also runs PC software like...
Read more...
It would be easy to assume that the Nintendo Entertainment System needs no introduction, but it's important for us old farts to remember that it came out in 1985, some 37 years ago. Many people reading this are probably younger than the NES.
Nintendo's first home video game system to be released in the west changed...
Read more...
RPCS3 is the world's leading PlayStation 3 emulator software. It allows users to play their own rips of commercial PlayStation 3 games, and last month, the project announced that it is now able to boot every game title released for the PS3. Progress doesn't stop there, though, and there's much to be done.
The...
Read more...
Like Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo gates its online-capable video games behind a subscription service. In the case of the Nintendo Switch, it's the simply-named Nintendo Switch Online. The subscription costs $19.99 USD per year, and besides enabling access to Nintendo's online services, it also allows you to play a...
Read more...
Super Mario Odyssey, downscaled from 4K.
To legally play console games in an emulator on a PC, you have to own both the game and the required hardware, which might leave some folks scratching their heads as to why you would even bother. Just play that games on the real hardware, right?
Of course, PC gamers know...
Read more...
Skate 3 running on RPCS3 emulator.
Owing to its ease of access as a development platform, there are dozens upon dozens of console game emulators for PCs. Besides their grey-market application of allowing PC gamers to play console games, these applications serve a vital role in the purpose of game preservation—that...
Read more...
Not only do PC gamers have more control over their games, but they can keep playing games released in ages of yore—even if it sometimes takes intermediary software like DOSBox. Console gamers don't have that same luxury, but fortunately, there are emulators for console game hardware that allow that software to run on...
Read more...
If you want to step back in time and play some retro games for nostalgia, it can be more difficult than it needs to be. Moreover, you do not get the fun of playing with friends on the same screen as everything is now done over the web. Evercade has decided to go against the grain and take the hassle out of emulation...
Read more...
For many people, the golden age of PC gaming was the DOS era. Or maybe that is just my nostalgia kicking in. Either way, emulation is the key to reliving those days, playing old games that are neither lost nor completely forgotten. One of the go-to emulators has been DOSBox, but the newly released DOSBox Pure promises...
Read more...
Always-connected Windows 10 PCs powered by Arm processors have plenty of potential as nice portable workstations with other-worldly battery life. Every time we've tested one of these machines, starting with the Surface Pro X, we've come away impressed with battery life while maintaining adequate performance for most...
Read more...
In the 22 years since 1998, Unreal Tournament was released and remastered, a long-forgotten 3Dfx graphics card has finally seen the light of day, and a little-known arcade port of Quake has finally been made available for emulation.
Quake Arcade Tournament Edition is quoted as being a “short-lived commercial ARCADE...
Read more...
Back in June, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced their newest single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi 4. This tiny PC packs a quad-core Cortex A72 SoC from Broadcom and up to 4 GB of DDR4 memory at a very attractive price. While aimed at emerging markets for folks new to computers, the Pi really caught on with...
Read more...
As of September 6th, 2019, the officially-licensed Evercade retro handheld console is available for pre-order. Like other retro consoles, Evercade is capable of emulating a number of older game systems, and like a few others, Evercade is also a portable handheld. Where Evercade differs from most retro emulation...
Read more...
When someone is looking to get into game emulation in this day and age, RetroArch is likely the most common suggestion. It's a front-end that utilizes Libretro cores that open up the ability to emulate old platforms -- from Atari to NES to MSX to disc-based platforms like Dreamcast and PSone. RetroArch isn't too...
Read more...
