Earlier this week, we saw the ugly side of modern emulation. So, in the interests of fairness, today let’s look at some people hoping to set things right.
https://kotaku.com/how-modern-tvs-ruin-old-games-5220571
Full-time thinking man and part-time Kotaku Guest Editor Ian Bogost has asked some kids at Georgia Tech to come up with an emulator that can not only recreate an old game on a new platform, but recreate how it actually looked back in its day.
http://kotaku.com/321389/ian-bogost-signing-on
For example, the Atari 2600 was designed to run on 1970s TV sets. Big, clunky, cathode ray TV sets, on which a pixel looked a lot different than it does a crystal-clear monitor or HD TV set. So the GT computer science students have created some tweaks for the popular Stella emulator, which are able to recreate the way a game would have looked on a dusty, wood-panelled television set.
The results are, for this misty-eyed nostalgic, wonderful. Bogost says talks are currently underway to have these tweaks incorporated into Stella’s release builds, so hopefully they’ll be made available to the public soon.
A Television Simulator [Ian Bogost]
