Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Rincewind]

I could say this about most console emulators too, but you don't really need any help with DOSbox unless you're trying to set-up some non-standard setting like a fancy sound card or something. And in those cases there are usually guides telling you all you ever need to know to set it up. Its good to go otherwise, outside of very specific games. Meanwhile despite claims to the contrary, multi-system emulators like MAME and RetroArch are pains to set up, which is why they keep coming up in this topic.
Also, on asking Codexers about old computers never seems to work out, you're always better off searching dedicated forums for that. Case in point, I was trying to get an Acorn Archimedes game working this week, something I highly doubt anyone on the Codex would be able to help with at all.

You spouted a lot of words just to confirm that this is, indeed, the console emulation thread.

what is currently the best way to emulate

The answers are always here :
http://nonmame.retrogames.com/

Uh oh... that doco recommends the RetroArch PUAE Core as the "best" Amiga emulator. Only WinUAE provides lagless vsync via beamracing, which is a HUGE deal, so not even mentioning this makes this writeup invalid even for the "using the Amiga as a console on the big TV" use-case.

For those who don't know, what that achieves is cutting the lag down to "frametime / N", where N is configurable. I'm using N=4 with good results, which gives me 1000 / 50 / 4 = 5ms lag on PAL games. Many fast-paced games are next to unplayable with the 20ms lag, e.g. all pinball games, Arkanoid-likes, etc. Best of all, works perfectly with WinUAE shaders with ReShade on top.

...but at least they recommend VICE for the 8-bit Commodores.

 

[AndyS]

So we've finally got a proper Atari Jaguar emulator: BigPEmu. It's the same emulator that was used for the recent Atari 50 collection - Digital Eclipse let the guy release it standalone for free, possibly because the poor man is dying of cancer - and so far it not only works flawlessly but it's actually better than the original hardware thanks to the ability to speed it up a bit and get better framerates. We're still lacking a Jaguar CD emulator as the author would like to create one but it's hard as hell to find any surviving working CD units and who knows if the man will live long enough to make an emulator for it even if he gets one?

 

[Rincewind]

So we've finally got a proper Atari Jaguar emulator: BigPEmu. It's the same emulator that was used for the recent Atari 50 collection - Digital Eclipse let the guy release it standalone for free, possibly because the poor man is dying of cancer - and so far it not only works flawlessly but it's actually better than the original hardware thanks to the ability to speed it up a bit and get better framerates. We're still lacking a Jaguar CD emulator as the author would like to create one but it's hard as hell to find any surviving working CD units and who knows if the man will live long enough to make an emulator for it even if he gets one?

From the FAQ:

Q: Is this emulator really free? There's no installer which quietly asks to put garbage on my machine, and it's completely self-contained?
A: Yes. I'm a broken old man with no savings, but I'll die refusing to give in to this garbage culture of user/consumer exploitation. However, if you'd like to delay my ultimate demise, you can help me out.

 

[somerandomdude]

My favourite King's Field is King's Field 4: the Ancient City (the PS2 game), I've completed it a few times on PCSX2 with no issues at all.

It's been years since I've played it, and maybe it's been fixed, but there were a few areas in the game where chunks failed to load properly. The solution was to save somewhere near by and reload the game.

I highly recommend Shadow Tower: Abyss, I thought it was even better than KF4. There's a translation patch available for it.

 

[spekkio]

BROS, imma let you finish your quality Retroarch discussion, but...

Game crashed when loading mission, looks like I have to update both Ryu & firmware.

 

[lightbane]

Looks like an uglier remaster of the DS edition.

 

[gerey]

What I'm really excited about is the release of the Front Mission 2 remaster.

 

[Derringer]

Quality™ animations.

 

[spekkio]

BROs, updated Ryu + Firmware, emu still crashed to desktop while loading mission. Turned out Vulcan was the culprit, switching to OGL helped:

As you can see, ultra-low CPU use, even on my vintage i7-7700.

 

[Puukko]

Rujinx's Vulkan frontend isn't as mature as Yuzu's, I haven't found a case where it was the best way to play a game yet.

'Mature' being a very subjective term here, considering Yuzu regularly blesses me with art pieces like these:

 

[perfectslumbers]

Yuzu is retarded but runs at like double the fps Ryujinx does for me. I have no doubt that Ryujinx will be the better emulator eventually though.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Jokes aside, I never owned any console, or even played any game on one for more than a few minutes. So I'd be interested in trying a few good console games out of interest that aren't JRPGs, twitch action games, or kiddie platformers.

Have you considered either of the Shadowrun console games? Both the Genesis and SNES games are pretty fun, albeit they're quite different.

The answers are always here :
http://nonmame.retrogames.com/

That seems like a worse version of the Emulation Wiki, except overly focused on free source software.

 

[Rincewind]

Have you considered either of the Shadowrun console games? Both the Genesis and SNES games are pretty fun, albeit they're quite different.

Nope, but thanks for the tip.

 

[Modron]

There's a hackjob out there that lets you mouse aim in the SNES Shadowrun.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/cxnyqh/snes_shadowrun_with_mouse/

 

[Lyric Suite]

Can someone explain RetroArch to me?

So i get the thing from Steam, and decide to try out some PS1 games i have loaded on DuckStation. Load up the thing and i'm greeted by some stupid consoltarded UI. Manage to figure out how to load a game. Use the PCSX ReARMed core. Game loads up but looks ugly and low res etc. Press a bunch of buttons both on the controller or the keyboard and nothing happens. Escape wants me to quit RetroArch. I randomly press F2 and it says it made a save state. Goodie, i press the others and nothing happens. F6 seems to just change save state slot ad infinitum. F9 mutes audio. Nothing else. I try alt-enter and now i'm getting some options. I look what's in there and i see F4 is supposed to load save states. Down't work. I see F1 is supposed to load up an option menu (toggle) within RetroArch. Doesn't work. I manaully click on the menu, it now opens, i see PCSX doesn't have any options, i try resuming the game, but i can't. All i can do is quit or restart RetroArch. I do that, try to load up save state again, nada.

So load another core, Beetle PSX HW. Now i'm getting some options when i go to the menu, but once again i can't resume the game i have to restart RetroArch again. Save states don't work i have to go through the PS1 intro then game menu etc etc. I load up the game and the settings i changed are working. Seems good so far, except i don't get why every time i toggle the menu to go change settings i can't resume the game. Loading up the game again every time i change something is ludicrous and why the fuck save states don't work. DuckStation i can just change settings on the fly, with the game on one side and the setting window on the other and i can even see the effect of the change instantly but here i can't do shit without having to relaunch the whole thing every time. Try another game, King's Field 1, game is actually fucked up. Inventory has no graphics and interface is all distorted. I reset all graphical settings to the default, same shit. I'm not going to even try to attempt finding out what the problem is if every time i go to the settings menu i have to restart the whole thing. Fuck that.

Am i doing something wrong here? Why the fuck is this shit so complicated.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Ok, i get it, i had to go to "quick menu" to be able to resume the game. At least that's something. Tried King's Field 2 same problem, inventory has graphics now but the text is garbled.

[EDIT] Jesus Christ so you have to press F1 for a second before it actually works lmao who the fuck designed this shit.

 

[Rincewind]

Am i doing something wrong here? Why the fuck is this shit so complicated.

It's a piece of shit, don't use it. I tried it about 3 times and always rage quite after a similar experience of desperately dicking around like you described, and I'm a very technical person.

It's abysmal, I don't get it what people see in it. The website and documentation is the same, amateur hour.

Just use standalone emulators.

 

[Great Deceiver]

There have been plenty of reasons listed in this thread by myself and others for using RA - the most important of which are, to me, runahead, perfect sync to non-standard refresh rates and stellar shader support. Those are all non-trivial aspects that surely justify it.

There are other UI options if you don't like the default one, and even a desktop UI (press F5) with clickable everything since 2018. Here are a couple of very old videos:

 

[Rincewind]

runahead, perfect sync to non-standard refresh rates and stellar shader support

Shader support is one of its redeeming features, indeed. The only thing I "envy" from RA when using other emulators. Whoever designed their shader system did a good job.

I doubt it can do perfectly smooth scrolling on other refresh rates the game was written for, and it's a bit of a moot point; most monitors can do 50 and 60 Hz fine these days.

Run-ahead, dunno, I'm not impressed by it at all and it's very resource heavy and can introduce a lot of problems. Lagless vsync via "beamracing" is the ultimate solution, as implemented in WinUAE. The guy who invented it has been literally *begging* the RA devs and offering them money to finally incorporate it into RA, but they don't seem to get it at the technical level :shrug:

 

[Great Deceiver]

runahead, perfect sync to non-standard refresh rates and stellar shader support

Shader support is one of its redeeming features, indeed. The only thing I "envy" from RA when using other emulators. Whoever designed their shader system did a good job.

I doubt it can do perfectly smooth scrolling on other refresh rates the game was written for, and it's a bit of a moot point; most monitors can do 50 and 60 Hz fine these days.

Run-ahead, dunno, I'm not impressed by it at all and it's very resource heavy and can introduce a lot of problems. Lagless vsync via "beamracing" is the ultimate solution, as implemented in WinUAE.

It's not a moot point at all - I play shmups quite regularly and there's an entire line of very good games (Raiden) that run in 54hz. If you play it in 50 or 60hz you're going to get choppy scrolling and/or sped up/slowed down sound. There are many other examples of non-standard refresh rates, especially for arcade games (Mortal Kombat 1-3 run at 54.706841hz, R-Type runs at 55hz, etc).

Runahead isn't really that resource heavy for most cores for old systems, I have a RaspberryPi 3 running on my JAMMA cabinet (through a great solution called RaspberryJamma) and and even that can do a 1 frame runahead on NES and SNES cores, for example.

Re: beamracing, there's a bounty on it for RA, but it hasn't been fulfilled in 4 years. Not a priority though the post (by BlurBusters) is pretty informative:

https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/6984

 

[Rincewind]

It's not a moot point at all - I play shmups quite regularly and there's an entire line of very good games (Raiden) that run in 54hz. If you play it in 50 or 60hz you're going to get choppy scrolling and/or sped up/slowed down sound. There are many other examples of non-standard refresh rates, especially for arcade games (Mortal Kombat 1-3 run at 54.706841hz, R-Type runs at 55hz, etc).

That's interesting, now I learned something. I'm not an arcade/shmup/console person at all, so didn't about these non-standard sync rates (50/60 Hz is all you need for PAL/NTSC personal computers in general, and 70 Hz for DOS VGA). I'm guessing RA must do some frame-dropping then, so there's some jitter now and then, but that's preferable to de-synced audio and games running at the wrong speed (btw, DOSBox Staging now has a similar feature to de-couple the emulated refresh rate from the presentation refresh rate).

Re: beamracing, there's a bounty on it for RA, but it hasn't been fulfilled in 4 years. Not a priority though the post (by BlurBusters) is pretty informative:

https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/6984

Yeah I know, that's me complaining in the last few comments ...but only the BlurBusters dude cared to reply.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I'm guessing RA must do some frame-dropping then, so there's some jitter now and then, but that's preferable to de-synced audio and games running at the wrong speed

I specifically meant that RA runs (well, the specific core, so MAME, Finalburn Neo, etc.) at the game's exact framerate if you have a VRR/G-Sync capable monitor. So it's perfect, really. It also does some sync magic for 60hz, but I'm not really interested in that.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Ok, i get it, i had to go to "quick menu" to be able to resume the game. At least that's something. Tried King's Field 2 same problem, inventory has graphics now but the text is garbled.

[EDIT] Jesus Christ so you have to press F1 for a second before it actually works lmao who the fuck designed this shit.

The RA interface is abysmal, but you will end understand it eventually.

The esiest way is to use the standard RA interface only to install the cores and for configuration. After that, if you need to run a game, you can just drag and drop your rom from you folder to the RA windows, and it will automatically run that game. Or use an alternative interface for selecting roms that can be accesses pressing F5.
F1 is still important during the game because it gives access to a specific menu to configure the core/game you are running.
For PS1 emulation in RA I would consider using the Beetle PSX HW core. Personally I use Duckstation stand-alone, without RA: it is the best modern PS1 emulator and its UI is league beyond RA. I use Bettle only for specific games since it has a slightly better way to implement downsampling.

 

[flyingjohn]

For all the Windows looser's running Citra on a Amd GPU:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkUfoEwHIdQ

Link to fancy sollution:
https://github.com/pal1000/mesa-dist-win/releases/tag/22.3.0
Link to forum post with additional info:
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/wrappers-fix-low-fps.441913/

Don't expect miracles and expect crashes.

 

[flyingjohn]

Can someone explain this post for me to me?

Mistakes made:
-Used steam version (main culprit)
-Didn't configure anything before running games
-Used worst versions of emulators(pcsx and beetle hw)

Stick to standalones,except for genesis and 3DO. Everything else is worse then standalone emu's.