Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Great Deceiver]

Played some Keio Flying Squadron today. It's a pretty cool Mega CD shmup that reminded me of Parodious somewhat. Nice bright sprites and fun music, controls well and is quite hard too.

Also played some GB Donkey Kong, which I didn't realize is actually a very good puzzle game and a precursor to the (weaker) Mario vs. Donkey Kong series on GBA/DS/etc.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Well Portal Roms is not super extensive in it's database but I've been doing alright with it.

 

[lightbane]

Don't buy into this doomsday shit. However, emuparadise was very convenient (mainly because speeds were very quick), not gonna lie.

I think it also has to do with the fact that Nintendo destroyed a veteran webpage with tons of content (Emuparadise), then immediately followed with many, many others in the following days in an obvious shock tactics display, which is quite effective to cause fear.

 

[groke]

Don't forget that Nintendo was also responsible for the sack of Underground Gamer, their villainy is boundless. They even have a site devoted to gloating about the rom sites they've crushed: https://ap.nintendo.com/

 

[abnaxus]

That's why I haven't played a Nintendo game in 25 years.

 

[flyingjohn]

That's why I haven't played a Nintendo game in 25 years.

But what if Nintedo started making hentai games?

 

[Don Peste]

NTSC vs PAL, does it matter at all with emulators?

 

[Great Deceiver]

It matters for older consoles (up to PS2/Gamecube era) because PAL is 50hz and NTSC is 60hz. Usually PAL versions of older games are much worse, running with judder or otherwise incorrect timing, in addition to just being slower overall (and having borders because of different resolution - 625 lines instead of 525). A few were carefully ported, but those are rare.

From the PS2 era onwards, some (most?) PAL games had a 60hz option, so the difference after that generation became moot.

Anyway, to be on the safe side you'll want to run NTSC versions of everything. Emulators run PAL games at 50hz too (I guess you could overclock some emulators to reach 60hz on 50hz games, but what's the point?)

 

[ghostdog]

I went for a few days during the summer vacation at my mother's village and of course I couldn't help but firing up my old NES that's lying there. Obviously Super mario Bros 3 was my first choice, what an awesome game.

When I came back I got the urge to play it again so I used nestopia. First of all we have the usual problem with the aspect ratio, internal NES aspect ratio is not pure 4:3 but stretched vertically a bit, even though in the TV it showed as 4:3. Then of course there are CRT's scanlines and there's also a little bit of color bleeding with CRTs.

So in order to get that authentic look, I went to the video settings and picked NTSC in the filter section. In NTSC's settings I changed tuning to "S-video". The default setting of s-video looks good but you can tweak it if you like, maybe up a bit the resolution setting or something. There I also added scanlines (something between 5-20 depending on your taste). The "TV aspect" setting is also mandatory if you want to get an actual 4:3 ratio.

Now specifically to Super Mario Bros 3 there is a certain problem. Even when I used the USA rom of the game and Nestopia's Machine Localization setting was set to NTSC the game speed was faster than normal. So You need to manually set it to PAL to get the original speed. Maybe the roms are mixed up, but I tried different sources and had the same results.

Anyway that's it for now, maybe I'll post some screenshots later.

 

[lightbane]

Not sure if it should go there or another thread. Either way, I found a windows 95 emulator pre-packaged and ready to go, although I haven't tested it yet: https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows95/releases

 

[octavius]

Newb-friendly list of recommended emulators + required files + other thingies.

Commodore Amiga / CD32

WinUAE

Official releases
Unofficial builds
Bios pack - WinUAE

FS-UAE

Official releases
Bios pack - FS-UAE

Atari ST

Hatari

Official releases
Unofficial builds

Not Amiga Forever or Steem?

And no, I haven't read all 91 pages of the thread.

 

[spekkio]

Our choices ITT are based on professional advisory services:

http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Amiga_emulators

http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Atari_ST_emulators

 

[aweigh]

...meanwhile you just know some heathens are playing it like dis:

 

[aweigh]

question: does ePSXe feature PGXP in some way?

 

[spekkio]

No, but I think more modern emus, like VGS and pcsx do.

Move with the times, grandpa.

 

[flyingjohn]

Newb-friendly list of recommended emulators + required files + other thingies.

Commodore Amiga / CD32

WinUAE

Official releases
Unofficial builds
Bios pack - WinUAE

FS-UAE

Official releases
Bios pack - FS-UAE

Atari ST

Hatari

Official releases
Unofficial builds

Not Amiga Forever or Steem?

And no, I haven't read all 91 pages of the thread.

Amiga forever is annoying as hell.It uses it own proprietary file format which means you can't just transfer stuff from the forever package to something else.
Also it is just a fronted for free emulators with a useless database.
All you need is a amiga 500 and 1200 configuration for win or fs-uae,and those can be easily found on youtube.

 

[flyingjohn]

new version of retroarch has been released:
https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-7-4-released/
Highlights include:
-Improvements to the desktop ui
-Grid view with thumbnails
-Drag and drop creation of playlists
-Automatic updates
-Live shader editing
-Sync to exact framerate
And many more

It is nice to see that the only reason they never implemented any of the gui features for years was money.I remember them defending the no update feature with many excuses.

 

[Walden]

That's some crazy shit.

 

[Great Deceiver]

new version of retroarch has been released:
https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-7-4-released/
Highlights include:
-Improvements to the desktop ui
-Grid view with thumbnails
-Drag and drop creation of playlists
-Automatic updates
-Live shader editing
-Sync to exact framerate
And many more

It is nice to see that the only reason they never implemented any of the gui features for years was money.I remember them defending the no update feature with many excuses.

What's most interesting to me in this update isn't the desktop UI (I'm one of the apparently few people that think the big screen UI is just fine, especially once you set up custom playlists with icons, etc.), but rather the variable sync - it makes me wish I had a G-sync capable monitor, because there are many games that I play on MAME that have a weird refresh rate - for instance, the entire Raiden Fighters series, which refreshes at a weird 54hz, or Raiden DX (my favourite in the entire series), which runs at 59.6hz. This means that I have two choices - either run these games synched to 60hz, which speeds up the gameplay significantly (as well as the music) and makes the games harder, or interpolating frames to run at the correct speed, which causes judder, and I'm very sensitive to judder/framerate pacing issues.

This is great news. If only G-sync monitors weren't so fucking expensive.

 

[ghostdog]

question: does ePSXe feature PGXP in some way?

Yeah I'm pretty sure the latest version has subpixel precision

 

[Don Peste]

I just found out there is a cancelled Baldur’s Gate PS1 version someone leaked a few years ago...

http://playstationmuseum.com/review/baldurs-gate/
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/baldurs-gate-for-playstation.15910/

 

[felipepepe]

Damn, I had heard about but never saw pictured... that's really interesting.

 

[LJ40]

Out of curiosity I just tried that Baldur's Gate for PS1. It's pretty terrible.

I haven't messed with the options yet but there's horrible graphical artifacts and flickering all through character generation and in-game menus. Controls are sluggish as hell moving the cursor around, unsurprisingly.

Best part is saving the game. 15 fucking blocks. A full memory card for one save game. Beats Diablo's 10 block saves by quite a bit.

Edit - And loading freezes the game. Meh. Might try again tomorrow on a better emu (using epsxe on this machine).

 

[RNGsus]

Is ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat for nds gud? I need some shit on my phone, since I'm out a computer atm.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Out of curiosity I just tried that Baldur's Gate for PS1. It's pretty terrible.

I haven't messed with the options yet but there's horrible graphical artifacts and flickering all through character generation and in-game menus. Controls are sluggish as hell moving the cursor around, unsurprisingly.

Best part is saving the game. 15 fucking blocks. A full memory card for one save game. Beats Diablo's 10 block saves by quite a bit.

Edit - And loading freezes the game. Meh. Might try again tomorrow on a better emu (using epsxe on this machine).

IIRC Diablo had 14 block saves actually. Leaving 1 block for your character save.

At least those are games you'd expect to have large save files. Better than the ultra retarded PS2 save files that were 50 times bigger than they needed to be because their save icon was a high rez spinning 3D rubber duck.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Played through Lords of Thunder yesterday. This game blew my mind when I was a kid because of the Malmsteen/Vinnie Moore-inspired Redbook tracks. It's still a pretty good shmup. The PC Engine was a great console for shmups.