Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Gerrard]

Is it still active

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jEJbFrLM200z43khewnaEE4n6BJgNETJ

Have fun, guys. Full romsets of everything, direct download through Gdrive.

Is there a faster way to browse this than through the godawful web interface that loads 10 items at a time?

Is it still active?

It was when I made that post.

 

[YldriE]

Spoiler

Interesting video that explains why we are living in the modern dark age of flat monitors, while vintage CRT technology is still the best, in particular for games.

A few years back I bought an OG Xbox and since the display was terrible and muddy on my LCD, I borrowed a CRT from a retrogaming enthusiast and the result was just stunning. The colors were so vivid, the contrasts so stark, and even the definition was incredible: as far as I know, the games I played ran in 480p (composite) but for some reason everything was perfectly clean and smooth. God-tier anti-aliasing.

Out of curiosity I plugged it to my computer and again it was unbelievable, like playing on Ultra after years of playing on Low.

The elephant in the room , of course, is the elephant on the table: it's hard to imagine that monster on my desktop. Convenience is still king, plus now my new GPU only has HDMI ports which very few CRTs have. Still, as unlikely as it is to ever happen, I'm praying for flat CRTs.

 

[mogwaimon]

You can especially notice the difference on older consoles, when it comes to that. I had the same experience when I bought my first flatscreen and attempted to play a PS2 game on it, it was so dark and muddy that I couldn't see anything and blurry as shit on top of that. Plugged the console back into a CRT, game looked just fine. Now I always keep around a CRT of some kind for my older consoles whenever I can.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

I bought a nice 32" CRT last fall a thrift store for $12. Awesome buy.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I am starting to regret to have sold my old CRT monitor...

 

[Great Deceiver]

I've always been a CRT enthusiast but since my last Sony G520 broke I haven't really had the desire to get a new one. Mainly because the really good tubes now command a significant premium and because my current desk can't support a 100 pound behemoth, but also because tube maintenance is annoying as shit and it's getting increasingly more difficult to find competent people who know how to fix them.

However, all this neophyte faux rose-glasses nostalgia about a period they never lived through is just funny to me. There are serious downsides to CRTs - geometry, colour accuracy, colour bleeding, overall impact on eyesight are but just a few.

To me, the most important advangage of CRTs is response time (something that was completely glossed over or not mentioned at all in the recent Digital Foundry video that's making the rounds) - although recent LCDs are pretty acceptable when it comes to input delay (my own Samsung LED has around 3-4 frames of lag which is acceptable), they suffer incredibly from 'screen drag' and reduced motion resolution, which turns old sidescrolling games into mush if you're anal about that sort of thing.

I have a couple of arcade cabinets at home with CRT screens (one vertical for shmups, one horizontal) and I don't think I'll ever buy another one for personal use, certainly not for everyday use. However, I fully endorse them for older consoles and emulation.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Cool explanation of HD-Mode 7 by Byuu himself (itself/xerself?):

 

[mogwaimon]

Yes, input lag is also a valid reason to look into CRTs. Few years back I was trying to play Super Mario World on an emulator (Bsnes, snes9x) on my PC, no matter what I did there was always a substantial lag...some people claimed it was the TV, some people would claim there was actually an input delay on the emulator...either way it was bordering on unplayable. I bought a SNES on eBay a month or two later (My old consoles having been long gone due to constant moves and other factors) and hooked it up to a CRT I had lying around, difference was night and day. Beat the game first try, easy peezy. Nowadays with Retroarch, the input lag is far more tolerable on my PC (still have a LED-LCD TV hooked to it so there's still a small amount of lag) but a CRT still can't be beat for responsiveness.

 

[HansDampf]

Input lag is a real pain. I have a SNES-to-USB converter which causes an enormous amount of lag, rendering it pretty much useless. I find it unbelievable there are people out there who claim to not notice this.
RetroArch offers a few options to reduce latency, like the runahead method which is supposed to achieve lower latency than the original hardware.

 

[Great Deceiver]

It's really almost impossible for me to go back to other emulators after Retroarch and runahead (on most popular cores, you can achieve next-frame response, excluding display lag). Some cores have a lot of delay still, in addition to no support for runahead, such as Beetle Saturn (I measured 6-8 frames of input delay last I tested), and runahead requires some significant horsepower on others (such as bsnes 110 with HD Mode 7).

It boggles the mind that so many people just don't perceive the obscene amount of input lag in PCSX2, for example - it's akin to playing online on 150 ping.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

When I tried runahead in Retroarch holding a button down would register as repeatedly pressing the button rather than pressing it once and keeping it down.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I've never had that issue. Are you on 1.7.8? What core were you using?

 

[Gerrard]

It's really almost impossible for me to go back to other emulators after Retroarch and runahead (on most popular cores, you can achieve next-frame response, excluding display lag). Some cores have a lot of delay still, in addition to no support for runahead, such as Beetle Saturn (I measured 6-8 frames of input delay last I tested), and runahead requires some significant horsepower on others (such as bsnes 110 with HD Mode 7).

It boggles the mind that so many people just don't perceive the obscene amount of input lag in PCSX2, for example - it's akin to playing online on 150 ping.

But that's not 100% accurate emulation.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Interesting video that explains why we are living in the modern dark age of flat monitors, while vintage CRT technology is still the best, in particular for games.

how am i supposed to know which is better when i watch recording of CRT from my LCD?

 

[Don Peste]

Anybody played this?

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I am thinking of paying older SRW games I know wont have any translation. Is there any text hooker that probably works with emulators? Or anyway to get machine translation of stuff on screen?

 

[flyingjohn]

I am thinking of paying older SRW games I know wont have any translation. Is there any text hooker that probably works with emulators? Or anyway to get machine translation of stuff on screen?

Depends on what you want.

If you just want a basic menu translation then you have a couple of options:
-You can check gamefaq for any faq since those usually have translated menu options.
-You can use stuff like visual novel reader or capture2text to get a basic menu translation
-You can try using retroarch machine translation which might not work and there is a limit on how much times you can use it per month

If you want to understand what is happening:
-Learn Japanese,machine translation is worse then useless

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I am thinking of paying older SRW games I know wont have any translation. Is there any text hooker that probably works with emulators? Or anyway to get machine translation of stuff on screen?

Depends on what you want.

If you just want a basic menu translation then you have a couple of options:
-You can check gamefaq for any faq since those usually have translated menu options.
-You can use stuff like visual novel reader or capture2text to get a basic menu translation
-You can try using retroarch machine translation which might not work and there is a limit on how much times you can use it per month

If you want to understand what is happening:
-Learn Japanese,machine translation is worse then useless

Regarding the retroarch one is there any link pointing out. Probably won't be able to play with it but it seems interesting.

 

[flyingjohn]

I am thinking of paying older SRW games I know wont have any translation. Is there any text hooker that probably works with emulators? Or anyway to get machine translation of stuff on screen?

Depends on what you want.

If you just want a basic menu translation then you have a couple of options:
-You can check gamefaq for any faq since those usually have translated menu options.
-You can use stuff like visual novel reader or capture2text to get a basic menu translation
-You can try using retroarch machine translation which might not work and there is a limit on how much times you can use it per month

If you want to understand what is happening:
-Learn Japanese,machine translation is worse then useless

Regarding the retroarch one is there any link pointing out. Probably won't be able to play with it but it seems interesting.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I am thinking of paying older SRW games I know wont have any translation. Is there any text hooker that probably works with emulators? Or anyway to get machine translation of stuff on screen?

Depends on what you want.

If you just want a basic menu translation then you have a couple of options:
-You can check gamefaq for any faq since those usually have translated menu options.
-You can use stuff like visual novel reader or capture2text to get a basic menu translation
-You can try using retroarch machine translation which might not work and there is a limit on how much times you can use it per month

If you want to understand what is happening:
-Learn Japanese,machine translation is worse then useless

Regarding the retroarch one is there any link pointing out. Probably won't be able to play with it but it seems interesting.

Thats actually amazing huh. So its basically OCR right, and then it translates them by sending the captured text to a chosen server and get back the translation.'

And the translation in that video are actually coherent enough I think?

Now my question is, is that just a general machine translation (as in the OCR captured text are put into some translation machine and being sent back) or do somebody actually contextualize the text (as in putting some strings of words into name or location name). While I understand 0 Japanese it would seems that instead of the old VN text hooker who will translate names into literal words this one actually managed to get some of the names as, well, names.

Additionally won't this work offline? From what I read this is made to be limited use because translation server stuff but is there no "offline" translation tools for this stuff?

 

[flyingjohn]

I am thinking of paying older SRW games I know wont have any translation. Is there any text hooker that probably works with emulators? Or anyway to get machine translation of stuff on screen?

Depends on what you want.

If you just want a basic menu translation then you have a couple of options:
-You can check gamefaq for any faq since those usually have translated menu options.
-You can use stuff like visual novel reader or capture2text to get a basic menu translation
-You can try using retroarch machine translation which might not work and there is a limit on how much times you can use it per month

If you want to understand what is happening:
-Learn Japanese,machine translation is worse then useless

Regarding the retroarch one is there any link pointing out. Probably won't be able to play with it but it seems interesting.

Thats actually amazing huh. So its basically OCR right, and then it translates them by sending the captured text to a chosen server and get back the translation.'

And the translation in that video are actually coherent enough I think?

Now my question is, is that just a general machine translation (as in the OCR captured text are put into some translation machine and being sent back) or do somebody actually contextualize the text (as in putting some strings of words into name or location name). While I understand 0 Japanese it would seems that instead of the old VN text hooker who will translate names into literal words this one actually managed to get some of the names as, well, names.

Additionally won't this work offline? From what I read this is made to be limited use because translation server stuff but is there no "offline" translation tools for this stuff?

Yup,it is ocr.
The translations are mostly wrong even if they seem right.It is a common trope for machine translation.
It is general machine translation.
It won't work offline since you are sending the ocr data to their servers and you need to be online to send data to their servers.

The only way to get offline translation for emus is using ocr tools like capture2text and vn reader and manually selecting the ares to translate.And even then there is no way to inject into the screen you are playing so the translation will be in a separate window.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

I'll just stick to games with actual human translations or just have moon runes and not know what any of it says.

 

[deuxhero]

Is there a way to just dump the OCRed text raw? Would greatly improve kanji lookup speeds.

 

[aweigh]

oh, btw, LOST ODYSSEY runs at fullspeed for me on the most recent Xenia Canary build. I'm on i5 8400 / gtx 1060.

There was some slight sound skipping during the very first encounter but that was probably because it was stitched into the introductory cutscene (actually pretty cool effect how it transitions back and forth).

you can get latest Xenia canary here: https://ci.appveyor.com/api/buildjobs/cdq18u7b2l0g5esa/artifacts/xenia-canary.zip

I tried running it at 2x resolution but, alas, performance tanked to 15-17fps (fullspeed for this game = 30fps, though menus are in 60fps).

I played the first hour or so, seems like a very well-made game with lots of polish. I'll come back to it in a year or so when the xenia emu is better performing and i can run it at a higher resolution; standard rez sux ass.

 

[Duraframe300]

oh, btw, LOST ODYSSEY runs at fullspeed for me on the most recent Xenia Canary build. I'm on i5 8400 / gtx 1060.

There was some slight sound skipping during the very first encounter but that was probably because it was stitched into the introductory cutscene (actually pretty cool effect how it transitions back and forth).

you can get latest Xenia canary here: https://ci.appveyor.com/api/buildjobs/cdq18u7b2l0g5esa/artifacts/xenia-canary.zip

I tried running it at 2x resolution but, alas, performance tanked to 15-17fps (fullspeed for this game = 30fps, though menus are in 60fps).

I played the first hour or so, seems like a very well-made game with lots of polish. I'll come back to it in a year or so when the xenia emu is better performing and i can run it at a higher resolution; standard rez sux ass.

It's fantastic. Ranks among my favourite JRPG's. You will also probably break the shit out of its systems as the game goes forward, but thats another story...