If you use the original system hooked into a really good CRT television that's the way the game designers intended you to see it. "It was the canvas of it's time" as IGN's Sam Claiborn so elegantly said. I think anything from PS2 back looks best on CRT. Source: Am super good at Paperboy. I play it on a RGB modded original SNES 1Chip (Super SNES Junior) plugged into a Sony PVM broadcast monitor CRT through RGB SCART cables. According to retrorgb.com is really the top tier way that beats any re-made system or emulator. Even a free Sony Trinitron off Craig's List with the original system is going to look, and FEEL AUTHENTIC. It's a spiritual thing, haha.
4
Two words: Oregon. Trail.
8
Exactly what I was hoping to hear about
Ignore this 'informative' article and just remember two words: emulators and ROMs.
4
What? No mention of Space Invaders? Asteroids? Galaga??
How can you go from Pre-Pong straight to Fortnite (what *is*that?)?
6
My greatest concern is that the inevitable death of Windows 7 (in just a few years time) will mean that many of the ways to run 16-bit and 32 bit applications wont work properly in Windows 10 (the current operating system that replaces windows 7). THAT means many older games wont be able to run and there is not a great financial incentive to re-code them to run in Windows 10.
At that point, you will need a techie in the house to run a virtual operating system to play many of these older games. Many great games from 1990s will be lost to the sands of time by 2020. There will just be some screen pics to represent them.
1
My arcade drug of choice used to be Scramble in the 80s. Later on, owned many ZX Spectrum games on cassette tape, some are available at the App Store, like Lords Of Midnight. Then Dune 2 on DOS was the gateway drug to RPG classics like C&C and Blizzard’s Warcraft and Starcraft and FPSs like Wolf3D and Doom. Now it’s Elder Scrolls and Assassins Creed. Graphic immersion has evolved hugely in 4 decades, but there’s no beating the classics for gameplay.
3
You can play Sonic the Hedgehog for free, in its entirety, without ads, with a controller, straight from your Apple TV. Just search the app store for it. Use your remote as the controller, or buy a wireless controller for a more authentic feel.
1
Lots of quarters in my youth spent on Frogger. I'd love to find a current workable version of that!
4
What a shame. Not one mention of the Commodore Amiga or Commodore 64, and it’s rich gaming history. For those who want to re-live those classic early gaming experiences you cannot go wrong with Amiga Forever, an emulator for the Amiga, and C64 Forever, from Cloanto (www.amigaforever.com and www.c64forever.com). Very inexpensive, and is a complete emulation of the computers, not just the games.
12
I just went through collecting 600 games. By a long shot the missing information in this article is all the emulators of arcade and console, such as, for example, MAME for arcade machines and Dolphin for Gamecube. Somewhat of a learning curve, but not much, and the rewards are plentiful.
6
@Jeff the emulators are great, but downloading games for them is usually of questionable legality. I'm assuming that's why it wasn't mentioned.
Tyler but not mentioning MAME is an article about this topic amount is inexplicable. You could read any article on any tech site on the same topic and THEY would mention MAME high up on the list. For the nytimes to not mention it with a legal proviso is odd.
2
As an added bonus, simply looking at MAME's source code (the emulator itself is free software!) is quite the window into the intricate workings of (its renditions of) all those machines that run the games, whether they're drawing character sprites and playing bleeps and bloops (yay!) or imposing wasteful, futile "copy protection" (yuck!).
Glance at e.g. [1] and [2] to try to wrap your brain around it for a while.
[1] https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/pacman.cpp
[2] https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/raiden2.cpp
1