Saying that he wanted to make the Mac 'the best game machine in the world,' Jobs introduced the Connectix Virtual Game Station, a $49 piece of third-party software that 'turns your Mac into a Sony PlayStation.'
Emulation is just software that makes a computer act like a different computer.'Ĭifaldi traces emulation's bad reputation in the game industry back to a 1999 Macworld conference keynote by the late Steve Jobs. 'I think our industry and consumers have a really bad misconception of what emulation is.
'I think emulation has gotten a bad rap over the years,' Cifaldi said. In a passionate presentation at the Game Developers Conference this week, though, gaming historian and developer Frank Cifaldi made a well-reasoned case for the industry at large to embrace emulation as a way to capture its heritage. For years now, 'emulation' has been a dirty word in the video game industry, regarded by many companies as nothing more than an illegal, piracy-fueling technology that represents an existential threat to the gaming business.
