VOGONS


Good emulators in DOS

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Reply 21 of 27, by Jo22

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Jorpho wrote:

But there is some precedent: there's such a thing as a "HardSID" for devoted fans of Commodore 64 music, and Brian Provinciano put an NES PPU on a card back in the days when he was heavily into NES development.

That's what I thought of; creating a little card with just one or two of the core chips and some interface logic.
The latter one could be assisted by a micro controller, for example, whereas the rest of the console is emulated.

In case of the NES, there even were very good copies of the PPU around. Early famiclones used pin-compatible clones of the real chips.
No idea, if they were exact copies or reverse-engineered (in either case, cloning their die should be possible).

To me, this is somewhat akin to using a NEC V20 instead of an 8088 inside of a PC XT machine:
It's not entirely the same, but close in terms of compatibility (and more authentic than running 8088 software "natively" on i7 processors).

Anyway, I'm not against creating accurate Emulators, either. Nestopia, for example, is considered a cycle-exact emulator, too.
It's my favorite and I really like this emulator. It's very well made and I love the fact that it does emulate even the old quirks,
like the real NES did (max sprite/tile limit, etc.). ^^

But unlike CSNES, this thing does run nicely on my weak Power Mac G3 - it doesn't require an i7 multi-core system.
And its system requirements don't change every year because of "utilizing every last ounce of power that we have available today".
Yet it is very accurate and compatibility is on a high level.

Nevertheless I like the old inferior emulators as well and think they should be honoured just a little bit.
Not so much for their quality, but for the creativity and the devotion of their authors.

To name a rather negatively perceived emulator as an example, Pasofami translated square-wave music into MIDI sequences.
It wasn't authentic or accurate by any means, but interesting and fun to play with.
Some game titles sounded astonishingly well or orchestral this way. ^^

About the same is true for an old GB emulator I had many years ago.
It wasn't very accurate, but it was good enough to properly run platformers on a 386SX laptop.

I forgot its name, but one of the cool features it had was OPL3 support.
Enyoing my favorite GameBoy games with OPL3 music was a fun experience, I recall. 😁

So as much as I like to hear the true musical composition of my favorite games,
I'm also open for alternate interpretations sometimes. I wonder, is this so wrong ?
Some people here do also prefer the sound of CQM or ESFM synthesis over the real OPL3.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 22 of 27, by spiroyster

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Personally have used:

Genecyst,
zSnes,
NeoRageX (windows version much better),
DosUAE (windows version much better),
MAME (windows version much better)

[EDIT:] Of course, back 'in the day' it wasn't just the target platform you wanted to emulate that was a problem. ROM sizes in conjunction with dialup speeds were just as ruthless. o.0

Reply 23 of 27, by leileilol

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Jo22 wrote:

I forgot its name, but one of the cool features it had was OPL3 support.
Enyoing my favorite GameBoy games with OPL3 music was a fun experience, I recall. 😁
.

no$gmb

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long live PCem

Reply 24 of 27, by xjas

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I used to run MEKA (Sega Master System), ZSNES and CCS64 on my old 5x86/100. I seem to remember MEKA did fine, ZSNES was solid & playable, and CCS64 ran well but the emulation (especially the SID chip) wasn't 100% accurate. One of the three ran without UNIVBE but saw massive speed improvement with it loaded, but I can't remember which one.

More recently I've managed to get my P233MMX to emulate an Amiga 500-ish with both Fellow and DOSUAE. It's not remotely accurate or full framerate, but it does work.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 25 of 27, by manuelink64

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on my 586x133mhz, 8 bits systems emulators run very well. 😊
A26 for atari 2600
MEKA, really good for SMS games
no$GMB, really good for GB games

Genesyst x.xx, some games run ok, others are sluggish, even without sound /frame skip....avoid Kgen98 (more accurate 😵 )
Zsnes /Esnes, without graphics trick/sound, runs ok, but the games looks ugly without transparencies.
NeorageX, just no 😢

if you want a better experience, a P200mmx works really great for DOS emulators (NeorageX, Zsnes, Kgen98) 😊
Regards

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Reply 26 of 27, by creepingnet

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I just made a video showing me running Z26, NESticle, and ZSNES on my 486. I'll put that here. Kind of wanted to show it on this thread as it give an example of how these things will run on a 486 DX4-100 with a decent amount of RAM. Sorry about the potato camera.

https://youtu.be/Y7XETcYr8vk

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Reply 27 of 27, by Jo22

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creepingnet wrote:

I just made a video showing me running Z26, NESticle, and ZSNES on my 486.

Hey, thanks! 😀

keenerb wrote:

Nobody's mentioned no$gmb yet?

Funny, that you mention this one!

What its author wrote a long time ago matches perfectly to what was said before.

He said..

[..] Well, I did choose this possibly silly pseudonym a couple of years ago, but alltogether it still
represents my lifestyle quite good. Nocash is meant as a statement against consum and luxory.

In case of computers that means that I am partly amused, and partly worried about the craze for newer and faster computers,
and for more bloated and inefficent programs. And the people really believe that they would need the hitrash stuff.
I mean, give list of five million numbers to one of these guys, and tell him to add all that numbers together,
how long would that take? One week? A month?
But he would still treat a computer that handles that calculations within a single second as 'slow'.

In my programs I attempt to point out that the quality of a program doesn't depend on it's size, or on the hardware.
Yes, yes, that might be a senseless attempt, but I like it that way. [..]

http://problemkaputt.de/about.htm

keenerb wrote:

I used to run it on my HP200LX.

Really, on a HP200LX ? Wow! 😁
Isn't it similar to an Atari Portfolio ?

leileilol wrote:
Jo22 wrote:

I forgot its name, but one of the cool features it had was OPL3 support.
Enyoing my favorite GameBoy games with OPL3 music was a fun experience, I recall. 😁
.

no$gmb

Hi, I think it was VGB, but no$gmb was also very cool and professional looking! It used the Adlib in DAC mode and had Covox support, too. 😁

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//