Game Pilgrimage

Observations

Gens is very close in sound, and probably actually displays *exactly* what the Genesis was producing graphically until it got output from the system. However, some instruments in the music are slightly different sounding, some are louder than they are on the actual console, sometimes music glitches actually occur that weren't in the original, and overall any shrill or high pitch sounds that were in the original cart are made that much more sharp and hard on the ears in emulation, possibly due to the lack of white noise or any other dampening interference that the original analog signal would normally be accompanied by.

Similarly, the video output of an emulator displays the exact image in digital perfection, meaning that things you couldn't or shouldn't have seen before are clear as pixilated day. I'm sure opinions on which is better, ultra-sharp, or blurred just right, will differ, but the developers made these games with the blurring aspects of the video output in mind, and many of the games take serious advantage of that blurring effect to create the illusion of more colors. This effect is totally ruined by emulation, where in the original a color transition appears to fade, in emulation it's clearly dithered, and the plainly visible pixels expose the true color count of the image, which ruins the image quality in more than a few cases. The SNES had a software blurring technique that aided its "higher color" image in much the same way, by blurring the overall image small flaws are effectively not flaws at all, but deliberate workarounds of hardware/memory limitations which effectively made these flaws not exist until emulation came along.

So, the emulator is accurately translating the original code over to your computer, but it is not addressing the issue of accurately recreating the original game's total experience, especially if you don't have a similar control pad or joystick to play the games with. Some emulation engines try to address this by blurring colors together, and they sometimes succeed in making a better image for the PC, but often times exasperate the differences in speed and framerate, and do not succeed in recreating the original game's final image besides. I suspect that many comments found online about 16-bit games, or specifically Genesis games, not aging well are based on playing the game in non-original form through emulation. The disenchantment these gamers feel is due to seeing a low resolution image blown up way too big, accompanied by sound output that's is variable at best.

Space Harrier II

X'Eye and 32X