In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nintendo had one serious competitor — Sega. Other game consoles from various companies existed, to be sure. But only the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive (the system was branded differently in different markets) came anywhere near to matching the SNES in total shipments. The total count was 49.1 million for Nintendo, 33.75 million for Sega, and just 10 million for the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine. Sega games from this era are still remembered fondly, and the new Sega Forever collection available on mobile devices should be a huge hit. Unfortunately, profound emulation problems are sinking the project.

According to the Sega Forever website, the service is a “free and growing classic games collection of nearly every SEGA game ever released from every console era – Master System, Genesis/Mega Drive, Dreamcast, and more. Available on iOS and Android mobile devices.” The site promises features like free play, game saves, leaderboards, Bluetooth support for wireless controllers, offline play, and the ability to download new games released every month. The company even put together a launch trailer for its new product, shown below:

This should be a huge deal. And it is — but not the way that Sega intended. Digital Foundry’s John Linneman tested many of the titles, and came back with this:

DO NOT TOUCH those Sega Forever games. Lousy emulation in a Unity wrapper. Not good at all. — John Linneman (@dark1x) June 21, 2017

Apparently even on high-end devices, the emulation experience is badly subpar. And what’s interesting is that a high-quality Sega emulator already exists, but the company made demands of its creators that the team found unacceptable. The development studio Libretro has an emulator, dubbed RetroArch, that’s generally believed to be superior to what Sega Forever is using. In some cases, earlier versions of these games released as iOS titles in 2009 literally ran faster on an iPhone 3GS than they do today on an iPhone 6s Plus.

Libretro’s developers released the following statement:

Sorry to all the people that are experiencing subpar performance with this Unity thing; they could have been using RetroArch right now if they hadn’t been so stubbornly insistent on demanding we relicense our entire program to something that would strip us of all our rights, on top of some other unreasonable things like not showing any branding, etc. Hell, they could have had this running on the desktop right now on top of consoles and maybe some netplay as well.

Mike Evans defended the initial quality of the games and blamed the problem on device fragmentation. “It’s difficult — a lot of the devices can run it fine, from the testing that we did,” Evans told Eurogamer. “Within mobile there’s a lot of fragmentation, if you look at all the different OSs, all the different devices — with mobile, as you go live, you get some feedback which you can’t get within a sandbox environment.”

We’re Not Buying That

First of all, Evans is right, there’s plenty of fragmentation in the market. The problem with his statement is that people are running into trouble playing these devices on the Galaxy S8 and the iPhone 7. It’s a well-known fact that emulation requires more horsepower than the original device to keep things running smoothly. But we also know that Sega released some of these games as mobile titles eight years ago, and they ran extremely well.

The Sega Genesis featured a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.67MHz with a Zilog Z80 clocked at 3.58MHz. It had 64KB of main RAM, 64KB of video RAM, and 8KB of audio RAM. The L2 cache on a modern smartphone is significantly larger (and vastly faster) than the Sega Genesis’ entire pool of memory. The CPUs inside these modern smartphones are clocked more than an order of magnitude faster, and we’ve already seen that proper ports from eight years ago could run beautifully on an iPhone 3GS.

Fragmentation would be an acceptable response for why a game might run beautifully on a Qualcomm GPU, but not an ARM Mali solution. It could explain why games could run well on Android Marshmallow, but not on KitKat. Heck, it might even explain why iOS 10 gamed well but older smartphones on iOS 8 had problems.

But when the highest-end devices with gigabytes of system RAM, caches larger than the entire memory pool of your former console, and multi-core support can’t manage to maintain frame rates nearly 30-year-old hardware can offer, the problem isn’t fragmentation. It’s lousy optimization and software that never should have launched yet. Evans defends the use of Unity as a way to bring games to the widest audience of people, but Unity isn’t known for high performance. How much of a problem that’s causing here is unknown, but it’s unlikely to be helping the situation.

And while I’m on the topic, skip the new SNES Classic Edition, too. It’s just another Nintendo bait-and-switch from a company that’ll build a hype train, deliver 1/10th the consoles needed to meet market demand, then claim they couldn’t build more, because reasons. Companies like Sega and Nintendo have huge potential nostalgia markets, but neither seems capable of delivering what they promise.