Still don't get why. This means fewer playstations they would have to make. Which is good because those are expensive, and more games to sell which is good because those are cheap.
@@aliasmcdoe I bet it would cause easier access to pirated copies of the game, since I don't believe that it wouldn't be easy to modify the emulator to allow burned CDs or even disk images to work.
@@aliasmcdoe precisely. Why did sony not take the deal? I don't understand. These people made sure it wouldn't play burned discs if that is what they were worried about (a legitimate concern.) Sony gets royalty !money. They get good press. They get an entry point into the pc gamer market while all but creating a mac gamer base.
the people first on the emulation scene are legends. and most don't even know what all they've achieved... we've really come a long way. and I'll forever be thankful to all involved. without you, I wouldn't be able to emulate on a phone...
I have to admit I’m seriously impressed by some of these early emulators and how fast they are on hardware at the time. Seems like a bit of a lost art given that now you can just throw immense amounts of compute power at the problem... back then you had to actually be clever.
Don't discount the work done by current emulation developers though. They are still doing us all an incredible favor by creating all of this software for free.
@@Carbine64 oh, absolutely, and especially the accuracy of modern emulation is really impressive - I guess I just have an interest in people doing surprising things with by modern standards immensely underpowered hardware.
Let's not forget about Xbox 360 and Wii U emulation, that requires the devs to reverse engineer entire hardware, with custom cpu and gpu, while running with actual decent performances.
First half of this comment is dead on but the second half is nonsense, which completely trashes the very impressive work done by current emulator developers. Not to mention totally irrelevant to the way computing power is used in software design
Its very interesting to see Punk Rock MBA comment on something like this and it honestly surprises me. I would love to see you talk about your experiences with this stuff on your secondary channel man
Ironically enough, Apple would take deep umbrage at anyone trying to emulate or reimplement iOS or macOS, yet they previously promoted an emulator themselves.
@@Name_cannot_be_blank Get a Oneplus/Xiaomi phone and install a custom ROM. IMO, this has more privacy than even Apple's products Or get a pixel and install GrapheneOS. Most secure.
ePSXe always threw me back in the day due to excessive setup Like, as a kid who was still fascinated by just being able to load pokemonblue.gb into SMYGB and just play it, ePSXe asking for everything specified and then just kinda not working made me... not so interested in PS1 emulation. So this woulda been nice
That's true, but if you used the software renderer on ePSXe you'd see it's problems disappear. But software emulation is kind of ugly...so it's a trade-off.
Oh, do you want to learn about computing story? Then you need to search the channel "Advent of Computing". Don't be fooled thinking you already heard and know the stories it's telling, you actually haven't. That podcast is amazing and almost totally unknown, a crime!
Aaron is a freakin’ genius, and a genuinely nice guy - a rare combination. Emulation wouldn’t be where it is today without his years of tireless, brilliant work. It’s great to see his efforts featured like this!
Great look at this ... this really did feel like the golden age of emulation in many ways. While we’re emulating at unprecedented levels these days, it was truly astonishing to see the feats of the community without the benefit of such brute force. Oh, and that Clamshell is fierce-a beautiful touch for this video!
some day in the future when MVG passes away, he will be replaced by an open-source emulator that will continue making TH-cam videos, and none of us will know
Said emulator that contains code he wrote for emulation projects several steps re!over, but still relevant in emulating a human mind Which emulated¡mVG would find hilarious.
"Can I have a rig capable of running the MVG emulator?" "We already have a rig running the MVG emulator at home" MVG emulator rig at home: *same but speaking with an American accent*
Those episodes about old emulators are always a treat, i still remember the first time i used zsnes and had access to pretty much the entire library of the SNES on my windows 98, it was magical.
Hey thank you, You were the one who attracted me to homebrew and emulation on consoles, i even modded my dreamcast, xbox original and my nintendo ds cause you inspired me
Man, this takes me back. This got me into emulation back in 2001. Incredible that such efficient emulation was done on such limited hardware. It was an incredible experience, it was like a whole new world back on Mac OS9. Such nostalgia. Thanks for doing this video. Mac didn’t have the PC games but it had emulation and it was incredible.
Thanks so much for talking about this emulator, MVG! I have rarely ever heard any history about this emulator. I remember using this emulator on my old hand-me-down computer from 1997 running win98 with a 266mhz processor. I remember being excited that I could fit the emulator on a floppy disc along with my game saves. I remember thinking, wow, a whole playstation on a floppy disc! Anyone here use any of aldostools with CVGS? Aldo was a dude who created many tools and patches for CVGS. The emulator played everything I had at the time (I could only play the games I had on disc at the time). Good times back then!
me: **adds button** **adjusts layout** what a productive day emulator devs: **reverse engineers entire hardware stack and emulates it at x1 speed** hmm this could be optimized a bit more
me: **uses bitwise/bitshift to extract rgba values from 32-bit color** haha i’m so smort emulator devs: **creates dynamic recompiler to translate between machine code at run time to speed up emulation** this isn’t fast enough, and sometimes the polygons are 1 pixel off compared to real hardware **sigh**
@@myface6739 mood, also: someone even ported windows 95 and dos to webassembly so you can emulate windows 95 **on the browser** and play dos games ***on the browser*** meanwhile I can’t even make my printer work properly lmao
Always saw this advertised in magazines at the time and wondered how the hell it worked, knowing how even SNES emulators ran on my PC at the time. Love seeing this video.
Those were the days... Around 2003 I ran connectix vgs on a PC for full speed PS1 emulation. There were other emulators out there by then, but none were as fast as VGS.
Dimitris your channel is a gift for the industry and everyone out there interested in how we came to where we are, i can't even imagine how much research you need to do and how many people you have to reach out to in order to make a video like this. Good Job
It's impressive that they managed to get such a high level of accuracy and speed for the PS1 only a few years after it's release, while certain PS2 titles still can't be properly emulated at full speed after two decades.
Compatibility doesn't mean accuracy, and as a matter of fact none of these emulators were accurate in the slightest (they would often hiccup on trivial matters). Also PS2 is a way more complex machine, while the PSX is extremely simple to program for and has a fool proof architecture.
@@geminirebirth Your name looks very familiar to me, are you the person that did the hacking for the Persona 2 Innocent Sin translation? If so, thank you so much for your work, it's probably my favourite game and I may not have played it if not for that patch years ago. If you're not them, sorry for my mistake!
I played all the playstation's greatest hits on a Pentium II 350Mhzs with this emulator, not having the original hardware. That piece of software was reeeeally good.
Incredible video. This really takes me back. I remember owning an iMac G3 (2nd generation, 300 mHz) in 1999/2000 and I was into gaming on mac, PC, playstation, and anything I could get my hands on. VGS was mind-blowing to me at the time -- I had been running simple emulators for Gameboy, NES, and SNES but VGS was on another level. I would pop my PS disc right into it and it just worked like native! I had my trusty USB gravis gamepad PRO which mimicked the original Playstation controller and I was set. I think I even purchased a memory card dumper so I could transfer my memory card data to the mac! It's great to hear the amazing technology and work that went into making this piece of software. So sad that it was shut down though :/
Sony: sells console hardware at a loss. Sony: only makes money on game sales. These guys: let's make something that vastly increases the market to which Sony can sell games while not requiring them to buy the product that loses Sony money. Sony: stop that.
Sony (and Microsoft and Nintendo) usually only sell console hardware for a loss in the first ~2 years. By 1999 Sony were making loads of profit with the PS1.
@@ps5hasnogames55 loss at the beginning of the generation. Break even on sales midway. And hope by the end, with hardware revisions and the cost of components coming down, to recover the losses at the beginning. If it's a very successful generation towards the end, they should be seeing profits, but the hardware will always just be what enables selling licensees rather than the profit center itself.
Virtual Game Station was my first introduction to emulation. I first played Spyro and Final Fantasy VII this way on a G3 beige desktop. Recently found my original copy of it and installed it on my G4 just to see how well it worked. A lot of later games have problems with menus and things not appearing and there are quite a number of audio issues for some games, but still, it's really impressive what they were able to put together. Thanks for the video, as this is a part of emulation history that it seems not that many people are really aware of.
I remember when we got a copy of it at the Apple Centre I worked at, we cracked it open, by the end of the day everyone had a copy and the box was back on the shelf. 🤣
@@monsterhunter445 Well we did the "impossible" more than once with various software (shrink wrap machines were good), but hey, it was easier to copy stuff on the mac.
I remember reading somewhere this emulator was used on the PSP by Sony to achieve PS1 emulation (called POPS internally if I am not mistaken), not sure if that was also a rumour or actually confirmed.
Possible, but not in its entirety. The PSP emulation uses no dynarec (it's all running virtualized code, since the instruction set is pretty much identical) and includes several brand new pieces like MDEC hardware decompression.
@@DominicGo yes, the only difference are the coprocessor instructions, which are emulated via software on PSP. The rest of the code can be executed natively with some adjustments.
What do you mean by "especially for the time"? That WAS the time, it was the beginning of a golden age of physical and software UX. That implies that it would be even better if released today, which I think is a hard argument to make.
i felt sad when i saw this video. i was an original purchaser and user of connectix when it was released, and then bleem too. this was all so cutting edge......its hard to believe this was 22 years ago
When I was a kid a friend had this on his Dad's Mac. I never knew what it was called until now. I just knew that we could play PSX games on a computer, and it felt like magic.
I take emu like MAME for granted, never really thought about the people behind it. It's actually quite amazing what you can do with emulation, if you think about it
Thank you for the video. Brings back memories. Connectix VGS was the first console emulator I've ever used. We didn't have Internet back in the day and when one of my classmates managed to get a copy of VGS from somewhere, I begged him to make a copy for me. Even though most games ran poorly (or didn't run at all) on my PC with a 300Mhz Celeron Mendocino CPU and a 4 MB S3 GPU, it was still fun to play PS1 games on PC when PS1 was the current-gen console. Wish I had a better PC back then. I think I still have that very same VGS executable I've used back in the day laying around somewhere in my stash of old files.
I would caution against making such an easily debunkable statement. Have you not heard of channels like My life in Gaming or Digital Foundry or Framerater? OBJECTIVELY SPEAKING those three channels do much more research than MVG does (when was there framerate analysis on MVG, when was there hour long interviews with dev teams of retro games, COMPLETE library reviews, etc)? As far as console and handheld emulation goes, sure, you can make that case, but as far as a gaming channel goes? This is all opinion based I know, but you brought in objective criteria so standing my your comment is a bit of a losing battle there when I could find two channels (there are more no doubt) that provides more data and more analysis. Is it better data or more relevant? Maybe not, but that's not what you are talking about here. I love MVG, this is one my my favorite channels, but claiming he does the most research is an uphill battle. Even Shane at Rerez often goes much more in depth, lol. And let's not forget, his videos are usually less than 15 minutes long, whereas most "gaming history" channels have longer videos (MLiG or Slopes Game Room videos are rarely less than 20 minutes long for example) so it's a similar thing with smartphone reviews in the sense that there's a threshold of "your video is too short for me to take seriously since I know hew well a half hour can be filled up talking about this product" thing.
@@awesomeferret bro it's just a opinion, what caused you to write a essay lol. Not everyone follows the same channels but I'll happily check out the ones you suggested
@@shorifahmed an obsession with accuracy and too much time on my hands I guess. Not much of an essay (try turning in a college essay that only take 30 seconds to read like this does) but I get your point.
I remember using this emulator to play the HP games when i was around 10 and i was really surprise by the quality. On the same pc that couldn’t even run VBA at full speed, i was playing PS1 games with no problem at all. Good times! Thanks for the throwback MVG
I remember playing Final Fantasy VIII on the Virtual Game Station. It was so mind blowing to be able to just insert the PS1 discs into my PC and play the game. There was also a bug, that let you summon Odin by pressing a button at the start of every combat. Couldn't replicate it on later playthroughs on the PS1 and PC, so I think it was the emulators fault.
I discovered Connectix Virtual game station on Macintosh Garden back in HS and used it to play FF7 on my lime green iBook. Brings back memories! The frame rates were really impressive . Great video!
Dc2 was buttery smooth on vgs until you hit the underwater scenes that had full screen distortion effects. Chrono cross was perfect except the square button quick menu which did not show. -amazing how I still remember these details after 20 years
Vgs just worked. Bleem died too early and i remember i always had issues with epsxe and its plugins. 3 out of 4 times some important plugin just didnt work. One great advancement in pcsx reloaded was that they added some basic plugins to the emulator itself so you wouldnt need to fetch them separately.
Thanks for shining a spotlight on this fantastic emulator. Running this on G3 Macs back in the day was my real introduction into PlayStation gaming -- to the point of being a little bit disappointed when I got a PSone afterward. I could swear the 1.2 release had some kind of graphic enhancement though--I did feel the games rendered better and took advantage of the ATI graphics.
All through highschool i had an extra laptop that happened to be a 2011 macbook pro. I kept it just for openemu and its honestly one of the best options for emulation. I wish open emu was on windows.
Really sweet how Connectix was able to take Aaron Giles's side project and commercialize it. My evening and weekend OSS contributions have NOTHING to do with my day job. Also the mention that Aaron's boss was a dynamic recompilation whiz. Seems like Connectix was a real engineering-first company.
At one point in history, macs were known for being decent gaming machines... I wish Apple would take gaming more seriously besides art indies and MTX titles re-made for Apple Arcade. Nothing is wrong with art indies but it saturates Apple Arcade lmao
Thanks for the video. I really enjoy watching these emulation videos. You go into alot of detail that is way beyond my understanding but still fun to watch.
when I went to our local LAN party out here back in the late 90s/early 2ks I had CVG running and everyone was like how the hell are you playing playstation on your pc??
Connectix: Hey Sony, wanna make some money with me by licencing your BIOS? Sony:No Connectix:Okay then, we will keep the money and build our own BIOS Sony: THATS ILLEGAL! Sony: *waste money on legal battle* Sony: *waste money buying the source code*
Most likely it was a 60-70 something years old boomer at sony the one that had the brilliant idea of buying vgs while pcsx and epsxe existed too and piracy was already rampant in poor countries..... They should have licensed the bios, ask for a % of the sells and forget about it. Maybe even try to bully the open source alternatives to help vgs.
I know nothing of coding, scripts, batch files etc but this was still highly interesting to me. A job well done MVG. I finished, completely enjoying the video.
Oh wow, I remember having this emulator on my PC during my childhood days cause my father doesn't want me to have a game console. I never knew if it was an original copy or cracked copy, but regardless, I'm glad I finally found out the first emulator I've ever used.
connectix has the similar outcome than bleem, being sued and taken over by MS... At least they got the showtime by steve jobs, so that's a plus i guess
what happened to bleem ? i think we need another video on bleem, i like it as compared to vgs coz if i remember corretly it has some options to smooth the graphics but it was buggy
? How was Bleem affiliated with Microsoft? And no to the outcomes being similar... The stories are very different....? Bleem won all their lawsuits, it was the legal fees that killed them. In contrast, connectix did win all, and didn't die in a similar way, it was bought out and dissolved (a worthy goal for many businessmen, creating a company that can be sold for a lot of money is often the actual goal). Is Audible a failure? By your logic, it would be, even though it's a company that was effectively shut down and is now just another service Amazon offers. Same goes for obvious stuff like TH-cam even.
Without the expertise of Connectix I guess Microsofts Backwards compatibility would not be as good as it is now. The first Xbox Classic Emulator for the 360 was based on the Virtual PC from back then.
? How does Microsoft have anything to do with this? Maybe I'm reading it wrong, I don't know. Sure sounds like you think the Xbox 360 could officially emulate PS1 games, which of course is not true, so what am I supposed to think here?
@@awesomeferret he's saying *Virtual PC* (a product that ran Windows virtual machines on PowerPC Macs, which Microsoft acquired from Connectix) was used to help emulate original Xbox games on the Xbox 360. he didn't say anything about Virtual Game Station (the PS1 emulator) lol
Oooh CVGS! I LOVED this very much when I was a kid. Runs perfectly without any tinkering compared to ePSXe. I think I played NFS High Stakes a little too much with it back then. Ah, memories.
same here. i remember trying bleem and it was a complete disaster with Final Fantasy Tactics. had i known about VGS PC version, i definitely would have been able to play without issue as it runs fantastically on a g3 233 i acquired not too long ago.
That's a great history about the EMU, later someone who is named Lord Raiden took the VGS code and made a fork named Emurayden that have compatibility until Windows XP. I tried to rerun those emulators in my modern machines, but have problems with dual core CPUs or have more than 1 thread; It runs very slow. But with modern emulators and have the original machine I don't have to mess with that. Nice video.
Also Sony: Censors tiddies, free speech, and throws a hissy fit when they see Spider-Man on stuff Disney is allowed to promote the character because they own the non-movie rights to him.
These type of episodes diving into the history of gaming and emulation and technology are just 100% why I love your channel so much thank you for this little piece of History
Great video mate, that's amazing the amount of innovative software developers at the time taking on nearly impossible tasks. Kudos to them! We need more of these people in today's society...
Another fine video with a perfect balance of storytelling, technical detail, and original research. There's a reason you've become one of my favourite channels on YT. Great stuff!
"Some of you probably owned a copy, and some of you probably owned a cracked copy." My seven-year-old self in 1999: I have Jump Start 2nd Grade, will that do?
Awesome video! I first discovered and used Connectix VGS back in the Fall of 2000. I couldn't believe how perfect the emulation was. I had used Bleem in the year before that but the versions of Bleem that I had didn't perform that great. I played several games on Connectix VGS. I beat Spider-Man, played a lot of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, played Toy Story 2, Syphon Filter, Hitman, Spyro, Rayman and I remember renting Tomba 2 but having issues getting it to work. I also remember that I played through Metal Gear Solid on Connectix VGS until I got to the boss Psycho Mantis where you needed to use a 2nd controller to beat him. However, Connectix VGS (at least the version I had on PC) didn't have an option to use a second controller and so I couldn't be Metal Gear Solid on that emulator. I was so disappointed and to this day, I have not beaten Metal Gear Solid. That '99-'00 era of emulation was really special. It was mind blowing at that time to be able to play what were at the time, brand new console games on your PC when the 8 and 16 bit systems had only relatively recently started to be emulated well on PC. It might be even more mind blowing that I just watched a video on this emulator, 20 years after the fact.
@@cin2110 I mean a decent PC can run Switch(2017) games pretty well, then again the Switch is weaker hardware than the Xbox/PlayStation gen equivalent. Also OG Xbox(from 2001) emulation isn't great even now.
Great video. You do some good research, and I like how you even contacted some of the devs. I used a cracked copy of Connectix back in the day for Windows 98. I also had Bleem as well. To be honest, I could never get Bleem to work right on my system. while Connectix did. I used a 433MHz celeron (clocked to 533), with a GeForce 2 64MB card and 256MB of RAM and could get pretty good performance. I actually bought Playstation games to plan on the system. Also, I would rent a lot, play them on my PC with a Gravis GamePad Pro. Also, I made a few "back up" .iso's and mount them in a virtual drive.
Right now, Beetle PSX and Duckstation are the best PSX emulators. But if you're curious, be on the lookout for Avocado and PCSX-Redux (another PCSX fork) Be also on the lookout for Laxer3A's PSX MiSTer FPGA core.
@@TorutheRedFox that was the "internal" name from the rapairs department back in my younger days haha great little machines .. pretty advanced for the time.. wifi in 1999! yep
Another great video from MVG, thanks to show us the insides of the video game tech that many of us just were too young to understand back then, i mean, my 13 year old me was so naive that i bought two pirated copies (i live in a poor country, piracy was the rule, no the exception) of playstation games to play it on my 166MHz pentium MMX, only to find that it does nothing lol!
Steve Jobs introducing what was basically a current gen console emulator on Mac for me was the biggest flex of the late 1990s.
As a Mac user I could imagine!
Too bad he was for the dumbing down of tec and lead apple down that road
@@jackbootshamangaming4541 Yeah he kind of killed the interesting parts of apple
1999 was 6gen consoles time, and the PS2 was on the horizon.
@SNES Nes mmm.....bc you could only afford a snes right?
I bet Sony were not happy when shown PS1 games on a Mac.
"Hi can we have a license for this BIOS", "You have 5 minutes to vacate the building"
"ok we'll just make our own" "ok......... waaaait a minute"
sony were very pissed and sued connectix. that lawsuit was lost by sony and it's the reason why emulation is legal today.
Still don't get why. This means fewer playstations they would have to make. Which is good because those are expensive, and more games to sell which is good because those are cheap.
@@aliasmcdoe I bet it would cause easier access to pirated copies of the game, since I don't believe that it wouldn't be easy to modify the emulator to allow burned CDs or even disk images to work.
@@aliasmcdoe precisely. Why did sony not take the deal? I don't understand. These people made sure it wouldn't play burned discs if that is what they were worried about (a legitimate concern.)
Sony gets royalty !money. They get good press. They get an entry point into the pc gamer market while all but creating a mac gamer base.
the people first on the emulation scene are legends. and most don't even know what all they've achieved... we've really come a long way. and I'll forever be thankful to all involved. without you, I wouldn't be able to emulate on a phone...
It was amazing how well this ran on the PCs of the day. VGS genuinely became my replacement PS1 when my console broke.
I have to admit I’m seriously impressed by some of these early emulators and how fast they are on hardware at the time. Seems like a bit of a lost art given that now you can just throw immense amounts of compute power at the problem... back then you had to actually be clever.
Don't discount the work done by current emulation developers though. They are still doing us all an incredible favor by creating all of this software for free.
@@Carbine64 CEMU and YUZU for me are pure wizardries
@@Carbine64 oh, absolutely, and especially the accuracy of modern emulation is really impressive - I guess I just have an interest in people doing surprising things with by modern standards immensely underpowered hardware.
Let's not forget about Xbox 360 and Wii U emulation, that requires the devs to reverse engineer entire hardware, with custom cpu and gpu, while running with actual decent performances.
First half of this comment is dead on but the second half is nonsense, which completely trashes the very impressive work done by current emulator developers. Not to mention totally irrelevant to the way computing power is used in software design
I remember this like it was yesterday! VGS was an amazing piece of work, so happy to see you document it like this!
Its very interesting to see Punk Rock MBA comment on something like this and it honestly surprises me. I would love to see you talk about your experiences with this stuff on your secondary channel man
I love your content man! I'd love to see a video on Nintendo-Core !
Why does it feel like the last 20 years was only 10?
I can't get over that weird feeling , esp with gaming its like time has flew by.
Lol I was just watching your channel! Love your work man.
@@nicolausteslaus he's a pretty cool guy after all. we're smash bros cuz we both smash the same chick.
Ironically enough, Apple would take deep umbrage at anyone trying to emulate or reimplement iOS or macOS, yet they previously promoted an emulator themselves.
Apple is utter garbage now
@@Name_cannot_be_blank don't you get spied on anyway though? If not from the phone itself, from the apps always listening and stealing your data
@@Name_cannot_be_blank Get a Oneplus/Xiaomi phone and install a custom ROM. IMO, this has more privacy than even Apple's products
Or get a pixel and install GrapheneOS. Most secure.
@@codydfwn ahh yes, you don’t know the apple permission system
You have to ENABLE permissions first for an app
And can deny them for specific apps
@@slay3rgamingyt I had no idea we even had extra better ways to combat this... But I'll look into this myself even!
This was an awesome emulator, worked with many games much better with less of a setup compared to ePSXe back in the day. Awesome video!
Hey Mario... U r awesome
Wish this could be ported to the og xbox so the emulation was better
ePSXe always threw me back in the day due to excessive setup
Like, as a kid who was still fascinated by just being able to load pokemonblue.gb into SMYGB and just play it, ePSXe asking for everything specified and then just kinda not working made me... not so interested in PS1 emulation.
So this woulda been nice
That's true, but if you used the software renderer on ePSXe you'd see it's problems disappear. But software emulation is kind of ugly...so it's a trade-off.
Dope !!!!!
Honestly great to learn about computing history
I didn't even know this existed tbh
is that thing legal
@@semihguzelel9966 yes
Oh, do you want to learn about computing story? Then you need to search the channel "Advent of Computing". Don't be fooled thinking you already heard and know the stories it's telling, you actually haven't. That podcast is amazing and almost totally unknown, a crime!
Yes I quite agree!
Aaron is a freakin’ genius, and a genuinely nice guy - a rare combination. Emulation wouldn’t be where it is today without his years of tireless, brilliant work. It’s great to see his efforts featured like this!
Great look at this ... this really did feel like the golden age of emulation in many ways. While we’re emulating at unprecedented levels these days, it was truly astonishing to see the feats of the community without the benefit of such brute force. Oh, and that Clamshell is fierce-a beautiful touch for this video!
some day in the future when MVG passes away, he will be replaced by an open-source emulator that will continue making TH-cam videos, and none of us will know
Said emulator that contains code he wrote for emulation projects several steps re!over, but still relevant in emulating a human mind
Which emulated¡mVG would find hilarious.
"Can I have a rig capable of running the MVG emulator?"
"We already have a rig running the MVG emulator at home"
MVG emulator rig at home: *same but speaking with an American accent*
We have already been working on it, we are in second alpha.
MVG ai In the format of max headroom
OpenMVG-accuracy
Those episodes about old emulators are always a treat, i still remember the first time i used zsnes and had access to pretty much the entire library of the SNES on my windows 98, it was magical.
Hey thank you,
You were the one who attracted me to homebrew and emulation on consoles, i even modded my dreamcast, xbox original and my nintendo ds cause you inspired me
Man, this takes me back. This got me into emulation back in 2001. Incredible that such efficient emulation was done on such limited hardware. It was an incredible experience, it was like a whole new world back on Mac OS9.
Such nostalgia. Thanks for doing this video. Mac didn’t have the PC games but it had emulation and it was incredible.
Thanks so much for talking about this emulator, MVG! I have rarely ever heard any history about this emulator. I remember using this emulator on my old hand-me-down computer from 1997 running win98 with a 266mhz processor. I remember being excited that I could fit the emulator on a floppy disc along with my game saves. I remember thinking, wow, a whole playstation on a floppy disc! Anyone here use any of aldostools with CVGS? Aldo was a dude who created many tools and patches for CVGS. The emulator played everything I had at the time (I could only play the games I had on disc at the time). Good times back then!
me: **adds button** **adjusts layout** what a productive day
emulator devs: **reverse engineers entire hardware stack and emulates it at x1 speed** hmm this could be optimized a bit more
me: **uses bitwise/bitshift to extract rgba values from 32-bit color** haha i’m so smort
emulator devs: **creates dynamic recompiler to translate between machine code at run time to speed up emulation** this isn’t fast enough, and sometimes the polygons are 1 pixel off compared to real hardware **sigh**
me: installs windows. "im so smart"
developer: creates a virtual machine to run the pc on the pc
@@myface6739 mood, also: someone even ported windows 95 and dos to webassembly so you can emulate windows 95 **on the browser** and play dos games ***on the browser***
meanwhile I can’t even make my printer work properly lmao
Hahahaha!!!
Always saw this advertised in magazines at the time and wondered how the hell it worked, knowing how even SNES emulators ran on my PC at the time. Love seeing this video.
Those were the days... Around 2003 I ran connectix vgs on a PC for full speed PS1 emulation. There were other emulators out there by then, but none were as fast as VGS.
So glad you did a video on this. I used to run this on my iBook G3 back in the day. Crazy what they were able to accomplish on old hardware.
Dimitris your channel is a gift for the industry and everyone out there interested in how we came to where we are, i can't even imagine how much research you need to do and how many people you have to reach out to in order to make a video like this.
Good Job
It's impressive that they managed to get such a high level of accuracy and speed for the PS1 only a few years after it's release, while certain PS2 titles still can't be properly emulated at full speed after two decades.
Compatibility doesn't mean accuracy, and as a matter of fact none of these emulators were accurate in the slightest (they would often hiccup on trivial matters). Also PS2 is a way more complex machine, while the PSX is extremely simple to program for and has a fool proof architecture.
@@geminirebirth Your name looks very familiar to me, are you the person that did the hacking for the Persona 2 Innocent Sin translation? If so, thank you so much for your work, it's probably my favourite game and I may not have played it if not for that patch years ago.
If you're not them, sorry for my mistake!
@@Fanta0846 I am.
@@geminirebirth I see, thank you for your work. I hope you are doing well!
PCSX2 is also sure taking its time, to be fair.
I played all the playstation's greatest hits on a Pentium II 350Mhzs with this emulator, not having the original hardware. That piece of software was reeeeally good.
Incredible video. This really takes me back. I remember owning an iMac G3 (2nd generation, 300 mHz) in 1999/2000 and I was into gaming on mac, PC, playstation, and anything I could get my hands on. VGS was mind-blowing to me at the time -- I had been running simple emulators for Gameboy, NES, and SNES but VGS was on another level. I would pop my PS disc right into it and it just worked like native! I had my trusty USB gravis gamepad PRO which mimicked the original Playstation controller and I was set. I think I even purchased a memory card dumper so I could transfer my memory card data to the mac! It's great to hear the amazing technology and work that went into making this piece of software. So sad that it was shut down though :/
Yessir another informative upload from the goat himself
It’s awesome that you reached out to the developer. Great investigative journalism! I love your channel. Keep up the good work.
Modern Vintage Gaming Historian. Compelling content, thanks for the insights into these moments in gaming history!
Fascinating technical details behind emulation I never knew about! Thank you for sharing
Sony: sells console hardware at a loss.
Sony: only makes money on game sales.
These guys: let's make something that vastly increases the market to which Sony can sell games while not requiring them to buy the product that loses Sony money.
Sony: stop that.
Thought the same thing. I imagine their fear is this emulator could play pirated games more easily. Even with the precautions they took
Sony (and Microsoft and Nintendo) usually only sell console hardware for a loss in the first ~2 years. By 1999 Sony were making loads of profit with the PS1.
@@ps5hasnogames55 loss at the beginning of the generation. Break even on sales midway. And hope by the end, with hardware revisions and the cost of components coming down, to recover the losses at the beginning. If it's a very successful generation towards the end, they should be seeing profits, but the hardware will always just be what enables selling licensees rather than the profit center itself.
Absolutely true
u forgot the part when they wanted to BUY the bios license from sony... so they lost even that money lol.
Virtual Game Station was my first introduction to emulation. I first played Spyro and Final Fantasy VII this way on a G3 beige desktop. Recently found my original copy of it and installed it on my G4 just to see how well it worked. A lot of later games have problems with menus and things not appearing and there are quite a number of audio issues for some games, but still, it's really impressive what they were able to put together. Thanks for the video, as this is a part of emulation history that it seems not that many people are really aware of.
Aaron did a lot of work in the emulation world as an emulation engineer. He did some truly epic work. I loved his blog.
I owned the virtual game station and played it on my old imac blueberry. I wish I still had both of them. Thanks for the video, I love your channel!
I remember when we got a copy of it at the Apple Centre I worked at, we cracked it open, by the end of the day everyone had a copy and the box was back on the shelf. 🤣
Now this would be impossible but that's funny
@@monsterhunter445 Well we did the "impossible" more than once with various software (shrink wrap machines were good), but hey, it was easier to copy stuff on the mac.
The good ol' 90s!
good ol' Blockbuster days. rent the game, copy it, give it back like the following day.
It was a great time to be a tinkerer. Thx for being so regular on the uploads, you make a great lunch date every week!
I remember reading somewhere this emulator was used on the PSP by Sony to achieve PS1 emulation (called POPS internally if I am not mistaken), not sure if that was also a rumour or actually confirmed.
Very possible. No point in reinventing the wheel when you already have a working one.
Possible, but not in its entirety. The PSP emulation uses no dynarec (it's all running virtualized code, since the instruction set is pretty much identical) and includes several brand new pieces like MDEC hardware decompression.
Pops leaked and you could package any PS1 iso with it for a PSP. It was cool.
both the PSP and the PS1 uses a MIPS processor though?
@@DominicGo yes, the only difference are the coprocessor instructions, which are emulated via software on PSP. The rest of the code can be executed natively with some adjustments.
You got me on this one I knew about or more of your work already published. But this is new to me. Epsxe was the first I knew of congratulations
The iBook Clamshell will always have a special place in my heart. I love the design and functionality of that machine, especially for the time.
I still use mine for writing papers. Useable still, but limited enough to prevent my ADHD from getting the best of me.
What do you mean by "especially for the time"? That WAS the time, it was the beginning of a golden age of physical and software UX. That implies that it would be even better if released today, which I think is a hard argument to make.
i felt sad when i saw this video. i was an original purchaser and user of connectix when it was released, and then bleem too. this was all so cutting edge......its hard to believe this was 22 years ago
If you were at school back in 99' with that IBook while playing PS1 Games via Connectix you were the ultimate MegaChad.
I love these videos on old school emulators. Spent sooo many hours with them. Thank you! :)
When I was a kid a friend had this on his Dad's Mac. I never knew what it was called until now. I just knew that we could play PSX games on a computer, and it felt like magic.
Great video! This hit a sweet spot for me: emulators and old Macs. Loved it.
I take emu like MAME for granted, never really thought about the people behind it. It's actually quite amazing what you can do with emulation, if you think about it
Thank you for the video. Brings back memories. Connectix VGS was the first console emulator I've ever used. We didn't have Internet back in the day and when one of my classmates managed to get a copy of VGS from somewhere, I begged him to make a copy for me.
Even though most games ran poorly (or didn't run at all) on my PC with a 300Mhz Celeron Mendocino CPU and a 4 MB S3 GPU, it was still fun to play PS1 games on PC when PS1 was the current-gen console. Wish I had a better PC back then.
I think I still have that very same VGS executable I've used back in the day laying around somewhere in my stash of old files.
MVG is honestly the best gaming TH-camr. Nobody has done more research than this dude. Also super good at speaking on camera!
Half the stuff he says I don't understand but feel smarter after watching his videos :)
I would caution against making such an easily debunkable statement. Have you not heard of channels like My life in Gaming or Digital Foundry or Framerater? OBJECTIVELY SPEAKING those three channels do much more research than MVG does (when was there framerate analysis on MVG, when was there hour long interviews with dev teams of retro games, COMPLETE library reviews, etc)? As far as console and handheld emulation goes, sure, you can make that case, but as far as a gaming channel goes? This is all opinion based I know, but you brought in objective criteria so standing my your comment is a bit of a losing battle there when I could find two channels (there are more no doubt) that provides more data and more analysis. Is it better data or more relevant? Maybe not, but that's not what you are talking about here. I love MVG, this is one my my favorite channels, but claiming he does the most research is an uphill battle. Even Shane at Rerez often goes much more in depth, lol. And let's not forget, his videos are usually less than 15 minutes long, whereas most "gaming history" channels have longer videos (MLiG or Slopes Game Room videos are rarely less than 20 minutes long for example) so it's a similar thing with smartphone reviews in the sense that there's a threshold of "your video is too short for me to take seriously since I know hew well a half hour can be filled up talking about this product" thing.
@@awesomeferret bro it's just a opinion, what caused you to write a essay lol. Not everyone follows the same channels but I'll happily check out the ones you suggested
@@shorifahmed an obsession with accuracy and too much time on my hands I guess. Not much of an essay (try turning in a college essay that only take 30 seconds to read like this does) but I get your point.
@@awesomeferret man we got too much free time on our hands now, stay safe.
I remember using this emulator to play the HP games when i was around 10 and i was really surprise by the quality. On the same pc that couldn’t even run VBA at full speed, i was playing PS1 games with no problem at all.
Good times! Thanks for the throwback MVG
So effin true, im able to play and beat xenogears but frickin battle network had to be at frameskip 2 just to run at normal speed.
I remember playing Final Fantasy VIII on the Virtual Game Station. It was so mind blowing to be able to just insert the PS1 discs into my PC and play the game.
There was also a bug, that let you summon Odin by pressing a button at the start of every combat. Couldn't replicate it on later playthroughs on the PS1 and PC, so I think it was the emulators fault.
I discovered Connectix Virtual game station on Macintosh Garden back in HS and used it to play FF7 on my lime green iBook. Brings back memories! The frame rates were really impressive . Great video!
I used back then!! Dino Crisis 2 only worked properly on the VGS... ePSXe was in it's infancy...
if i remember correctly bleem has smoother graphics as compared to vgs but vgs is not buggy as compared to bleem
Dc2 was buttery smooth on vgs until you hit the underwater scenes that had full screen distortion effects. Chrono cross was perfect except the square button quick menu which did not show. -amazing how I still remember these details after 20 years
Vgs just worked. Bleem died too early and i remember i always had issues with epsxe and its plugins. 3 out of 4 times some important plugin just didnt work.
One great advancement in pcsx reloaded was that they added some basic plugins to the emulator itself so you wouldnt need to fetch them separately.
I've played Warcraft 2 dark saga on it and it ran better than epsxe
ePsxe is still kind of ass though
Thanks for shining a spotlight on this fantastic emulator. Running this on G3 Macs back in the day was my real introduction into PlayStation gaming -- to the point of being a little bit disappointed when I got a PSone afterward. I could swear the 1.2 release had some kind of graphic enhancement though--I did feel the games rendered better and took advantage of the ATI graphics.
All through highschool i had an extra laptop that happened to be a 2011 macbook pro. I kept it just for openemu and its honestly one of the best options for emulation. I wish open emu was on windows.
Idk why but openemu runs like ass on my late 2011 Macbook pro
Really sweet how Connectix was able to take Aaron Giles's side project and commercialize it. My evening and weekend OSS contributions have NOTHING to do with my day job. Also the mention that Aaron's boss was a dynamic recompilation whiz. Seems like Connectix was a real engineering-first company.
If it wasn't for a cracked copy of this software a family friend gave me, I would not be the gamer I am today.
I'm assuming these cracked copies were able to play copied games as well?
@@no1DdC Not sure. It was over 20 years ago.
Amazing and unique content, great presentation, big thanks to you MVG from a russian fan of your channel!
"At the time macs had reputation for being pretty terrible gaming machines"
They still do.
thats what he said
Do they? In fact they are pretty capable machines but whatever, boo Apple bad
And Windows is still a colossal piece of shit.
At one point in history, macs were known for being decent gaming machines...
I wish Apple would take gaming more seriously besides art indies and MTX titles re-made for Apple Arcade. Nothing is wrong with art indies but it saturates Apple Arcade lmao
yeah Macs gaming prime was in the mid-90s and early 90s. But Jobs didn't really care about gaming on a Mac
I remember the Virtual Game Station when it came to the PC, it worked flawlessly, no doubt with all the research and work they put onto it! Thanks MVG
Connectix introduced me to emulation! Good times!
Thanks for the video. I really enjoy watching these emulation videos. You go into alot of detail that is way beyond my understanding but still fun to watch.
I remember using Connectix in my 600 mhz Celeron and be amazed by its "high" definition. After that, it was all about ePSXe.
I play vgs in a fcking amd k6-2 550 MHz, with 512 ram, and 8 gb maxtor hard disk, true happiness, i play all famous games possible.
And now, duckstation
nice to now the history of great programmers!
tnx,
Greetings from Mexico.
when I went to our local LAN party out here back in the late 90s/early 2ks I had CVG running and everyone was like how the hell are you playing playstation on your pc??
Great episode, thanks for the video 👍🏼
Connectix: Hey Sony, wanna make some money with me by licencing your BIOS?
Sony:No
Connectix:Okay then, we will keep the money and build our own BIOS
Sony: THATS ILLEGAL!
Sony: *waste money on legal battle*
Sony: *waste money buying the source code*
meh to be fair it's not like internet was really a true beast yet, and it's no where NEAR what companies today or even 10 years ago try to pull :P
Ultimate CHAD move they did there. Sad that we lost this emu at that time.
"THAT'S ILLEGAL"
ahh.. that's for the courts to decide 😎
Most likely it was a 60-70 something years old boomer at sony the one that had the brilliant idea of buying vgs while pcsx and epsxe existed too and piracy was already rampant in poor countries.....
They should have licensed the bios, ask for a % of the sells and forget about it. Maybe even try to bully the open source alternatives to help vgs.
They weren't too happy about that!
I know nothing of coding, scripts, batch files etc but this was still highly interesting to me. A job well done MVG. I finished, completely enjoying the video.
MVG drinking game: take a shot every time he says “utilize”.
Within the time I read this, he said utilize
Great videos . Very nostalgic having grown up around that time
Oh wow, I remember having this emulator on my PC during my childhood days cause my father doesn't want me to have a game console. I never knew if it was an original copy or cracked copy, but regardless, I'm glad I finally found out the first emulator I've ever used.
Amazing information! Thank you so much and thanks to Aaron Giles
I remember having virtual pc on the powermacs at my middle school in 1997
Bro this is a throwback! I played metal gear solid in its entirety on this emulator
Man that’s wild. I totally remember that macworld because Halo was announced as a Mac exclusive 🤣🤣
and then halo become a microsoft game
@@HoldmyApplejuice But they still released it on Mac, afaik.
Imagine a world where Halo was a Mac exclusive....
That's one impressive piece of software! I really enjoy videos on this kind of stuff!
connectix has the similar outcome than bleem, being sued and taken over by MS... At least they got the showtime by steve jobs, so that's a plus i guess
what happened to bleem ? i think we need another video on bleem, i like it as compared to vgs coz if i remember corretly it has some options to smooth the graphics but it was buggy
@@iplaygames9837 They literally went out of business trying to fight the copyright lawsuits. They had no money left.
? How was Bleem affiliated with Microsoft? And no to the outcomes being similar... The stories are very different....? Bleem won all their lawsuits, it was the legal fees that killed them. In contrast, connectix did win all, and didn't die in a similar way, it was bought out and dissolved (a worthy goal for many businessmen, creating a company that can be sold for a lot of money is often the actual goal). Is Audible a failure? By your logic, it would be, even though it's a company that was effectively shut down and is now just another service Amazon offers. Same goes for obvious stuff like TH-cam even.
Fantastic emulator. I was blown away. Quite an accomplishment at the time.
Without the expertise of Connectix I guess Microsofts Backwards compatibility would not be as good as it is now. The first Xbox Classic Emulator for the 360 was based on the Virtual PC from back then.
? How does Microsoft have anything to do with this? Maybe I'm reading it wrong, I don't know. Sure sounds like you think the Xbox 360 could officially emulate PS1 games, which of course is not true, so what am I supposed to think here?
@@awesomeferret he's saying *Virtual PC* (a product that ran Windows virtual machines on PowerPC Macs, which Microsoft acquired from Connectix) was used to help emulate original Xbox games on the Xbox 360. he didn't say anything about Virtual Game Station (the PS1 emulator) lol
@@ps5hasnogames55 ah, I see.
Oooh CVGS! I LOVED this very much when I was a kid. Runs perfectly without any tinkering compared to ePSXe. I think I played NFS High Stakes a little too much with it back then. Ah, memories.
I've heard about BLEEM tons of times, but never this one. Strange.
in my 266mhz PC Bleem not runned well, connectix was the solution. In Brazil we used this a lot
same here. i remember trying bleem and it was a complete disaster with Final Fantasy Tactics. had i known about VGS PC version, i definitely would have been able to play without issue as it runs fantastically on a g3 233 i acquired not too long ago.
That's a great history about the EMU, later someone who is named Lord Raiden took the VGS code and made a fork named Emurayden that have compatibility until Windows XP.
I tried to rerun those emulators in my modern machines, but have problems with dual core CPUs or have more than 1 thread; It runs very slow.
But with modern emulators and have the original machine I don't have to mess with that.
Nice video.
Sony: What a nice emulator you have there, wait, that's illegal!
Also Sony: if you can't beat your competition, buy it!
Also Sony: Censors tiddies, free speech, and throws a hissy fit when they see Spider-Man on stuff Disney is allowed to promote the character because they own the non-movie rights to him.
These type of episodes diving into the history of gaming and emulation and technology are just 100% why I love your channel so much thank you for this little piece of History
"At the time Macs had a terrible reputation for running games" Some things never change!
We love when you do these type of Emulator history videos. Awesome looking as always. :)
¡Qué recuerdos! Nunca tuve PS1, jugué los mejores juegos de la consola en ese emulador.
Cuales?
@@Pwnulolumad MGS, Silent Hill, Gran Turismo 2, Final Fantasy 7, Parappa, Vagrant Story, Breath of Fire IV, entre otros.
Feliz navidad.
Great video mate, that's amazing the amount of innovative software developers at the time taking on nearly impossible tasks. Kudos to them! We need more of these people in today's society...
38 Sony employees have watched this video
Another fine video with a perfect balance of storytelling, technical detail, and original research. There's a reason you've become one of my favourite channels on YT. Great stuff!
"Some of you probably owned a copy, and some of you probably owned a cracked copy."
My seven-year-old self in 1999: I have Jump Start 2nd Grade, will that do?
I am really happy that you are releasing videos regularly, keep it up, man!
Can you do a deep dive into Switch homebrew or are you sort of afraid of the potential repercussions of that?
Nintendo hit hard it will be difficult for him to do that
MVG alread announced he won't do many videos on the switch because of nintendo already has filed many bullsh!t copyright claims against him
Awesome video! I first discovered and used Connectix VGS back in the Fall of 2000. I couldn't believe how perfect the emulation was. I had used Bleem in the year before that but the versions of Bleem that I had didn't perform that great. I played several games on Connectix VGS. I beat Spider-Man, played a lot of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, played Toy Story 2, Syphon Filter, Hitman, Spyro, Rayman and I remember renting Tomba 2 but having issues getting it to work. I also remember that I played through Metal Gear Solid on Connectix VGS until I got to the boss Psycho Mantis where you needed to use a 2nd controller to beat him. However, Connectix VGS (at least the version I had on PC) didn't have an option to use a second controller and so I couldn't be Metal Gear Solid on that emulator. I was so disappointed and to this day, I have not beaten Metal Gear Solid. That '99-'00 era of emulation was really special. It was mind blowing at that time to be able to play what were at the time, brand new console games on your PC when the 8 and 16 bit systems had only relatively recently started to be emulated well on PC. It might be even more mind blowing that I just watched a video on this emulator, 20 years after the fact.
You should talk about Bleem. It is also a PSX emulator with interesting story behind it.
well, bleem has already gotten plenty of attention on youtube unlike connectix
+1 for Bleem. Always wanted to know more about it
Bleem is mentioned in the video.
@@goob8945 LGR has a video about Bleem.
th-cam.com/video/MFY9Kv1c4-Q/w-d-xo.html
you make great videos. I'm never disappointed!
I like the fact that PC's from way back when could run current console games Amazingly. But now Its Almost the total opposite
back then every year hardware 2x as powerfull as your 1 year old one relased for pc not like now
@@cin2110 I mean a decent PC can run Switch(2017) games pretty well, then again the Switch is weaker hardware than the Xbox/PlayStation gen equivalent. Also OG Xbox(from 2001) emulation isn't great even now.
Technically not true thanks to the Switch. That doesn't mean much since the Switch isn't much more powerful than the Wii U or Xbox 360.
Great video. You do some good research, and I like how you even contacted some of the devs. I used a cracked copy of Connectix back in the day for Windows 98. I also had Bleem as well. To be honest, I could never get Bleem to work right on my system. while Connectix did. I used a 433MHz celeron (clocked to 533), with a GeForce 2 64MB card and 256MB of RAM and could get pretty good performance. I actually bought Playstation games to plan on the system. Also, I would rent a lot, play them on my PC with a Gravis GamePad Pro. Also, I made a few "back up" .iso's and mount them in a virtual drive.
I missed Connectix so much... Maybe PCSX could be the better choice.
pcsx runs almost all games fullspeed
@@omegarugal9283 yeah even on my celeron N3350 (kinda hate it) edit: use ePSXe the PCSX2 is better for PS2
Try Duckstation it's new great PS1 emulation from man who previously help develop Dolphin and it's still get update unlike ePSXe
@@bhirawamaylana466 I mean does it really need updates tho? What else do you expect from a PS1 emulator..
Right now, Beetle PSX and Duckstation are the best PSX emulators.
But if you're curious, be on the lookout for Avocado and PCSX-Redux (another PCSX fork)
Be also on the lookout for Laxer3A's PSX MiSTer FPGA core.
Another great video, never knew Connectix was on Mac too, nice find.
toilet seat G3 ... Apple used to be such a fun company... now its souless
I've literally never heard anyone call the clamshell a "toilet seat"
@@TorutheRedFox that was the "internal" name from the rapairs department back in my younger days haha great little machines .. pretty advanced for the time.. wifi in 1999! yep
@@covert0overt_810 lmao
Well documented research and good presentation for game preservation.
Too bad Anti-SLAPP laws weren't enacted in time for connetix to defend itself from Sony.
Another great video from MVG, thanks to show us the insides of the video game tech that many of us just were too young to understand back then, i mean, my 13 year old me was so naive that i bought two pirated copies (i live in a poor country, piracy was the rule, no the exception) of playstation games to play it on my 166MHz pentium MMX, only to find that it does nothing lol!