Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

edit: blah, whatever

 

[spekkio]

^
Joos.

 

[HansDampf]

Anyone have some experience with higan? I'm getting some annoying framerate issues. The status bar says the games are running at constant 60 fps, but they actually appear to oscillate between periods of smooth 60 fps and (shorter) periods of 20-30ish fps. I assume this is due to the SNES running at slightly above 60 fps, not exactly 60.0 fps, and my monitor refresh rate is 60Hz. This problem doesn't occur when I'm playing PAL games which run at 50.0 fps. Turning video sync on gets rid of the framedrops, but then the sound is messed up instead. And with both video sync and audio sync on the framerate is even worse than before.
Anything else I could do?

 

[Hirato]

RPCS3 has published their much awaited April update

https://rpcs3.net/blog/2018/05/20/progress-report-april-2018/

I assume you've all seen this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtCWoQCzMvI
so I'll embed the other 5 update videos for you.









There's been some big stuff so far in May with ASMJIT v2.0 and an experimental preview of SPU LLVM - at the moment it's slightly slower for the cases where it works.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Anyone have some experience with higan? I'm getting some annoying framerate issues. The status bar says the games are running at constant 60 fps, but they actually appear to oscillate between periods of smooth 60 fps and (shorter) periods of 20-30ish fps. I assume this is due to the SNES running at slightly above 60 fps, not exactly 60.0 fps, and my monitor refresh rate is 60Hz. This problem doesn't occur when I'm playing PAL games which run at 50.0 fps. Turning video sync on gets rid of the framedrops, but then the sound is messed up instead. And with both video sync and audio sync on the framerate is even worse than before.
Anything else I could do?

Have you tried the Retroarch Higan core?

 

[HansDampf]

That's much better.

 

[Great Deceiver]

The SNES version of Aero Fighters is a lot worse than the arcade. Still a fun game if a bit too easy.

Arcade version of Aero Fighters 1:

I like Aero Fighters because it's somewhat of a curiosity. The team that made this series broke off and eventually worked in the Strikers 1945 series, which is better and also a lot harder. Strikers 1945-II in particular is one of my favourite shmups.

 

[Bigg Boss]

There's a new release of Cemu (12.1d), however I didn't notice any tangible improvement on the two games I'm playing: Zelda: BotW and Xenoblade Chronicles X. Zelda runs at 40-45 fps for me in the new release, same as in the previous one, and Xenoblade X runs at 30 fps because there isn't yet a patch to unlock the frame-rate.

Amusingly enough I can't think of any other games worth playing on Wii U other than those two games, the Twilight Princess and Windwaker HD remasters, and the Mario/Mario-themed games (like Captain Toad for example).

The Cemu dev team was unbelievably smart about charging for development while the iron was hot with the release of Breath of the Wild because there is literally nothing else worth playing on the emulator.

Depends on your taste but Wonderful 101 and Bayonetta 1 and 2 are worth trying if you like the genre.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Just finished Thunder Force IV/Lightening Force IV (weird US name, misspelled in the original too).

This has got to be one of the hardest shmups of all time. It's just so fucking hard. There are bullets coming from everywhere and the colour palette is really muted so it's sometimes really difficult to tell where bullets are coming from.

It's awesome, though. Great weapon and enemy variety, 10 (!) levels and a kickass soundtrack. I really miss games like this. When I was a kid, I played TF2 to death, but I never played this when it was new. It's like discovering a treasure.

I'll try to 1CC it sometime. It'll probably take me a couple of months playing every day to get it.

Favourite song:

 

[Puukko]

Playing Pokeyman Ultra Sun on Citra. Runs quite well, but with short slowdowns. Some rare texture bugs/flickering too, but nothing that seriously gets in the way. Upscaling to 5x resolution makes the game much more pleasant to the eye. Citra also supports servers that emulate local connections, so you can trade and battle easily.

 

[Hirato]

Some bilinear filtering would go a LONG way to making that scene look better.

Spoiler

Besides, everyone knows digimon is the superior series

 

[flyingjohn]

Sonic is too fast for the switch emulator it seems.


As for Pokemon vs digimon,i really hate what they did with the digimon world series after the first.There was some charm in exploring the various worlds of the first,and then they made it a horrible roguelike/action rpg/jrpg.

 

[aweigh]

thunder force IV ost is fucking dynamite.

 

[flyingjohn]

So recently i have had the desire to play some older computer games(commodore,msx,spectrum,etc) and i wonder,does anybody have any experience emulating these systems.

But before that,is there even a worthy selection of rpg/strategy games on these systems?Most of the top games seem to be platforming/arcade games which i am not the biggest fan.I know that the Amiga has quite a nice selection of rpog games and the pc98 has most of the jrpg goodness,but am unsure about older systems.

Back to the emulation questions.Is there any point in selecting any different models then the default ones? I remember that there are multiple models,especially when it comes to the spectrum. I know retroarch can automate most of the work,but i remember getting better results using standalone emulators like fuse and bluemsx.

 

[CryptRat]

For Amiga in theory you need several models, but there's a good chance that most of what you want to play will run on an Amiga 500 with extended memory (a few would require a 1200, that you remove the extended memory or what WinUAE calls Amiga 500 "old").
Besides the usual suspects (Ambermoon, Black Crypt, Fate : Gates of Dawn, Knightmare, Perihelion) I can recommend Celtic Legends which is a fun strategy game :

As simplistic as it is, I thought Hero quest 2 : Legacy of Sorasil was a decent turn-based tactical :

 

[spekkio]

Re: C64

1) Go here: http://www.lemon64.com/
2) Search for "rpg" by Genre
3) ???
4) PROFIT!

97 games in database.

There are mini-reviews, comments, screenshots and shit.

 

[tet666]

NieR does run fairly well now even on mid-range CPU's so if you have not played it give it a try it's pretty great there is even a fan translation for Replicant if you don't like Papa NieR.

 

[SCO]

https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/#deprecationofopenglandopencl


Apple finally 'deprecated' opengl. And by finally i mean 'good, emulators can kick to the curb retards that bought macs'.

 

[flyingjohn]

Does anybody here have any experience with commodore emulators and fixing the terrible loading speed.It is ridiculous that you have to enter warp mode for any loading related stuff,and even then it still doesn't boost it enough.I am using Vice and hoxs64 and they both have this issue.
Do i need to select a specif model of drives or something?

 

[spekkio]

AFAIR cartridge images (.crt) work much faster (almost no loading), but for disc and cassette images nothing can be done. Commie has to load data to memory, run program, unload, repeat 100 times. 64 KB of RAM FTW. It was all the same on original hardware, except the turbo button, OFC.

Oh, and loading could fail.

 

[newtmonkey]

flyingjohn
spekkio is 100% right, there is really nothing you can do, and even warp mode will break stuff since many games rely on 100% accurate drive emulation. The C64 had a notoriously slow disk drive, even on real hardware it is horrible.

The only way to get decent load times with accuracy is to use a fastloader, like action reply or epyx fastloader. I THINK you can select these with C64 emulation, but they are still much slower than warp mode, so you will likely be unimpressed.

 

[Great Deceiver]

The Reicast core for Retroarch has been completely rewritten, with a new OpenGL renderer.

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/...t-libretro-core-updated-reicast-regular-core/

To celebrate, I fired up Zero Gunner 2, my favourite Dreamcast shmup and which had severe graphical glitches in previous versions of the emulator.

Worked great, but the game glitched out after the Stage 5 boss. I killed it and the gamestate remained the same... will try again later. But at least graphically, it's completely fixed, and plays perfectly.

It also has a kickass soundtrack:



I love the Dreamcast, it was my last console purchase that I really enjoyed. It had so many great games. Most of them have been ported by now, but it will always have a special place in my heart. It was the first console with truly arcade-perfect ports (if you discount the Neo Geo) and many great original action games from back when game developers understood the value of 60hz gameplay.

 

[aweigh]

I was recently digging around Saturn emulation and there are a few JRPGs there that I've never played, plus some fan-translations.

Shining Force 3 chapter 1 (didn't even know this existed)
Shining Force 3 chapters 2 and 3 (fan-translated)
Dragon Force 1 (i remember this from glowing reviews back in the day, but I was a PSX kid so...)
Dragon Force 2 (fan-translated)

Any others? I know there's also the first SMT: Devil Summoner (the sequel is Soul Hackers) which was never translated.

 

[CryptRat]

The only time I used a Saturn emulator, I think, it was for Albert Odyssey.

 

[index.php]

I was recently digging around Saturn emulation and there are a few JRPGs there that I've never played, plus some fan-translations.

Shining Force 3 chapter 1 (didn't even know this existed)
Shining Force 3 chapters 2 and 3 (fan-translated)
Dragon Force 1 (i remember this from glowing reviews back in the day, but I was a PSX kid so...)
Dragon Force 2 (fan-translated)

Any others? I know there's also the first SMT: Devil Summoner (the sequel is Soul Hackers) which was never translated.

Shining the Holy Ark and Panzer Dragoon Saga are probably the best RPGs on the Saturn.