Emulation heads know that The Simpsons Bowling, an arcade game from 2000, could never be properly played outside of an original arcade machine. The problem is that no emulation app could get it to run with the voice clips intact. So you could play it, but without voice clips itโs missing a major reason to even play through as all these characters.
Jumping to the present, Arcade1Up released an arcade reproduction cabinet with both The Simpsons Arcade and The Simpsons Bowling installed, including all voice clips! Players dug into the code recently and discovered that the game is running on a custom version of DuckStation, an emulator for PlayStation games, because the arcade hardware was apparently based on the original PlayStation. Itโs kind of wild. You can see footage here of someone trying to emulate the game with the standard version of DuckStation. As it says in the video description,ย โAs far as i can tell this is THE only version of this game that runs with the sound clips from the announcer and characters unlike MAME which can't even play them back.โ
There are more details in this Reddit thread, and some apparent drama around the legality of using DuckStation to emulate the game in a commercial product.