The dream of perfect game emulation gets closer with a filter designed to make retro games sound as bad as they did on your family TV in the '80s

The world of game emulation continues to move forward at a tremendous pace. Even though we have had emulators such as MAME since 1997 emulator our favorite arcade games of yesteryear, technological leaps and bounds continue to be made.

Emulation is probably the only place where you can class making something worse than it is today as a technological leap (or indeed bound) but that’s what’s going on here in a project to make that crisp, reproduced sound of your old console or arcade classics, sound muddy and less pleasant, as it would have done back in the day through that mono speaker on your Zenith/RCA/Magnavox CRT. Ah, the memories.

The filter is made by Retro Crisis and consists of a small file you stop into your RetroArch folder before applying it to your games. Check out the video below for examples and installation instructions. His description of the plugin is as simple as: “Well here it is, a filter designed to ruin your audio and make it sound like a crappy 80s mono speaker. Enjoy.”

I play a lot of my retro stuff on CRT to this day but on a great quality Sony Trinitron, this filter perfectly recaptures the actual sound you would have heard back in the day. The Sonic the Hedgehog example in the video is a great one. When you listen to the two side by side you realize, even with my failing ears, how different they sound, and if you are as keen on getting the most perfect reproduction of the era as you are playing the games, this audio filter will add a little extra to your experience.

You may well be wondering why on earth you would go to all this trouble, but for a lot of people, emulation is about reconnecting with your childhood as much as anything. It was this aim that actually got me so heavily involved in the retro gaming scene.

While it may be cool to upscale PS2 games with the latest textures and play them on a lovely 4K screen or Steam Deck, for many the memories that come flooding back are much deeper too.

Check out the video and see if it awakens anything in you!

Featured Image: AI-Generated in Ideogram