Weird glitches. Flicker, or colors being wrong. Things running at the wrong speed. Things not rendering right. Sometimes the game crashes at certain spots.
A lot of games have been perfectly playable on emulators since the 90's, but they may not have been totally representative of the look and feel on the original hardware. If you look at emulator compatibility docs they frequently will list an estimation of how faithful it is to the original hardware, and as well denote, "Completable" (i.e. you can actually play the game all the way through without something devastating happening, or you getting stuck because a door never opens or something like that)
> Weird glitches. Flicker, or colors being wrong. Things running at the wrong speed. Things not rendering right. Sometimes the game crashes at certain spots.
A lot of those were there in the original, especially flicker on NES, which was due to the sprite limits. That's actually something you can turn off in modern emulators, because it's an old and annoying hardware limit on the number of sprites per line.
Some of the weird flicker/color glitches in the corners weren't visible or as noticeable on old CRT monitors, but they were still there as well because CRTs had rounded corners and some of the pixels there could be lost.
If anything, emulators let you have an experience superior to the old days to filters, ways to bypass sprite limits, etc. And some games have been extensively patched by fans (Final Fantasy 4/6j in particular) or were only translated by fans, etc.
That said, there are some differences in viewing things on a modern monitor vs. a CRT because of how the CRTs had more persistence due to how phosphors work and this could cause color bleed that's not there any longer.
No offense, but this really reads like a post from 15 years ago. It's not true anymore for NES and SNES and has not been for years. Look at mesen and bsnes -- 100% compatibility, indistinguishable from real hardware on every released game.
Your post is still accurate if you're talking about newer hardware like the Wii or PS2. Even N64 emulation is still kind of sketchy 25 years later due to the weird exoticity of that system.
yea gonna have to call BS on this. there's more NES and SNES emulators around these days than any other systems and their compatibility and accuracy is mind-blowing.
