esreveR
New Member
Bombs are boring. The explosions they cause are not.
Posts: 17
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Post by esreveR on Apr 4, 2011 15:29:40 GMT -5
I found that DESmuME and DEmul work better than No$GBA and nullDC for me, respectively. DESmuME has a lot more options in terms of emulation and DEmul...uh, they're still making progress on that thing.
Oh, also, I use Yabause as a Saturn emulator, since it's got some nice graphic viewing capabilities. And I use SNES9X for some reason, I haven't used it in ages so I really have no idea what prompted me to switch over to it from zSNES. Probably sprite ripping related, though.
The MAME variant I prefer to use is MAME Plus!, simply because it has AUTOFIRE and GRAPHIC ENHANCEMENT and whatnot. I use a laptop so naturally I want to keep my keyboard intact as much as I can, you know?
Also, between Kawaks and Nebula, I tend to use Kawaks, though Nebula doesn't seem too bad, I'm just not used to the thing.
I use NeoRaine for NeoCD emulation. Seems to have pretty much every feature MAME has, and then some. Nice.
I used to use pSX but eventually I found that ePSXe was simply more effective at the stuff I was going for. It takes a bit more to get working though.
Visual Boy Advance is what I use for GBA emulation, though this is mostly because I never bothered to check if any other GBA emulator is out there, and also partially because VBA has a convenient OAM viewer for sprite ripping (In case you haven't gotten the idea already, I like to rip sprites!)
EDIT: Whoa, all of these posts are going to new pages. Weird.
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Post by Vokkan on Apr 24, 2011 6:33:40 GMT -5
ePSXe prefered? Compatibility problems with pSX?
Man, pSX has long been my prefered emulator because it runs so many games ePSXe don't. The lack of customization was a small pill to swallow, since all games I've tried have looked and worked well from the get go.
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Post by bladededge on Sept 24, 2011 21:22:14 GMT -5
I just finished writing a rather long piece and now I'm in the 'wrangling with emulators for screenshots' stage. I think I'm qualified to give opinions here, having tried a few dozen in the past few months.
I use a Windows 7 64-bit machine, which narrows the choices somewhat, so there may be better emulators than the ones listed here for a particular platform (SainT for the Atari ST in particular is atrocious, but it's pretty much the only one that works on this operating system).
As I see it, there's two real 'types' of emulators; simple and streamlined ones that run as fast as possible (for instance, BGB), and feature-rich ones for working on images with (for instance, MekaW). I am biased towards feature-rich emulators.
Arcade General: Mame64
There's really no other reasonable choice here.
Arcade NeoGeo NeoRageX 5.0
Admittedly it's clumsy, has an ugly interface, and requires special rom images of its own rather than the MAME ones. The important thing, though, is that it works, and it works reliably with all of the NeoGeo's library, as well as being a bit less finicky than WinKawaks and far friendlier than MAME.
Sony Playstation ePSXe
Irritating to configure and still not terribly accurate to the original hardware (judging by how it includes so many individual game fixes), but it seems to play most games right off a real Playstation disc just fine, which is more than can be said for PCSX. Final Fantasy VIII and Lunar: Silver Star Story are a hassle. The new rewrite of PCSX looks promising however.
Sony Playstation 2 PCSX2
This emulator does not appear to have any real competitors. Annoyingly, emulation off a physical PS2 disc is extremely sluggish compared to emulation off a disk image.
Nintendo NES FCEUX
It's a toss-up between this and NEStopia. FCEUX has game genie emulation, better PAL support, and more tools, as well as handy control over emulation speed, which leads to me using it far more often.
Nintendo Famicom Disk System NEStopia
...but what FCEUX doesn't have is FDS support.
Nintendo SNES ZSNES
Lots of options, easy to configure, seems more accurate to the original hardware than SNES9X (judging from the slowdown in Harvest Moon being more annoying on ZSNES than SNES9X, just like a real Nintendo!). SNES9X still necessary, however, for certain games (such as the Shin Megami Tensei series), and given how small the two of them are there's really no reason not to keep both around. bSNES looks like it may obsolete both of them if development keeps up, though.
Nintendo 64 Project64
There's no really good Nintendo 64 emulator. I keep Project64 around just because I've had the least problems with it. It still has accuracy issues, particularly for Wonder Project J2 and WinBack.
Nintendo Game Boy/Super Game Boy/Game Boy Color/Game Boy Advance VisualBoyAdvanceCE
There can be only one. Others in this thread have shared the virtues of VisualBoyAdvance. bGB is a viable alternative for just running GB/GBC/SGB games, since it's very streamlined and simple.
Nintendo Gamecube Dolphin
Another case of one appearing to have no competition. I'll comment on how well it works when I can put a gamecube disk into my DVD drive and have it actually run.
Sega SG-1000 MekaW
While BlueMSX runs these programs adequately, MekaW is hands-down the superior choice, with the wealth of developer tools included as well as the essentially perfect accuracy (not to mention the appealing GUI, which has more personality than emulators normally do). No errors running Sega BASIC with this one like with BlueMSX or Kega Fusion.
Sega Mark III/Master System MekaW
See above.
Sega Game Gear MekaW
See above.
Sega Genesis/Megadrive/CD/32X Kega Fusion
This is unquantifiable personal preference. Kega Fusion and Gens Plus are equally useful with equal additional features. I keep both around. Fusion seems to run Sega CD disks a bit faster than Gens.
Sega Saturn SSF
SSF has no worthwhile competition to speak of.
Sega Dreamcast Chankast
Sega Dreamcast disks can't be read by normal DVD drives, forcing the use of disk images for everything, which is annoying. Chankast seems able to run more of the disk images I've tried than NullDC. NullDC will work, just more slowly.
Panasonic 3DO FreeDO
3DO emulation support is sadly lacking. FreeDO seems to be the only one in anything like a state of completion, and it still won't run Space Hulk. There's always the option of finding a 3DO expansion card if you have an open ISA slot and a few hundred dollars, I suppose.
Mattel Intellivision Nostalgia
This is the only Intellivision emulator that seems to work on my operating system. BlissJ doesn't count, because Java must be burnt at the stake.
Mattel Aquarius AqEmu
The Aquarius may be all but forgotten now but I'll always have a fond remembrance of the thing. AqEmu, though, actually improves on the original Aquarius immensely instead of just emulating it. I'll never hook mine up again.
Coleco Colecovision BlueMSX
The only interest I've ever had in the Colecovision was Fortune Builder, and BlueMSX runs it just fine. Haven't looked into comparing Colecovision emulators but BlueMSX seems like a perfectly adequate one. Notably, the ColecoVision had quite a number of nearly arcade-perfect ports (Congo Bongo, Zaxxon) so that may make BlueMSX a viable alternative to MAME for some arcade games.
Atari 2600 Stella
Stella has video issues on two-monitor displays but it works, it works well, it runs nearly everything, and I managed to get the same stuck-player2 bug I remember in Outlaw while running it, so it's probably near perfect emulation.
Atari 8-bit Atari800WinPlus
You need to map all of the keys yourself with a custom keymap if you want to move around the world in Ultima one-handed, but not only is it feature-complete (including a very useful custom palette editor to replace the default composite-monitor color schemes), it actually works in Windows 7 64-bit. No other emulator seems to. The emulator is annoyingly finicky about system images, though; I still can't get OS/A recognized.
Atari ST SainT
Like Atari800WinPlus, this is the only emulator that seems to work on Windows 7. And it is awful. Attention for the Atari ST platform, like the 3DO, is sadly lacking. It may not be as beloved as the Amiga (which shares nearly the entire software library, it looks like) but the ST had a few nifty things going for it anyway.
Atari Jaguar Nothing
I'm all ears for good advice on this one. The only one that seems to be in a state of near completion is ProjectTempest and that one has joystick issues.
NEC PC ENGINE Ootake
For the PC Engine it's a toss-up between MagicEngine and ootake, and I object to MagicEngine on principle (the same one that makes me object to paying money for fansubbed cartoons). Ootake has my pet peeve of not being able to read physical disks directly and requiring disk images, but it is jam-packed with options, including the very useful ability to pause emulation and then advance frame-by-frame, which MekaW and FCEUX very much need.
NEC PC-FX Nothing
I absolutely cannot find an emulator for this one which works in a satisfactory manner.
NEC PC-88 M88
I'm not sure how many PC88 emulators there actually are, but this is the only one that I've gotten to run at all. It's not perfect (especially since the entire program is in Japanese and you have to figure out what the options are by guesswork), but the ability to directly specify clock speed like in DOSBOX is neat.
NEC PC-98 NekoProjectII
This is here simply by virtue of it being the only one that works.
Fujitsu FM-7 XM7
See above.
Fujitsu FM-TOWNS Unz
See above. Amusingly this one seems to only run off physical disks, when it's one of the machines for which I would be wanting to use disk images. You get around this by creating a virtual drive using a program like Daemontools and mounting your disk image, and then configuring UNZ to recognize DISK2 as the drive letter of your virtual drive. The program will automatically recognize the disk image and boot it when you start or reset UNZ.
Microsoft MSDOS DOSBOX
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.
Microsoft Windows 9X Virtual PC
A perfectly working virtual machine is included with Win7-64 Pro called Virtual PC, on which you can install Windows 95 or 98 right off your old install CD. As I understand it, the windows 9X series is a horrible mess and probably very difficult to write an emulator for. Alternatively, DOSBOX is so perfect an emulation of DOS that you could install Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 3.1x or 9x in that, theoretically. Good luck finding Windows 1.0 disks around.
Apple II AppleWin
AppleWin is sadly light on the options but the emulation is so perfect I swear that Woz wrote the thing. Setting authentic disk speed makes Ultima IV load up at the same speed as on my real machine down to the millisecond, which was amusing. Very stable, very user-friendly.
Apple Macintosh Basilisk II
This is actually a virtual machine, not an emulator; it is really running a full instance of Mac OS inside the program. BasiliskII is a devil to get working and requires a lot of work and tools, but once it's running, it's perfect. This one is designed for OS 7, which is the version Apple has for free on their public FTP server.. You need to use a program called HFVexplorer to create Macintosh hard disk images and move files between your images and the rest of your computer.
Apple Pippin Nothing
I can't find a single usable emulator for the Pippin. It needs one badly, especially one that can boost disk read speed so Super Marathon becomes playable.
Commodore 64 VICE
VICE is actually a set of emulators for multiple Commodore machines with nearly every feature or hardware tweak you could possibly ask for built in. It's so accurate you, too, can experience the soul-destroyingly slow disk access speed of PAL C64s.
Commodore 64 WinUAE
Like BasiliskII I think this one is technically a virtual machine and not an emulator. It runs Workbench 1:1 with a real Amiga.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum FUSE
Finding a ZX Spectrum emulator that 1. ran on Win764 and 2. ran any software at all without locking up was more annoying than it should have been. Here you go. FUSE is the one to use.
Sharp MZ-series nothing
If anybody has any ideas on a usable emulator for these I'd love to hear them.
Sharp X1 XMillenium
This is yet another instance of 'this is the only game in town'.
Sharp X68000 WinX68K-highspeed
See above.
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Post by justjustin on Sept 24, 2011 21:29:31 GMT -5
Nice write-up, quite a few I didn't recognize and will check out. One small correction though, Ootake can definitely play discs. I fired up Dracula X just last week straight off the CD and it worked flawlessly. It's been an excellent replacement since my PCE CD unit broke.
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Post by bladededge on Sept 24, 2011 21:56:07 GMT -5
Care to help me out in that case? I've got a physical copy of the US Lords of Thunder I was trying to get running. Now, under the CD-ROM menu of Ootake it lets you select from among your computer's disk drives, but the emulator never recognizes the disc in either of my two drives (CD: not ready message). I originally thought that the problem was that it was a bad CD; it's a little scratched up and I don't have an actual Turbo Duo to check it on. I made a disk image out of it that ootake let me install to the emulator's virtual drive, though, which lead me to think that ootake just didn't have the support for this properly coded in. Am I doing something wrong?
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Post by justjustin on Sept 25, 2011 8:53:49 GMT -5
Welp, as (bad) luck would have it, my PC is currently out of commission... I only tried the emulator a few times, so all I remember is a small box with a green background that had a button labeled "play from cd" or something similar, so I just hit that after assigning what bios to use. I think this box appeared before the main emulator was accessible. Sorry I can't be of more help, I won't have a working PC until the end of this week.
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Post by zellsf on Sept 25, 2011 13:09:02 GMT -5
Experimented with PSX emulation today, I find that both ePSXe and pSX has too many compatibility issues and other problems to be worth using as my main emulators. I use SSSPSX and Xebra.
SSSPSX runs quite a few games ePSXe doesn't, has less sound issues than ePSXe (caused by core timing? I don't know) and supports pad plugins. Xebra isn't one of the plugin based emulators, but it is the most accurate emulator you will find.
For the plugins, gpuBladeSoft is the most accurate still and as a nice bonus, it allows you to manipulate the image freely. Move it around and zoom in to get rid of any black borders (which are common in PSX games). GSdx is a nice software based plugin that can render at 4x resolution presumably without the inaccuracies of hardware based plugins (though I've yet to verify that) and Pete's OpenGL2 plugin is the plugin to use with games that work with it and you want to look prettier than they actually did on a PSX.
For sound, Eternal SPU seems to be the only valid choice.
Not sure why I bothered to write any of this :/
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Post by Jonathan Ingram on Sept 25, 2011 13:56:39 GMT -5
I use ePSXe almost exclusively for PS1 emulation. Though I do have a bunch of other emus installed as well.
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Post by roushimsx on Sept 25, 2011 14:57:47 GMT -5
Experimented with PSX emulation today, I find that both ePSXe and pSX has too many compatibility issues and other problems to be worth using as my main emulators. I use SSSPSX and Xebra. SSSPSX runs quite a few games ePSXe doesn't, has less sound issues than ePSXe (caused by core timing? I don't know) and supports pad plugins. Xebra isn't one of the plugin based emulators, but it is the most accurate emulator you will find. For the plugins, gpuBladeSoft is the most accurate still and as a nice bonus, it allows you to manipulate the image freely. Move it around and zoom in to get rid of any black borders (which are common in PSX games). GSdx is a nice software based plugin that can render at 4x resolution presumably without the inaccuracies of hardware based plugins (though I've yet to verify that) and Pete's OpenGL2 plugin is the plugin to use with games that work with it and you want to look prettier than they actually did on a PSX. For sound, Eternal SPU seems to be the only valid choice. Not sure why I bothered to write any of this :/ Have you tried the latest versions of peops dsound now that it's been brought out of mothballs and updated? I haven't had time to mess around with them, but from what I understand, it's really cleaned up a lot of problems and has become the best spu plugin available. For anyone complaining about nullDC being dead, please direct your attention here. Makaron is supposed to be pretty good, but I've never tried it. on the arcade front, Supermodel is coming along nicely with emulating Model 3 games (Daytona 2 is playable now and you can use steering wheels with both it and Scud Race!) and el semi's Model 2 emulator is the best way to enjoy games like Virtua Fighter 2 and House of the Dead (short of buying a Saturn or using SSF).
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Post by bladededge on Sept 25, 2011 15:43:29 GMT -5
Not sure why I bothered to write any of this :/ Because, being of both academic and altruistic persuasions, you enjoy sharing knowledge.
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Post by kobushi on Sept 25, 2011 18:49:45 GMT -5
ZSNES - Lots of options, easy to configure, seems more accurate to the original hardware than SNES9X SNES9X is more accurate than ZSNES, that's why the SMT games work. But in terms of properly emulating the SNES, bsnes blows the doors off everything else. bsnes is not just good - it's literally perfect emulation. You don't even need a superfast CPU if you use the compatibility profile. The only minor headache is making a one-time adjustment to the audio rate so that audio and video will sync properly on your PC. PlayStation 1I usually start by trying pSX, because in pSX a game either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, I switch to Xebra or ePSXe and start fiddling with settings. Xebra has a cryptic and unfriendly interface, but it is the most accurate PS1 emulator in existence. ePSXe is a horrible Frankenstein monster of overlapping hacks, but once configured properly it works surprisingly well. DreamcastDreamcast emulation still has a way to go in general, but I can usually rely on nullDC. As a fallback I use MakaronEX to play certain titles such as WinCE-based games. NEC PC EngineMagic Engine is a good emulator (and worth paying for IMO), but sometime in the last year or two it was eclipsed by Kitao Nakamura's Ootake. Ootake is just amazing, a shining example of what an emulator should be. NEC PC-8801M88 is awesome, its only real flaw being incomplete support for cassette tape images. My second favorite PC88 emulator is P88SR, but it only runs on PC-9801 computers. NEC PC-98Not true. Neko Project II is certainly the best PC98 emulator overall, and the unofficial versions are still frequently updated, but T98-Next and Anex86 are still decent and useful in certain circumstances. Fujitsu FM TownsLike many Japanese emulators, Unz was intended to be used legally, by people who owned a real FM Towns (to dump the BIOS from) and real FM Towns software. I'm not accusing you of being a dirty pirate (I'm no hypocrite ), but that's the rationale behind the lack of iso support. Microsoft Windows 9XVirtual PC is extremely useful, except it can't do 3D and MIDI sounds like shit. Sharp MZ-seriesMaybe these links can get you started. Unfortunately some of the homepages for the old MZ emulators have vanished from the Internet. Doesn't MESS include several MZ machines now? www.jcec.co.uk/mzemu.htmretropc.net/mz-memories/emunavi.com/emulator/oldpc/mz2500/mz2500.htm
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Post by ReyVGM on Sept 26, 2011 0:10:43 GMT -5
FCEUX does play FDS games, I don't know where you get it doesn't. And like Kobushi said, SNES9X is way better than ZSNES. You might have been using an old SNES9x if you're saying it isn't.
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Post by zellsf on Sept 26, 2011 10:34:43 GMT -5
Experimented with PSX emulation today, I find that both ePSXe and pSX has too many compatibility issues and other problems to be worth using as my main emulators. I use SSSPSX and Xebra. SSSPSX runs quite a few games ePSXe doesn't, has less sound issues than ePSXe (caused by core timing? I don't know) and supports pad plugins. Xebra isn't one of the plugin based emulators, but it is the most accurate emulator you will find. For the plugins, gpuBladeSoft is the most accurate still and as a nice bonus, it allows you to manipulate the image freely. Move it around and zoom in to get rid of any black borders (which are common in PSX games). GSdx is a nice software based plugin that can render at 4x resolution presumably without the inaccuracies of hardware based plugins (though I've yet to verify that) and Pete's OpenGL2 plugin is the plugin to use with games that work with it and you want to look prettier than they actually did on a PSX. For sound, Eternal SPU seems to be the only valid choice. Not sure why I bothered to write any of this :/ Have you tried the latest versions of peops dsound now that it's been brought out of mothballs and updated? I haven't had time to mess around with them, but from what I understand, it's really cleaned up a lot of problems and has become the best spu plugin available. I actually forgot about that. Probably nice to have around but I don't really care enough about sound quality to tell the difference in games I play. It does some annoying time stretching (slowing and speeding up audio to keep emulator in sync) by default though... but there seems to be a lot of options to tweak if you want to get rid of that. I'm sure having to Google both "altruistic" and "persuasions" disqualify me as "academic"
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Post by starscream on Sept 27, 2011 7:58:46 GMT -5
Does Mednafen not work in Win7 64 bit? I'm still on XP here. If it does, that should provide decent PC-FX emulation. I don't consider emulators for screenshot purposes to be necessarily ones I'd play games on extensively anyway. This obviously depends on what kind of screens are needed. For Atari ST, STEEM is supposed to work. Pippin games work only in SheepShaver (at least some do), from what I've read a workaround is supposed to exist to get CD-ROM images to work on Win7 64 machines. There's has been some movement in 3DO emulator development since the source code was released. www.fourdo.com/Can't say anythng about it.
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Post by roushimsx on Sept 27, 2011 16:26:48 GMT -5
Does Mednafen not work in Win7 64 bit? I'm still on XP here. If it does, that should provide decent PC-FX emulation. I don't consider emulators for screenshot purposes to be necessarily ones I'd play games on extensively anyway. This obviously depends on what kind of screens are needed. Plus FRAPS works with all of the best emulators available for the wintel platform. Sure, some might see it as a negative point in that it captures at exactly how you're outputting to the screen instead of before any image manipulation occurs, but honestly that's going to result in a more accurate picture more often than not (particularly in regard to systems that outputted at funky resolutions but at a 4:3 aspect ratio, like the CPS2/CPS3). If it wasn't for Ootake, Mednafen would still be my PCE emulator of choice. I really don't see why people still bother to pirate/pay for Magic Engine with the PCE/PC-FX alternatives available now a days.
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