The Emulation Thread!

As you know me and eatup have been talking about SNES emulators and games in the Video Gaming General forum.

I will also make a separate emulation thread for game emulator software too!

FAQ:

What is an emulator?
An emulator can play the games of your childhood on your PC. The Game Boy and NES are probably the most emulated consoles of all time.

What are famous emulators?
UltraHLE (1999) - made high level emulation a thing. It was discontinued 4 hours after its release but the source code is available. Requires Glide Wrapper if you don't have a Voodoo Card.

Nesticle (mid 1990s) - NES emulator which included many debugging features and such, useful for rom hackers and gamers. Could run a game full speed on a 25mhz processor.

bsnes/higan (2004) - in 2012 this emulator became the only one in history to be able to emulate the SNES 100% as it would on the actual hardware. Unfortunately though it requires 3ghz to actually work at full speed for most games.

Is this legal?
A common misconception is that they're illegal. It's not. It's actually commercial ROMs which are illegal, unless you have made the ROM dump yourself, and not got it off a website (where it might not be the same game, it might be a different region/revision to yours). You probably won't get done for downloading things like full set ROMs, but whoever put it up on the internet probably will some day.

Why do N64 emulators have so many graphical errors?
HLE is a type of emulation where the emulator guesses the next actions, meaning that there may be graphical glitches. LLE doesn't have this, but is obviously going to be like playing bsnes on a under 1 GhZ processor in the accuracy core if used for N64 emulation.

Where can I get ROMs?
PDRoms. None of those are commercial games but these ones are legal ROMs! I can direct you to pdroms, but I can't direct you to a site offering free commercial ROMs, though.

100% Virus Free?
A very common question among newbies. Nearly all emulators are 100% virus free, the only one I am aware of that has malware is Project64 (since v2.0), which is rubbish anyway. PJ64 1.6 and older do not have this bundled malware.

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Discuss!

 

Emulation died for me right into the N64 console. There maybe graphical glitches, but for some reason, I never liked any N64 game. Mario Kart 64 may have been the most fun of any N64 games, though.

Let's not talk Mario64. It maybe widely praised, but personally, I thought it was a crap game. The reason being, when you venture into 3D environments, games begin to have a psychological effect on the gamers. For instance, on certain difficult levels, Mario falls into a deep abyss, or off a cliff, or slide more often than not. And b/c these 3D environments mimic reality, I've often experienced nightmares after playing Mario64.

 

I understand this is old, but, I have to say:

I fully agree with eatup - Mario 64 just doesn't cut it for me - perhaps that is because I grew up with 2D platformers and fighters, because I am generally not a big fan of 3D platformers, least Mario 64 - I didn't particularly care about the N64 despite some of its better releases - I had a PlayStation and it was fun.

Emulation is difficult to create post-SNES/MD although there are good attempt such as Dolphin or ePSXe, which I run on my Vista machine (and my MacBook Air), it's not ever going to be entirely accurate until one can build such powerful PCs to run - Higan, for example, taking many amounts of processing to work with good speed.

 

I just had a blast playing bits of NES Super Mario Bros 1&3, Tetris, Gyruss in a virtual machine.

If anyone is looking to game the oldies while keeping their system safe from malware inherent in some emulators, try running it in a Windows 98 virtual machine, which is what I did to play the games listed above.

Windows 98 is by far much faster than XP within a virtual machine, which is what you want to get the desired framerates/minimal input lag.

Emulators known to fully work in Windows 98 (after installing the last DirectX that runs on it): ZSNES, VirtuaNES.

An untouched (MSDN) ISO of Windows 98 can be found here:

winworldpc.com

 

Thanks.
How would I proceed to install it on VirtualBox? I don't really know how...

 

Windows 98 SE on winworldpc.com comes in 2 flavors, the OEM one and the Full Retail one, both of which are "untouched" original versions. One of them is bootable while the other needs a boot diskette, I forget which one.

Anyways, you install Win98 into VirtualBox the same way you would WinXP, by mounting the bootable ISO onto the virtual drive...

(Btw, the person who created my all-time favorite NES space shooter, Gyruss, is the same guy who invented StreetFighter...)

 

I'm definitely gonna check Gyruss mate
Also thanks for the info.

 

I just cycled between similar games on the NES and SNES. Don't know if it's just me, but I had much more fun playing the NES games. I enjoyed NES tetris much more than the SNES one. Sure, the SNES games had better graphics, but they weren't as fun to play...

 

My Windows XP Virtual Machine runs fine while the Windows 98 one takes like 10 mins to open the start menu when I click it. And yes, it's clean almost nothing on it.

 

Looking for the name/title of a really old NES puzzle platformer. I think the game was Japanese, though not 100% sure. Main character looks like C3PO's head. Uses head to smash boulders to make staircase to jump on, etc. Each level is a puzzle to get character to jump to a goal platform on the right. Smashing the wrong boulder/too many boulders/in wrong order causes character to be unable to reach the goal platform.

 

I'm going to forward this question to another community if I can so that I can help you out.
Sounds like an interesting game though.

 

Don't bother name is Moai-kun...

 

I actually use project 64 the only malware it had was chromatic which I easily removed. however i completely removed the 2.0 version and got an old version.