Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Reinhardt]

I want to play some yuge animu game. Which emulator is better for Xenoblade Chronicles 2? There are posts from few weeks ago saying it's better to wait but now i see video "INSANE UPGRADE TO SWITCH EMULATIUON" on this page. Anything changed?

 

[aweigh]

What controller would you guys recommend for Wii emulation?

I use an Xbox One controller for everything, including all kind of emulation.

You can just map wiggle/waggle motions of the Wiimote to a button press in Dolphin, or to an analog stick, whatever you want. Never had a problem.

 

[flyingjohn]

What controller would you guys recommend for Wii emulation?

Depends on the games.
Anything requiring actual motion controls that aren't just wiggle/waggle are only emulateable with the wiimote.
Keyboard and mouse can be used but it is a a hassle.
Notable such games:
Skyward sword,trauma center,zack and wiki,red steel,warioware,etc.

For anything else you can use any control method you like.
Games that actually have a wii pointer are mouse friendly.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

What controller would you guys recommend for Wii emulation?

For light gun games (such as RE: The Umbrella Chronicles or The House of Dead series) and adventure games that use a pointer (such as Another Code: R) I unironically suggest to use the keyboard + mouse. You can map the motion controls (that are basically 2D in these games) to the mouse.

 

[Mustawd]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I should have added it was mainly to plug my PC into a large TV and play with my kid. After some research and per other's suggestions, I'll probably just get a Dolphin Bar and two wii controllers.

 

[Miner 2049er]

Guys..I can't believe, I'm playing a new Suikoden game in 2021. Genso Suikoden Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki /The Woven Web of a Century. This last entry of the series was released 2012 in Japan for the PSP. There is only a google translation, but better than nothing. And there is a HD textures mod, I'd like to recommend, because it has very helpful addtional UI translations (stats, combat screen information...): https://forums.ppsspp.org/showthread.php?tid=27283

I'm like 20 hours in and it gets better the longer I play it. The first 5 hours made an awful impression though. Approching it with realistic expectations helps. It's a spinoff for a handheld and no main entry. You still search for the stars of destiny, but only a few become playable party members. No army battles so far. Both are no deal breaker for me. On the plus side of things is the return to the 6 characters party and an intresting master/scholar mechanic. In combat the scholar has to repeatedly use the masters moves and after a while he inherits the technique and can use it without the master.

 

[aweigh]

Snap's fixed on Yuzu.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Now you can play Too Human with less issues
Or finally play those X360 exclusive DLCs for Tomb Raider Underworld

 

[Unkillable Cat]

In my possession is a collection of roms for a certain unnamed system. The thing is, the collection comes in three zip-files but they all contain the same roms - the only difference is that one is 'headered', one is 'unheadered' and one is some variant of 'headered'.

My question is, what's the difference? For what circumstances would I use headered roms, and in what circumstances would I use unheadered roms? I looked up the term, but the answers sadly were too vague to give me an answer (something to do with patching the roms was the best I could glean from it).

Thanks in advance.

 

[mogwaimon]

headered roms just have a few bytes of data before the actual rom that are meant to describe certain aspects of the game for emulator purposes, i.e. the name, release date, other information. whether they matter or not depends on your specific use case; if you just plan to play the games then for the most part it should be fine to use either headered roms or unheadered as modern emulators should support either implementation. But if you plan to patch said roms with romhacks and other mods, then you're going to need the version of the rom that's specified by the patch creator. Typically this is unheadered but I believe some authors make their patches for headered roms too. There are tools out there to strip headers from roms if needed though too.

 

[Duraframe300]

In my possession is a collection of roms for a certain unnamed system. The thing is, the collection comes in three zip-files but they all contain the same roms - the only difference is that one is 'headered', one is 'unheadered' and one is some variant of 'headered'.

My question is, what's the difference? For what circumstances would I use headered roms, and in what circumstances would I use unheadered roms? I looked up the term, but the answers sadly were too vague to give me an answer (something to do with patching the roms was the best I could glean from it).

Thanks in advance.

I'm guessing you're talking NES. (Since that's the most popular example)

As already stated headers contain additional information that emulators need to run a game. This became necessary because NES cartridges weren't actually all the same on a hardware level. The different configurations are called *Mappers*. Now the rom data itself doesn't actually contain any information which configuration/mapper a game used. So, the early emu devs in the 90's decided to put a bit of extra information at the beginning of roms to mark that and let it emulate correctly.

Modern emulators get around it by just including that info directly and then matching the rom to it.

Fun fact: Nintendo used headered roms for their Virtual Console sevice.

Just tells you how full off shit they are in their crusade against emulation. Straight up ripping off emu devs.

 

[Derringer]

Jews jewing pirate archivists, they did it with the censorship rating bullshit with Sega and Mortal Kombat since they were competition releasing a better product that they ruined themselves intentionally.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Thanks for the info - now I know which zipfiles to keep and which ones to ditch. (The eternal struggle for hard disk space continues.)

 

[Duraframe300]

Duckstation has returned its upstream as a retroarch core

Re-add libretro core · stenzek/duckstation@e2a23cc · GitHub

Seems like they got over their differences.

 

[aweigh]

Thanks for the info - now I know which zipfiles to keep and which ones to ditch. (The eternal struggle for hard disk space continues.)

Use the Windows 10 "Compact" feature to use xpress4k compression. It is a type of compression that does not impact performance on modern CPUs in any discernible way and works on executable files as well.

I use 'compact' on all of my games installed on SSD to conserve precious disk space.

 

[Duraframe300]

Thanks for the info - now I know which zipfiles to keep and which ones to ditch. (The eternal struggle for hard disk space continues.)

Use the Windows 10 "Compact" feature to use xpress4k compression. It is a type of compression that does not impact performance on modern CPUs in any discernible way and works on executable files as well.

I use 'compact' on all of my games installed on SSD to conserve precious disk space.

That difference is miniscule for files that are already compressed.

Good advice in general though.

 

[aweigh]

Yeah not everything 'compacts' well if it's already properly compressed.

 

[Puukko]

5600X get. A mere 3x improvement over my ol' 3770k. The limiting factor is now my 1070 which I am more than fine with. I'll be sure to do some extensive emulation testing. Even PCSX2 had started to chug with the newer versions.

I'd definitely like to hear how well Yuzu, Ryujinx, and RPCS3 work for you. They're all pretty shit on my 5800X but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

Early ryujinx impressions are very promising - on the recent POWER fork, at least: https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/pull/2286

I gave XBC HD a brief go on the main stable release and got anywhere between 35-60 fps, mostly stabilizing in the 40-45 range. I didn't go back to it on the fork yet but it was very playable and I may go back and play the extra story bit in the near future.

XBC 2 was a different story - as soon as I got to the first bazaar area, my fps would drop to 14-21 on the stable build which just wasn't enough, but once I switched to the POWER fork, it shot up to 27-30 and was very playable. (No 60 fps patch for this game for the time being as far as I know) I proceeded to play it for some 3 hours (about to go back) and in that time only noticed two minor graphical issues - skyboxes would sometimes have these barely visible vertical line patterns, and explosions in cutscenes would look odd, as a grid pattern of smaller explosions. Very minor problems. I will note that I did encounter two crashes eventually, but this was when streaming and every time that happened, Discord would also get fucked up, so it could very well be that this is one of those cases where the program just doesn't like being streamed, which would certainly not be the first case for me. My undervolt (very worthwhile on 5000 Ryzens) is also experimental so that could factor in, so I wouldn't recommend putting much weight into these crashes. I'll keep playing and see if anything else crops up.

All of this was at 1440p, which I found to decrease FPS by 8-10% for a huge increase in visual fidelity which I think is a very good tradeoff.

Edit: 10-11 fps in the first open plains... That's rough.

 

[Perkel]

Huge update today for Ryujinx:

Huge performance boost + multiplayer coming out of specific build beta into mainline.

For much of recent memory Ryujinx has been widely known as a highly compatible, feature-rich emulator with one caveat: without a high-end PC, many first-party games simply ran too slowly to be considered playable. We aim to change all that with today's major overhaul of the emulator's memory management, (absurdly but affectionately) nicknamed POWER - Performance Optimizations With Extensive Ramifications. Lowering CPU requirements and increasing headroom for higher end PCs, this update effectively unlocks full-speed gameplay for a vastly larger audience. Thanks to the joint efforts of gdkchan and riperiperi, users with all kinds of hardware can enjoy performance increases anywhere from 20%-100% and beyond, depending on the game and the user's PC specifications.

 

[flyingjohn]

Played some 3DO games.Decided to give some emu and game tips.
Emu:
Use retroarch opera core.It is a updated 4dO core and runs everything fine for now.
If you want upscaling,turn the hires cell rendering option on.
You also want speed at 1.5 overclock.The system is just too slow at standard speed.
The best performance option is changing madam matrice to software.

Your other bet is the phoenix project.A Russian multi system emu with 3DO support.Menus are finicky and you are at the mercy of translators when something new gets added.

Games:
The best games are the dnd real time first person/single man dungeon crawlers,slayers and death keep.And even that is miles behind real time blobbers on dos/pc.
Also would recommend the space hulk,it is a interesting mix of fps and squad management.
Everything else are weird mediocre jrpg/s or somewhat interesting but not good enough ports of known games.

edit:
Forgot about the bios.
Use fz 10.
There are two versions,anvil with modified graphics and the normal fz 10.Anvil ain't perfect,especially for some action games.
You are also gonna need a jap font file for jap games.You can use the anvil one here without problems.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Games:
The best games are the dnd real time first person/single man dungeon crawlers,slayers and death keep.And even that is miles behind real time blobbers on dos/pc.
Also would recommend the space hulk,it is a interesting mix of fps and squad management.
Everything else are weird mediocre jrpg/s or somewhat interesting but not good enough ports of known games.

Isn't Space Hulk also on the PC? Dunno if its any different though. Killing Time, which was originally a 3DO exclusive but went PC changed quite a bit in the porting process.
That said, I think there are quite a few interesting-looking titles, but I don't have any experience with those. I do have experience with Escape From Monster Manor. Do not play Escape From Monster Manor. It has all the worst possible design choices a FPS could have and several I didn't know were possible. However, the lead on it made a LP of it, its on Youtube, and its a fascinating look into just about everything in the gaming world at that time. Not necessarily exclusively talking about the 3DO either. He also has videos on several other 3DO titles, but I haven't seen those yet.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Games:
The best games are the dnd real time first person/single man dungeon crawlers,slayers and death keep.And even that is miles behind real time blobbers on dos/pc.
Also would recommend the space hulk,it is a interesting mix of fps and squad management.
Everything else are weird mediocre jrpg/s or somewhat interesting but not good enough ports of known games.

Isn't Space Hulk also on the PC? Dunno if its any different though. Killing Time, which was originally a 3DO exclusive but went PC changed quite a bit in the porting process.
That said, I think there are quite a few interesting-looking titles, but I don't have any experience with those. I do have experience with Escape From Monster Manor. Do not play Escape From Monster Manor. It has all the worst possible design choices a FPS could have and several I didn't know were possible. However, the lead on it made a LP of it, its on Youtube, and its a fascinating look into just about everything in the gaming world at that time. Not necessarily exclusively talking about the 3DO either. He also has videos on several other 3DO titles, but I haven't seen those yet.

There were two Space Hulk games, one from 1993 ("Space Hulk") and the 'sequel' from 1996 ("Space Hulk: Vengeange of the Blood Angels"). Oddly enough, the Blood Angels-one was originally released on the 3D0, and then later ported to other systems, including the PC.

The only other games I'd say are worth mentioning on the 3D0 are "Star Control 2" (originally released in late 1992, but got a revamped release in 1994, adding more cinematics, upgraded music

and full speech) and "The Horde", which was also an original 3D0-title from 1994 that later got ported to other systems, including the PC. Incidentally, both these games were made by the same studio. (Since Star Control 2 now has a brilliant Open Source-release there's little need to get a 3D0 for the extras, which leaves "The Horde"... which may not be to everyone's tastes.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

The only other games I'd say are worth mentioning on the 3D0 are "Star Control 2" (originally released in late 1992, but got a revamped release in 1994, adding more cinematics, upgraded music

and full speech) and "The Horde", which was also an original 3D0-title from 1994 that later got ported to other systems, including the PC. Incidentally, both these games were made by the same studio. (Since Star Control 2 now has a brilliant Open Source-release there's little need to get a 3D0 for the extras, which leaves "The Horde"... which may not be to everyone's tastes.

Crystal Dynamics did a surprising number of 3DO titles, and curiously enough EA really believed in the console.
Also, I don't know if it affects anything in an emulator, but The Horde on 3DO would delete everything else in your memory card when you saved. Come to think of it, Killing Time had a glitch that could screw you too. For a system that was so expensive, a lot of its original titles seem to have major issues...

 

[flyingjohn]

I just want to talk more about DND slayer.Look at this manual:
https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media...ted/Slayer_-_1994_-_Strategic_Simulations.pdf

It is simple but beautiful.It covers alignments,multiclassing,a variety of different enemies,etc.You can individually customize elements of the dungeon from how much enemies to how much powerful poison is.Character creation feels like it is out of a proper dnd game.
Such a shame it is wasted on a single character real time dungeon crawler on a 3do.


NOW LOOK AT THE SEQUEL VS ORIGINAL CHARACTER SELECTION:

Look how they massacred my boy.Oh and the sequel fucks up basic stuff like movement too,ugh.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Everything else are weird mediocre jrpg/s or somewhat interesting but not good enough ports of known games.

Wrong

Great, underrated console and only thing it lack its killer app that has not been later ported to other platforms.

Need for Speed, Space Hulk VOTBA, Return Fire, Gex? All are originally 3DO gaemz
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo - great port and has best OST out of all version
Doom - one of the worst ports but not unplayable, best OST again - original midi tracks turn into CD-AUDIO
Samurai Showdown
Myst
Primal Rage
Alone in the Dark
Star Control 2
Wing Commander 3
Wolfenstein 3D (new, hi-res sprites, rocket launcher - waay better than DOS version)
TONS of obscure japanese shit

I like it for being pretty PC-centric platform and kind of pre-Xbox.