Retro Gaming Australia

It’s a sad reflection on the state of knowledge preservation when you don’t know exactly when an important event happened. That just happens to be the case with the release of Super Mario Bros. as Frank Cifaldi points out in his investigation into the matter over at Gamasutra. The article is well worth your time.

In case you were wondering, Super Mario Bros. was available for the 1987 launch of the NES in Australia – except we currently do not know that exact date either (and not through lack of trying, let me assure you).

ArsTechnia has posted an article written by bsnes developer Byuu, explaining his justifications for chasing accuracy in emulation over system compatibility and resource efficiency.

The article provides an interesting insight into what’s required to get a SNES emulator to be more accurate, and the challenges you face in improving the quality of emulation. He also discusses why past emulators did things the way they did, and why he doesn’t agree with that methodology.

Regardless of where you stand on Byuu’s position, you have to consider this to be a key point in his argument, if not the most important one:

You have to realize that emulators, too, have shelf-lives. That’s especially true for ones such as ZSNES that are written in pure x86 assembly. You simply can’t run this on your cell phone. By locking a hack to run only on ZSNES, you are dooming your hack to irrelevance. As soon as Windows drops 32-bit backwards compatibility, just as it has already done with 16-bit backwards compatibility, these fan translations and hacks will be lost forever. At that point the emulator itself becomes almost like another dead console, instead of a way to keep the old games alive.

With preservation becoming a major issue in the video game industry, Byuu’s approach may end up being vindicated after all.