Eat-an-Octorok wrote:Damn, that's a rip off. When wasd the last time people had to pay to download emulators?
Depends on what you're emulating and its target market... I don't think the price quoted is a rip-off. If you're actually interested in the CD-i and perhaps own one or two, it's not much to pay, especially when you consider the amount of work that has been put into it.
Besides, paying for the emulator is cheaper than buying an actual CD-i machine from the likes of eBay (especially when you add shipping costs), and then you can't guarantee that the laser transport mechanism will continue to work indefinitely.
A lot of emulators are free because:
1. The target machine is easy to emulate
2. It was a very popular machine in its day
3. There's more than one emulator of the target machine
The CD-i has none of the above.
As for paying for emulators in general, I bought Z80 (the original Spectrum emulator for the PC) as it was cheap and did a decent job, much better than the freebie equivalents at the time. I've also bought a Spectrum emulator for my phone, again because this did a far better job than a free one.
Just my 2p worth!
- Ali