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What are the best console emulators out there?

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Reply 40 of 64, by Jorpho

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Lo Wang wrote:
Kind of late but... […]
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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Gameboy

Kind of late but...

Gameboy emulators don't come better than BGB. Accuracy, compatibility, features (excellent debugger), all covered.

I always had this thought that the Gameboy would have made an excellent, portable, general-purpose computer with just a lil bit of extra built-in hardware/software support (keyboard, serial port, a cassette recorder for storage and a ROM Basic interpreter).

Off topic, but there were in fact plans for a Game Boy keyboard/PDA known as the Workboy. I understand it was almost released, but was scrapped when it became apparent how expensive it would be. I dimly recall reading about a PS/2 keyboard hack usable with some of the homebrew Infocom ports.

Also, the link cable is sort of a serial port (as it was used for the printer), but not a very good one.

Last edited by Jorpho on 2015-06-21, 16:50. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 41 of 64, by Evert

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I highly recommend checking out CEN64. It is still in development, but it's looking like a promising low-level N64 emulator. In my mind a good emulator is an accurate emulator.

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Reply 42 of 64, by mr_bigmouth_502

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Heh, it's been a while since I've posted in this topic. 😜 Anyway, it seems Mednafen now has a decent frontend program, known as Mednaffe. The version I have is still a bit unpolished, but it seems pretty decent. I also like the new XMB-like skin for Retroarch, though it's a shame it's not enabled by default.

Reply 43 of 64, by leileilol

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Mednafen is nice when I used it as a libretro core. Nice to see it shaping further up!

Personally I wonder if there'll ever be a ZSNES or NESticle frontend for retroarch, clicking that dismembered hand around windows to open videos and the like 🤣

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Reply 44 of 64, by mr_bigmouth_502

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leileilol wrote:

Mednafen is nice when I used it as a libretro core. Nice to see it shaping further up!

Personally I wonder if there'll ever be a ZSNES or NESticle frontend for retroarch, clicking that dismembered hand around windows to open videos and the like 🤣

You have no idea how much I would love that! 😀 ZSNES is how I discovered emulation in the first place, at the tender age of 8. It seriously had one of the coolest UIs ever. Nesticle's UI was pretty awesome too. Why are emulator UIs so bland nowadays?

Reply 46 of 64, by Jorpho

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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Why are emulator UIs so bland nowadays?

Because coding a bug-free, portable UI from scratch is a pain in the neck, especially when there are much better alternatives available.

I suspect the decision not to change the ZSNES GUI might have something to do with the code being partially written in assembly language, but that's just speculation on my part.

Reply 47 of 64, by dr_st

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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

You have no idea how much I would love that! 😀 ZSNES is how I discovered emulation in the first place, at the tender age of 8. It seriously had one of the coolest UIs ever. Nesticle's UI was pretty awesome too. Why are emulator UIs so bland nowadays?

Good question. I assume it is because in the DOS era there were no standard GUI libraries, so you had to roll your own, and people invested creative effort in that. Now it's easy to just use whatever Windows provides, and spend more time on making the emulation work well. 😜

Interestingly, ZSNES was also the first emulator for me. The first game I played on it was Lost Vikings II. I really hated the PC port's ugly graphics and terrible voice acting, and was so glad to find out that the original SNES release had the same fun cartoonish look&feel of the first game.

I also used Nesticle (and its Genesis counterpart with an equally gross name - Genecyst). Their UI was awesome, but it quickly became obvious that they stayed behind the curve in emulation capabilities. ZSNES kept up. I still use it today for whatever little SNES emulation I do.

Others I use are nullDC, PCSX2, Visual Boy Advance, Gens, and of course MAME.

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Reply 48 of 64, by mr_bigmouth_502

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I've been messing around with Mednafen again recently, and well, the way the PSX core handles overscan is driving me nuts. 🤣
M0aGOQ9.png

Those black bars should NOT be there. I measured the actual area the game occupies, and it has a ratio of 1.22:1. Playing on an actual CRT TV, PSX games display in 4:3 without visible overscan borders. I know it's probably trying to display things with square pixels, but this is NOT correct. Much like 320x200 DOS games, a good number of PSX games (if not most) are supposed to use non-square pixels.

For comparison, here's a screenshot I took from the PC Engine/Turbografx 16 core. The whole area is filled with no overscan, the aspect ratio seems correct, and this is on a system WITHOUT any 4:3 square-pixel resolutions!
OenxkyX.png

Wait a sec, The PSX window is wider than the PC Engine window. I did not notice this before. Maybe Mednafen just doesn't do 4:3 stretching.

Reply 49 of 64, by Indess

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laxdragon wrote:

Honestly, while not the best, I tend to use MESS for most of my console emulation these days. It is just nice to have a single emu that does multiple platforms. That, and MESS is constantly improving, and like MAME shows no signs of becoming stagnant like every other emu ever.

Yeah i also agree with you that MESS is the good choice among others.

Reply 50 of 64, by leileilol

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I recently ran into an odd problem with Mednafen when running Darkstalkers 3 (no surprise?). The screen was shifted too much to the right and cut some things off

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Reply 52 of 64, by Stiletto

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Funny you should mention that - Samuele actually touched xbox.c in MESS this release cycle:
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/b8d19a … f24cf4190a9915f
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/cc6f34 … 632ed01b2ba8695
Mind you, it still doesn't do a whole lot.

XQEmu is still developed tho. See some discussion here:
What's the big hold up with XBox emulation?
http://xqemu.com
https://github.com/espes/xqemu

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Reply 53 of 64, by Licentious Howler

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If anybody wants a good recommendation for Nintendo DS emulators, obviously DeSmuME is the logical choice, but I really can't help but recommend the x432r fork even if it won't get as many updates as the main emulator, because this fork lets you upscale the native resolution and apply Anti-Aliasing. If I recall correctly though, this is all done by the CPU, so you may not be able to just crank everything to max per se...

http://www.geocities.jp/gponys/desmume_aa.html

I mean, look at this! I'm stunned at how good some DS games can actually look when they're not rendered in a lower res than Doom!

Edit: Agh! How on earth did I forget to mention this!?

http://www.exodusemulator.com/

It's a Sega Genesis emulator that's focused on accuracy above all else. How much accuracy?

Last I checked, it requires a 2nd-gen i5 ~3GHz at minimum to run full speed (new versions may have eased this up though).

Debugging features seem to show a lot of promise too, but that's hardly my expertise.

It's also left open enough that it could adopt other emulation cores in the future, but you can read more about that on the website.

That "non-mess" link that Stiletto provided is really good one for this topic btw.

http://nonmame.retrogames.com/

It links to MAME now because MAME and MESS were merged together back in May (I always wondered if they'd ever do that).

Lo Wang wrote:
mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Gameboy

Kind of late but...

Gameboy emulators don't come better than BGB. Accuracy, compatibility, features (excellent debugger), all covered.

Sorry, fairly old post, I know, but I'm interested; do you know how this stacks up to Gambatte? That's been my emu of choice for some time, if not the VBA-M core in Retroarch that gives some nice screen filter options (but I wish there were more that emulated that green hue).

The fact that BGB supports linking Game Boys might give it a leg up over Gambatte, but I'm not super familiar with Gambatte's "under-the-hood" features...

Reply 54 of 64, by Stiletto

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Licentious Howler wrote:

That "non-mess" link that Stiletto provided is really good one for this topic btw.
http://nonmame.retrogames.com/
It links to MAME now because MAME and MESS were merged together back in May (I always wondered if they'd ever do that).

Not only am I a forum moderator and founder here at VOGONS, but also am a resident longtime MAMEDev here, howdy 😉

Yeah I like Shoegazer's page with the exception of the copious RetroArch mentions, I've also made some suggestions for him over the years (originally I was more interested in his NonMAME page than his NonMESS page for obvious reasons)

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do the Fandango!" - Queen

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Reply 55 of 64, by leileilol

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Desmume already has resolution scaling implemented in recent revisions. The fork's no longer neccessary.

also i don't consider upscaling/high resolutions part of being a 'best emulator' feature. They tend to be misinforming inaccuracies that create new bugs and unintended behavior, and are often recommended for that "see? computers are beter than console's!!! pc master race" novelty value by the younger crowd. Especially if it's ePSXe, which had those "HD" features for a good 15 years (17 if you count the plugins' life in PSEmu Pro) and still has unfixed critical menu and window bugs for that long.

I'd love it if Dolphin or PCSX2 get a libretro core strictly at native res, no plugins and etc. and that's way easier said than done unfortunately. Same for Xbox, I hope to play that in 640x480 too. 😀

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Reply 56 of 64, by Licentious Howler

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leileilol wrote:

Desmume already has resolution scaling implemented in recent revisions. The fork's no longer neccessary.

oh...

This is embarrassing...

Uh, how long ago was that added, I wonder...?

(Man, I really don't play DS games at all I guess.)

Furthermore, I really hope they added the feature because they wanted to and were going to anyway... I really hope they didn't do it just to shut people up or anything like that.

also i don't consider upscaling/high resolutions part of being a 'best emulator' feature. They tend to be misinforming inaccuracies that create new bugs and unintended behavior, and are often recommended for that "see? computers are beter than console's!!! pc master race" novelty value by the younger crowd. Especially if it's ePSXe, which had those "HD" features for a good 15 years (17 if you count the plugins' life in PSEmu Pro) and still has unfixed critical menu and window bugs for that long.

I'd love it if Dolphin or PCSX2 get a libretro core strictly at native res, no plugins and etc. and that's way easier said than done unfortunately. Same for Xbox, I hope to play that in 640x480 too. 😀

I actually completely agree with you that features like this are very antithetical to proper emulation--one only needs to take a look at the compatibility pages of Dolphin to see the numerous games with bugs all caused by expanding the native resolution or applying AA/AF in games that never used it.

I personally can't stand the way that EPSXE and PCSXR mangle the way that Playstation games look and would honestly take a native res dithery-ass Xebra any day, and it was a happy day for me when I discovered my Mupen64Plus/Retroarch @ 240p + NTSC shader combo.

But dang it; I'm a fallible human being too, and when the option's there, sometimes I like to toy with features like this.

Sorry if that's a pet peeve I touched upon there...

Stiletto wrote:
Licentious Howler wrote:

That "non-mess" link that Stiletto provided is really good one for this topic btw.
http://nonmame.retrogames.com/
It links to MAME now because MAME and MESS were merged together back in May (I always wondered if they'd ever do that).

Not only am I a forum moderator and founder here at VOGONS, but also am a resident longtime MAMEDev here, howdy 😉

Yeah I like Shoegazer's page with the exception of the copious RetroArch mentions, I've also made some suggestions for him over the years (originally I was more interested in his NonMAME page than his NonMESS page for obvious reasons)

You're so courteous...!

Pleased to meet you.

I don't have any accolades as cool as that unfortunately.

Reply 57 of 64, by JaKSLaP

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Firtasik wrote:

the issue with mame is not mame but the roms. The Roms which are available have alot of missing files in them. i remember back in the day i was recompiling roms to get it working with mame. it eventually worked.

Reply 58 of 64, by Jorpho

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Why are you bumping a thread that's almost a year old and quoting a link about Kega Fusion while writing a post about MAME roms?

(And yes, there was a time when extra files were suddenly added to a whole bunch of older MAME roms in the name of improving accuracy, but that was years and years and years ago.)

Reply 59 of 64, by cdoublejj

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KEGA Fusion for SEGA, runs on windows, linux and mac, seems to be accurate or at least stable and never had any problems with it. In short "It just works" at least for the 99% most part.

EDIT: woops, just saw the title and blindly posted ,looks like this was necro thread, my bad.