for some reason , I cant stop booting up my old PS1 emulator and playing Demolition Derby - something about that old game just hits the sweet spot..

Yeah I know - this is a PC gaming forum, shut up and go haunt a console forum :)

Anyone else got a hoary old game from the distant past they still have to play every now and then?

I have this relationship with Hardwar.

Several. Including several of which I only learned far postdated from their release. From NES to GBA. I would do DS, but until recently, the state of DS emulation was subpar.

I have an old PC that I can still boot up into Windows XP (by switching the SATA cable to the SSD where I got XP installed, unplugged from the internet of course) to play History Channel Civil War (that I can't get to run in Windows 10, not even in compatibility mode):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Channel:_Civil_War_%E2%80%93_A_Nation_Divided

I often like to play older games. Consider, for example, my recent interest in Demon's Winter, a game that is definitely not a recent game.

Paladin's Quest is one game that I sometimes replay from time to time, though sometimes I stop right before the final boss. (Thing is, the final boss is *notoriously* difficult; if you're unlucky, the boss can take a character down from full HP to 0 in one round, and once a character reaches 0 HP, there's no bringing them back until the battle is over. It doesn't help that only one character has an attack that's capable of doing meaningful damage, and it costs 250 HP to cast.)

There's also the occasion of me replaying the original Dragon Warrior. Note that I actually prefer the original version of this game, as the remakes increased experience and gold gains so much that it really isn't the same; I actually *want* to spend hours wandering around, killing enemies, and slowly watching my XP increase until I can level up. So, how has it improved? (In particular, would it be possible, using an open source emulator, to play a DS game at full speed on a low spec laptop, one with only a Celeron as its CPU?)

(Speaking of which, I sometimes like to replay the early SaGa games, namely 1 and 3, and the remakes of 2 and 3; if I replay the original 2, it will be a glitch run, and I actually don't think the WonderSwan Color version of 1 is that good (it fixed the RNG, but introduced new bugs and didn't fix some bugs that really should have been fixed, like the confusion bug).)

Are you sure you don't mean Destruction Derby?
That game is available for PC, so you can hunt yourself a copy and stop using emulators.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/destruction-derby

i would love them to get some rights to games that are only available on abandoned ware sites

make some bundles out of them.

I'd most likely purchase the bundles since I havent bothered to venture out to the other sites and take a gamble at the games not being as advertised, ie viruses etc.

Block Out
Are we there yet?
California games

etc etc

That's DOS, so you're still emulating, and if the choice is DOS emulator or a PS1 emulator, the PS1 wins.

Except that, on a PS1 emulator you have to deal with load times, whereas DOS games can be installed to the hard drive, and when there there's typically no (or very little) load times.

Kung-Fu on NES.

uhh - I had a brain fart. I do mean Destruction Derby :) It was late last night when I posted...

And yeah - I have tried the PC version, but its just not the same - i had the game and the PS1 back in the day, it hits that nostalgia spot exactly. Playing the PC version is subtly different...

Doesn't it depend whether you are using a physical PS1 CD-ROM to play the game, or an ISO image which is sitting on your hard drive? Wouldn't the PS1 emulator load game data blindingly fast from that ISO sitting on the hard drive?

You could even install your PS1 emulator in the Azure or AWS (definitely not Google!) cloud, and play it over the internet on your tablet, using only your TOES to control the game! Then again, I have no idea why you'd want to do that, but hey, it is one possible scenario.

That sounds like when I was discussing about the movie Blade Hunter. You know, the older movie with Harrison Ford in it?

What's wrong with using an emulator? DosBOX is an emulator and PS1 emulators can play legit Playstation discs, so there's no moral or legal difference between the two options.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on the GameBoy is my pick for the thread topic. I know the game like the back of my hand because I've played it since I was 8. It presents no challenge to me whatsoever, I just bathe in the warm glow of nostalgia.

I haven't had the opportunity to really grok into it, but MelonDS appears to have completely displaced the previously alone DeSeMunE, even to the point of allowing the running of DSiware titles and being the basis for DS TASes. Which seems to speak to a high regard towards accuracy.

Load times in emulators sometimes have to be emulated due to timing reasons which might cause the emulation to fail for certain games, however emulators also generally have loading speedup options for games that don't need "correct" loading speeds.