That seems like a good idea, so higher quality versions of some of the games on here could be provided.

I'd love to see some N64 games on here, too, but I'm not sure how well the finished, legal product would translate.

Nintendulator used to be -the- most accurate NES emulator a while ago. Glad to see you know of BSNES.

And the Pippin was basically a consolized Mac with System 6 or 7, I forget.

Forget about seeing Amiga games here unless those Amiga Forever people stop demanding money for the rom files.

Have you SEEN the C64 version of Alley Cat? It mops the floor with DOS release in nearly every section.

It may very well do that but again it is all subjective nonetheless.

I personally would think if they were given the rights to use an emulator by someone like SEGA, Atari, or Sony that they could provide an emulator, which being made by the people who made the console the program emulates, would work extremely well.

It's a technical problem, if you don't emulate every single transistor and chip in the unit you end up having to spend time and energy providing workarounds to get the game running correctly. Sometimes it isn't an issue, but other times a game can be rendered incompletable because a switch won't register or the game freezes.

They could use the emulators which exist, but that depends upon them both existing and having a license that's compatible with GOG's business. In practice emulated games are a real mixed bag. Some like the new Sonic CD re-release seem to work pretty well and others have graphical problems and other bugs.

What's worse is that unlike dosbox games the amount of QA that you need to put into it is significantly increased and bugs are more likely to randomly pop up.

In other words it's a much more complicated situation and it's even harder for them to know if it's ready for release as such bugs are going to affect everybody rather than just people with certain video cards.

Sonic CD isnt run with emulation, it was a remake done on a new engine using the old sprites

D'oh, you are correct about that.

well unless they were willing to do that with everything in there library or get a green as grass developer to do that. it would probably be easier for emulation. at least on a mass scale of a consoles library.

According to the GOG guys this was when they were looking in a different direction than they are now. I would never say "never" but neither would I hold my breath. I think there are some serious legal issues to work through with emulators, as well.

I see a lot of comments about precision and accuracy here, but how much different is that than other Dosbox using games on Gog? I've noticed for example Ultima IV seems to either need some tweaking to run properly, or maybe a day really does go by in a minute when run on proper hardware.

As for finding arcade games. The PS2 has quite a lot of arcade collections released for it. I have Midway arcade treasures 1, 2, 3, capcom classics collection 1+2, the SNK arcade collection and Metal Slug collection. Not quite sure if they were emulated or recreated, but I have a feeling it might've been mostly emulation.
For the PC I have Taito Legends 1+2 (you know, bubble bobble, new zealand story, elevator action and so on), which actually seems to use MAME for emulation. Rather entertaining to think of considering Taito Legends 2 used Starforce protection, but copy the actual games folder into a MAME roms directory and 80% of them will run directly, and a few need renaming of rom files because the mame version is different.
Also DotEmu has Irem Arcade Hits for sale, again fairly well emulated arcade games though the emulator might not be as low-usage as for example MAME. I was waiting to see if Gog would also get that bundle, but in the end I ended up signing up for DotEmu for that specific game.

So no, having emulators to work are not impossible, it's happened before, even on the PC. What's important is not if the emulator will play every game ever on the system, but whether it'll faithfully reproduce the original game which would be sold. There are likely still a lot of obscure games Dosbox don't emulate properly, but that hasn't and shouldn't stop gog from releasing Dos games, should it?

Personally, I would rather they have gone in that direction than in the new games direction. Console games are still GOGs, new games not so much.
The difference is that there's a lot of cruft in the processor that doesn't need to be emulated for DOS games to work. Some of them won't work, but it's usually a bit less random and most games from say 1991 aren't going to use legacy features from the original 8088 processor.

But, the bigger issue is that consoles up until at least the GBA were programmed to the hardware a lot more closely than DOS games were. Meaning that in order to write a pixel to the screen on GBA you would write a value to the register that was appropriate to that pixel and the hardware would do that for you. So in order to emulate the GBA you have to emulate that specialized register and probably most of the transistors in it or you have to figure out a way of writing code that gets from point A to point B in a different way.

If you're really curious, you should see the post mortem on Pit Fall done by the original developer about all the cheating he had to do in order to get the game to run on Atari 2600.

I might just have to go do that. I'm guessing youtube is the place for that, since it's likely not one of the unlockables for Pitfall in the Activision Hits on the PSP (Nice collection if you like the old Atari games, apart from the games needing analog controls they all seem to work rather well)

My point wasn't so much perfect 1:1 hardware emulation, that would be impossible. But emulation close enough that it's pretty darn close, with maybe a few patches of the game to make it run properly on the emulator

It doesn't have to be 1:1, it's just that if you don't do it 1:1 it's a lot more work in the long run.

BTW, here's the link. It's particularly interesting for anybody that played consoles before they became computers. http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014632/Classic-Game-Postmortem-PITFALL