Argos

It does make me wonder about the path emulation takes in the future if current-gen consoles similarity to PCs ends up being more of a hindrance than a help. PCs and consoles are sharing more and more games recently with even Japanese companies slowly beginning to realize that there's something to porting over their games to Steam and while I totally welcome that it does mean that there are fewer true exclusives that would entice emulation efforts. Just seems as if there's been a shift over the past few generations where first-party/exclusive games get less prominent while multi-platform games take more and more of a central role. The Xbox One is kinda an extreme example of that, and I'm interested in seeing how the community tackles it in the future. If their play-anywhere initiative holds up throughout the rest of its lifespan and those games remain available on PC after the Xbox One cycle there will be something like...ten non-Kinect retail games that are truly exclusive to the system. This isn't a dig on the Xbox, but something I'm worried about when the time comes. These companies don't seem particularly interested in investing in real, long-term preservation efforts for their games so that burden rests largely on talented, passionate hobbyists for now and I wonder if that will be enough if the systems keep getting harder to emulate for less games. That's probably way too far in the future to even begin worrying about though, and I'd never claim to actually begin to know what the actual programming challenges for any particular system would be.

I'm honestly a bit worried about Xbox preservation in the future, it seems to be a perfect storm of frustrating hardware (although I didn't know that its similarities to PC actually made it harder to emulate!) and lack of interest. The last I checked there were only one or two people working on the most promising Xbox emulator, and one of them had gotten a job that took them away from doing much work. It would probably be a far different story if the original Halos weren't ever ported to PC, but a lot of the remaining exclusives are relatively niche, even if those "niche" games are well worth the effort. I remember seeing someone else on some emulation forum break down that only two or so million-selling original Xbox games were true exclusives, so there's less clamoring for something to get done. Panzer Dragoon Orta, Phantom Dust, Otogi - these are the kind of "cult classics" that never quite got the attention they deserved when they first came out. They're the kinds of games that we love to discover, but there's a worry that they don't seem a pressing enough need to attract the kind of enormously talented, dedicated programmers that are necessary to get emulation running for such an evidently complex console. There's that fear that the time where it would have gotten the most attention has already passed. It's a real shame because not only do many of those games stuck on the original Xbox look fascinating (I'd die for a chance at Jet Set Radio Future in particular) but it also has the best version of many multi-platform games by most accounts. The thing that still makes me hold out hope is that surely some enterprising programmer or programmers will see the ongoing lack of an Xbox emulator as a challenge. The Mednafen Saturn core is a great example - though there has been at least some emulation of Saturn for a while, though often limited and overly complicated. Still, if the Sega Saturn - a console that sold fifteen million less units than the original Xbox, had notoriously complex and haphazard hardware and with a good percentage of the best of the library being ports of arcade games easily emulatable elsewhere - can get a good emulator, why not the Xbox? All it takes is a few people with passion, talent and opportunity to get something going.

Thanks a million for giving such detailed responses to such an open question. It's especially good to know that going through the effort of emulating Amiga is worth it, I was wondering whether most of the stuff worth exploring wasn't already ported over to DOS at some point. One of the reasons I chose Launchbox in the first place was because of the tutorials, and your Amiga one might be one of the best for such a tough subject. I think I'm still going to try and get into MSX emulation because I think there's enough there that interests me, but it's a relief not to have to deal with the Spectrum considering that I'm already not a fan of its graphics. I knew that it was pretty central to UK gaming at the time, but I suppose all the best stuff was ported to the C64 and such? Hadn't even thought about Atari 8-bit and X68000, as someone who likes shmups (despite being terrible at them) and classic Japanese games in general I'll definitely go through the effort to emulate the latter at some point down the road.

As an American whose first memories of PC gaming after Reader Rabbit were with Windows, I've been slow to pick up on the wealth of history it has to offer. Coming from emulating consoles, though, it's a bit more difficult to suss out what's worth my energy. Basically, there were so many competing standards with games being widely ported between them that it seems like there will be diminishing returns with each computer emulated. I currently have DOS and Commodore 64 emulated (along with Atari ST but that's only a few games so far) and I'm looking into building MSX, Amiga, ZX Spectrum and maybe Apple II libraries right now. What else should I be looking into, or are any of these basically redundant? Is there any reason to look into Amstrad emulation if it's not something you grew up on, for example? Are there any post-MSX Japanese computers worth checking out if you only speak English? Sorry if this is too broad of a question, but I'm hoping that a newfound excitement for diving into a realm I'm not familiar with won't lead me to spending too much energy where it's not needed.

FightCade also uses FBAlpha, so people who are happy with its selection and don't want to deal with another arcade emulator might go with it. I haven't used it in a bit since I really figured out MAME but it's more intuitive as well iirc, at one point it was the only place I could get to play my NeoGeo roms. But yeah, if you're comfortable with MAME it's probably not necessary.