the sick man of emulation
I like to play Donkey Kong Country these days. It's a game that I played in the nineties and probably beyond as a young kid, not knowing that some hidden openings and shortcuts in it would still be in my conscience now. Whenever I get to the special levels where I'm a giant fish or an ostrich and intuitively break through foliage or jump over cliffs that aren't on the screen (meaning out of the Kong world), I feel the rush.
The game has held up, but I could do without the distant Funky Kong savepoint barrels when it's game over, it being a time padding method of the past, similar to many of its contemporaries that did the same and were seemingly more prevalent on the home consoles.
This is a good reason to be emulating on the dirt cheap Chinese Data Frog SF2000 (or SF 2000) that I bought on Aliexpress, and subsequently forced the most juice out of by adding Multicore 0.10 to it as well as gpSP dynarec.
It's too rudimentary for any kind of custom firmware as of August, 2024, even if a little froggy told me that I haven't yet heard of AmphibiOS which is as far as we know is only a future expectation, and/so didn't hold me back from hyperfocusing what is approaching hundreds of hours of Microsoft Paint designing and not finishing four or five different themes whose edits require baked-in icons and words in some places and arbitrary text files represented by, say, an Arial_en.ttf file that might not even be Arial in others. But I'm my own worst enemy, and though the stock theme might be considered charming, to me it feels fugly and stupidly uneven.
I play Tetris on it in the OG Game Boy version, wanting simplicity out of a game and trying to enjoy the puzzles without being overstimulated by colours. At time of writing Multicore doesn't provide Gambatte out of the box, so I put a libreto version of it on it, and this core (Gambatte) can default to 1:1 and option-wise has the Dot Matrix palette of the past.
So though I'm having fun playing and tinkering with the SF2000, I wish to have original hardware and collections at my disposition, but I'm poor. Objectively it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't really need to. Sometimes I'm just not with efficiency.