Comment by emodendroket 3 days ago
This is cool but of course it's only going to be a small handful of titles that ever receive this kind of attention. But I have been blown away that now sub-$300 Android handhelds are more than capable of emulating the entire PS2 library, often with upscaling if you prefer.
I do hope you're right, but I'm quite skeptical. As mobile devices get more and more locked down, All that memory capacity gets less and less usable. I'm sure it will be accessible to Apple and Google models, but models that obey the user? Not likely
As state of the art machines continue to chase the latest node, capacity for older nodes has become much less expensive, more openly documented, and actually accessible to individuals. Open source FPGA and ASIC synthesis tools have also immensely improved in quality and capability. The Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 contains an open source Risc-V core designed by an individual. And 4G cell phones like the https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck-pro are available on the market built around the very similar ESP32. The latest greatest will always be behind a paywall, but the rising tide floats all boats, and hobbyist projects are growing more sophisticated. Even a $1 ESP32 has dual 240mhz 32bit cores, 8Mb ram, and fast network interfaces which blow away the 8bit micros I grew up with. The state of the open-source art may be a bit behind the state of the proprietary arts, but is advancing as well.
It's really fun to have useful hardware that's easy to program at the bare metal.
Even when technically accessible to individuals it still costs at least 10k$ to get a batch of chips made on a multi project wafer.
It might not be in our lifetimes... the frontier models are using terabytes of RAM. In 10 years iPhones went from ~2GB to ~8GB.
2012 Macbook pros had up to 16gb, 2026 maxes out at 64gb. So 4x increase in 16 years. 1996 Mac desktop had 16MB of ram, so from 1996-2012 there was a 1000x increase.
We won't see gains like we did from the 80s-2000s again.
I don't think you're going to see phones with 512gb VRAM+RAM in your lifetime.
When I was a kid I recall my cousin upgrading his computer to 1 or 2 MB so that we could get some extra features when playing Wing Commander 1. That was 1990.
35 years later, burner phones regularly come with 4 GB of RAM these days. 3 order of magnitude difference, not taking into account miniaturization and speed improvements.
In another 35 years who knows what will happen. Yeah things can't improve at the same pace forever but I would be surprised if anyone back in 1990 could predict the level of technology you can get at every corner store today.
Maybe it's not that everyone gets an RTX 5090 in our pocket, but maybe it's that LLMs now can run on rpi. Realistically it's probably something in the middle.
When I was a kid in Elementary we used DOS computers with maybe 4MB of RAM or few MB and the Play Station wasn't many times powerful. A few years (two or three) later we got Windows 95/98 with 128 times more RAM. A few years later, computers could emulate more or less the PSX and the N64, all within six years.
Phones have as much memory as Android requires, not much more. A low end thinkpad 10 years ago had 8gb memory, and today is same capacity bit more modern and faster. By the same rate we would have a very very fast 8gb memory thinkpad by 2040. Same thing with GPUs. Mid range GPU 10 years ago had 12gb VRAM, mid range AMD GPU last generation (6600xt) had 8gb and 7600xt 16gb, Nvidia 5060 comes at 8gb/16gb.
Phones with 4gb ram is not feasible today because they wouldnt be able to run Android and phone home comfortably, even being a thin client requires running Android and react application on electron. 4gb is not good.
In 2040 phones will came out with the bare minimum to run Android, all the stupid Chinese apps Android distro pushes into consumers, and a react application on electron.
Maybe he fell for the 12 + 12 crap they advertise where half the memory is swap
> ... It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters.
Maybe, perhaps phones will have the compute power... But not enough memory. If things continue the way they are, that is. Great for AI firms, they'll have their moat.
Well, we live in extraordinary circumstances today. A $40 kit (Patriot Viper Venom DDR5-6000 C36 16GB) is now $199. And that is the cheapest DDR5 I saw. With this year's news of even more allocation towards data centres, Micron exiting the consumer market, and the current inertia of things, I think it will take quite some time for us to see prices back to as they were.
It really is incredible. I've been playing through my childhood games on retro handhelds, and recently jumped from <$100 handhelds to a Retroid Pocket Flip, and it's incredible. Been playing WiiU and PS2 games flawlessly at 2x res, and even tackling some lighter Switch games on it.
It truly is. My issue though, like in 2010 when I built an arcade cabinet capable of playing everything is you eventually just run out of interest. In it all. Not even the nostalgia of it keeps my attention. With the exception of just a small handful of titles.
- Excite Bike (it’s in its own league) NES
- Punchout (good arcade fun) NES
- TMNT 4-P Coop Mame Version
- NBA Jam Mame Version
- Secret of Mana SNES
- Chronotrigger SNES
- Breath of Fire 2 SNES
- Mortal Kombat Series SEGA32X
- FF Tactics PS1
I know these can all be basically run in a browser at this point but even Switch or Dreamcast games were meh. N64/PS1/PS2/Xbox was peak and it’s been rehashed franchises ever since. Shame. The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died has been Battle Royale Looter Shooters.
Outer Wilds, Baba is You, Blue Prince, Hades 1&2, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, Clair Obscur, What Remains of Edith Finch, 1000xResist, Return of the Obra Dinn, Roboquest, Rocket League, Dark Souls, etc. I could go on, and on, and...
Not rehashes. Original, phenomenal games covering damm near every genre and if there is a genre you're missing, I can find a modern game to match.
Do you actually engage with modern games?
Those may be some amazing games you listed but none of them scratch the itch that some folks have for twitchy NES games. For some reason, modern indie developers never try to emulate the tight, twitchy, highly responsive controls of NES games. Instead, they go for floaty, slow acceleration-based, more forgiving controls.
The puzzle games in your list have no equal though. The NES is pretty light on puzzle / adventure games, though it did receive really nice ports of the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate) as well as Maniac Mansion, and it has a couple of unique ones with Nightshade and Solstice that blend in a bit of action while remaining primarily adventure games.
2019, 2019, 2025, 2019, 2019, 2017, 2017, 2021, 2025, 2017, 2024, 2018, 2020, 2015, 2011.
I only see three games here less than five years old. The oldest is from three console generations ago. Do /you/ actually engage with modern games? Remember the time you’re comparing to had 5-year console generations. This is like someone on the release date of the PlayStation 3 saying that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a “modern game”.
Of course there are good modern games, but I agree there was something special about the first 3D generation of hardware (hardware cheap enough to be in home consoles at least) and the games it enabled.
Only VR has come close recently, but that hasn't hit in the same way because it is still too expensive and cumbersome.
Ok, I’ll give you Rocket League. That’s an entirely new spin on a genre I didn’t see coming. The rest are just RPGs or platformers you like. Good games, but not innovative. Yes, some new franchises have been born and some successful indie titles have been launched but most of the market share in the games industry is held by the top 5.
Yes, I have over 1,000 games in my Steam library going back to 1999. I engage in most games that make the top 500 and have so since I was a teenager making games myself.
>The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died
lol
There are countless already classic modern story driven games which pushing the boundaries of video games forward.
I know nostalgia is a very strong drug and I also love the games I grew up with in the 90s but it's pure ignorance to say that 1, "storytelling died" 2, no innovation happened in video games in modern times (whatever that even means)
You are misconstruing my love for nostalgia games for when you think I believe storytelling died. It didn’t die in the 90s, it died in 2010s. Everything since 2018 that I have played has been relatively easy to guess the plot line or it didn’t ever materialize to begin with.
For the oldies but goodies in my list:
- Any one of the 194_ games
- Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past
- Super Mario World
- Final Fantasy VI, VII, IX
- Chrono Trigger (agree)
- Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition
- Metal Gear Solid 1-3, MGS: Peace Walker
But I think there's been good stuff since.
- The Super Mario Galaxy games
- Super Monkey Ball
- MGS4, MGS5
- Witcher 3
- The Bioshock games
- Minecraft-- probably the game with the most replay value of anything of all time.
I don't know what will stand the test of time. I don't want to play any of these games now, since I've burnt them out, but at some point I'll likely want to play them again...
- Undertale
- Bravely Default
- The Octopath games
- Dispatch
- AstroBot
- Clair Obscur
Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition (whichever was the one with the most characters) as well as Street Fighter Alpha were great for the arcade machine.
Most of my buddies at the time would come over, have a beer, immediately hang it on the boat-coozy cup holders (the ones that gyro) and go to town shoulder to shoulder playing SF2. The cup holders gyro would prevent the beers from spilling as the arcade cabinet rocked back and forth from two grown men having a virtual fist fight. Best times.
Playing Metal Gear Solid 2 was one of my fondest memories I cherish. I could play it only at Taekwondo gym I was attending to. I couldn't finish it because I only had a couple of hours at the gym and I could play only during break time. Oh and I was always waiting for the break time!
I disagree. There are some new (sub-) genres and great games since that period.
* Roguelites have proliferated: Hades is the most obvious example, but there are a variety of sub-genres at this point.
* Vampire Survivors (itself a roguelite) spawned survivors-likes. Megabonk is currently pretty popular.
* Slay the Spire kicked off a wave of strategy roguelites.
* There are "cozy" games like Unpacking.
* I don't recall survival games like Subnautica or Don't Starve being much of a thing in the PS2 era.
* There are automation games like Factorio and Satisfactory.
* Casual mobile games are _huge_.
* There are more experimental games, sometimes in established genres, like Inscription, Undertale, or Baba Is You.
Not to mention that new games in existing genres can be great. Hollow Knight is a good example. Metroidvanias were established by the SNES and PS1 era, but Hollow Knight really upped the stakes.
I'm sure I'm forgetting things and people will have some criticism, but I really don't believe games have stagnated in general.
"Roguelites have proliferated"
I know it's easy to feel that this is people chasing trends, but I've really come to appreciate roguelites over many of the PS2 era games because they give me real progression in a single play session, but also, that single play session is discardable.
As an adult this is a very compelling proposition.
In the PS2 era, while you can find some early roguelite-like-things, you tended to have either the games that have no interesting progression (arcade-like) and the you would just play the game, or you had very long scale games like JRPGs that slowly trickle out the progression but are also multi-dozen-hour games. Compressing the progression into something that happens in a small number of hours, yet eliminates the "I'm 50 hours into this game that I stopped 2 years ago, do I want to pick it back up if I've forgotten everything?" has been very useful to me.
This has been a fairly significant change in gaming for me. I still have some investment into the higher end JRPGs but the "roguelite" pattern across all sorts of genres has been wonderful overall. I don't even think of it as a genre anymore; it's a design tool, like 'turn based versus real time'.
Roguelites are the worst thing to happen to video games since microtransactions. It’s an extremely attractive option to the cash-strapped indie dev, as it promises infinite ‘content’ for little development effort, but what it’s really done is turned every game into a combination of cookie clicker and a slot machine.
The fact that you think arcade games have “no interesting progression” shows just how toxic the roguelike design pattern is. The progression in arcade games is you getting better at the game. If a game needs a “progress system” to communicate a sense of accomplishment to the player, that’s because the gameplay is shallow.
If you're struggling with keeping your attention, you ought to try making a list of games you never finished (or never played) and commit yourself to playing through them in order. I have been doing that with NES games and really enjoying it. I alternate between RPGs/adventures and action games, to mix things up a bit.
Recently, I have played through Faxanadu, Dragon Warrior, Blaster Master, and am now working through Fire Emblem (translated from Japanese).
Glad to hear the love for BG3. Grew up playing Black Isle games (BG1 and BG2) so it was nice to play against a substantially more intelligent AI that couldn't be cheesed nearly as hard due to the new turn-based combat as well.
For reference in case anyone "@" me on that cause rose-tinted glasses make people blind:
No one remembers using Animate Dead (a third-level priest spell with no summon limit) to summon a skeletal warrior and walking them up to the enemy's camp/ambush? Enemy wizards proceed to waste EVERY memorized spell on a f###ing summon - and half the spells are charm/control spells that are completely ineffective against undead anyway. Isn't intelligence supposed to be the prime ability score of a wizard? :)
My least favorite story of the Baldur’s Gates. Sorry. I gave it a 6/10 on Steam.
> N64/PS1/PS2/Xbox was peak and it’s been rehashed franchises ever since. Shame. The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died has been Battle Royale Looter Shooters.
I was a kid when ps1/n64 came out so I also have a lot of nostalgia about that era of gaming.
However…
There are a ton of great games out there from this era. Hell, the Uncharted series and Expedition 33 will get you 100-200 hours of excellent gameplay, Elden ring is another 200. Lies of P is a fantastic game, 50-100 more. The star wars Legos and star wars Harry Potter games are a lot of fun to play with kids, and Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the Zelda games we wanted on n64 as a kid, I love those games. And they’re not a rehash, at all.
There’s a lot of fun things out there to play if you poke around. Your local library might surprise you with the collection for completely free games you can borrow. Modern games even.
Money is not the limiting factor.
I agree there are many games and tons of hours of content available. That is never my issue. There’s lot of games. Games I play. I see the same mechanics in all of them. Some of them because there’s no better way to do it given our current input scheme, others, because they did it. As my kids are now grown, I no longer play kids games like Lego or Zelda (although I do recommend you play them, they are fun) but my argument about peak gaming was that we were still pushing the boundaries of what was possible, hardware wise even. Today, it’s more standardized, polished, refined, as we developed PBR rendering pipelines to recreate realism. My hill I’ll die on is that after that era, it’s been mostly rehashed franchises and game design we have seen before. Yes we have new stories, new graphics, new characters, but you’re still “kill X monsters” or “loot X from Y” style task rabbits. I am jaded because I know we can do better, it’s just the people who hold the purse won’t let us.
We have pushed technology but we have been limited in how far we can push narratives and reality. This gap is closing though. As for storytelling, there are some great stories out there, some predictable ones as well. The freedom of choice in games like Last of Us and Tell Tale Series helped push that a little further but we are still constrained to a linear timeline of events like it’s a movie or a book. Even games where it makes no sense to have it, has it as a way to tracking your level, or progress, or what areas you can visit.
Some stories should be told linearly. Some stories shouldn’t be. There was a time when you were given just enough narrative to understand the world you were in, but nothing more. Your story was your own making.
Renting games was a thing. I had about 30 SNES games, and likely played more than 200.
What really happens when talking about retro games is that people remember the remarkable stuff. There were plenty of shitty games back then, they are just rightly forgotten.
Blockbuster and Funco Land gave me all the titles I could get my 7 year old fingers on.
It's called getting older.
As a grown adult, nothing can recreate the feeling of exploring a new game as a child/teen. Especially during the 80s/90s, where gaming as a whole was new and rapidly-evolving.
But revisiting old favourites for the nostalgia can still be enjoyable.
What? Dreamcast was a marvel when it came to games, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis, Power Stone, Jet Set Radio, Grandia, SoulCalibur etc.
SoulCalibur was better on PlayStation.
Dreamcast’s only hit was Crazy Taxi.
The Demons Souls lineage titles are another valuable innovation (I understand the earlier inspirations it had but those aren't playable like these modern ones)
For MAME I recommend trying Pang and Super Buster Bros
I sit here with a laggy windows 11 computer with an Nvidia GPU and wonder: WTF
Its fine with Fedora, but Windows 11 is terrible.
They all bear some of the blame.
Software engineers are hired to be the expert in their field. If you don't learn your craft, managers aren't going to do it for you.
Ideally new hires would be mentored by senior engineers who understand performance, and who can teach new hires how to write (and ship) good, performant software. But unfortunately that doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it should.
Maybe. I had a director that fired anyone who wouldn't use Microsoft Power Automate.
Previous to that director, I built stuff in python for 5 years under a different director.
I suspect we will see a proliferation of emulator development in the next few years.
In a lot of ways, emulators are the perfect problem for vision/LLMs. It's like all those web browser projects popping up on HN. You have a very well define problem with existing reference test cases. It's not going to be fun for Nintendo's lawyers in future when everybody can crowdfund an emulator by simply running a VLM against a screen recording of gameplay (barring non deterministic éléments).
They can't oppress the software engineering masses any longer through lawfare.
I gave up video games, but I remember that being a huge reason why I picked Android a decade + ago. Emulators :D
Apparently now iphone allows it. Eventually Apple gives features that are standard elsewhere. Veblen goods...
I find PS2 emulation to be lacking.
Of course I am spoiled by Dolphin and their meticulous work, and the leap in N64 emulation, and PS3 emulation is way farther than I thought it could ever be.
But PCSX2 is mediocre. It reports the vast majority of the library in "green" emulation state, but that usually means there are glaring issues that someone is choosing to overlook, like shadows that are broken.
The Ace Combat games for example are all broken with the hardware accelerated renderer. Things run like garbage in the software renderer for a lot of games. Multiplayer functionality is spotty and hard to set up and poorly documented.
The state of emulation of that console generation is not up to snuff, save for Dolphin. It's still very much in the "Shut up, it works fine for Super Mario 64 so it works" mindset it seems.
This is true even of official emulators! The Xbox emulator that ran on the Xbox 360 has many games that are "officially supported" with serious issues. Forza Motorsport 1 has weird slowdowns on key tracks. I understand the serious hardware difficulties but I still wish emulation accuracy was an option.
What the dev of AertherSx2 did to run games smooth, even on my midrange 2019 android phone, is wonders.
Too bad the dev is a very emotionally unstable person that abandoned his port, despite his big talent.
Moore's law never ceases to amaze (the vulgar version where we're talking compute/dollar, not the transistor count doubling rate.) It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters. It's hard to even imagine the things that will be running on billion dollar clusters in 10 years.