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Best console emulators these days?
#319306 - 12/27/13 11:57 AM
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Can anyone tell me which emulator is the best for NES, SNES and Genesis these days?
Its been a while since I checked things out on the console side of the fence...
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> Can anyone tell me which emulator is the best for NES, SNES and Genesis these days?
> Its been a while since I checked things out on the console side of the fence...
Higan (formerly BSNES) for SNES no doubt. It is *the* SNES emulator of choice if your PC can handle it (get the 64-bit version if possible). You may need to tweak it with shaders a bit (it renders all 240 scanlines vertically and most games only use 224 so it may be a bit letter boxed if you don't use an overscan shader to crop it), but it's great.
Not absolutely sure on NES/Genesis. For NES I use either the latest SVN build of FCEUX or NEStopia 1.40. For Genesis, I'm using Kega Fusion 3.64.
Edit: I've attached the combo of shaders I use for Higan. It combines "hi-res blend" which looks a bit like bilinear filtering, but actually will blend certain effects in pseudo-hires mode to be translucent as it would on a real tv. Basically, on a 512x224 SNES resolution, where every other vertical line of the 512 pixel horizontal plane is used, they are blended together to make translucency. The second pass of the shader crops the overscan and stretches to appropriate AR on my 16:9 display. You have to use the "stretch" AR and the shader basically compresses the image to the correct AR as I'm very bad at shader code editing, and this is the best I can do ;-) If you need any help with it, let me know.
Edited by Pr3tty F1y (12/27/13 04:25 PM)
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Re: Best console emulators these days?
[Re: Pr3tty F1y]
#319318 - 12/27/13 05:13 PM
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| CiroConsentino |
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Re: Best console emulators these days?
[Re: Trebor]
#319320 - 12/27/13 06:11 PM
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| DMala |
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Sleep is overrated
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Re: Best console emulators these days?
[Re: CiroConsentino]
#319326 - 12/27/13 08:55 PM
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> I didn't know about this Nestopia Undead Edition. Thank you
Same here. Nice!
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| RATMNL |
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Patron Saint of the Totally F*cked
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Re: Best console emulators these days?
[Re: DMala]
#319328 - 12/27/13 09:38 PM
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> > I didn't know about this Nestopia Undead Edition. Thank you
>
> Same here. Nice!
It's pretty Good! FCEUX is also alright. And with some work mednafen will do as well. Higan is indeed good, but there's a nasty split now between going for the 64-bit version and enjoying the new 32-bit betas which have library-functionality.
There's a lot of small ones on the rise, but haven't checked those out.
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"Those voices in his head might not be real, but they have really good ideas!"
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Re: Best console emulators these days?
[Re: RATMNL]
#319335 - 12/27/13 11:56 PM
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> > > I didn't know about this Nestopia Undead Edition. Thank you
> >
> > Same here. Nice!
>
> It's pretty Good! FCEUX is also alright. And with some work mednafen will do as well.
> Higan is indeed good, but there's a nasty split now between going for the 64-bit
> version and enjoying the new 32-bit betas which have library-functionality.
>
> There's a lot of small ones on the rise, but haven't checked those out.
It's quite easy to compile your own Higan x64 win build. I have a thread on Byuu's message board asking about how to compile and the answers were quite helpful. You just have to build Higan and then build ananke (the Higan import library file). Takes maybe 2 minutes total on my machine.
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How about N64? -NT-
[Re: jonwil]
#319362 - 12/28/13 10:00 AM
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: mike20599]
#319364 - 12/28/13 12:21 PM
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IMO, N64 emulation still sucks to this day...any of the so called 'updates' to established emulators are nothing more than nasty hacks that seem to break just as much as they fix.
The basic Project64 1.61 is still the best for playing the classic N64 games like Super Mario 64,Zelda OOT, 1080, Goldeneye.
Someone is trying to do a 'cycle accurate' N64 emulator, good look with that though, it'll be a long,long,long time before that will run at playable speeds, assuming the author doesn't give up.
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: Ziggy100]
#319365 - 12/28/13 12:50 PM
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> Someone is trying to do a 'cycle accurate' N64 emulator, good look with that though,
> it'll be a long,long,long time before that will run at playable speeds, assuming the
> author doesn't give up.
Cycle accurate with all those high clock speed cpu's interacting is basically impossible.
Writing an emulator that is accurate enough that the games are happy is more likely.
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: ]
#319366 - 12/28/13 01:01 PM
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Quote:
> Cycle accurate with all those high clock speed cpu's interacting is basically impossible.
Which is why I chuckle to myself whenever there is a new release for the project.
I think to myself, that's another 2 cycles emulated, only another 150 million to go.
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| RATMNL |
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Patron Saint of the Totally F*cked
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: mike20599]
#319367 - 12/28/13 01:13 PM
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MUPEN is doing quite well for me (needs a frontend and a bit of patience though) especially with the community plugins. P64 will do as well, I have to check out the new RSP plugins though.
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"Those voices in his head might not be real, but they have really good ideas!"
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: Ziggy100]
#319368 - 12/28/13 01:30 PM
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> > Cycle accurate with all those high clock speed cpu's interacting is basically
> impossible.
>
> Which is why I chuckle to myself whenever there is a new release for the project.
>
> I think to myself, that's another 2 cycles emulated, only another 150 million to go.
I don't think anyone even has the concept of what cycle accurate N64 means, let alone a way of coding it.
If it's this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Niorn5R-M then it's not cycle accurate, it's probably just LLE (which is way more achievable than cycle accurate).
FWIW most of MAME/MESS isn't cycle accurate in any form.
Edited by smf (12/28/13 01:31 PM)
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| R. Belmont |
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Cuckoo for IGAvania
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: ]
#319375 - 12/28/13 05:32 PM
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> Cycle accurate with all those high clock speed cpu's interacting is basically
> impossible.
> Writing an emulator that is accurate enough that the games are happy is more likely.
The original gate-by-gate design files for the N64 customs are out in the wild, so it's actually theoretically possible. It's a bit easier than going from a completed chip would be, something that's been successful for 6502 and is in progress for Z80, 68000, and the PSX CPU.
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: R. Belmont]
#319387 - 12/28/13 07:28 PM
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> The original gate-by-gate design files for the N64 customs are out in the wild, so
> it's actually theoretically possible.
And afterwards you could sell the simulator to spice as to run it 100% accurately in real time would be better than the tech they've got. In another FPGA cycle or so I guess we'll be see a real N64 in an FPGA.
Edited by smf (12/28/13 07:37 PM)
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: ]
#319417 - 12/29/13 11:35 AM
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Proper emulation instead of the hacks and simulation that emulators like UltraHLE uses would be great.
To me any emulator that needs to care about actual addresses in the software its running (e.g. to patch out protection, look for and simulate library functions instead of proper emulation etc) is not worth calling an emulator.
Even MAME is guilty of patching out things like protection instead of emulating it (or simulating the protection chip until it can be decapped and read out 
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| RATMNL |
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Patron Saint of the Totally F*cked
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Re: Best console emulators these days?
[Re: Pr3tty F1y]
#319420 - 12/29/13 02:51 PM
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Thanks will check it out!
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"Those voices in his head might not be real, but they have really good ideas!"
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: jonwil]
#319423 - 12/29/13 04:19 PM
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> To me any emulator that needs to care about actual addresses in the software its
> running (e.g. to patch out protection, look for and simulate library functions
> instead of proper emulation etc) is not worth calling an emulator.
Well that is a rather hard line to take. If it stops you using it to write homebrew then it's a problem though.
But there are no 100% accurate emulators, it just comes down to whether someone has managed to achieve something by abusing the behaviour of the real machine that you don't emulate.
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Re: Best console emulators these days?
[Re: Trebor]
#319478 - 12/30/13 12:26 PM
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Does the answer to the "best emulator" question change if I am asking now about the best (i.e. most accurate to what one would have heard from a TV set back in the day) sound emulation for the 3 consoles (NES, SNES and Genesis)?
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: RATMNL]
#319571 - 01/01/14 09:29 AM
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> MUPEN is doing quite well for me (needs a frontend and a bit of patience though)
> especially with the community plugins. P64 will do as well, I have to check out the
> new RSP plugins though.
Plugins and HLE can die in a fire for all I care, we're not in 1999 anymore. It's bad enough that the Wikipedia entry for Super Mario 64 has a screenshot taken from one of these emulators, complete with enhanced upscaled graphics. Even better, it's a JPEG file to make things look even worse than it already was.
I think I'll stick with my real Nintendo 64, at least until MESS becomes the best N64 emulator out there in terms of compatibility, or if a pSX-like emulator appears out of the blue.
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Re: How about N64? -NT-
[Re: R. Belmont]
#319573 - 01/01/14 11:59 AM
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> The original gate-by-gate design files for the N64 customs are out in the wild, so
> it's actually theoretically possible.
That's interesting ...
How do you find them ?
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