Which console emulates old-school games the best?
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grandmaster
Veteran
I played Elite on the SNES - well, a very early pre-production version that never came out. This was full polygon 3D and without the FX chip. I guess since the original NES handled the original Elite, the SNES should've been able to handle a polygonised version.
Speaking of the NES, I remember hearing a rumour at the time that the UK (maybe even European) rights for NES Elite were snapped up for a pitifully low £400... apparently it required a pretty insane cart configuration.
I'd like to add that his figure is highly exaggerated. I can get close to 120 FPS on my Pentium Dual-Core 2160 OCed to 2.4 GHZ.
As for why accurate emulation is a good thing(Though not necessarily the only way you should do things), well, it's simple. Many games need that in order to work 100% properly. Many SNES games have completely off sound/music in Zsnes and SNES9x, or game stability problems because of it(Breath of Fire 2 will freeze 100% of the time at an early point in the game if you run the latest version of Zsnes, 1.51. According to the people who work on the emulator, it's a related to the sound code. I can get the link if anyone wants to see it.), for example. I know of one japanese GBA Dragon Quest game that will have a screen glitch so bad it prevents you from going further in the game if you use no$GBA and have not gotten ahold of the GBA's BIOS file.
And, of course, many games work 100% fine. They sounds just like the console, look just like the console, play just like the console, etc. It all depends on the game and the console.
True, but I figured snes emulation was a better example...
Cant remember the N64 emulator I had (EMU or UltraHLE or other). Did pretty good in the few games I tested. mario, Golden Eye running at roughly same framerate as on N64 but slightly higher res and quality. This was on a Celeron 500Mhz and a TNT2 graphic card.
Playstation games where light using Bleem! a 166Mhz MMX CPU did it with ease at same or better framerate + higher resolution. The demo version of Bleem! didn't have 3D support so the Voodoo2 card was idling.
In the end I guess it is up to the quality of the emulator.
DOS/Win95 games are perfectly fine with a AMD A64 3200+ running DosBox/ScummVM inside a virtual PC. No difference either with a Opteron 185 with one core allowed for VM with low thread priority by Windows.
Playstation games where light using Bleem! a 166Mhz MMX CPU did it with ease at same or better framerate + higher resolution. The demo version of Bleem! didn't have 3D support so the Voodoo2 card was idling.
In the end I guess it is up to the quality of the emulator.
DOS/Win95 games are perfectly fine with a AMD A64 3200+ running DosBox/ScummVM inside a virtual PC. No difference either with a Opteron 185 with one core allowed for VM with low thread priority by Windows.
The demo version(Or, really Bleem in general) didn't work properly on most games.
Some N64 games have gotten a lot of attention from the emu devs. But most of the N64 library has issues with the emulators. That's why the Surreal64 N64 emulator for Xbox comes with 3 separate emulators and a variety of video plugins for each one! And there are still quite a few games that just don't work.
I think the number of just don't work at all games is only about ten or so. I haven't checked in a while. It's down to unsupported microcodes, IIRC.
Sadly, that number includes big name games like Rogue Squadron...
Blazkowicz
Legend
you can play the PC version of rogue squadron instead 
you can play the PC version of rogue squadron instead
I was under the impression it didn't work well with modern cards...
Not my cup of tea any way, but still.
tripleagent
Newcomer
What slows emulator authors down is that they have to reverse engineer many undocumented aspects of the hardware to get things working. For example in order to get N64 games working some emulators use video hacks that approximate what the RSP microcode does. The problem is there is no public documentation of how the RSP microcode is actually implemented so emu authors have to create hacks that simulate parts of the RSP behavior to get a game "working." But really no proper emulation is being done because no one outside ArtX, Nintendo Japan or former SGI team member are allowed to spill the beans because of NDAs. The lack of documentation means that reverse engineering is the only way of documenting (and emulating) the hardware to any level of accuracy. Exact details of this nature are protected IP. That's why Nintendo is in a much better position to produce a compliant emulator since they have low level documentation of all the undocumented microcodes while emu authors have to trudge along building test vectors to build their code against.
3 Ghz to run an SNES game, that's ridiculous.
I myself have emulated GB, NES, Genesis, and SNES on my Palm (overclocked).
And they work perfectly fine, I can even utilise Lanczos sharpening while maintaining a completely smooth framerate. I did a complete playthrough of Sonic 3 and A Link to the Past and encountered virtually no sound or visual bugs.
If it's close enough that you can't tell the difference, why would you bother spending exponentially more processing power and effort to emulate the system 'properly'?
I myself have emulated GB, NES, Genesis, and SNES on my Palm (overclocked).
And they work perfectly fine, I can even utilise Lanczos sharpening while maintaining a completely smooth framerate. I did a complete playthrough of Sonic 3 and A Link to the Past and encountered virtually no sound or visual bugs.
If it's close enough that you can't tell the difference, why would you bother spending exponentially more processing power and effort to emulate the system 'properly'?
Read my original post in this thread, vanquish. I answered that quite well.
But, why does it matter if only few can even notice the minor differences?
OK, you must have accidentally skipped over some of my post. I'll quote the relevant portion:
Another thing is that a large amount of the unnoticed differences come from people who have never played the game on a console. FF3us, for example, has screwed up sound effects in just about every SNES emulator. Seriously screwed up ones. bsnes and SNESGT are the only ones that get it right.
Other unnoticed differences come from forgetting what the original game was like. It's very easy to miss sound effects/music/colors/whatever being off when you haven't played the game in 15 years!
Do you have a fast PC? If so, compare bsnes' sound with ZSNES and Snes9x in FF3(Of course, using a copy of the game you've made yourself...). You'll find huge differences in sound effects.
Now, I'm not saying that accurate emulation is the best and/or the only way to emulate. All I'm doing is pointing out why it's needed.
I'd also like to restate that tripleagent's numbers are off. I can get almost 120 FPS on a 2.4 Ghz Pentium Dual-Core 2180(It's overclocked) on the most demanding games. A 60 dollar CPU can run bsnes just fine.
I can offer other examples of games not working at all/with highly off sound, if you wish.
But I have never had a problem with any emulator/game, that prevents you from finishing the game.
So it doesn't matter unless you use a crap emulator or want to play some obscure title no one has ever heard of.
I recently "discovered" the pSX emulator that does rather accurate emulation. Puts out visuals with all that authentic PS1 uglynesses. Not that I don't appreciate the accurately terrible dithering and all from a nostalgic viewpoint. Must say that I prefer ePSXe though. You still get the funky wavering texture mapping and mis-positioned polys, but enjoy much less dithering and sharper textures.
Not that I don't appreciate the accurately terrible dithering and all from a nostalgic viewpoint. Must say that I prefer ePSXe though. You still get the funky wavering texture mapping and mis-positioned polys, but enjoy much less dithering and sharper textures.
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I recently "discovered" the pSX emulator that does rather accurate emulation. Puts out visuals with all that authentic PS1 uglynesses.
With regards to the visuals... It depends on the video plugin you're using. The P.E.Op.S. software plugin looks pretty much identical to pSX.
FWIW, pSX gets a fair bit of stuff wrong too. I'd argue pSX and ePSXe are in the same positions ZSNES and Snes9x are in: One is better at some games, the other is better at others, and they do most games well, or well enough that most people who have never played the game on an actual SNES/PS1 won't notice anything being off.
That said, I think ePSXe currently has the best sound emulation, given all the updates they did in 1.7.0. I wouldn't bet anything on this, however, as I've not done any real extensive testing, and no one else has either.
Yeah and I had quite decent framerate on my old 500MHz Celeron and Golden Eye and Super Mario 64 at roughly same framerate as the N64 versions. Though it looked better. Few PSX games I tested ran well but some had slight artifacts. But that was on a P166MHz MMX and PSX games was like nothing for the CPU alone to emulate/play. GTA ran like 2x the framerate!
Some SNES and NES games to on the P166MHz MMX without problems.
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