Tag Archives: emulation

Abandon-What?

Shifting paradigms in gaming are hard to see coming, even when they’re already underway. Ideas often crop up ahead of their time before the technology or infrastructure exists to support them; CDs are a good example of this, being used mainly to store awfully digitised voice samples and full-motion video for a good couple of years after their introduction as a storage medium, and it wasn’t until the Playstation that they began to be filled with the art assets required to render 3D games. Graphics cards were another distinct shift in the market, and I can hazily remember after the first 3dfx Voodoo card came out that it was considered unthinkable that one day in the near future PC games would not only make use of them, they’d require them in order to run. And now we have fibre-optic broadband connections and digital distribution making physical media obsolete. If I want to play a certain game from the last 15-odd years of PC gaming history the chances are there’s a digital distribution channel somewhere which will provide me with the goods almost instantly. It’s gotten to the point where buying a game that comes on a disc inside a box feels distinctly dated.

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