A prisoner's view of emulation.

Hi there!
For those who have read along, you're aware that I'm behind the concertina wire of a Florida prison, and I'm telling a view of a gender-nonconforming neurodivergent in a Men's prison.

While I could joke about having to emulate some of the behaviours of the men surrounding me, I'd rather be my nerdy enby self in my zone, and talk about my experiences with video game console emulation.

setup.txt

I remember the days of NESticle and Genecyst, the early days of ZSKnight working on ZSNES, the rivalries between them and the SNES9X crew. This part of my story starts nearly quarter of a century ago, running emulators on my desktop computer to play games that I couldn't afford to buy back then for a myriad of reasons.

Some price tags were prohibitive, be it the cost of buying import hardware to circumvent region lockouts, or the game was sufficiently rare that even then, a single cartridge ran $100+, used.

Some of it was due to regional language barriers. My skill at reading French was basic, conversational level. My skill at Japanese was limited to one character, 'no', both of which hindered me from playing games that may have never earned an English release.

What Emulation brought to the table

For a person who didn't exactly know they had hearing loss (thanks to a lack of testing), I favored the heck out of reading. Video games offered me interactive reading, whether it was to draw tears and a growled "Damn you, Zio!" out of my throat when playing Phantasy Star IV: End of the Millennium, or laughter at certain scenes in SquareSoft's Final Fantasy III (later renumbered as VI for North America).
I fell in love with the RPG in the mid 1990s.

Then, emulation gave me a cushion that has largely propagated into modern gaming: the ability to save my playing frequently, in case I need to go do responsible things.
It also allowed for communities to come together around what might have been an obscure title that never was afforded a translation into another language -- say, the Super Famicom release of Front Mission as example, and give it the love and attention it deserved as a title.

It also brought adaptability to the table. With emulation, I could choose what I used as a controller, meaning in my case, I can favor large handheld controllers that made my hands hurt less. A person who might need assistive tech to manage certain kinds of input can now have that access.

It brought e-waste down: maybe someone has an old fighting stick setup that they still want to use. An emulator can be mapped to use the controller, extending its usable lifespan when the original system may no longer exist.

Is it beneficial?

Yes, I would gladly say emulation is beneficial -- it allows us to preserve a form of entertainment beyond the availability of certain types of hardware. You might have trouble finding the right combo of certain hardware components to play an older game, or the original media becomes unreadable as time passes. Rather than being locked into the decaying memory of human mind, or only viewable as videos on YouTube, we emulate to extend living memory access to created content.

Prison is a great use case for emulation.

We are a people behind the wires, with little to nothing to do in many cases. While some might argue that prisoners don't need entertainment, I find the need to rebut:
Having nothing to do raises the danger level for all involved in the system.
This said, most things we get are modified for security concerns. That means we're not walking around with Nintendo Switches or some of the fantastic console mods built by makers in the last 20 years.
That we even get tablets these days is already a major concession, albeit older hardware and modified, again for security.

To wit, I am offered through our Media Store a selection of emulated console titles that I have purchased access to two. It is reasonable to say that in absence of actual hardware to mitigate security issues,an emulator gives me and others access to titles that might be a couple of decades old, but have plenty of care and thought put into them, and in the case of one title, gives me something in common to bond with my fellow inmates residents.

Bond.

Yes, bond. Until I played one of these titles here, I hadn't given a toss about this franchise of pocketable monstrosities. Now here I am, 54+ hours in, and learning about their various quirks from three other players in my quad, having conversations about my naming conventions (many of my names are clearly joke names).
I even drew a picture for my tablet's sleeve that's themed around this game, of which one of my conversational partners caught the joke embedded in it, and was just about doubled over in laughter.

It's a cleanly done but still inappropriate joke that, should I gain my freedom, or if I ever replace the image with something else, I might like to share with you all. :)

Less hardware, More play.

In the end, having access to more emulated titles at a fair price would be ideal; we get a lot of shovelware for $3-6, and most emulated titles are $7.48. While I am clearly getting my $7.48 worth out of this and the other title, I lament the lack of roleplaying games in general in our store.

Anything that stimulates the mind into directions other than doing prison drugs, or plotting eventual revenge and regret; anything that helps to detour suicidal ideations; anything that could even be educational for a person who might be learning the language? I welcome it.

But that's just me.

Take care, folks, and thank you for reading.