TLDR: I think MVG did a story on the Nes/Snes emulation wars.
There were a lot of old emulators mentioned in that

EDIT: Here it is 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3vk3cHYLSQ

Akuma wrote on 2021-08-05, 08:39:

TLDR: I think MVG did a story on the Nes/Snes emulation wars. There were a lot of old emulators mentioned in that […]
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TLDR: I think MVG did a story on the Nes/Snes emulation wars.
There were a lot of old emulators mentioned in that

EDIT: Here it is 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3vk3cHYLSQ

Thank you very much for the link, Akuma! ^^

And a happy new year!

The atari 2600 emulator, stella, has an older version for DOS. It is v1.3 (st13.zip):
https://github.com/stella-emu/stella/releases … tag/release-1.3

It has higher cpu requirements than the fastest emulators as listed in this thread.

This was the very fastest ZX Spectrum emulator for DOS I think, running well on 286, maybe too fast on anything else.
https://github.com/ZXSpectrumVault/z80-spectrum-emulator
Honorable mentions were SpecEm and JPP which both did well on low 486. (And maybe had more features and archive format support)

I've quickly searched those 5 pages and couldn't find, but i hope I havent missed the information I am looking for:

I have a Commodore 386SX/25 equipped with 8MB RAM + 8GB CF-IDE "adaptered" HDD.

Do you know of any emulator that will run on this? I also have mouse, joystick and a soundblaster 16 on this machine.

trafokopf wrote on 2023-12-22, 04:03:

I've quickly searched those 5 pages and couldn't find, but i hope I havent missed the information I am looking for:

I have a Commodore 386SX/25 equipped with 8MB RAM + 8GB CF-IDE "adaptered" HDD.

Do you know of any emulator that will run on this? I also have mouse, joystick and a soundblaster 16 on this machine.

Hi, I've gotten a few emulators to run on a 286 @10Mhz.
No$GB, for example. It was playable, even. An ET4000 may improve performance even further, maybe, if the emulator has special support for it.

The others I tried were from here. Apple II and C64 emulators may run on a 386 class PC, as wel.

NES emulators may run, too. . It depends.
NESticle on a 386: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAATEGyzMTU

SNES/MegaDrive (Genesis) emulation is more demanding in general, I suppose.
Good ol' Genecyst might be humble enough, not sure.
Here's Genecyst on a 486, at least: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF-0wf0gPw0

ZSNES is the latest DOS-based SNES emulator (SNES 9x had dropped DOS support in the 90s).
By using a quick, low-res graphics mode and omitting transparency (by using merely 256c) and a low audio sampling rate, it *may* run, if no 486+ instructions are required.
It may do well enough for puzzle games, I mean. Bizyland, Tetris etc. StarWing is too heavy.

trafokopf wrote on 2023-12-22, 04:03:

I've quickly searched those 5 pages and couldn't find, but i hope I havent missed the information I am looking for:

I have a Commodore 386SX/25 equipped with 8MB RAM + 8GB CF-IDE "adaptered" HDD.

Do you know of any emulator that will run on this? I also have mouse, joystick and a soundblaster 16 on this machine.

Mostly it's going to be 8 bit home computers that will emulate on that with emulators written prior to 1995. We find those in places like the Simtel archives on CD..
http://cd.textfiles.com/simtel/simtel0595/DISC1/EMULATOR/

122nce142.zip    52152  940707   Z80 CP/M emulator for MS-DOS systems. SYDEX
268em10.zip      63389  910507   6800 emulator for DOS, includes a realtime O/S
3ame86.zip       22883  870717   CP/M-86 emulator for MS-DOS
4coco2_14.zip    66591  941124   TRS-80 Colour Computer 2 emulator, v1.40
5cpcemu12.zip   346978  940905   Amstrad CPC Emulator v1.2 w/ROM, req. 386, VGA
6emily52.zip     50765  940323   8051/52 simulator/emulator/debugger
7euphoric.zip    86543  950320   Oric 1/Oric Atmos emulator
8exec199k.zip  2331623  950319   Macintosh Emulator done totally in software
9exkdisk1.zip  1370385  950318   Mac Emulator packaged for floppy install, 1of2
10exkdisk2.zip  1145045  950318   Mac Emulator packaged for floppy install, 2of2
11jpp.zip        270189  921216   Emulates a ZX Spectrum 48K RAM Z80-based micro
12mcx11v15.zip    74018  920205   MC68HC11 MicroController multitask eXecutive
13model1_d.zip    81284  941006   TRS-80 Model I emulator & support progs. v3.01
14myz80111.zip    93173  930516   Simeon Cran's Z80 CP/M Z-System emulator
15pc370v42.zip   305700  910119   PC/370 v4.2 IBM 370 assembler and emulator
16pcdgn201.zip   359250  941201   Dragon/CoCo Emulator & Debugger v2.1 EGA 40Mhz
17s48v11.zip      23714  950211   Full screen simulator for 8048/49/50 micros
18sim6822c.zip   214040  921101   Motorola 68HC11 uController simulater, v2.21
19ts1000_c.zip    18980  941024   Emulates a Timex/Sinclair 1000 w/printer, v2.1
20v2080j88.zip    19766  880109   Run CP/M-80 programs on system with V20 CPU
21v20boot.zip     81476  900501   Turbo Pascal source code for V20 CP/M emulator
22xtndr093.zip   139592  930201   Timex/Sinclair ZX81 (TS1000) emulator, v0.93
23z80_303.zip    225851  941229   Virtually complete ZX Spectrum 48/128 emulator
24z80mu52b.zip    87255  891110   CP/M (Z80 processor) emulator for MS-DOS
25zrun321.zip     26892  880403   Z80 CP/M emulator for MS-DOS
26zsim241.zip    356257  950116   Z80 emulator + CP/M-80 BIOS to run CP/M

I think that Macintosh emulator is going to need a pentium though.

Wow, that is quite a lot to try, thank you very much 😀

My 386 has a AVGA1, which is not a too bad video card. Also I have a AVGA2 and a 16bit ISA Cirrus Logic GD???? (the 1st Cirrus card after buying Acumos. This card is in fact an AVGA2 card).

This thread lacks info about early fast Sega Saturn emulators.

Somewhere around 2006 I've been experimenting with stuff like Satourne, GiriGiri (?) or Satournin on 400 Mhz with no luck, first Saturn game I managed to run was NiGHTS on 2008 built of SSF - it ran almost fullspeed on 1,7 GHz Celeron M. Xbox port of Yabause is able to run some games at playable framerate like Bubble Bobble / Rainbow Island or Resident Evil but you need at least Pentium 4 to reach that level of performance on PC.

Question is, which of those old emulators is the fastest and what are its minimum requirements (including OS)?

Probably SSF. Yabause (and everything else before SSF) never felt like it could emulate, so I didn't bother. My primary focus were hand assembly'd emulators for 4th-6th gen systems

trafokopf wrote on 2023-12-22, 04:03:

I've quickly searched those 5 pages and couldn't find, but i hope I havent missed the information I am looking for:

I have a Commodore 386SX/25 equipped with 8MB RAM + 8GB CF-IDE "adaptered" HDD.

Do you know of any emulator that will run on this? I also have mouse, joystick and a soundblaster 16 on this machine.

Most of the dos emulators will “run”

I played on a similar machine used
Nesticle (nes) no sound and fixed frameskip
Same for Genecyst and SNES9x

NES was playable even if slow, Genesis was slow motion and I played anyway SNES, same very slow motion, made games easier but 4x or 5x frame skip gets jittery

Hi, im building my "final" Cyrix 5x86 at 120mhz and i found incredible good performer with emulators

genecyst with sound at 11khz, no vsync and NO frameskip is about 45-50fps. I decide to put some optimized pal games and is amazing after so many years one of my small dreams come true.. emulate megadrive at correct speed on a 486 without frameskip 😀

I don't have so much experience with console emulators, but being an old guy, used plenty of old arcade emulators back in the 90s, when you found you r0m5 at Brian Peek's archive. Anyway, so from an low requirement / arcade emulation perspective, the following were all very popular in the pre / early Mame era.
Vantage - I think this ran over 80 games, and full speed with sound enabled on a 486
Retrocade - This was a massive release back then, I stayed up all night to download all the files and add on packs via modem, so could FTP to my site (Daves Video Arcade - don't worry, it was a minor emulation site I ran long ago). Compared to Mame, the speed was amazing, especially in the vector games. Bit rusty, but I'm sure this ran 100 games, on a 486/Pentium
I started out with Sage and KEM, but Callus (same team did NESticle) was another popular one, but hosting it got me a cease and desist email from Capcom, scary, I never removed anything from my site so quick!

Mame version 0.30 reportedly has support for a 320x200 video mode in some cases, although there may be some dependence on the host hardware configuration, and it is better optimized for 486 class machines than subsequent versions. There is also a use of sound samples in some cases that were later changed to an emulation of the sound hardware.

Regarding arcades I'd think the fastest would be Raine. Supposedly that has VGA pan implementations for some games

i remember a Spectrum emulator running smooth on a 386SX 33MHz (i think):
it 's called JPP, created for DOS in 1992.
rather accurate in what it does too, just doesn't have many features.

ah, it's mentioned above. but i can swear by it, being a dedicated user back in the days. 😀

hail-to-the-ryzen wrote on 2024-07-03, 21:00:

Mame version 0.30 reportedly has support for a 320x200 video mode in some cases, although there may be some dependence on the host hardware configuration, and it is better optimized for 486 class machines than subsequent versions. There is also a use of sound samples in some cases that were later changed to an emulation of the sound hardware.

Yes, in the early days of Mame it obviously supported fewer games (...and clones!) but those it supported generally ran pretty well even on the 486/early Pentiums that many of us had, but worth pointing in view of the above quote that prior to Mame 0.35 it used .SAM samples, not the .WAV samples so you'll want to visit Twisty's who has the old sets. I used to find the DOS versions of Mame back then were generally faster than Mame 32. As I mentioned in a earlier post, Retrocade was optimised for 486/early Pentium, had improved sound, and add-on packs for a cool GUI, but if you'd like to have your own 486 version of those 60 in 1 Jamma PCBs, try VAntAGE, which will run all the classics on a 486. Bit rusty now, but sure I needed to use Scitech Display Doctor in the early days for the Vesa support on certain games.

Who else was around back then and remembers Retrocade's 'Retrobabe'? ...and the patch! Yes, cool for 5 minutes, but detracted from it's real benefit, fast Star Wars emulation! in Mame the death star explosion sequence almost ground to a halt back then.

The fastest for me being a NES and Atari 2600 guy were NESTICLE and Paul Robeson's A26 (with Z26, based on A26's sourcecode, coming up near second). I still have em' running on my 486 to this day. Virtual GameBoy is another good one that's very zippy, I'm sure having Adlib for the sound on the earlier release helps as well.

A26 ran nicely enough on my old 486 DX-33 ZEOS boarded frankenbox otherwise referred to as "Creeping Net 1" to play Super Breakout on it, 🤣. Z26 is what I use now on the old retro-boxes for emulation of the 2600, which starts to run well on a 486 DX4-100 as long as you stay away from Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns or some of the other resource intensive 2600 games.

NESticle was king for a reason. Besides being able to edit the Pallet, Pattern Tables, and save it to VRAM, and save playthroughs of the games, it also ran perfectly on a 486 DX-33 with 8MB of RAM and a frameskip of 1 or 2 (if you had a decent L2 cache at least, my first Dx-33 kinda' sucked for NESticle). DX4-100's with 16MB or more were the bare minimum for optimal performance in NESticle. I remember putting 16MB in my IBM PC-330 100DX4 I had in 2001 and firing up Mega Man and being shocked how well it would run after that. I imagine a lot of kids who got tossed the old Family PC enjoyed this emulator back in the day.

I'd say the second fastest for the NES though is a real underdog nobody mentions anymore - LoopyNES! The LoopyNES Beta to me had an even better GUI than NESticle, because it was all keyboard driven.

Virtual GameBoy was a more recent discovery. Honestly, you want to feel like you have a BIG Game Boy - go get something like a NanTAn FMA3500 (the MONO version) and play VGB on it, 🤣, it's almost like playing on a real Game Boy with a 9.4" screen and Adlib for sound, Lol.

I remember when the SNES emulators started to appear. The three fastest were SNES9x, ZSNES, and ESNES - with ESNES being the fastest. I remember playing Yoshi's Island on aforementioned IBM PC-330 and quite enjoying myself, even though it was running about 1/2 speed, complete with music (I got some old version that worked with music IIRC).

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-18, 05:39:

The three fastest were SNES9x, ZSNES, and ESNES - with ESNES being the fastest.

I distinctly remember ESNES being the slowest - their early soundless releases had no assembly! Later on that became NLKE and had very slow transparency emulation.