Got into a heated debate at a retro PC swap meet in Detroit last Saturday

I was selling some old Sound Blaster cards and this guy walks up and starts arguing that DOS games actually run better on a modern PC with emulation than on original hardware. I told him, no way, the sound lag on emulation kills the feel of Doom. He fired back that my CRT monitor was giving him a headache. We went back and forth for 20 minutes while his buddy just stood there holding a box of floppies. So which side are you on, do you stick with original hardware for authenticity or go emulation for convenience? Has anyone else dealt with purists trying to pick fights at these events?

2 comments

2 Comments

leo2384d ago

One time at MGC a guy tried to convince me that running Doom on a Pentium 166 with the original Sound Blaster AWE32 is actually worse than using a hacked together DOSBox setup on a laptop from 2018... I just pointed at the blinking cursor on my boot screen and he had nothing to say. His friend was holding a bag of old RAM sticks like a weird shield. Some people get really attached to their modern convenience and forget the whole point is the clunky experience.

the_rowan4d ago

Did you catch that old LGR video where he talks about how DOSBox just can't reproduce that specific sound of a hard drive grinding through a boot sequence? It's those little imperfections that make the real hardware feel alive.