Which console emulates old-school games the best?

[Old Right Member]

I'm new here, so my apologies if my questions are bit noobish. Between the GC, Xbox, DC, and PS2, which console is capable of emulating the following the best, or with least programming effort and why, assuming one or some are better than the other?


Pentium 90 PC or less (e.g., 486/66) w/ 256 color VGA graphics
Sega CD
Wolf arcade architecture (used in MK3)
CoJag
32X
Super NES

 

[Blazkowicz]

Emulating a PC is very CPU demanding (dosbox is slow), Snes less so but still quite demanding so I'd choose Xbox or gamecube. Xbox is probably most easy because many people ran linux on it, GC I don't know. I think segaCD is easy, at least bare genesis/megadrive ran on my 486SX25!

see http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/System_Requirements
you won't be able to run demanding DOS games such as duke nukem 3D and the like, doom may be borderline, so use native ports for such games; but the classic stuff : arkanoid, dune 2, incredible machines etc. is a piece of cake.

 

[Old Right Member]

The Sega CD may be a little more difficult to emulate than just a Genesis, because the Sega CD has an extra Motorola MC68000.

 

[Sonic]

I hacked my Xbox back in 04 or 05 and put XBMC and Avalaunch on it. It ran the Genesis, SNES, Turbo Grafix (spelling?), GBA, and MAME just fine. It has enough memory to do it. I also had Doom and Duke Nukem 3D on the system and they ran silky smooth without much of a problem. The good thing about the Xbox is that it's x86 based so a lot of the code was already done earlier for the PC and probably required just some modification here and there. Also there's plenty of emulators for Linux that run fine.

I'm sure the Xbox would be best at running P90 or less games considering it has some backwards compatibility built into the CPU.

 

[tripleagent]

Properly emulating a SNES (like a bsnes approach) requires > 3 Ghz Core2 processor class integer performance. Many popular emulators do not emulate to a cycle or sub-cycle exact accuracy. Many fast emulators have graphics glitches that are often overlooked. Many emulators are incomplete in their sound emulation, simplifying the sound model to eat less cpu but introducing subtle bugs in the process. The problem is that emulators are single threaded because of the fundamental problems of cycle accurate sychronization. Consequently using more than 1 cpu to speed up emulation often gains very little. Cycle accurate emulation of the NES requires ~1.4 Ghz Pentium 4 processor, far higher than most people would assume. PS2, Xbox & Gamecube simply do not have the single threaded performance to emulate the 25 year old NES with cycle exact accuracy. So people port fast emulators that are incomplete models of the hardware. The perfect example of this is UltraHLE where its possible to play a N64 game like goldeneye on a 233Mhz Pentium 2+3dfx Voodoo2 class hardware. UltraHLE takes the approach to emulate as little as possible the underlying hardware but instead translate C code directly and translate RSP&RDP calls to Glide API calls. The problem with this approach is that it only works in specific cases, the rendering process done on the RSP&RDP almost never exactly matches to Voodoo behavior. Even today the video rendering of N64 on more advanced emulators is still not close to perfect, lots of video bugs to be had.

So in short sub-cycle exact emulation of the following
NES ~>1.4Ghz Pentium 4
SNES ~>3Ghz Core2 solo
N64 ? unknown much higher than SNES, almost all emulators have incomplete RDP&RSP emulation
Dreamcast >2.6 Ghz Pentium 4+ incomplete video emulation
PS2 current emulators require > 3.6Ghz Core2 Duo, many games have lots of video bugs, complete emulation still many years away
Gamecube incomplete, good luck, requirements much higher than any modern hardware can provide
Xbox emulation good luck(whats done on the xbox360 is hackwork more like ultrahle approach than bsnes)
Virtual Console most emulation still use incomplete model

 

[swaaye]

I think that the "fast" HLE (or semi HLE) emulators are much more of a problem for N64 games than they are for SNES/NES. I'm rather happy with the quality and compatibility of the "fast" SNES/NES emus. They do the job more than adequately for me. Basically I don't see anything to gain that would make it worth the Xbox/Wii not being able to handle the emulation. I don't really play that many SNES/NES games, but the ones I have played on the emus have been rather indistinguishable from the SNES and NES consoles that I never touch anymore. Perfect emulation is a neat idea, but I think it kinda misses the target for what most gamers want from their retro gaming...

N64 emus, on the other hand, are horrible disasters that only run a very few games rather well and don't run some games at all. Surreal64 for Xbox comes with 4 emulators to choose from to try to get games going and that still gets you only part of the library working.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Properly emulating a SNES (like a bsnes approach) requires > 3 Ghz Core2 processor class integer performance.

Wow... just... wow. My mind is blown. Seriously, I thought one of these days, I can grab a cheap ass duo core laptop or even a single core laptop and be able to play SNES on the go! Geez, I never realize how insane it is to emulate these old systems.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Well, I used zsnes on my old p2 350Mhz (internetplay with rock and roll racers is awsome) and as far as I can tell its the same as it would be on a real snes. Same with the snes emu on the wii.

I played psx games using a emulator on that system too btw. At the time it seemed to run fine though I dont remember well as its such a long time ago.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

SNES ~>3Ghz Core2 solo

Can I ask how this figures are calculated? The SNES max clockrate was 21 MHz going by Wikipedia. You're saying that a current processor needs >100 cycles per instruction to emulate SNES? Actually I suppose it's about 3 21-25 MHz processors to emulate. Still, that seems alot of overhead to me.

 

[Reznor007]

http://byuu.cinnamonpirate.com/articles/optimization

Author of the most accurate SNES emu around.

Read his bit about erratum for a hint at how tricky it can be to have perfection.

 

[DJ12]

Wow... just... wow. My mind is blown. Seriously, I thought one of these days, I can grab a cheap ass duo core laptop or even a single core laptop and be able to play SNES on the go! Geez, I never realize how insane it is to emulate these old systems.

You can just don't use bsnes. There is a case for emulation perversion such as for old computers where someone might want to do something weird and wacky with it but I don't see the point with consoles where the only purpose is to play games.

for 99% of the games that work on other emulators you will notice zero difference between bsnes and them despite them not emulating the snes "properly".

You barely need a ghz from your CPU to enjoy the games.

Anyway to answer the original question the xbox is the best for emulation. it's easily hacked and much more powerful than the other consoles and being similar to a x86 system emulators are fairly easily ported from what I can gather.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

A ghz cpu? You wont even need a 400mhz one.

 

[tripleagent]

The MAME devs once talked about how it would require >10 Ghz Pentium4 class cpu performance to properly emulate some arcade boards like sega model 3, naomi, seattle, and others. These boards use slower RISC cpus then gamecube and xbox. The architectures of home consoles are also radically different than a PC architecture so everything ends up being to be done in software. So in accurate emulators single threaded integer performance becomes the dominant issue.

Game console emulators have large game libraries that hit the hardware in different ways exposing esoteric things like ram access latencies, rom access timing, interrupt latencies, register quirks, and even hardware bugs in order to function. Some games will run improperly if some functionality dose not behave exactly like it it expected on real production hardware. Its a good thing that like 98% of games do not rely on these quirks to run properly. But a bsnes like approach helps those 2% that exhibit minor timing,cpu,graphics, or sound bugs work properly. So in retrospect a fast emulator like zsnes might offer a great experience for most people its just a different approach than bsnes. Their is no good or bad way of doing things just diferent levels of accuracy.

 

[Simon82]

Well. there are examples of old 8bit environment where modern cpu really emulate it with lot of cpu cycles where the accuracy is the most important goal. For example try Hoxs64 C64 emulator..... or gbc latest game boy 8bit emulator...

 

[lbartley]

Can I ask how this figures are calculated? The SNES max clockrate was 21 MHz going by Wikipedia. You're saying that a current processor needs >100 cycles per instruction to emulate SNES? Actually I suppose it's about 3 21-25 MHz processors to emulate. Still, that seems alot of overhead to me.

Actually, if I recall, the SNES had a variable clock rate on the CPU. It topped out at 3.6Mhz.

This is why the Genesis was so much faster, at 7.6Mhz.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Genesis does what nintendont

 

[Blazkowicz]

21MHz is the speed of super FX 2 (super FX 1 is the same chip at 10.5MHz), found as an add-on in game cartridges. It got awesome use in Yoshi story.

SNES's main CPU indeed is slow, that gave some slow early SNES games, and makes it unable to do real (polygon) 3D on its own. Someone tried : Race Drivin', very bad racing game. The Genesis had some 3D games (LHX chopper, IF22 interceptor)

 

[ninzel]

I'm running MAME-Osx on my Intel 13.1 Macbook and it runs great.
2.0 Ghz CPU,Intel GMA graphics and 4GB RAM.

 

[TheWretched]

I'm running MAME-Osx on my Intel 13.1 Macbook and it runs great.
2.0 Ghz CPU,Intel GMA graphics and 4GB RAM.

But those emulators mostly only approximate the hardware.

Also, like (Win) UAE, some older versions run faster and the same stuff, but the code is emulating the AMIGA better, although there is little benefit, beside slowdowns.

 

[ninzel]

But those emulators mostly only approximate the hardware.

Also, like (Win) UAE, some older versions run faster and the same stuff, but the code is emulating the AMIGA better, although there is little benefit, beside slowdowns.

I'm not sure what that means. Am I missing out on something by running it this way? I click Play and the rom plays,isn't that all there is to it?