achievements Achievements for PC? (Retro Achievements)

[cyrodiilwarrior 0]

I've noticed Retro Achievements supports certain game console emulators. I was using BizHawk emulator to play Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the PlayStation 1. It wasn't entirely smooth, but I did unlock an achievement once I found 6 lost Gobbos.

Old PC games tend to look much better than old console games. With the Croc Unofficial Update and unofficial Definitive Edition patch, I got  my Croc looking beautiful.

Only issue is not unlocking achievements.

I was hoping to raise attention to this in hope that old PC games would also some day get an achievements option, just like Retro Achievements and emulation consoles.

[TioGilipollas 0]

On 6/14/2023 at 11:39 AM, cyrodiilwarrior said:

I've noticed Retro Achievements supports certain game console emulators. I was using BizHawk emulator to play Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the PlayStation 1. It wasn't entirely smooth, but I did unlock an achievement once I found 6 lost Gobbos.

Old PC games tend to look much better than old console games. With the Croc Unofficial Update and unofficial Definitive Edition patch, I got  my Croc looking beautiful.

Only issue is not unlocking achievements.

I was hoping to raise attention to this in hope that old PC games would also some day get an achievements option, just like Retro Achievements and emulation consoles.

That would be great indeed!

[axer128 0]

Yea what we really should get some day is a pretty much a "PC emulator for PC"

 

Sounds silly but it makes sense in the case of many old PC games, where it's not worth manually patching the game, but approaching the whole era of PC games as  a whole

.. While in your case of croc, sure there's a fan made patch that makes the game great on modern PCs.. There are TONS of old games where that's not the case ,and even with the best generic tools like specialK / dxgl / etc, its simply not possible to make them run as nicely as they could versus if the exact same game was available for say Playstation 1 or 2. Since PS1/2 emulators can do many awesome things very easily like increase native resolution, add AA, post processing filters, patch to widescreen/ 60 fps, and recently achievements, etc, and all very easily , especially compared to messing with obscur config files, not so user friendly tools like dxgl / specialK, which in many cases simply will never work with select ancient games.

 

So yea a tailored built PC emulator for old PC games would be awesome. Odd no one seems to be attempting it. Pretty sure it's entirely possible.

 

Most go the far more difficulty route of actually reverse engineering the games and building modern source ports.. But for games old enough that we can just toss raw horsepower at, we could actually just "emulate" the expected hardware ( or not with games that otherwise will just run on new hardware - , but instead not allow the game to output normally, instead intercepting the output code, capture that output and wrap it into a modern API which the emulator can than do good stuff like uprez/force higher fps.

Would obviously need a lot of profiles for many games.. But entirely doable. Wine / proton already does it similarly and makes a select few old windows games actaully run better on linux than do they on windows.

 

You'd essentially load in the .exe to the emulator, it would run it in a hidden offscreen container, try to figure out what APIs its trying to use, how its going to output, capture and modify said output, and then run a seperate output uprezzed, etc.

 

Closest thing that exist I guess is scummVM, which is very cool but it's supported games list is relatively small and hasn't got too much focus on modernizing the games, more so just making them easier to get running on modern hardware.