Quote Originally Posted by stardust4ever View Post
...and you totally miss out on that warm fuzzy feeling of playing the authentic cart, whether the hardware is authentic or not.
Don't get me wrong, I suffer from this particular mental disease that afflicts retro gamers too, hence why I own about 2500 physical games. A lot of times I get a new game for a retro system I could easily emulate it, I justify it by thinking something like "well, I already have a huge collection already, what's one more gonna hurt?" or "oh well, it was cheap anyway". Later on when I think more clearly I think "I shouldn't have wasted that money".

Rationally, there can be no doubt about it - the "feeling" you talk about is nostalgia driven nonsense that's entirely in your head. The difference between loading a game up via a cartridge vs an emulator is distinguishable only as far as its the process you repeated tens of thousands of times in the past vs something that's new and achieves the same effect.

It would be like if you were given the opportunity to drive a new future car that ran on electricity and didn't have petals and a steering wheel, but instead a Star Trek like control panel. Totally different process, but the end result would be a car that you can drive around. That "warm fuzzy feeling of playing the authentic cart" would be exactly the same as longing for the gasoline driven, pedal and steering wheel cars of today.

Nostalgia is something to be examined, and those kinds of metal blocks that lead you to prefer the way things used to be simply because you aren't used to using the new methoids shouldn't be embraced. The only legitimate reasons to have a physical collection of anything that can be perfectly emulated is for resale value and not to worry about DRM. You can't sell a digital game short of selling an entire account associated with it.



Quote Originally Posted by treismac View Post
Yeah. There is a small nagging part of me, which I wish would die half the time and the other half I celebrate, that really seems pleased knowing that I'm playing a cartridge over a rom. It's not rational; it is the nostalgic part of me as a retro gamer that is gets all warm and fuzzy when I fire up a cart from my collection, and this same side of me will probably unfortunately feel like the experience is still cheapened when I play a game on the RetroN 5 because it isn't the original hardware. And the thing is I enjoy emulation. It feels convenient and fun and "futuristic."
First, see my response to stardust, secondly, and this is important, I really don't want to offend anyone here. So If I inadvertently do, I deeply apologize. Everyone is free to their own thoughts.

What you said right there got me thinking about science and religion, and the The Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate. One side is rational based, interested in seeking answers to questions and building knowledge, the other side is irrational based, not particularly interested in knowing answers and instead comfortable with the way things are, what is already known, and what will forever be.

So too I think there might just be a correlation to the schools of thought that are behind those who state that something is lost when you emulate vs those who feel like there is only gains.