Emulation is something that has been going on for a long time with modern computers. Through something like AppleWin you can emulate an old Apple ][, allowing you to play games like Wasteland or others that are out there. And if you really wanted to you can even program in old Apple Basic. I’ve also been a huge fan of Amiga Emulation, using different versions of Amiga Forever over the years. And Archive.org has a great collection of Amiga stuff too.

But one of the most interesting uses for an emulator has to be the SWGEMU project. I played Star Wars Galaxies back when it came out in 2003, and it was ruff. A very old school game by todays standards. It’s hard to make money, there’s no real story line, and it’s open world, just a huge sandbox. So the game was updated over the years, first came the combat upgrade, that made a lot of people unhappy. Then further down the road they came out with the NGE version, New Game Enhancements, giving it a very World of Warcraft feel with talent trees and all. They really got away from their roots.

Then Lucas Arts decided to start a new MMO based on the Star Wars universe, coming out in the end with Star Wars :The Old Republic something that just doesn’t live up to what Galaxies was. Yep, Lucas Arts killed SWG when SW:TOR came out. Shutting down the servers, and killing off everybody’s characters. And expansions were still coming out for it, so the developer was still behind it, what a shame.

Well a couple of hackers have gotten together and emulated the old Star Wars Galaxies servers, so if you have a copy of the original disks, any of them, you can log onto there servers and still play the game. It’s incredible that something like an MMO server could be emulated and fans of a game could still keep it going. You almost have to wonder that if there was enough interest maybe a few other games could come back. NCSoft has killed a couple of games.

- D

Currently Playing: SWG EMU