Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[flyingjohn]

For anybody interested Drastic( best ds emulator exclusive to android) is free thanks to the Nintendo lawsuit.

 

[spekkio]

BRO, check the post above yours.

Don't worry, I never do either.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Whats the best emulator to play unicorn overlord on pc? In terms of stability and performance.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Whats the best emulator to play unicorn overlord on pc? In terms of stability and performance.

I mean at this point in time the asnwer is probably whatever last version Yuzu is

In time Ryujinx probably will be better but to begin with Ryujin is accuracy focused so it will be slower still in general

 

[KeAShizuku]

Cdromance is back up too. My go to place for old weebshit.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Shhhhhh.......



They're listening ready to shut it all down..

 

[spekkio]

BROs, there was some testing...

Re: Archimedean Dynasty running in 3dfx mode on various DosBox forks.

DOSBox-Staging 0.81.0

Regular, non-3dfx version looks simply glorious with:

glshader = crt-auto

I mean, shit:







It's almost like I'm back in '99, gaming on my Flatron 720B.



3dfx emulation in Staging is low-level only:

Note this is purely software-based low-level emulation; we’re emulating the 3dfx Voodoo 1 hardware accurately in software, which requires a beefy host CPU. We don’t support high-level emulation where the Glide API calls are transformed and passed through to modern 3D APIs for the actual rendering (e.g., OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D, etc.)

So it requires game's glide2x.ovl.

Sadly, it isn't prefect (yet?). 2D part looks and works fine:





Unfortunately, the 3D part has problems with some HUD fonts:





But for a low-level emulation, it's fast as fuck (~100 FPS).

Verdict: looks quite promising, will be monitoring its progress in the future.

DosBox-X 2024.03.01

There are two options for emulating 3dfx here:

a) Low-level:

voodoo_card

Possible values: auto, false, software, opengl

Enables low-level Voodoo card hardware emulation.

NOTE: This emulation mode does not work in fullscreen mode.

b) High-level:

glide

Possible values: true, false

Enables high-level Glide API pass-through to the host OS. This requires that the host OS has a Glide API library (or Glide wrapper) installed, and in addition it requires the special GLIDE2X.OVL file provided by DOSBox-X, or for Windows 9x games a specially patched GLIDE2X.DLL.

What they forgot to mention is the fact, that high-level emulation works only with the SDL1.x version of DosBox-X.

Which took me some time to figure out. Plus, the required glide2x.ovl is "hidden" on virtual drive Z: instead of simply being stored next to dosbox.exe (like any sane korean would do).

Anyway... It's shit in both modes.



a) Low-level emulation (game's glide2x.ovl + openglide)

- Works only in small 640x480 window.

- Loading screen is busted:



- Filtering works, but game looks meh:



b) High-level emulation (emu's / openglide's glide2x.ovl + nGlide)

- Goes fullscreen (thank god).

- Loading screen is correct:



- HUD is totally fucked:



- There's also heavy flickering when using the "chase" view:

Verdict: shit x2

Daum's SVN Build 2014.01.27 (yeah, fucker is more than 10 years old)

Only high-level emulation has a point here.

Disable game's glide2x.ovl (from 1997) and use the one included with Daum's build (openglide from 2013). Disable Daum's glide2x.dll too (so nGlide's is used instead):



I bet somebody spent way too much time figuring this all out...

Install nGlide, disable V-Sync (or game will be choppy):



And voila.

Original 640x480 window, scaled to full screen. Everyting looks and works fine:







And speed? Well, >240 FPS:

Verdict: still the way to go, at least till low-level emulation in Staging catches up (if that ever happens)...

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Anyone can suggest a good (and easy to use) MSX emulator?

 

[AndyS]

Anyone can suggest a good (and easy to use) MSX emulator?

Last I heard, BlueMSX is still the main one and is fairly intuitive to use. Also can be used to emulate Colecovision and Sega SG-1000, and there's a Retroarch core if you prefer that.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Anyone can suggest a good (and easy to use) MSX emulator?

OpenMSX works pretty well in my experience. Easy, unfortunately, seems to be impossible for most MSX games.

 

[flyingjohn]

What are the best options for ps1 3d games when it comes to shaders? Or is it just preferred to skip shaders?

 

[Odoryuk]

What are the best options for ps1 3d games when it comes to shaders? Or is it just preferred to skip shaders?

In my experience, for PS1 you either want some slight CRT smoothing (leave textures unfiltered, only smooth the whole screen), or full CRT simulation, like CRT–Royale, which requires high resolution (no lower than Full HD) and considerably performant system. The former is for fully 3D games, the latter is for 3D games with prerendered backgrounds (Final Fantasy 7-8-9, Resident Evil 1-2-3, etc.), for these games it is necessary to use shaders to blend 3D models with 2D backgrounds, otherwise it looks very ugly.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

it is necessary to use shaders to blend 3D models with 2D backgrounds, otherwise it looks very ugly.

Blending is easily obtained with downsampling. And you get at the same time anti-alias for 3d polygons and textures.

 

[Great Deceiver]

What are the best options for ps1 3d games when it comes to shaders? Or is it just preferred to skip shaders?

High internal resolution + downsampling to 1x with a good crt shader (I'm partial to gtu-v050 in Retroarch). Very good experience.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Been recently on an android emulation kick. I've had a Samsung Galaxy S20 phone for a couple of years now so I thought: why the fuck am I not taking advantage of its Snapdragon 865 chip and Adreno GPU and getting my android gaming on? It beats the tar out of my old Asus tablet. So I installed a shit load of ROMS and APK files. Didn't want to mess with a bunch of different emus for the 16-bit and 32-bit console eras so I used Lemuroid, a free, lite, highly-pre-configured Retroarch-based frontend with the better libretto cores. Can't say I'm too disappointed since it makes the resolutions of even the most godawful early video game consoles and handheld systems look acceptable using various fine-meshed shaders. Let's face it, GBA or GBC emulation on a big screen looks like dog pie, but with a decent shader on a 6.5" phone display, it looks as it was meant to look in the original hand-helds - crisp.

I still use standalone android emus for PS2 and PSX since they're better than what Lemuroid offers. I now have a portable hand-held gaming system in my hands with approximately 10,000 games. Next project: seeing what I can do with Magic DOSbox (which I bought off Google Play a few years ago... I'm not a total content thieving cunt, you know). I only wish there was a device where you could strap your phone to your head and pretend your 6.5" screen is 65". That tiny screen shit for gaming is jarring, junior.

 

[flyingjohn]

Just tried the super duper c64 dreams collection.
-Cracked games with the added benefit of having no naming convention so you have no idea what group cracked it until you start the game.
-Using retroarch cores
-No manuals for specific games
-No deathlord, no simcity and some other glaring omissions.

Nice to see the 20+ gb being put to good use.The positive thing is that it does contain cartridge version of games + homebrew stuff like eye of the beholder.But missing manuals is such a glaring omission when it comes to older games since some of them are practically unplayable without one.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I wondered about that; still that's a huge catalog.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

There's a curated eXODoS-like collection for C64 called something like C64 Dreams. I found it rather ambitious and appreciated that he pre-configured all xinput and sony-type controllers (including noisome disk swapping using button combos on the controller... I still have nightmares about those 8 floppy disk C64 games) , and added proper viewports with correct aspect ratios so there wasn't all that wasted on-screen real estate. I found it rather nice when I tested it out a couple of years ago since I am done with manually configuring controllers and viewports in emus for these old systems. I think he still regularly updates it. The author told me something I didn't know - that you can change C64 color palettes (make colors more vibrant or more muted) just using shaders. I thought you had to change color palettes with complicated manual editing of config files in the emu.

 

[Puukko]

I feel like at this point you could do a doctoral dissertation on these shaders, or at least a 4 hour video essay. An absurd number of settings, many of which I have no idea what they even do.

I've mostly been trying to get the curvature right, and the reflections subdued enough. I wonder if this counts as raytracing.

As a side note, I recently got my first set of dedicated speakers in a very long time (cheap Edifiers) and man, the FF6 soundtrack is bliss. I can just sit at the inn or overworld, chilling. Who even needs to make progress?

 

[Ezekiel]

Is there a way to not make Ryujinx take insanely long to unpack/pack and update the 12,000 shaders every time I open Tears of the Kingdom?

 

[soutaiseiriron]

no
welcome to PSO shaders, it sucks, i love it

 

[AndyS]

Interesting development in N64 emulation: static recompilation of roms, starting with Majora's Mask. I can't claim to understand it how it works, something about instantly converting the rom to an .exe, but I did download it and play it for a short while and it was really impressive in terms of the game running so smoothly with higher widescreen resolution. It would be nice to see this extended across the whole library. One of my pet peeves is that the Aki wrestling games are among my favorite N64 games but even the best emulators still have serious timing issues with those.

https://github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/Zelda64Recomp

 

[pakoito]

It's a bytecode-to-C transpiler, with some extra code for input and window management. Seems obvious in retrospect that it could be the best approach to playing old games, rather than emulation. It's closer to how modern emus like Yuzu worked, once the games started shipping using mainstream CPU/GPU architectures.

 

[Odoryuk]

Seems obvious in retrospect

I'm not entirely sure if it's so simple and it's just a coincedence that nobody thought of that before

 

[Rincewind]

It's a bytecode-to-C transpiler, with some extra code for input and window management. Seems obvious in retrospect that it could be the best approach to playing old games, rather than emulation. It's closer to how modern emus like Yuzu worked, once the games started shipping using mainstream CPU/GPU architectures.

Huh, but what's the point? Why not just do it at runtime with a JIT? Many emulators have been doing that for ages.

What's the selling point here? Getting rid of the JIT overhead? Or doing extra optimisations at compile time that couldn't be done with a JIT in real-time?

I would think barring the JIT overhead, the JIT approach is superior as there is more room for "context dependent" optimisations at run-time. Some times of optimisation opportunities are just impossible by doing static analysis. Plus if the JIT runs threaded, any supposed performance overheads are moot? (Given the CPU emulation code most likely needs to run on a single thread anyway.)

But then, I'm not exactly an expert in this area.

I kinda got interested in this, and found this old topic in the PCSX2 forum:
https://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Static-Recompilation?page=4

Basically, they're saying what I'd instinctively think, namely that nope, this is hogwash and a runtime JIT is king.