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Post by pseudo3d on Apr 13, 2013 17:34:58 GMT -5
A floppy disk could hold, what, two, three NES ROMs?
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countzero
New Member
Byronic Time Lord
Posts: 35
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Post by countzero on Apr 14, 2013 1:35:13 GMT -5
A floppy disk could hold, what, two, three NES ROMs? A 3.5" floppy could hold about 3-4ish (I think - it's been a while), depending on the rom and whether it was zipped or unzipped. Usually I'd dedicate 3-4 floppies to the task of carrying ROMs to and from school. Later though, when I got a laptop which I'd use to take notes during class, I'd hook it up to the wall via Ethernet, and while taking notes I'd also partake of the hot-and-cold running ROMs provided by the school.
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Post by wxbryant on Apr 14, 2013 20:22:57 GMT -5
That sounds about right. I found some of my old floppies recently and they usually had four ROMs on them averaging 256kb each. The max capacity was a little over 1 MB, so... yeah.
Also, your story about emulating the 16-bit systems reminds me. There was one night where I foolishly tried downloading a Nintendo 64 game (circa 1999/2000) since I had rather enjoyed playing it at a friend's house but didn't have the system myself yet. I say "foolishly" because it was a pretty big download (my connection, though still dial-up, was at least faster than the one described in my last post) and my computer was definitely not capable of running it properly anyway. Trying again five years later with a newer computer still wouldn't allow me to run it at full speed.
Heck, even today the emulation isn't perfect, but it's at least playable (though, yes, I have also gotten an N64 and the actual game in the meanwhile).
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Apr 17, 2013 1:58:07 GMT -5
Back in late 1997, one of my dad's coworkers was passing floppy disks he made around the office with about 10 popular NES roms and the NESticle emulator. They were somehow compressed together into a single executable that displayed "WELCOME TO GAMELAND!" when booted up. You pressed a number key to load the game of your choice, without any rom folder involved. I'm not sure what the purpose of him modifying it this way was, maybe to make it harder to get caught playing at work. My dad gave this disk to me, and it was my first foray into emulation. I was already familiar with most of the games (which included SMB 1 & 2, 1943 and Contra), but this was where I first played Punch-Out, although it wasn't perfectly emulated at the time and suffered from glitched graphics. I was pretty surprised when I saw how it actually looked later on. Sadly, I lost the disk during a move to a different town.
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Post by Purple Moss on Feb 2, 2014 17:28:51 GMT -5
My first emulation was in the early 2000s, when my older brother got a Game Boy emulator. We only had Pokémon Gold for it. I played it quite a lot, either until I got tired or a weird glitch triggered which altered the colors and replaced them with a light brown palette. Fearing it was a permanent thing that would load with the save file, our only solution was to exit and restart the emulator. This lead to that one time where I lost almost two hours of progress because I hadn't saved at all.
Yeah, there probably was a less painful solution.
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Post by strizzuth on May 25, 2014 12:54:25 GMT -5
I got into emulation back in the 90s. I'm not sure exactly when, but I clearly remember the numerous efforts at translating the Final Fantasies. FF4 (we called it Hardtype at the time), 2, 3 and 5 were big on the list. At that time nobody was even thinking about retranslating FF6 because Woolsey hadn't been vilified yet. I remember getting NESticle to run and thinking it was amazing. I could finally play all these NES games I'd never had a chance to try and... And something struck me right away. The graphics were wrong. I don't mean they were corrupted, I mean everything looked all blocky and jaggy. I thought "maybe I'm remembering wrong" so I fired up my NES and things looked smooth and rounded. If I ran the game in a teeny tiny window it looked okay, but enlarged it looked like crap. Ever since I've been into tweaking filters and shaders to get the "right" look. The other thing I noticed was how a lot of games seemed corrupted. Vertical segments in CV3 were unplayably bad at the time. I also remember SNES96 being supplanted by SNES97. I was running Final Fantasy II (US). The version I used initially did not have sound support. I was disappointed but realized that this was kind of the nature of the beast. It was just kind of awesome to be running SNES games on my computer. I also recall the game ran in a tiny window. Most of the emulator was actually made up of debug info. When I finally got sound support, it was horribly, horribly off. No, I don't mean some sounds were slightly wrong or the whitenoise support was iffy, I mean it ran at like half speed and nothing sounded okay. Still, it was better than nothing. I was playing Super Street Fighter II on my PC! As time went by, fan translations and ROM hacks became more of a thing. You already had an obligatory set a tropes forming. First you had the nude hack, which made everyone naked. Then you had the blood hack, which made everyone look beaten up/mauled/decapitated, whatever. It didn't add blood spurts though, so it was kind of a let down. You also had character replacement hacks. One of my favorites turned Mario and Luigi into Bumblebee and Cliffjumper on a quest to save Cybertron. Even though it was still the same game, it was fun for a minute. The fan translations were where the real action was, though. I remember waiting eagerly for news about updates and hanging out for hours on IRC channels discussing what was being learned about the games as translation work continued. Back then so little had been done on Final Fantasy II that you really couldn't make much progress in the game so nobody knew how bad the game was. Most individual efforts were focused on the basics such as battle and menu text. We were eager to play unfinished works, though, because it was like the wild west. We were exploring new territory and finding out things that not every gamer was privy to. Virtual Game Station in 1999 was definitely a game changer. I didn't have a Mac so I couldn't run it, but a friend of mine was playing Final Fantasy 8 on it. We were blown away that such witchcraft was possible. A current console was being emulated? How? Now it seems like work on emulators starts before a console is even released, but in the 90s it seemed like something from the future had accidentally been sent back in time. I remember Neo Demiforce and J2E bringing us finished translations of games. Not just our precious Final Fantasies, but also the notorious Earthbound Zero. I remember Seiken Densetsu 3 being a big deal. For a while it was really awesome, but then the weaboos started whining. It seems that certain translations were not up to their high standards. They wanted more accurate translations. They wanted the Japanese version of the game without the modifications done for the English market. People were unhappy about censorship but also about "liberties" taken by translators. Ted Woolsey was turned into the great satan for daring to change "hissatsuken" to "SwdTech" in a cramped display window and given less than 3 months to refine an entire script which contained multiple allusions to world mythology not well known in the west, Sanskrit terms, phrases specific to Japanese culture, all while under scrutiny from Nintendo to not include anything they didn't like and in a very strictly limited memory space. From what I recall, however, early versions of the script were basically the same as Woolsey's version only with gratuitous profanity added. This is when I stopped following fan translations so closely. We have it SO much better now. Everything feels so much more drag and drop (except MAME, of course, which hasn't changed a bit ). Plus we have all these nice shaders and NTSC filters and to play with.
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Post by GamerL on May 29, 2014 2:25:58 GMT -5
I'm pretty much a newcomer to emulation, while I've been aware of it's existence for a while I've only started emulating games for myself since 2012, I can't remember what exactly inspired me to start doing that, but I think I got tired of spending money on old games on the Wii shop channel after being burned by buying a few games I wound up not liking and figured "screw that"
I'm glad I dived into it though because it's really cool, especially being able to play any PS1 game ever made for free
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Post by Terrifying on Aug 22, 2014 14:05:36 GMT -5
Probably ZSNES somewhere around 2003. Today I only use cycle-accurate emulators.
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Post by ReyVGM on Aug 25, 2014 14:59:54 GMT -5
So you only play BSNES and MAME then?
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Post by The Great Klaid on Aug 25, 2014 21:13:35 GMT -5
Snes9x back in the early 2000's. I think.... It might have been in '05 with Tales of Phantasia. I would have finished Symphonia about then, and I was curious where the series got it's start.
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Post by Terrifying on Aug 25, 2014 23:44:58 GMT -5
So you only play BSNES and MAME then? Indeed bsnes / higan. But also gambatte, nestopia undead edition, TwoMbit, XEBRA, FS-UAE, Hoxs64 and blueMSX. MAME isn't really accurate I believe. I hope Exodus gets a new release and will be optimized in the future.
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Post by PooshhMao on Aug 26, 2014 3:18:10 GMT -5
My first hands-on encounter with emulation was an ancient Game Boy emulator for DOS, back in '96 or so I think. Incidentally, that was also when I started working in IT for a small service provider (one of the very first in my country). I did not have internet at home yet, so I spent about half of my time there researching emulation and discovered Nicola Salmoria's Z80 Pac-Man emulator, SNES96 (later SNES97, now SNES9X), and some others I forgot the name of. I downloaded pretty much everything I could find and took it home with me on ZIP disks (remember those?). I was in awe seeing those Super Famicom games I only read about running at a frame every couple of seconds on my PC (with tons of graphic glitches and without sound), and the timing was great too since my SNES and cart collection got stolen when I got burgled a few months before that.
A bit later, Bloodlust Software released NESticle and Genecyst, and emulation was never the same. Suddenly, all those (hacked/modified/wrongly dumped) roms I got were actually fully playable on my modest P75 (with 8Mb of ram, woo). Around that time I also got MagicEngine, opening up the previously unattainable PC Engine library to me. The Pac-Man emulator started adding more and more games and really took off around this period, and was eventually renamed MAME. Some local computing magazines even had articles on emulation but didn't seem to take it all that seriously.
Then Callus came along, causing a huge stir in the community - near-flawless Capcom CPS-1 emulation running at 60fps on my trusty old machine! (With the tantalizing claim that CPS-2 emulation would be trivial to add if only they could find a way around the encryption) - that board was still commercially very viable at that time.
The next big thing was Neo-Geo emulation, around late '97 I think. I'm not sure what the name of the first Neo-Geo emulator was, but it wasn't really all that usable. A bit later, NeoRage came out and I visited GeoShock religiously to check for new releases.
MAME became the poster child for emulation and supported a couple of hundred releases at that time. You wouldn't believe my reaction when I saw the first Double Dragon or R-Type screenshots on the web.
SNES emulation remained iffy overall, until ZSNES came along. It pretty much blew SNES9X out of the water in regards to usefulness and performance.
Fast forward to 2014, the only emulators I use now are UME on PC (combined build of MAME and MESS) which I have developed an awesome frontend for, and a few on the PSP.
I fucking love emulation - I would never have dared to dream that one day, I would carry a roughly wallet-sized thing in my pocket that would have everything worth playing from every system I care for on it.
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Post by ReyVGM on Aug 26, 2014 3:33:41 GMT -5
So you only play BSNES and MAME then? Indeed bsnes / higan. But also gambatte, nestopia undead edition, TwoMbit, XEBRA, FS-UAE, Hoxs64 and blueMSX. MAME isn't really accurate I believe. I hope Exodus gets a new release and will be optimized in the future. If there's a cycle accurate emu, it's MAME (and MESS too, by extension). I mean, that's their focus and I believe they were the first one that started the cycle-accurate "movement" by refusing to apply hacks to make games run faster like every other emulator does.
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Post by r0ck3rz on Aug 26, 2014 11:06:15 GMT -5
Huh, I even have a post on the first page.
I would go with the cycle accurate stuff, but it always seems less user friendly, and the latest Fusion, SNES9X, and whatever else, seem pretty close anyway, even if not perfect. You don't turn to emulation expecting perfection anyway. At that point you'd stick with the actual consoles.
I'd take what M.A.M.E.(or one of it's derivatives) is now, over the DOS command line program it was then.
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Post by Yoni Arousement on Aug 28, 2014 13:31:35 GMT -5
Back in March of 2004, I somehow stumbled upon emulation. One of the very first NES ROMs I downloaded was Metroid. I wondered how I was supposed to play it. My first NES emulator was probably Nester.
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