Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[AndyS]

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...

I would guess that EA went for the 3DO because Trip Hawkins was the founder of both companies and was able to pull some strings with his old pals at EA to support his new venture.

 

[Puukko]

RetardArch moment. Played a bit of Xenogears after I turned on the save setting to prevent proper saves from being tied to save states. When I returned to it today (left it running on my laptop) it crashed on me as soon as I got back in game, which apparently reverted the changes I had made to settings as well as my most recent save states, which meant I loaded an old state which in turn deleted my manual saves up to that point.

Now that was perhaps an hour+ of gameplay which i can catch up to in 20 mins of turbo mode and text skipping, but Christ, am I stupid for expecting software built around convenience to not be a minefield where your saves are under constant threat of deletion? Office software figured this shit out a long time ago. I'm not a software engineer but if I was building software that saves user data, I'd make sure as hell that it cannot be deleted by anything but express consent and action from the user.

 

[mogwaimon]

your first mistake was using Retroarch for PSX emulation; sure it's more accurate but the way it handles memory cards is, IMO, inferior to the virtual memcard system used by ePSXe/PCSX2/other PSX emulators. Second mistake was mixing save states and SRM/in-game saves. Third mistake was leaving the emulator running while you were away from the keyboard for a few hours, Retroarch only writes SRM/save data on exit as far as I know by default.

There's also an 'undo load state' button that you could have used to recover from loading the wrong savestate, but since the emulator crashed on you unless you had also set it up to save SRAM on a timed interval instead of only when the program exits that wouldn't have helped either. I know people like to shit on Retroarch because it's not 'the best' option for everything and it has the consolized UI but it's really not terrible for systems before the 32-bit era.

 

[Puukko]

Right. Why do you say mixing states and manual saves is bad practice? I most often use them in tandem, using states as a quick way to save time when I need to reload, or sometimes to prevent having to rewatch long cutscenes.

I've been recommended Duckstation and I very well might. Beetle has served me well enough but most games have minor graphical issues while the HW version is very hit or miss. SW can handle 2x resolution fine which is my usual preference.

 

[mogwaimon]

You can indeed do it if you're well versed enough or comfortable with it, but if you're not experienced with emulators it can be a bad idea especially if you do have an emulator that is fucky with SRM and save states or a game that auto-saves, for instance if you accidentally load an earlier save state and then unwittingly save or the emulator decides to write to SRM or something and now you've lost progress. It hasn't happened to me all that much on the occasions that I do mix save-states and manual saves because I'm very careful but I've heard things like that happen to a number of others. Or, actually this happened to me fairly recently, but I had forgotten to save in a game I was playing right before doing a one-chance sort of thing and I messed up the one chance so I went to reload my manual save only to find that I'd lost an hour of progress, so I figured I'd save stated, right? well I loaded a save state to find myself several hours back before even my last manual save, imagine if the emulator had chosen that time to write to SRM, I'd have been screwed...especially if I hadn't had that option you had mentioned about SRM being tied to save states configured properly.

 

[pakoito]

am I stupid

Yes

am I stupid for expecting software built around convenience

RetroArch is the opposite of convenience. It has the worst UX of all emulators, maybe tied with mednafen. I had a better time with NO$GMB in the late 90s than with that overdesigned piece of amateurship.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I use both retroarch+mednafen and duckstation for ps1 emulation. They have some complementary features in graphics enhancement that I use depending on the game.

I also use save games in tandem to save states but I never experienced save game corruptions. I was assuming that save games and save states are not bound togheter by default. But I usually remember which is the last kind of save I have made, and I restore direclty from that.

I also use normal save games mainly for keeping and/or sharing it among different computers/devices/emulators, since it is the most compatible, but on the same computer I mainly use save states, since it is much faster (and you can save also during long cutscenes).

 

[A horse of course]

Who is this semen demon?

 

[spekkio]

I also use normal save games mainly for keeping and/or sharing it among different computers/devices/emulators, since it is the most compatible, but on the same computer I mainly use save states, since it is much faster

This. When using emus which write "memory cards" every time quicksave is made - and that's the majority ATM (Retroarch for all cores AFAIK, pcsx2, citra) - you should stick to one type of saves. In most cases I go with "emulator saves" AKA quicksaves, for reasons mentioned by BRO Nifft. I still use "game saves" written to "memory cards" OFC, but only as a secondary solution. Plus, I make backups on regular intervals (same with saves for regular PC games).
Only in some cases (recently BoF4 on pcsx2) I'm forced to use "game saves" only, but in this case it's caused by the way the whole saving system works in the game. In short, "game saves" become corrupted if you use quicksaves, unless you're super careful with them.

AFAIK only Dolphin and PPSSPP behave differently, trying to "preserve" memory card's contents when making a quicksave.

 

[d1r]

Who is this semen demon?

In what god damn world is this a elf?

 

[Puukko]

Did some modding for BOTW on Cemu. The mod organizer (BCML) for this game works well and is mandatory for anything beyond simple texture swaps, but the installation instructions leave a lot to be desired. You need Python installed with specific settings and then install the tool via cmd. No one click exes here, but I suppose the devs have their reasons for doing it this way.

The biggest hurdle in this was that Gamebanana which hosts the mods has atrocious download speeds. The mods are not big, 100ish MB at most, but are capped to about 100kbps and like to fail midway through. I pondered why and then noticed 95% of new mods are for Friday Night Funkin which is a popular rhythm game so I suspect the site's just exploded in popularity recently and can't keep up with demand.

As with any proper modding venture, by the time I was finished I decided to return to it tomorrow so I didn't get to test the compatibility and stability of everything I installed. The big players were End Game for a harder Ganon fight, Relics of the Past for more and harder guardian battles and Survival of the Wild for, well, itvs in the name. There's a respectable amount of tuning you can do via the graphics packs (really a catch all term Cemu uses for modifications) aside from bumping up the resolution and frame rate, like increasing render distance (max still isn't enough) and disabling even more HUD elements. This may very well be the most moddable and tweakable modern emulated game there is.

After some tactical video recommendations of "8k ray tracing" for the game, I was made aware of a Reshade raytracing effect that even runs on older cards, made by an Nvidia dev and obviously locked behind a patreon (supposedly free once out of beta). After half a dozen nuked links, I managed to find a recent copy and yeah, the performance is about what you'd expect. BOTW had its framerate halved on my 1070, from just above 60 to just above 30. During my brief tour with it I only really paid attention to how much more grass popped out. Still, I am very curious how universally this can be applied, as I really don't know if it works with everything that runs Reshade. Time to boot up PCSX2 and try some mad science?

 

[flyingjohn]

Decided to go through my 3ds stuff.
The patched pokemon romhacks have more size then the entire game library.Nice.

Also,finally found a correct Amiga 3000 bios file for fs uae. Zipped it with other fs uae files located in the Op.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/c248vaqiop7ocxx/Kickstarts.7z/file
Edit:decided to add the retroarch amiga files as well:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/9aq3ufaezne5qyl/system.7z/file

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Having very little proper understanding of the Amiga, what era would the 3000 be best for?

 

[flyingjohn]

Having very little proper understanding of the Amiga, what era would the 3000 be best for?

For emulating games only you only need the 1200.
3000 is just a novelty with lower game compatibility.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I suppose if some game exists that had been designed for ECS but not OCS, then 3000 emulation would be best suited for it, but I doubt such a thing exists.

The Amiga 3000 was an expensive attempt at creating an Amiga workstation and sold poorly. In any case, its ECS (Enhanced Chip Set) was a relatively minor improvement over the OCS (Original Chip Set).

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Having very little proper understanding of the Amiga, what era would the 3000 be best for?

For emulating games only you only need the 1200.
3000 is just a novelty with lower game compatibility.

Ah, that's useful to know, so far I've been using an A500 and it hasn't failed me so far, but I anticipate that not working at some point in the future.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

As I just witnessed recently, using the A1200 as a measuring stone for all Amiga games (especially when it comes to emulation) can end badly, as some game will run too fast.

The best bet is to have the means to emulate all the different Amigas, but having just the A500 and A1200 covers a large majority of them.

 

[flyingjohn]

For anybody interested in amiga emulation there is a nice video to explain everything you need.



The only thing that has changed is that you can setup the manual quit key in whdload from the whdload settings.

Also i would like to recommend the amiga core puae. It works nice and is being updated semi regularly.

 

[flyingjohn]

Is there any tool/frontend that can categorize older computer games(apple,commodore,etc) by genres?
All i want is the ability throw thousand of unsorted apple stuff and let something actually categorize it.I have given up on manually sorting this stuff on how time consuming it can be.Script's get only 1/3 because of stupid naming convection(looking at tosec and their,the shenanigans).

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Is there any tool/frontend that can categorize older computer games(apple,commodore,etc) by genres?
All i want is the ability throw thousand of unsorted apple stuff and let something actually categorize it.I have given up on manually sorting this stuff on how time consuming it can be.Script's get only 1/3 because of stupid naming convection(looking at tosec and their,the shenanigans).

In the past I looked for some similar tool, but in the end I resorted to write my own script to read the contents of my HDs, where the roms are stored, and to do automatically some web-scraping on gaming sites (such as Moby) to fill a database with different infos (including genres).

The script is written in "R" and it is all than user friendly... and is tailored for the structure of my HDs folders.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Will this help?

 

[flyingjohn]

HAHAHAH,Found something that works.
When in doubt go full retard.Took somebodies genesis script and just added my own shit.
This is all you need:
move "title*.*" ".\folder\"
It is so simple and stupid it works.Just get a list from moby and just create a couple of hundred lines with games per genre.You can also use notepad ++ regular expression to replace every beginning and end line with ^ and $.
Except one problem.
TOSEC,YOU DO NOT ADD,THE AT MOST FILES .WHO DA FUCK NAMES THE BATTLE OF SHEGOL AS SHEGOL,BATTLE,THE.

You can use this to go through thousand of files and cut the fat.

 

[Puukko]

Started FETH proper on Ryujinx, still using the POWER build from last month which has since been rolled into mainline. Using the 60 fps patch on my 5600x, it was pretty smooth sailing and I would call this version a solid candidate for the definitive version of the game, though there were some hiccups:

- I experienced a couple crashes after intro dialogues, though they both happened after I had left the game running for quite a while. I played the game nonstop for about 6 hours afterwards and had no crashes, just one instance where the game froze for baout half a minute during battle before resuming.
- it sticks to 60 fps a lot of the time but you can expect pretty heavy drops when running around town, all the way to the 30s. Given that the game normally runs at 30 and apparently lags in those parts on real hardware as well, this isn't that much of an issue.
- the only real graphical issue is a fucked up skybox in a game where you will almost never be looking at the sky. There's some shimmering aliasing going on in some armors which no amount of resolution seemed to fix but again, not something I paid attention to during actual gameplay.

I opted to try Gshade for some post processing, which is advertised as an improved fork of Reshade. I don't know about that, but I will say the effects like to bleed very heavily into background programs. Still, given those crashes I experienced, you won't want to be alt tabing much with this game anyway. It came with a bunch of FF14 presets which unsurprisingly didn't play nice with the game so I ended up just manually adding some vibrancy to turn up the colors s little bit.

 

[spekkio]

So, I've heard that the recent Ninja Gayden - Masta Edition isn't that mastah actually. Well, that's too bad, but nothing to cry about. After all, there are other options available...

Except some slowdowns, lack of rendering above the internal res and shitty camera, game is totally playable (Win7 + i7-7700 + GTX 1050 + 16 GB RAM). Ignore the FPS counter, though - FRAPS lies this time and emu runs much slower than 60 FPS).



Hack & Slash bonus:

Runs fast, but with graphical glitches.

Slow & unplayable due to severe graphical glitches.

And that's all the interesting Xbawks titles methinks.

Files used:

• xbox-4627_debug.bin & mcpx_1.0.bin from here.
• HDD image from here.

 

[flyingjohn]

Armstrad cpc.
Well,it has a pretty big chuck of the spectrum library but with better graphics.If you have a favorite speccy game and want to play it in actual graphics,the cpc has you covered.Also it mostly used disks so loading ain't a problem.
Emu:
Caprice32 is the recommended one.
Press F1 go to load/save and load a disk image.
Type cat and type run"gamename.bas to execute it.
I prefer this to auto loading.
For retroarch use the caprice core. Croco ds is not really comparable when it comes to accuracy.Just drop your disk file and it will autostart.
And that is it,no bios,no shenanigans.

Games:
Lots of french only games.
Rpg:
Le diamant and le maitre seem interesting and have the best graphics of the ports.
There is also lords of midnight and its sequel but they are pretty much identical to the speccy version.
Shadowfire looks worse then the speccy version,which is a first.And you have the original bard's tale.Very similar graphics tot he apple ii.
Strategy:
CCP wargames are worth it.Any port from the spectrum has much better graphics.Shame that only about 1/3 of the library actually got ported.
Everything else is a mishmash of speccy/apple ports.
Let me show you my personal favorite:
Avalanche:struggle for Italy:

It really can't compare to modern stuff,but i like it anyway.

Edit:Also don't use myabandonware for cpc games,there are problems.
Emuparadise has the most complete collection.