THINGS THAT I THINK NEED EMULATION

Things like these are worth preserving and emulating properly!

Something I've noticed in the game preservation and emulation community is that there is a disproportionate focus on consoles and games made by more well known companies, and consoles and games that people love. More obscure consoles, and sometimes games, get little to no attention because people think they aren't worth anyone's time. Hell, it wasn't until recently that the CD-i had a proper emulator made for it that wasn't paid, broken, or designed to only play a single game.

Some consoles I also feel that people only care enough to make sure that it turns on and works, but not to make sure that it's actually playable. Case in point, the Sega Pico, which had a plethora of storyware scans available at one point in time, but now they are nowhere to be found. Any emulator that can run the games for it are rated by runability rather than playability. Sure, you can RUN a pico game in MAME or Kega Fusion or Retroarch, but can you actually play them without the storyware scans? No. Currently, the only way to play the Pico with storyware is one of two ways:

1: An old, depreciated version of Picodrive that is no longer receiving any sort of support, and many of the games either don't work or have major functional issues. 2: BlastEm, which emulates the games perfectly but currently has no way to add storyware images. Though I suspect (or hope) that this will be added in the next major update, since right now the most recent versions that support the pico are nightlies. I talk more about Pico emulation on a different page of this website, as it's one of my little obsessions.

Anyway. I can understand if there are things that can be hard or even impossible to emulate, because that is an unfortunate side effect of the gaming industry and the many, MANY crackpot and pipedream ideas that companies have tossed out there. There are required features that aren't able to be emulated, consoles that were never released, consoles only released in very small numbers or very specific parts of the world, consoles that flopped so spectacularly that people hardly even remember or know they exist, services that went offline without warning, and stuff that is just plain lost media that might not have ever existed in a playable state.

The preservation and emulation community has made some incredible feats. Like preserving a good chunk of the Satellaview's library, LBP3's playermade levels, and an entire flipnote hatena archive. There's ways to re-connect your wii to the internet and expeirence certain channels again. Just in December 2025, Garfield: The Lost Levels, was found and dumped online, something nobody thought would get preserved.

All I'm trying to say on this page is, that there is more beyond what is here that was someone's favorite thing to play with as a kid. So please don't go around telling people that something isn't worth finding, preserving, or emulating.

The LeapFrog LeapPad Learning System

• It’s nostalgic and would just be cool to mess around with. There's lots of people who grew up with this thing, who probably had their parents throw or give it away once they grew out of it.
• We have dumps of most of the cartridges, we just need booklet scans. Though, I can see some issues with this, as it requires people to buy booklets and have a scanner. There are some booklet scans on Internet Archive, but they aren't free to download.
• Would be easy to make, considering PicoDrive and Blastem can emulate the Pico Storyware. There's no graphics to emulate, just audio cues, so it would be that much more easier.
• The My First and Little Touch variants should also be included, as well as the Quantum LeapPad.

• In fact, throw the Sawatte Pico in there too.
• The Leapfrog Tag might also be a worthy choice.

The VideoNow

• This is more of a hope than anything, just a silly little idea. I know the video quality is shit but it's another one of those nostalgia things.
• There are a lot of disc dumps out there. It is incredibly easy to do a disc dump because all the VideoNow is are a bunch of encoded audio files.
• There is a way to rip the video and audio from the discs into a playable video format on a pc, but it’s very time consuming and involves stitching the video back together from thousands of frames. Very inconvenient. Would be easier to just load up a videonow ISO.
• The VideoNow XP did have games on it, or at least certain VideoNow discs had games included that could only be played on the XP.
• The only real issue I can think of is copyright. I know emulation already kind of goes against copyright anyway, but the MPAA and Viacom are a lot more relentless than gaming companies are. VideoNow did have some exclusive content for it, like behind the scenes stuff, but a large majority of it was kids shows and movies.
• VirtualDub has a plugin called VideoNowToGo that let's you make your own VideoNow files to burn on a disc, though. So imagine how fun that would be to make your own ISO and be able to load it up on an emulator.