From the Mouth of Madness:
Emulator 64

By Jason "loonyboi" Bergman

Here's the other three:

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's talk emulators.

Here's the hard, cold facts: a lot of those classic games I grew up playing are never going to be re-issued. I like Pac-Man as much as the next guy, but what about obscure titles like Adventure, that are more important to me on a sentimental level? Nobody in their right mind is ever going to put that out again, and I'm not holding my breath for a 3DFX enhanced sequel. :)

In cases like that, you need emulators. But there are plenty of other examples.

Emulating current systems is a different issue entirely. As I mentioned last week, i think the true excellence of UltraHLE lies in its code. It's a brilliant technology demonstration. How psyched do you think 3DFX was at UltraHLE? How about Intel? Man, you can say all you like that your desktop computer's more powerful than a console, but until you can out-play them, nobody's going to believe you.

Case in point: at the MacWorld expo, Steve Jobs (a personal hero, admittedly) couldn't contain himself as he showed off that PlayStation emulator running on a G3.

I do think the world of emulators is due for another big stir...the PlayStation emulator Bleem is on the virge of release, and early reports say that it's scary just how well it runs games. The Connectix emulator is hitting the shelves now, and Sony's getting pretty peeved.

Let's be sure to remember the difference between say...MAME, and UltraHLE in all of this. Just because a few people are abusing emulation (and I don't lump the programmers in there, just the people stealing software) doesn't mean the whole concept's bad. Laugh all you like, but remember...some of us still want to be able to play the Smurfs Colecovision game (one of the most underrated games of all time) without having to pull that out of the bins and dust it off.

- Jason "loonyboi" Bergman is the editor-in-chief for loonygames. He can't stop playing Falcon 4.0.