A MESS O' Trouble

My affinity for obtuse puns can be found today. Kudos if you get both references.

Well, I'm playing through The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which I started well over two years ago (Water Temple now. Gee, I'm in for some fun...)

But as I play, I'm getting increasingly dissatisfied. The constant pestering about a Rumble Pak (which the N64 version utilized) is getting to me: I can't use the Stone of Agony and fishing is a bit more difficult. And of course, I'm haunted by the mythical Ura Zelda (which, I can't reiterate enough, is NOT the same thing as Master Quest), which will never happen. After Ocarina of Time, I want to play The Wind Waker next for the "great Zelda experience", but also have a desire to play Majora's Mask, which isn't really the grandiose epic like OoT and TWW are, so it could be played at the same time (after all, both are in alternate timelines).

The thing is, I want a good emulation device. While the jailbroken "iPod as portable SNES" was a crushing disappointment, so much so that I ended up restoring it, with two lessons: jailbreaking isn't the Golden Ticket that will free your iPod from the invisible box Apple creates, nor is the iPod really a good game playing machine, with or without jailbreaking.

I realized then that while a portable device is cool and all: nothing like a device that you can play on the cozy environs of your bed, your couch, or any place where you can sit down and chill with headphones (school hallways, public transportation, etc. etc.) it's also to have a better emulation range. No doubt that the 16-bit generation was a great one (and yes, that includes you Genesis die-hards), but I'd kinda like something better: like the 5th generation of video game consoles (N64, PlayStation). Mupen64, which I have on my Mac, looks and runs great--that is, when the Rice video plug-in isn't giving the screen jitters (and yes, it's in a small windowed mode). The other major problem, which comes to a major problem when trying to play an N64 game: is the fact that my computer (Snow Leopard based) doesn't seem to recognize controllers very well. I suppose I could boot up into Windows, but the last time I tried that, it wouldn't even run sound--in an updated version of Snes9x, even--without some ActiveX upgrade. I stayed away from that. Frankly, I don't even boot up into Windows unless it's worth it: usually it was for SimCity 4, Portal, or Evil Genius, and I'd frankly like everything to stay on one OS (in an ideal environment). The reason I can't do that is...
- Games perform poorly in WINE or Cider wrappers, which is a major pain if it's a game that's not supposed to be some retro-style freeware game
- It takes up a ton of space per game.
- gmax, used for building SC4 "BAT"s, can't be used in WINE to my knowledge

I considered doing homebrew on my Wii again, as that would solve the "emulation but I can't use controllers" issue, but there were a few problems with that, and I wouldn't be able to use some of the cooler emulation features (such as a high-resolution texture pack).

I suppose my main problem is really the controllers--I can't get a joystick to work right on any software (even my beloved Apple IIGS emulator--I had a working joystick set-up on the iMac G3 for playing The Three Stooges in Bernie ][ the Rescue). And of course, I would need a bigger screen: my monitor size isn't going to cut it.