The Laughs of Us | The Snigger

GAMING

BY Euan Scarlett

Hello and Happy New Year! I realise its February now but since we’ve had a wee break, Happy New Year!

It’s been a quiet couple of months for me in games land, and I haven’t done a huge amount of gaming due to accidentally committing to 5 different shows at the upcoming Glasgow International Comedy Festival 2026 in March. However I did have some great fun over the festive period introducing my sibling’s kids to the wacky history of videogames via the power of emulation.

If you don’t know what an emulator is, putting it simply, it’s a type of computer program that, when you run it, allows whatever computer or machine you’ve run it on to pretend it is a different type of machine or computer. It can then run software and games created for that machine it is pretending to be. There are emulators for almost every type of retro home computer or operating system, historical video game consoles, old coin-operated arcade games like Pac-Man or Space Invaders and even digital recreations of physical pinball tables which play uncannily like the real deal. With the right information, you can easily tap into pure unadulterated nostalgia and play all the games of your childhood from yesteryear, or even pretend you’re a cunt working on Wall Street and boot up an original 1988 version of Excel 2.0 for the true Patrick Bateman experience, if that’s what you are after.

Speaking of Patrick Bateman, I have a daft oldskool mp3 player for listening to tunes on the bus to work, and despite me having the extremely, stupidly, long playlist of entirely music I own -which according to the data presented on the tiny screen, would take over 35 days to play through if I listened to every track in order, and I’ve only got half what I own on there - despite me having the extremely, stupidly, long playlist on random, the thing seems to have moods and get into specific bands, and delve heavily into their back catalogue. Sometimes this is fun when it’s into a mix of Iron Maiden; Norway’s most successful musical act of all time, A-ha; Jurassic 5; a random collection of Japanese Hip-Hop I bought in Tokyo, and Daft Punk’s magnificent soundtrack for Tron: Legacy. I sadly haven’t been able to watch the new Tron movie yet or heard the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack either, mostly because Jared Leto is problematic.

Going back to the mp3 player however, I shat it when it went on a Madonna kick recently and played so much Madge on a single bus journey in January that I had to check online she hadn’t died, and that I didn’t have the mp3 player equivalent of the notebook from Death Note, ‘cos the last time that happened was when Bowie croaked 10 years ago. Right before he popped off to meet the Starman, I’d had everything from the Ziggy era classics to his ill-fated dabble with metal in Tin Machine, then heavy rotation of his divisive 1997 drum and bass album Earthling, which is actually one of my favourite albums by Bowie and one he heavily dipped into in his outstanding Glastonbury 2000 set, which I was privileged enough to be at. So, my mp3 player recently got into ‘Sports’ by Huey Lewis and the News, a band I actually saw live, at the then new and shiny SECC in Glasgow, when they toured the world in 1986 off the back of their smash hit ‘Power Of Love’ from the soundtrack to Back to the Future. They were ace. Their early work was a little too new wave for my taste. But when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.

Anyway, emulators and emulation. Now, I must stress that anything written here regarding this subject is purely for informational and educational purposes. From the perspective of preservation and maintaining a historical archive of videogames and software for future reference, in the same way we value other forms of media as historically significant records representing the time and method of their creation, there is no question of the value of emulation. However there are clearly grey areas in legality when it comes to emulation of hardware and software which may or may not still be under copyright or otherwise still owned by someone somewhere. Nintendo clearly aren’t massive fans of emulation out in the wild, but it powers their Virtual Console offerings and all other legacy back catalogue titles, when you download Mario Kart 64 on the Switch there’s just an official Nintendo emulator turning the Switch into the Nintendo 64 and running the original cartridge. Same with the PS1 classics on PS3 and PS4, and Xbox Classics on the Xbox consoles.

As you can probably imagine, turning one type of machine into another and getting it to work as it should is an enormously complicated programming task, and emulators were always quite frankly a bastard to set up in the past, but I don’t see the point in continuing with big debates about the legality of the whole situation with emulating old games consoles when it’s now legitimately as easy for someone with no technical skills whatsoever as going on Amazon, or even better AliExpress, and just ordering a generic box for about 30 quid up that’s already set up to run emulators emulating thousands of games from yesterday, which are already installed, including all of those Nintendo classics that provoke legal action, and simply plugging it in to the TV when it arrives. We’re going to have to just assume that the manufacturer of said box has negotiated correctly the rights for the 4000+ roms which are pre-installed. Or has the ship already sailed here perhaps.

Also, ordering one of those pre-built boxes would give you a shit experience, and is giving money for nothing to criminals. If this is something that does interest you, you’d be far better repurposing old tech you may have sitting around and make your own, and learning the basics of how to set things ups and troubleshoot it yourself. Surprisingly, that shady old laptop or mobile phone you have sitting in a cupboard or drawer could easily be turned into a retro games console simply by downloading the right app, such as the popular (and free) RetroArch, or better yet by instead changing the operating system from what is likely an out of date version of Windows, Android or IOS, to a free Linux-based operating system called Batocera Linux, which, when set up, provides a way to emulate many different older systems and run their software whilst removing a huge amount of the headaches involved. It can be installed as the main operating system on a device or onto a bootable usb memory stick or drive, making it portable.

Batocera supports a wide variety of different systems and consoles: it has built in RetroArch and Steam support; provides alternative emulators for many systems to provide options for different powered base hardware; and is pre-calibrated for a wide variety of input devices out the box for these emulators, including standard Xbox, Switch Pro and PlayStation controllers, Steering Wheels, USB Dance controllers, several of the new type Light Guns which can be used on modern TVs such as those made by Sinden – you can even use original Wii Remote controllers as Gun Controllers for classic target shooting action. It includes freeware or shareware examples of games with an easy option to download several more, including an entertaining C64 version of Fix It Felix, the fictional game in which Wreck-It Ralph is the villain; a remake of classic 1 on 1 sword fighting game Barbarian for Sega Megadrive; the original shareware version of Doom; and an absolutely storming fan-made He Man and the Masters of the Universe side-scrolling beat-em up. The system can be personalised with a number of downloadable themes and the interface provides easy access to options if required. It is pretty versatile for its use purpose and has been used to build various arcade cabinets, pinball tables or even a versatile living room media hub as the Kodi media player is also included. I’ve just genuinely found it to be pretty decent all round at getting the job done without much in the way of issues, I can fanny about with it and customise stuff as much as I like, and there’s a decent and helpful online community surrounding it.

Whilst I have experimented with other Linux-emulation distros with varying degrees of success, from my perspective for those reasons Batocera provides arguably the best all-round solution for this at the moment. Pretty much everything is set up for you already once it is installed, and whilst some of the more obscure systems might require a little tech skill and internet searches to set up correctly, for most of the popular systems all that remains for you to do is to ensure that games in the correct file format are in the correct directories and that the corresponding system files required for that system, are in the correct directories. Obtaining those files is up to you as that’s where there is a lot of grey area or outright no no’s legally and it is up to you to ensure you are complying with the law in your territory, and I am not suggesting or condoning any type of behaviour that may get you into trouble with His Majesty’s Constabulary; The Fuzz; The Po-po; The Pigs; The Rozzers; The Filth; The Five-O; The Law; The Heat; The Boys (and Girls) in Blue; The Feds; The Gestapo; The Old Bill; Smokey; Babylon; La Chota; Nintendo; or The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I am not going to provide any specific information about it, if you are reading this blog thing then you are on the interwebs and can easily find all the info yourself on how to do this yourself by going to Google or any of the other less intrusive search engine options, and there are plenty of sources for the information, not least the official site for the Batocera operating system itself, and the ever-helpful repository of everything, the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine, where you can find all sorts of interesting stuff available if you search. It’s a rabbit hole but a fun one

Back to Xmas at my sibling’s place then. I got a mini pc off EBay for a tenner and stuck Batocera on an old 500 GB hard drive I had kicking about, set it up. Bluetooth dongle and usb Wii bar off AliExpress for a couple of quid. A couple of cheapo Bluetooth switch controllers, and a cheapo wireless keyboard and mouse off Amazon. Bishi Bashi Boshi – established cool Uncle status by bringing the kids a home-made games console.

Given the numerous and much flashier looking modern alternatives on offer via tablet and phone, it was a delight to watch an 11 year old with no previous controller experience work out how to play the now 30 year old PS1 Tekken 2 properly before their non-game playing dad did, then proceed to beat the absolute ever-loving shit out of him and all-comers after repeatedly on-screen, round after round, much to both theirs and everyone else’s entertainment. The Tekken session was followed by my being pestered to pick a game for them due to the overwhelming choice on offer and choosing another PlayStation 1 classic which went down a storm, Bishi Bashi Special, a compilation of the first two Bishi Bashi titles from Japan which was released in Europe in the year 2000, and consists of a series of competitive minigames which can be played by up to 8 players. Lots of screaming and hilarity. Later, I walked in on a co-operative session of Secret of Monkey Island with the kids helping each other and knew my job was done.

Then they broke the thing by deleting a file accidentally as I hadn’t locked the menus down properly, and Xmas was ruined.

See you in March!