What Is The Best Nes Emulator Around?

[Dynamo]

Well, I'm kinda lost with FCEUltra considering it doesn't come with an FAQ to my knowledge, and no homepage exists for it seeing it ceased progress over a year ago.

 

How can I set up FCE Ultra to be as accurate as possible to a real NES? Is it possible to achieve a decent-looking full-screen mode with this emulator (or one at all?).

 

Oh, and seeing as I don't want to create another thread for this, and seeing as I recall you Agozer being quite proficient with SNES emulators (any of you guys can help as well) I have a couple of SNES-related emulator questions:

 

1) Why does the sound in ZSNES sound like it "skips" a beat every few seconds? To me its like the sound/music doesn't flow as smoothly as on a real SNES or even SPC's. When I mean skip I mean a barely-noticeable skip (which I notice). With the specs I have I can definitely run ZSNES at full speed (I use no filters, but I do use Double Buffering/VSync. Speaking of, what's the difference between the aforementioned two? Should I enable both?) with the highest sound quality/filters. Is it just me or is that damn pokey SNES sound hardware still a ***** to emulate accurately (Earthworm Jim 2......................)

 

2)How can I set up ZSNES to mimic a real SNES as close as possible?

 

 

Hope I'm not asking too much. Thanks.

[Agozer]

I think you mean Triple Buffering.

 

Originally, the SNES uses two buffers for displaying graphics; the front buffer and the back buffer. The front buffer has the graphics that you see on your screen. Why not use just one buffer then, since that's all you see? Using just one buffer that needs to be updated, cleared and redrawn every frame (60 or 50 times per second) would produce uneven animation and visible, serious flicker.

 

So, we take the back buffer as and aid. Now the hardware draws one frame to the front buffer and simultaneously draws the next frame on the back buffer, then the buffers switch places and they get redrawn. Rinse, lather, repeat. Smoother animation ahoy!

 

Triple buffering works exactly the same, but adds a third buffer into the mix, which smoothes out frame changes even more. Old graphics cards can only do single- or double-buffer rendering, hence why triple buffering doesn't work on them.

 

VSync (Wait for Vertical Sync) synchonizes the game (more specifically, front/back buffer drawing) with your monitor's refresh rate. This reduces "tearing" of the screen when the scene moves from top to bottom or left to right. Without VSync, your monitor updates the screen faster than the buffers can draw to the screen as they still update 60 or 50 times perr second.

 

Also, if you do not set your monitor's refresh rate to match the game's (60hz), VSync does not work right, since buffers update the screen at an interval that's not divisible by 60. Like, if your monitor does 75 or 85Hz natively.

 

I use both options, as they often back up one another.

 

Yes, the SPC700 is a biatch to emulate correctly, but I'm not sure what you mean by 'skipping'. btw, you might be able to fix EWJ2 a little by dropping the percent of execution is zsnesw.cfg to 70.

 

2) * 256x224, 320x224 or 512x224 resolution (a 4:3 resolution will do, resolution makes little difference anyway)

* Choose a DR mode, since it keeps the aspect ratio and doesn't stretch the image to fit the screen like the S modes.

* 32000Hz stereo sound with Gaussian interpolation

* No video filters of any kind

Edited November 3, 2005 by Agozer

[Dynamo]

Thanks for the help with ZSNES. Though I prefer stretching the image to full screen with every emulator so it could naturally fill up the whole screen and so I can play from slightly far away of the monitor (I've already been ******* my eyes for too long now, so why not try to curb any further damage?)

 

Back to FCEUltra, its driving me up a frickin' wall! The sound REFUSES to cooperate with me no matter what sound-to-buffer ratio I put it at (50ms, 40ms, 30ms, 70ms, 190ms, 200ms........nothing!). Could it really be that this emulator

is stressing my PC? Now that I go over my FCEU config, I think setting the "blit-skip" (thats another term for frame skip right?) at 0 might be making the sound choke. But my specs should be enough to handle the emu with no frame skip, right? And especially when it comes to precision based games (Punch-Out) frame skipping SUCKS. I hate it, which is why I only use emus up to Playstation 1 on my PC (which it can handle). I mean, the sound chokes while I'm playing Super Mario Bros.! I really don't want to give up on this emu, seeing its as good as it gets with NES emulation and is the "standard" format used for speed run movies. Can anyone help me?

[Agozer]

I use stretching in ZSNES as well.

 

I just tested FCEUltra, with Super Mario Bros., Very High quality sound, no other bell or whistles, windowed = no problems whatsoever.

[Dynamo]

Well, how did you set up your FCEUltra? You're killing me here!

[Dynamo]

**** it. Seriously, **** it. I banished the goddamn emulator. I tried EVERYTHING (including setting the maximum frame-skip value) to make that sound cooperate but it still turns to **** anyways. You have no idea how much that crackling and popping sound frustrated me, so much that i damn well buried that "delete" button on my keyboard when I erased the damn folder. Does this happen with you guys as well? I dunno whether to chalk this up to incompatibility with my PC (which is frickin' ridiculous, seeing as I have a common setup and more-than-adequate specs) or piss-poor sound programming. Very few emus nowadays have that obnoxious sound-to-buffer scale and function even better without it. Keep in mind that I play all of my emus in full-screen, not windowed.

 

Gah, I'm so frickin' pissed right now.

Edited November 4, 2005 by Dynamo

[Agozer]

Well, how did you set up your FCEUltra? You're killing me here!

I simply set the Sound quality to Very High, didn't use fullscreen, and fired up Super Mario Bros. Like I said earlier, no problems whatsoever.

 

I suggest you try Nestopia

 

EDIT: After reading your last rant, I tried it in fulscreen. No problems.

[Dynamo]

Guess my PC flat-out doesn't like FCE Ultra or it was just poorly programmed.

 

 

I see that the next best thing about FCEU is JNES. Is that good? I used to have Nestopia and it worked perfectly fine, but 2 things bugged me about it:

 

1) It didn't emulate Lagrange Point's (VRC7 chip) sound. Don't remember if it emulated Akumajou Densetsu's (VRC6 chip) sound as well.

 

2) Its default color palette looked crappy. And I'm not one to mess with palettes.

 

3)FCE Ultra is still the preferred format for game movies/speed runs.

[Agozer]

For the palette problem, you might want to try AspiringSquire's NES palette, it seems pretty damn accurate to me.

 

http://filespace.org/AspiringSquire/

[Dynamo]

I'm trying out the newest Nestopia out now, seems like it was rewritten from scratch since the last version I used. No problems yet (still doesn't emulate Lagrange Point's sound............) so I'll see if this emulator simply isn't all flash.

[Dynamo]

Well, I've been trying out the latest version of Nestopis for awhile and it rocks. Seems like it has really improved over the last version I was using which was from way back in 2003 (STILL no Lagrange Point VRC7 emulation though.........I mean c'mon, FCE Ultra & NNNesterJ emulate it! and both are pretty much dead!). Its functioned perfectly with all of the games I've tossed at it. Only qualms are:

 

1) Not compatible with the most common format of NES video: FCE Ultra's. The emu community really needs to sit down and decide on one format.

 

2)The aforementioned Lagrange Point emulation.

 

3) I dunno, but I can't find a way to stretch the screen to full screen. There are some set screen dimensions that can possibly be tweaked with but I dunno how to.

 

 

 

I dunno....................unless this emulator chokes on me this might be the end of my journey.