Replay value

It's no secret that my favorite games I played while growing up were the Final Fantasy series, and I have recently gotten the urge to play them again.

The problem is, I don't have the systems that play those games anymore, and I won't be spending any money to get them. That means I need to find another way.

The solution? Emulation. A program that enables your computer to emulate that game system, and this allows you to run roms of the games, or copies of the original game made into files that are playable on the emulator.

I was originally going to get an the various emulators for the different systems that the Final Fantasy games have been released on over the years, but I remembered that all the early games were later re-released on Playstation, and figured that only having to deal with one emulator would simplify things.

So I went online and found that the preferred emulator, called the epsxe. There is a little setup involved with configuring plugins, but I this guide walks you through it enough to get you started, and then you can mess with settings from there. I would suggest downloading the file pack near the top of his guide, which includes all the necessary plugins so you don't have to go searching for them.

Next I needed some game files, and after a quick Google search I found this site. It had everything I needed, and not only do the downloads go pretty fast, but there aren't a bunch of ads you have to follow in order to get them like I've seen on other rom sites.

I figured I'd start with FF4, one of the games in the series that I remember the least, and then work my way up. I got the game working and all, and have now made it about 3/4 of the way through the game. It's been great, and there is so many memories it brings back, but also so much that I had forgotten about.

There is one drawback to having chosen to use the PSX emulator over the original system the games were released on, and that is the sound. For some reason the emulator doesn't play back the sounds correctly. It seems that the sound plug-in doesn't know how to deal with looped music or multiple sound files at once.

What ends up happening is any music playing will play through fine on the first loop, then it cuts out and just repeats the first note until you enter an area with different music. I also have no music during battles, just the sound effects. It's frustrating, and I've been tweaking the sound plug-ins to find one that works but I haven't had any luck so far.

Now that I'm so far into the game I really don't want to start over again, but part of the nostalgia is gone because that battle music was a big part of it for me. If there is anyone out there that has a solution for this I would love to know.

Other than that it's been great, and I'm looking forward to beating this game and moving on to the next. I expect this to keep me busy for a good while.