“If you cared about Latin classics, you’d be reading them on parchment rolls, that’s actual preservation.”
”If you cared about Star Wars, you’d only watch the original film reels of the versions before George Lucas started altering them with CG. If you really cared about these movies you’d want the experience replicated accurately down to the original film and its boxes.”
I was pointing out the dishonesty of conflating actual preservation and nostalgia than the adolescent desire to simply have a longer list of games on your pile of shame.
I also think citing Star Wars is a pretty bad idea given how "Greedo shot first" was a big fucking deal to actual fans, and certainly more important than the adding-in of shitty CG detail to the background of scenes in order to conform to then "modern" visual standards!
Have I made clear enough what a dumb deflection what you wrote is?
Nah, you simply established a combative tone that I'm going to reciprocate.
About the multi-language support, tell me: how important is having multiple European languages in a ISO file meant for an Asian market?
The Asian market is relatively new, and games of that generation were rarely if ever localized. Not everyone in Asia speaks Japanese you dimwit!
Also, it could be argued that since these games are so old that they’d be interesting only to a small audience,
That's not an argument, that's a demonstrable fact.
we may easily infer that the aforementioned small audience would want to experience them in their best version, which is pretty much invariably the English one.
No its not. Regional variation is about more than display frequency. Its an idiotically reductive stance.
We may also think that these people would be old enough to know enough English to be able to play these games without the need for a localized version. In the past, localized versions of games have been literally forced on me, because some games, like Metal Gear Solid, didn’t offer a multi-language option and they were Italian only. As cutely hilarious as some local dubs were back then, I doubt anyone would want to go back to those today.
As per usual, its not all about you. Being able to understand what's going on matters a lot more to the general audience than frame-rate. Good luck on figuring out Meryl's codec frequency without the ability to understand that its written on the back of the box!
Also, localization in those days was a considerable headache. Just adjusting text for the wildly variable symbol counts of different written languages often involved tediously editing and reformatting to fit within the confines of a SD frame. It also ate memory and disk space which again was problematic within the strict 650mb limit of a CD.
Adding and subtracting different languages is non-trivial, and requires actual work on the binary - quite an issue when not only the source code and assets may be long lost, but the tools used to create builds are similarly obsolete. Emulation is not remastering.
fair counterpoint: if you cared about these games from a “nostalgia perspective”, you’d want to play them in the language you played them originally. And English is in all the multi-language versions anyway, so it’s not like you can’t play in English. “You are not being denied anything”… except the best-playing version of some games, and accurate emulation, which is part of preservation as much as the games themselves)
Again your assumption is that the binary contains all languages, when that's not likely. Furthermore it assumes that the actual content and function of different regional builds are the same, which again is fallacious.
Its worth noting that so-called "PAL Slowdown" demonstrates the need for region specific re-coding. We're talking about simple single-threaded programs that often used frame-counting for timing purposes, the facility to calculate time-delta the way that modern programs do was simply not on the table. And that's for real-time display, pre-encoded stuff like video files is obviously tied to its authoring standard.
20 plus years on its likely not easy to determine the degree of care and effort that was put into the localization. Results are going to vary on a per-case basis, and frankly as these titles are more or less offered as novelties to the primary market, there's little incentive to try and figure out which sku is the best option for any given market or individual user within it.
Years of grey-market emulation have effectively reduced the value of these works to negligibility. The calculation of opportunity cost versus return on investment ensures that these things HAVE to be turned out quickly and cheaply.