how bad was emulation during the early 00s? What about gamecube? Ps2? do you find yourself fiddling with old outdated ones to this day?
I started emulating in '01. Just NES and SNES (dial-up blocked me from PSX) and had no issue despite being a retarded middle schooler. I just wanted to play the games so it was great. There were screen tearing issues sometimes or the sound would go out of sync but I figured those out.
it was better than today
>>11483685they dont make soul like this fr
I was introduced to emulation in 1999 but didn't start using it regularly until a year later in 2000. Remember having so much fun with it. There were a handful of games I remember not working, like they'd just lock at the title screen or something. Captain Planet on NESticle and Demon's Crest on ZSNES as some examples. But the vast majority that I messed around with seemed fine.
I remember using some PS1 emulator that I forgot the name now, had to download plugins and mess around with options, but never looked as good as on console for some reason (and my monitor was CRT so it wasn't about that)I had ZSNES too and still use it to this dayI had some Genesis emulator that somehow turned my monitor off and on again for about 2 seconds when I opened it, I have no idea what that was about
>>11483685I remember downloading Sonic Advance + Visual Boy Adcance on a school computer around 2002 or 2003 and it blew me away that the emulation was pretty much perfect. The GBA was basically the Switch of its day, you could emulate current gen games perfectly and sometimes even play leaks way in advance of the street date.The N64 was ass though, constant audio stutter, numerous graphical glitches. The PSX was fine, but you had to juggle so many plugins (video plugin, audio plugin, input plugin, CD drive plugin, and so on) that it wasn't really worth it (I still emulated SOTN, Vagrant Story etc). Here's a blast from the past:http://www.pbernert.com/
>>11483685I was introduced to emulation in 2000 thanks to a CD my uncle gave me. It had NESticle with like, 200 NES games and a GB/GBC emulator with Pokemon Red/Blue and an untranslated Gold version. I remember sound emulation was off on old NES emulators and played using keyboard controls.Back in 2002 I played GBA games in Visual Boy Advance in half speed and didn't care. Used to try playing my copy of FFXII on PCSX2 in 2011 and thought it was a nightmare to set up on my PC. Honestly, we have it way better these days, but I just miss being a kid when emulation was brand new. It was something my friends and I really bonded over.
>>11483943>Back in 2002 I played GBA games in Visual Boy Advance in half speed and didn't careThe "didn't care" part is key. The games ran and we were happy, nobody cared about muh accuracy and nobody even noticed when things were inaccurate unless it really messed up the game. That's why byuu had to write an entire essay in the late 2000s to get people to understand why accuracy was a factor people should care about.
>>11483685It wasn't bad reallyThe ps2 and xbox are good emulators especially for that timeYour phone should be able to do most of these now but they were impressive for the time and technology has slowed down a lot since then
>>11483685zsnes discovered the secrets of frameskipping so every time I need to frameskip I coppy zsnes settings.
>>11483685Not perfect, but it played many popular games, at decently enough accuracy, with good speed. It got the job done, and it was interesting to see the faster-paced development, since many emulators were still beginning.
SNES and Genesis emulation was good enough to play virtually every popular game at full speed with minimal to no issues and PS1 was a bit of mess.
NES, SNES, GB, GBA, SMS, Megadrive and even PSX were all greatN64 required a more powerful computer however. I still played through OoT at half the speed and without analog.
>>11483685hilariously enough, emulation was "better" because we didn't care about accuracy yet.n64 was almost perfect. retards just didn't know you could dl plugins.saturn was always alright. many people thought you couldn't emulate saturn and that mindset stayed for awhile.ps2 stagnated due to shitty forum mods and it fucked ps2 for years. basically if an issue didn't exist in software mode, they didn't care to fix it in hardware mode.also they would twist words and if they found out you "pirated" or downloaded a game, they'd lock the thread and issue closed.xbox took forever to emulate and wasn't a thing.dolphin was literally magic and kept improving.gb/gba/ds all existed while their respective systems were alive and probably hurt sales.literally everyone pirated pokemon.new pokemon ds games day 1.
I played FFX on PCSX2 in like 2009 at full speed probably 95% of the time. I remember having to use a beta build for the cutscene at the end of Home. Otherwise I was fairly mind-blown at how functional and simple it was for the time
>>11483685I've been playing emulators since at least 2001/2002 and the only issue was znes not being able to emulate certain games like super mario RPG because it would freeze on the star pieces screen but there were other ones to use so it wasn't much of a problem
>>11483685I remember emulating a Japanese copy of Pokémon Gold months before it released in Europe.Me and my brother got to just before the lake of rage. We found a weird Mankey in the grass and didn't know what was up. We couldn't find another.Years later, we found out it was a shiny.
>>11484123>saturn was always alright. many people thought you couldn't emulate saturn and that mindset stayed for awhile.SSF was not a good emulator. It took until 2016 to get decent Saturn emulation. SSF was an unstable, buggy mess. It’s outrageous to claim Saturn emulation was “alright” in the early 2000s.
>>11484359>SSF was not a good emulator. It took until 2016 to get decent Saturn emulation. SSF was an unstable, buggy mess. It’s outrageous to claim Saturn emulation was “alright” in the early 2000s.yeah you didn't put the effort in.
>>11483685How bad was it? It was fucking GREAT you could play tons of games for free. Are you fucking retarded?Only later on was there any effort toward 100% compatibility. The whole point was to play a huge wealth of games even if the emulation was a bit janky. Imagine playing a game that you could never beat in the arcade because it was a quarter sucker and it cheated / was cheap, for free? It was like taking the money you were tricked into spending at the arcade and SUCKING those quarters back out of the machines, retroactively.
>>11483905ePSXe was kinda shit back then. Duckstation completely blows it out of the water.
i tried playing ff4 on zsnes and the first cave was pure white and i thought that was how it eased meant to be. Couldnt se e anything
It worked well enough if you wanted to play games from a generation ago but other than GBA contemporary systems were not well emulated. Even stuff like N64/PSX was mostly fine just a bit cumbersome to set up.
>>11483685I was just happy it existed, period. I think the first time I emulated anything was around 1997, when my older brother discovered ZSNES (I think, it was back when it had no GUI) and downloaded DBZ Super Butoden 2, but the music didn't work at all IIRC. I didn't get really into emulation until around 2000/2001, though, when emulators became a bit better and were easier to set up and use (except for MAME, as usual). I had a blast playing the Final Fantasies, though I had all kinds of problems with transparencies not working and the sound emulation being ass at that time. Again, though, I was just happy to be able to play these games for free.
>>11484123>n64 was almost perfect. retards just didn't know you could dl pluginsIn the early 2000's? Fat fucking chance. Sure, Mario and Zelda and some of the other common popular games ran fine (as long as you used the right plugins, as you say), but beyond that you started running into trouble, requiring you to try other combinations of plugins, settings, or another emulator altogether. If you were fine with juggling all that bullshit to get games outside the usual fare, sure, it was "ok", but far from "almost perfect". It wasn't until around 2010 that you could more or less stick with a single emulator and plugin combo and play most games decently well without needing to fuck around with it, and it's only been in the past five years that almost every game just works.
>>11484453decades ago whenever someone made this argument, i always asked what game.it was always paper mario and they didn't dl the right plugin.
>>11484453Kirby 64 had UI glitches till 2018. N64 emulation was only good for a few titles like you said.
People love shitting on ZSNES because it isn't (nor was it) accuracy focused, but the real ones were playing shit like the Super Bomberman series, GWED, DBZ:HD, SD3, even the fuckin weird ass Yuu Yuu Hakusho fighting games back in the day on Zbattle. Shit was better than modern netcode since the packet transfer was so much smaller.
>>11484463Sure, by 2010 or so you could just use Project64 1.6, download Glide64 and Azimer HLE, and most games people give even the most remote shit about would most likely work with minimal issues, but again, I'm referring to the early 2000's. It wasn't until around 2006 that Glide64 gained HWFB capabilities and so became truly worth using over the likes of Jabo and Rice. And that's just the graphics. Audio and speed issues were rife as well, with some games requiring an older or alternative version of Project64, some needing Jabo's audio plugin while others worked better with Azimer's, and at other times you straight-up needed to grab either 1964 or Mupen64. Shit, even as late as 2012 you STILL had to do this for some of the less popular games, as can be seen in this page:http://bhemuhelp.unaux.com/n64mgcl/N64ConfigList.html?i=1I'm frankly glad we're past that shit. Mupen+ParaLLEl plugins, while not 100% perfect, actually is "almost perfect", and greatly simplifies things over how things used to be back then.
>>11484514Gained HWFB capabilities that people without a Voodoo 4/5 could use, that is, since it technically gained those a few years earlier.
It was good for the most part for consoles that weren't 5th gen yet. A couple of them were still ways to go like the Sega CD (nobody didn't really play Sonic CD until the late 00s on Gens for example). It was still the best option despite some flaws (like the Sega Genesis sound being pretty bad until Kega and even then it's still inaccurate on all genesis emulators to this day). The only consoles that I felt like I eventually had to throw the towel in and buy a console + games for because the emulation wasn't there were the n64 (still true to this day), Saturn (which was pretty bad until the late 2010s), and og Xbox (still bad).
can we all take a moment and appreciate the advancements being made to the emulation scene? not only are we able run to 7th gen consoles, the switch but it is also possible to emulate an entire win98 machine with 86box.
>>11483685I still use znes. it works and I have no issues with it at all so yup
>>11484529still cant play xbox on my phone though :/ the only thing i need to be complete
>>11483685GameCube wasn't even out until 2001. That's like asking how good PS5 emulation is today
>>11483685It was pretty imperfect, but overall rather playable. I never had a SNES or Genesis so I didn't really know that some sound was emulating correctly or that some timing was off in places, stuff like that, but aside from some games just not working at all for whatever reason, I had a great time playing all these super cool games I had missed out on, and for free.>>11483694Based. Emulating 8-bit and 16-bit games was quite popular with kids my age group in those days, everyone thought it was so cool that you could play all these amazing games for free.>>11483978Some people are autistic as fuck about the accuracy (I don't really mind minute discrepancies), but emulating became objectively better with time because it became more accurate and thus more playable. Some games would just not run at all in emulators because devs didn't know how to make them work yet.This picture exists because N64 emulation used to be completely dogshit once upon a time (and pretty shoddy for a while longer), it's not like today when you can run it great.
>>11484581>That's like asking how good PS5 emulation is todayNothing to emulate lmao, any given game that's on PS5 usually has an official port on PC already, it's like the old "PS3 has no games!" memes on steroids.
>>11483685ZSNES was hackey and inaccurate, but ran on dirt and it never made the games less fun. NES emulation was pretty solid, had its own slider of accurate to optimized emulators.Genesis was pretty great.GameboyEtc ...PSX emulation was pretty new around 2000/2001. Connectix VGS was impressive as was bleemcast. I don't remember what year it got good tho. 2006 or 7 maybe. >What about gamecube? Ps2?Lol
>>11484429You hit 1 or 2 or something and turned off the bg tiles.
>>11484485This. I wish some modern emulator would focus on speed and compatibility hacks, damn accuracy (within reason)
the early days was pretty badpc cpus couldn't handle the speed and colorsnesticle was a huge breakthrough and things came pretty fast after that up to ps2.
Most 2D stuff was able to be ran fairly well, but 3D emulation was very much in its infancy.Dolphin and PCSX2 were just starting up and weren't the greatest, especially PCSX2 which was pretty garbage. Same with PS1 and N64 emulation which were both laggy plugin hells.Some people really don't know how good we have it when it comes to emulation these days.
>>11484529It's honestly crazy just how much progress has been made. Dolphin/PCSX2/simple64/Duckstation are pretty much plug and play and play anything you throw at them, not even counting how much progress stuff like PSP, PS3/4 and Xbox related consoles have made.
we didn't need to emulate because we had games worth playing
>>11483685I mostly played Aeon Genesis SNES JRPGs where microissues don't really add up to a bad experience. I haven't installed zsnes in anything in as long as I can remember. I remember being impressed with how well Kessen or Kessen 2 ran in PCSX2 on my 2003 PC build in like 2008 but I didn't really dig into it much more for reasons I don't remember. I remember running epsxe for PSX games.
>>11484849lollmaoThe emulated games were worth playing, because I could go back and forth between all these cool old games that I missed out on, those I already had, and then cool new games.
>>11484739We had that going on with Yuzu vs. Ryujinx in Switch emulators.
>>11484940Fair enough. I haven't tried those.
Emulation in the early 00s was great.We didn't give a shit about accuracy or features or whatever. It was great because we were all huddled around a PC playing Dragon Ball Z: Hyper Dimension and cheering the fights on as we took turns.
>>11484405Show us a video of SSF in motion on 2004 era hardware. Come on, do it. Show everyone how great it was.
>>11483685I got introduced to emulation in 2001 with Gens and PJ64, and I infected several computers as a kid trying to find roms with Internet Explorer 6.Good times.
>>11485056ZSNES and Gens were mine. Playing Sonic on the computer and trying the SNES library for the first time was pretty cool desu.
>>11485067I found ZSNES shortly afterwards. One of my core memories was playing Bart's Nightmare and Super Mario Kart for the first time on the last day of school in 4th grade. Bart's Nightmare is still one of the strangest games I've ever played.
>>11485080One of mine is a new kid that joined school in 2nd grade that I became friends with showing me ZSNES running Kirby Super Star on his family PC, which was my very first experience with emulation. Felt like I was looking at alien entertainment or something my mind expanded so wide.
>>11483685I started using ZSNES at v 0.400, when it was still a DOS program and the UI was a simple box on a screen.The biggest issues were the inaccuracies in wind noises, no transparencies without SciTech DIsplay Doctor or a VBE 3.0 compatible card. I remember buying a Voodoo Banshee for $80 and it was the greatest day of my life being able to have ZSNES transparencies and being able to have UltraHLE run Mario 64 at a semi-decent speed. Shit was so cash.
>>114839412025 and N64 emulation is still ass. They still can't figure out the timing issues.
>>11485092What we have right now with simple64 and other ParaLLEl-based emulation is more then good enough.
>>11485092You can count on one hand the games that are affected by timing issues to the point of unplayability, and they're not exactly hidden gems in any case. Sure, more well-known games have some problems, usually related to cutscenes, but they're relatively minor and don't significantly impact the gameplay itself.
>>11485098>>11485105Just comes down to your standards for what constitutes good emulation I guess.
>>11485107Don't get me wrong. The OoT ending cutscene's audio desyncing bothers me massively and I wish they'd fix the timing issues just for that alone because it mars what's an otherwise masterful sequence, and I guess I'd like to be able to do some of the lag-based exploits on DK64 sometime (though some versions of ares and simple64 do have its timings down pat from what I recall), but outside of that the games are fully playable with no actual problems. It's really just mediocre shit like Knife Edge that's fucked beyond belief. Just like Air Strike Patrol on SNES, there'll be a bit of fanfare once they get it fully working, only for no one to actually sit down and play it.
>>11485117Speaking of the OoT ending cutscene decsync, I wonder if they could imitate what the NSO release does to account for the more stable framerate
>>11485126What does the NSO version do?
>>11485127Dunno exactly, I just know the audio cues match much better than any other emulator I've seen. I think they may have adjusted the scene length in some instances, either that or they actually have accurate timing or close to it. https://youtu.be/F2Pp2qU3QWI?si=Uq8P8idrlSnvDfCw&t=850
>>11483685> how bad was emulation during the early 00s?I thought it was pretty awesome. That’s when I discovered MAME and all the other emulators.
>>11483685>how bad was emulation during the early 00s?Systems like N64, PS2, Dreamcast ran like shit with games encountering issues at every corner. PS2 especially was demanding for the long time, Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure 2 had graphical problems (the most notorious one with King Boom Boo's shadow being invisible).Everything else, I believe, worked in near-perfect or acceptable condition. Played NES, SNES, GBA a lot and rarely had an issue (only with games that required special mappers/patches to work properly, WarioWare: Twisted badly needs another gyro patch nowadays)
Maybe it's just a coincidence but it really feels to me that the early 00s Bleem! trial kicked open the door for emulation. Once emulation was officially legal it sparked a lot more interest from developers as it became a legit field.
>>11485208Bleem! definitely had a hand in making emulation well known among more people then just the underground PC crowd that were already in the weeds. And yeah it winning the case against Sony pretty much made emulation bloom.
>>11485208Bleem was absolutely a big part of that. Another was NESticle and Genecyst allowing (very relatively speaking), working and smooth emulation at not too heavy system requirements. Very rough for the first few versions but they kept improving.
>>11484681>N64 emulation used to be completely dogshit once upon a time (and pretty shoddy for a while longer), it's not like today when you can run it greatN64 emulation was shit for such a long time that a lot of people still think it's shit (but again, a lot of retards still insist on using PJ64)
so when will they figure out xbox huge?
>>11485242ParaLLEl pretty much rocketed N64 emulation from plugin hell to plug and play.The people that still use Project64 because they don't like change can just wallow in their ancient emulator.
>>11485245xemu can play many games and is actively worked on. Just download it and the files it needs to run and test an Xbox ISO with it.
>>11485246Crazy to think that ParaLLEl came from RetroArch's creator deciding to try his hand at creating a super accurate N64 video renderer just because he happened to be working with a lot of Vulkan stuff and wanted to see how far he could get with compute shaders. It's the kind of thing you only used to see in the early days of emulation, namely emudevs making magic happen just to see if they could.
>>11485289Yeah the whole deal with that was lightning in a bottle for sure. Can't imagine the N64 scene without it now.
By mid-00s there were emulators on fucking phones, I remember playing NES games which wasn't painful because my phone had buttons.
>>11485294And he's doing it again with PS2 now. Granted, it's not as accessible at the moment, and perhaps the need is not as high since PCSX2 has matured enough that most games just work now with the current renderers, but it's still cool to see.
>>11484359>SSF was not a good emulator. It took until 2016 to get decent Saturn emulation. SSF was an unstable, buggy mess. It’s outrageous to claim Saturn emulation was “alright” in the early 2000s.You are probably confusing it with Girigiri-gav, which was the only playable Saturn emulator in the early 2000s. SSF was... it could run games as early as 2001, but no machine was fast enough to do anything more than 3-4 fps. And it had no sound.It was only in the later half of the 2000s that it got sound emulation, and computers got fast enough to run it. I don't remember the exact version (it got updated every week at one point), but I'm fairly sure I was doing complete playthroughs on it by 2006-7, either on an Athlon 64 X2 or a Cuo 2 Duo.
>>11485302Oh he's making a new PS2 emulator? Would have to be pretty great to overshadow how very quickly amazing PCSX2 became over the past couple years.
>>11484736>I don't remember what year it got good tho.2007 with pSX and Xebra.
>>11483685First played SNES games on ZSNES around 98ish. Was decent, had a lot of transparency issues with some games. I used to have to turn off layers if a game had something like fog or clouds. I only kept to NES and SNES majority of the time. Genesis emulators were pretty bad at the time so I never bothered with them after a while.
>>11485315Wasn't Gens pretty much the first "good" Genesis emulator
>>11484123Most people just assumed emulation was not for anything past the 16 bit era.
>>11485308Well, not a whole new emulator, just a new graphics renderer base on Vulkan compute shaders similar to what he did with N64. It's even named almost the same (ParaLLEl-GS). It's still in development, so there's no official releases, but there's compiled builds of standalone PCSX2 with ParaLLEl-GS floating around (ask around on /emugen/), or alternatively, you can try RetroArch's LRPS2 core through the Core Updater, which already has it as one of the graphics renderers.
>>11485318Interesting. Hope I hear good things in the future,
>>11485316Honestly don't remember when they finally became useful. I just tried playing Maximum Carnage on a couple and nothing ever worked out right at all.
>>11485316Gens always sucked, it's only claim to fame was that it was in development for a long time and eventually became more compatible than KGen and then it added semi-working Sega CD and 32x emulation. And it got open sourced, so it was what everybody used for stuff like TAS videos, every time I see a video that has the PSG channel using the Gens "Improved PSG" I want to gouge my ears out.Kega Fusion was the first "good" Genesis emulator.
>>11485332I mean good in a relative sense. Kega Fusion was the first great Genesis emulator.
>>11485082>running Kirby Super Star on his family PCabsolute chad
>>11483685I started emulating games in.... '02? It was fine for 16bit stuff. I was amazed I could play GBA games as they were still being released.
did the xemu devs finally their shit emulator by implementing the vulkan renderer?
>>11486236finally fix**
>>11483685It wasn't bad at all, compatibility was all over the place but for the mainstream games whatever emulators we had worked well.
>>11483685It wasn't bad, that's why it became popular. Of course it's only gotten better, especially in QOL. For the most popular games, emulation hasn't changed much in 25 years.
>>11486407RetroArch really changed everything. Before, you would save state and accidentally softlock yourself 18 hours into an RPG. Now, you can "Undo Save State" or rewind to the exact frame you fucked up. The next revolution will be in patch/mod management.
I started dabbling in emulation in my teens in the mid 00's when my cousin came over one day and brought a usb flash stick loaded with Project 64 and Smash. Literally blew my mindI stuck mostly with NES, Gameboy, and SNES games because they weren't as taxing to download on Netzero. Usually when I got the itch for N64, I'd ring my cousin and he'd download it for me.Was really fun exploring the various libraries for the consoles, especially when I found bootleg games like MK3 for the NES
>>11485049I think a lot of advancement in emulator accuracy was driven by home-brew coders who got frustrated with the state of emulation and their code not working.
Emulation wasn't that bad in the early 2000s.>t. was playing NES and SNES roms on my shitty gateway PC in 2001/2002
>>11483685It was pretty bad...
My first experience with emulation was in 1999 with a CD containing MAME32 and like 10,000 arcade roms that a family friend gave to my dad who shared it with me. Even if 3D emulation was pretty barebones around the early 00s having that CD plus Gens and VisualBoyAdvance was pretty nice.
>>11485092>2025 and N64 emulation is still assThis comment is insane.
>>11485235Based Bloodlust Software
>>11483685I can only give my own perspective as I emulated GBA and N64 back in the day including PS2 in the early and late 2010's emulation was primitive. N64 worked for only two or three games. It's much better today but I think the Decompilation effort is 10X better than trying to do accurate n64 emulation. As for GBA and GB it did mostly well on the simpler games and Pokémon. But really it was nothing to write home about. PCSX2 was very demanding until the early 2010's and that is finally when Hardware mattered than Software. Dolphin literally is one the best Emulators that rose to prominence due to great compatibility and Easy to Understand UI. It was very similar to the GBA Emulators in that it was easier to understand and use with very few headaches. A lot of things back then were a ton of trial and error. I did not get back into the emulation scene until the mid 2010's due to using a Laptop that was just underpowered. Until I bought my own Gaming Desktop PC and had an idea to give everything a shot. PCSX2 became way better and I am very very happy with the UI overhaul it had, PS1 with Duckstation really took off. I would say the older Emulators are fun to look at. But today's emulation scene is so good I hardly would go back.
>>11485092Anon it's better to just wait for Decompilations of all the N64 Library. At this point it's just not possible to emulate N64 games really well and have an easy UI and to have controller compatibility that is simple.
>>11487321Simple64 works really well and has the simplest interface you could possibly ask for. RMG is a close second, only being slightly more complicated since it still uses multiple plugins, which may potentially confuse some, whereas simple64 did away with them altogether so there's no fucking anything up on first booting up a game. Control configuration is good and easy, too, and allows you to have multiple profiles if you don't have an actual N64 pad.Not saying decomps aren't great, by the way. They're obviously more performant since they're running natively, often have lots of cool options built-in, and some games really benefit from them (such as Perfect Dark, with KB+M controls). I just think you're really underselling how good N64 emulators have become. Let's face it, many, many games are years away from being decompiled, but are readily playable right now with no fuzz.
>>11485302>the need is not as high since PCSX2 has matured enough that most games just work now with the current renderersI mean, most games work perfectly with software rendering and I'm not against using it, but early PS2 titles like Ridge Racer 5 use field rendering which makes the game look like a shimmery, jaggy mess even on real hardware. RR5 also still has visual glitches in hardware mode so software is still the only option for now. Hope we'll get an option to make the game look better soon
I was 11 and not autistic, I didn't notice most issues and the ones that I did where a non issue to me, I was playing the entire SNES library for free.
>>11487321>DecompilationsWhat about recompilations though? Like the one for Majora's Mask, the guy said he could automate most of the process and make PC ports of other N64 games, but then he disappeared.I wish he made a Conker recomp at the very least. That game emulates like ass.
>>11483685For 8/16-bit systems, emulators of the time were more than serviceable. I don't think any of them were cycle accurate, but they got the job done in 95% of cases.>>11483905>I had some Genesis emulator that somehow turned my monitor off and on again for about 2 seconds when I opened it, I have no idea what that was aboutMight've been Gens switching display modes. I remember it used to insist on running in 16-bit color.>>11486862Insanely true, you mean. We're still not at the same level with N64 emulation that we were at with NES/SNES 20 years ago.
>>11488026>>I had some Genesis emulator that somehow turned my monitor off and on again for about 2 seconds when I opened it, I have no idea what that was about>Might've been Gens switching display modes. I remember it used to insist on running in 16-bit color.That was probably Kgen or Genecyst, those had full screen menus similar to ZSNES, but you couldn't run them in a window at all.
>>11488026>We're still not at the same level with N64 emulationWhat do you want? Every Mupen64 + ParaLLEl fork out there has a similar experience: great out-of-the-box, but not perfect. How is it any different from NES/SNES 20 years ago?
>>11488103>Every Mupen64 + ParaLLEl fork out there has a similar experience: great out-of-the-box, but not perfect.Then why is RMG only marginally better than the emulators I tried back in 2006?> How is it any different from NES/SNES 20 years ago?NES/SNES emulators were brain-dead simple 20 years ago, and would attempt to run any arbitrary ROM you threw at them. Didn't matter if it was a hack, homebrew, etc.
>>11483685still use Kega Fusion and Zsnes to this day.If I want accuracy, I will use my flashcarts on my actual hardware, on my actual CRT.
>>11488145>Kega FusionHow? It's made in DirectDraw, which is a dead API that Windows has to emulate (poorly). So you're literally emulating an emulator.>ZsnesOh nvm, it's gotta be a bait post.
>>11485087I remember that version, its impossible to find screenshots of that versiom because Google sucks and Pinterest madenthings even worse.
>>11488017The advantage of decomps is that since they open up the source code, they're no longer dependent on any one person, anybody motivated can take up the work
>>11488150Works on my machine.
>>11488164I mean, it will work, but it will drop frames as the DDraw legacy support in W10 and later is not very efficient. You'll need a wrapper like dgVoodoo2.https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kega_Fusion
>>11488174What do you suggest as a better Genesis (+32X and CD) emulator?
>>11488150>It's made in DirectDraw, which is a dead API that Windows has to emulate (poorly). Download it and see for yourself. Works just fine.>Oh nvm, it's gotta be a bait post.Why would it be bait? Comfiest UI, and again, it works just fine.
>>11488113>NES/SNES emulators were brain-dead simple 20 years ago, and would attempt to run any arbitrary ROM you threw at them. Didn't matter if it was a hack, homebrew, etc.Is that what your gripe is? That modern N64 emulators sometimes have issues running shitty old ROM hacks made for Project64 with shoddy HLE graphics plugins?
>>11483685It was good until exclusive ps1, gamecube etc.
>>11488026>Insanely true, you mean. We're still not at the same level with N64 emulation that we were at with NES/SNES 20 years ago.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETNiMHxu8xw
>>11488175Use Bizhawk
>>11488316No, but an emulator's willingness to run arbitrary ROMs is a good metric to judge its worthiness by. Unfortunately, we're still at the point where N64 emulators have to rely on databases of recognized games in order to run them somewhat properly.
>>11488380That's a strange standard to judge an emulator by. Those emulators didn't require a database because they baked in the hacks and workarounds needed to run various games into the emulator itself, and since they were comparatively simple, games typically only needed a tweak or two, and whatever ran would run and whatever wouldn't, well, wouldn't.Meanwhile, getting N64 games to run was historically more complicated and needed a LOT more settings tweaks, so emudevs formed a database with the necessary per-game tweaks to get games to run on their emulators, usually for things like CounterFactor settings for proper timing and sometimes GameShark codes to get around certain issues like the OoT Start submenu taking forever to open with the shitty old graphics plugins of the day.Nowadays, as the emulators have gotten more accurate, the amount of per-game settings have been reduced drastically and the database is far less crucial. Simple64 has actually gotten rid of the vast majority of, if not all, per-game hacks, tweaks and workarounds. You can get rid of the mupen64plus.ini database file and games will work just fine, only throwing up an error in the log about not recognizing the game if you care to look. RMG still uses the regular untweaked Mupen64Plus core, which still uses CounterFactor for timing, so the database is admittedly more needed there. It also comes with GLideN64, which also requires its own database since it's for the most part still a hacky HLE plugin, whereas ParaLLEl-RDP does not.In any case, an emulator being able to run whatever isn't always a good thing. Recall that ZSNES's inaccuracies allowed for ROM hacks that don't work on real hardware and modern SNES emulators. It wasn't until recently that options were added to SNES9X that make it capable of running most of those hacks.
>>11488512My personal standard is that it played everything I wanted it to, with online multiplayer support and other neat features like binding macros and other superfluous shit like filters/sprite layer toggles/cheat search and generation/extremely cozy GUI. Nobody gave a fuck about the accuracy of shit like wind sfx when playing games from only a few years prior on even the shittiest grocery store family PC with a bunch of extra frills the original consoles didn't have. Early emulation was a lot more about "holy shit this actually works!" and "oh shit this random game from japan that I can't understand at all is fucking awesome!" and less about checksum autism and "akshully this animation is 3 frames faster than its supposed to be."I swear people forget to play games to have fun most of the time now.
>>11483685I'm sure it was bad compared to today, but I was happy to have something. A game like Mortal Kombat was better on emulator from the early days of Mame. Every official port they've done has been shitty.
>>11488547Ok, so your gripe is more with the priorities of modern emudevs and their emulators, then? Well yeah, sadly we're no longer in the good ol' days when emudevs were more akin to demoscene dudes just making cool shit to see if they could anymore (although that is more or less how ParaLLEl even came around - the dude behind it had literally no history with N64 emulation and just wanted to make something cool using Vulkan compute shaders because he finds the technology interesting, and it just so happened to revolutionize N64 emulation). I too admittedly miss the "soul" put into those little programs. Modern emulators are still great at actually playing games, though, and they have almost all of those options you mention on top of that anyway, save for the fact that UIs have gotten more standardized and sterile. Development autism aside, if your goal is to just play games and have fun, they're as good as they've ever been.
>>11488948Oh yeah, there's absolutely nothing wrong with modern emulators from a stand point, in terms of power and functionality they're (mostly) the best they've ever been. My personal gripe is more with how old emulators get looked down on by the weirdest form of purists I've ever seen in any game community, when all the old shitlord champ emulators like Meka, RockNES, Nesticle, ePSXe and so on get shit on regularly when they did the job just fine for a very long time. ZSNES in particular especially since SNES9X wasn't exactly very far behind it, and most people at the time still preferred ZSNES due to stuff like Zbattle even if it was the inferior emulator on a technical level. Priorities were just a lot different back then, and that difference is more about the developers and users than it is about the emulators themselves. I'll use stuff like bizhawk for convenience with some systems every now and then regardless of my nostalgia for the tried and true ol' shitty champions.
>>11488970The only old emulators I don't look back on all too fondly despite using them a lot are ePSXe and Project64 precisely due to the fact that they didn't always just work, and then you had to deal with the plugin hell. This was especially bad with PS1, given I didn't get broadband until 2004, so downloading games took forever on dialup, only for me to encounter an issue. Everything else, while still giving me some issues here and there and some inaccuracies actually bothering me somewhat, I salute because fucking hell, I was playing NES, SNES and Genesis games for free, and you couldn't ask for anything better than that.
>>11488996There's a lot of stuff I forgot about from back then that was pretty ahead of its time, like SPC players for extracting and generating loops of ingame music tracks outside the emulator, or those "demo" recordings you could do with ZSNES back before shit like youtube. I still remember recording combos in GWED and trading them with my friends. A lot of those features aren't even necessary in modern emulators, but they were really cool low tech ways of getting game related media we kinda take for granted now.I will admit that ePSXe wasn't the best example compared to a lot of the others, but the ps1/N64 era in general is where plug in hell pretty much took root, like you mentioned (and where I stopped following along as much for that reason.) I was still using an early ps1 with a goldfinger at the time, so that might be why I didn't have as many frustrating episodes with trying to get things to work in ePSXe. I didn't really use it as often once I got a CDR drive so I guess I was spared in that regard.But yeah, I guess my point is that what makes an emulator "good" in my opinion is its historical impact and its impact in terms of things like accessibility and improvement of the end user experience through adding new features and innovations more than things like accuracy. Accuracy is great and all, but it feels more like "we can't find ways of improving the experience itself outside of making it as close to console perfect as possible" or the return to superficial shit like generating achievements for old games or a bizarre obsession with shit like crt shaders. When you think about how much of a game changer being able to play games from within the last 5 years, online on a 56k connection with less than 100 ping with people on other continents and neither of you needed to purchase a single thing you didn't already have all in the 90's, that level of innovation just isn't there anymore. I'd argue the closest we have now are projects like recomps.
>>11489020...Excluding stuff like rough compatibility actually being addressed when it was an issue in the past, like said plug in hell being less prevalent of course. That shit's great.
>>11489020Yeah, it's just like you said. It felt pretty awesome just how advanced things felt in emulation back in the day, SPC is a good example that I often used. Plugin hell was real for more advanced (read: 3D) systems. It made running a game satisfying but also very annoying at times, depending on which game it was.Maybe it's because we seem to have experienced the same history of emulation as it happened, but I also agree with you on how the obsession with accuracy or achievements and shaders feels stagnant and superficial compared to the huge leap emulation felt like back in the day.
>>11489047The strangest thing about the accuracy and shader obsessions is that I feel like they're from a younger generation trying to ironically emulate the actual experience of playing the games at the time, as they're the most superficial yet "straightforward" aspects of recreating the experience. After all, how can you be more accurate to something than recreating it as exactly as possible?The problem is that for most of us, it was more about the experience than the perfections. In an age where ports between platforms were often wildly different, we never though as much about those imperfections and variations, and things like video guides and longplays weren't really a thing. The most you'd generally have would be in person discussions (and spoilers,) strategy guides and as time went on the dawn of online walkthroughs. But all of that stuff was a LOT more avoidable than it is now.The thing that seems to escape a lot of the younger generations is that they will never be able to accurately relive what it was like to play the classics when they were new and unique, and its kinda sad if I'm honest. They will never be able to experience what playing Super Bomberman 5 with random people thousands of miles away on the family computer after school was like, complete with needing to abruptly end the session because your dad needed to make a phone call so you'd switch back to your first playthrough of a game like Secret of Evermore. Or maybe even the dejap translation of FFV where you'd try your friend's theory on learning L5Death in world 1. There was so much more to those experiences than having the pitch of a noise perfectly match the original cartridge, especially since some of those games we didn't even have access to cartridges of in the first place.I wish there was a way for them to actually experience everything warts and all, I really do.
>>11483685I recall being a kid in the early 2000's, but I grew up with the SEGA Mega Drive and loved the thing. It broke eventually and I was quite bummed by it, at around that same time my dad started using Ubuntu in our home PC, and my sister, who was more into technology than I was at the time, installed the Gens emulator on it for us, and I had a blast.Good times.
I was always a PC gamer first even in the '90s so I was always very interested in "better than the real thing" emulation, just the same way e.g. everyone playing Morrowind in 2025 is going to crank the settings and resolution well beyond what was possible on an ideal 2002 rig. Although even I knew pretty much nothing helps 2D games besides maybe NES anti-flicker and anti-slowdown.I always thought accuracy sperging was just for speedrun trannies, but it hardly matters anymore to take the hit and skip ZSNES.
>>11483685I started in 98 and it was fine. I don’t remember PS2 or GC emulation even being a thing until the 2010’s. If it was, you couldn’t just find the games on any rom site like you could now. Hell, DS emulation was literally just Super Princess Peach worked and that was it for years.Also I had dial up until 2004, so Chrono Trigger took an hour to download, but once I got good net, I got into arcade emulation and was playing new KOF games when they came out in NeoRageX. Good times.
>>11488026>Might've been Gens switching display modes. I remember it used to insist on running in 16-bit color.Oh god, I didn't need to remember that. Yeah, another reason why Gens sucked.
>>11488174>I mean, it will work, but it will drop framesIt works fine without dropping frames over here. Win10.pretty sure one of the last versions was just to have some win7/10 specific stuff added to it to fix just that problem.
>>11488017> That game emulates like ass.Unfortunately it is emulating perfectly. it just runs like ass even on console.
>>11488512I use RMG but Bomberman 64 suffers from issues of slowdown and the Controller feels hacked together and slows down it's less worse than PJ64 but still suffers from some issues. I am going to try simple64. My other issue with N64 emulation is sadly the mic with Hey You Pikachu not working unless you have a VCU Mic. I wish there was a workaround.
>>11489047Accuracy is important, but i would argue that Netplay is way essential than anything. I think a lot of emulators forget that part of the fun of these games was playing with random people online.
>>11489548You're in luck, simple64 has VRU emulation, so you can play Hey You Pikachu with it just fine.
>>11489558Will be trying it out. I have been waiting 30 years for this lol.
>>11485087Post a screenshot
>>11485249Xemu is pretty good so far but I definitely wouldn't bank on being able to play much just yet. Ive had good luck on a couple games, I played Shenmue 2, Jet Set Radio Future and Red Dead Revolver all the way through with basically no issues but then a ton of other games have severe graphical issues and/or unbelievably bad performance. Im not complaining though, its certainly better than literally nothing like how Xbox emulation used to be not all that long ago
>>11489621Exactly. It also recently got a new version as of a couple days ago so dev is on track.It's probably gonna be a while before xemu is as just werks as something like PCSX2 currently is now but give it time. They're most likely just making sure the big games that everyone wants to play like Jet Set Radio Future work properly before making sure more obscure games work.
>>11488948You're talking to a different anon, but they've made some good points. I'm the guy who brought up running arbitrary ROMs, and my logic behind that is basically that a good emulator should be able to run games the way the actual hardware does, i.e. without any specialized tweaks or hacks needed to get specific games to run. I think I'll give Simple64 another look. It might just be the N64 emulator I'm looking for.
NeorageX ran NEO GEO games full speed on low spec computers in the first years of the 21st century. Pretty fucking impressive then and now - the RAGE team pulled off the impossible and it helped the whole thing was in asm to optimize speed. Nothing in emulation will ever impress me as much as Neorage did, the most expensive, biggest cart games for free!
>how bad was emulation during the early 00s? It wasn't. We were out of the jank age of HOLY SHIT I AM PLAYING A NINTENDO GAME ON MY COMPUTER (with a fuckton of glitches) that was considered acceptable in the 90s. Arcade emulation was actually better than it is today for retards, because you could download games from any rom site and run them in MAME and they just worked.
>>11491352Emulation was already pretty solid in the late 90s.
>>11485235>>11487260Didn't those guys become industry pros?
If you want to get an idea of how bad emulation was in those years just boot up a somewhat old version of ZSNEShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq7_6R_cvgw
For me it's playing Nesticle in DOS on a 486 in a basement in 1999 using an SNES pad replica, and noting down passwords on a notepad because the concept of savestates hadn't hit me yet
>>11492040If you think those videos represented how people played you're retarded. It's like those Nesticle videos using v.20 on purpose when in reality the emulator only started to get widespread attention with v0.40 when it already had great compatibilityhttps://web.archive.org/web/20161116081727/http://bloodlust.zophar.net/NESticle/nes.html
>>11492048Sure, even the latest versions of ZSNES aren't accurate at all compared to other SNES emulatorshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWZ7Q6U2x-c
>>11491352>MAMEWell here's your problem
>>11492040NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO DELETE THIS ZSNES WAS PERFECT ZSNES IS SOULFUL ZSNES IS MY CHILDHOOD IT WAS PERFECT
>>11492056I can live without Timecop working right.
>>11490276What ho you mean? I can load any hacked N64 ROM in mupen64 (RA core) and it tries to run it.
>>11483685I downloaded Mame 2003 just to see how much the emulation has improved. Suprisingly alot of games look, and sound the same.
>>11488103you can always tell right away when it's an n64 emulator. it really is dogshit compared to where the snes was 20 years ago
>>11483685Funnily, Project64 made people forget that N64 games were low res, had 3 point filtering and blur AA. N64 games being 640x480 was a popular belief.
>>11483685We were happy with what he had, zsnes was glorious for a few years despite the issues.
>>11483685It was fine (enough).
>>11494103did any game run at 640x480 (max vertical res) for either psx, n64 or the segatrash?
>>11494148Look up "internal resolutions." IDK about sega but generally PSX and N64 ran in 320x240 and was stretched to 480, but was often cropped further.Conker runs at 292x214FFVII runs at 322x224Some things like Rogue Squadron could run native at 400x440 at best.
>>11494151>generally PSX and N64 ran in 320x240 and was stretched to 480That's not how it works. When talking about the resolution, we really have to consider two things: one is the internal, digital resolution in the console's framebuffer and the other is the behavior of the analog signal that it outputs. The standard NTSC resolution is 480i. What this shorthand represents is that 240 even-numbered lines of picture get sent in one frame, then the 240 odd-numbered lines get send in the next one and so and so forth. There are 59.94 of such "half-frames" per second (or at least that's how it's supposed to be, because consoles will usually output at a different frequency that's very slightly higher or lower that this number; CRTs can handle this, but it might lead to about every 3000th frame or so getting dropped or duplicated on LCDs). It's possible to cheat this system and shift every other "half-frame" by one line, making them full frames in effect. 240 even-numbered lines of pictured get sent in one frame, 240 even-numbered lines of pictured ALSO get sent in the next frame and so on and so forth. The odd lines are always empty and remain black on the CRT display, that's how you get horizontal scanlines. This is what's called 240p. It's progressive and no longer interlaced because full frames get sent.Here's the thing: the contents of a single line are a wave in analog signal, which means that the horizontal resolution doesn't really matter. It's not digital so it's impossible to speak about its number of pixels when it already gets displayed on the screen.
>>11494151>>11494201Idk about N64 because I never owned that console and have very little experience even with emulating it, but PSX has its own additional quirks to it on top of general analog signal quirks. For example: "240p" games actually only send 224 lines in every frame, so they're actually 224p. 480i games are actually 448i and this is also true about PS2. Horizontal resolution in 224p games inside the digital framebuffer in the console's memory isn't always 320 either. For example, Soul Blade actually runs at 640x224 internally. This means you'd get stretched-out image if you wanted to display it as square pixels, but that's not what happens with equipment that receives an SD analog signal. It has no idea how long lines are supposed to be, it just gets a wave that describes the luminosity and/or color along them and fills the entire length of its display with that.Now, Dreamcast is interesting because it's also 448i when using common signal types like composite, S-video or SCART RGB, but it outputs full 480p if you use it with VGA. 480 full lines get send in every frame. VGA is usually a computer signal and much newer than the NTSC standard, so it's better thought out and generally more sane as a result. VGA does actually distinguish vertical resolution, a VGA display can tell if its gets a 1368x768 or 1024x768 resolution image. Which when a quirk of Dreamcast comes in, because while the usual VGA resolution is 640x480, it outputs 720x480 instead (that latter value is kind of a "digital" NTSC), which means that not all VGA-capable displays can handle it without distortion.
>>11494203>VGA does actually distinguish vertical resolution*VGA does actually distinguish horizontal resolution
>>11492039Yes, Icer Addis I think works at EA, hopefully they're not treating him too badly, but the man's a highly talented programmer so his value must be realized in some capacity. He actually began work on some new emulator stuff again a couple years back:https://famiboards.com/threads/what-year-is-it-icer-addis-bloodlust-software-ea-tiburon-is-working-on-a-new-nes-emulator.2183/Ethan Petty has written for a bunch of Ubisoft games, Assassins Creed and Tom Clancy ones. Hoping he won't get cut with their current financial struggles, but he shouldn't struggle to find another job if he does.He released his own point and click adventure game in 2015, which almost nobody played, called The Knobbly Crook. It's a free game and it went almost completely under the radar (though people who did play it say that it's pretty good), but he doesn't seem too discouraged and he's working on other stuff.It's also funny looking at its art, because while Petty has clearly improved colossally as an artist since the Bloodlust Software days, The Knobbly Crook still carries some of his character design sensibilities from back when he was doing all that edgy schlock together with Addis in the 1990s, and I like that.
>>11483685>how bad was emulation during the early 00s?Why is the question written with a stupid assumption?
>>11494235youtube bias. They think this >>11492040 is how people played
>>11494201>he odd lines are always empty and remain black on the CRT display, that's how you get horizontal scanlines. This is what's called 240p. It's progressive and no longer interlaced because full frames get sent.So THAT'S where the scanlines come from holy shit
>>11491352>arcade emulation for retardsTaking this opportunity to do a PSA for the tardanons - Finalburn Neo will run your 2D arcade games without requiring you to pay attention to a 5 minute MAME set explanation. Just find the romset on archive and you are gaming. Bonus: the Retroarch core isn't total dogshit like the MAME ones
If you enjoy messing around with old emus go to zophar and get some from there.
>>11494353no, anon, that is just not true. https://wikiless.funami.tech/wiki/Interlaced_video?lang=enhttps://wikiless.funami.tech/wiki/Raster_scan?lang=en#Scan_lines
>>11483685played all of chrono trigger with zsnes and found a gameboy emulator and played all of chain of memories on it
i got in trouble with my mom for having NESticle because of the name lol. i think it would have been a lot worse if she had seen the icon! Dad tried it out and pretty much suggested either hiding it better or finding something that did the same thing but with a “less offensive” name.
>>11495059>i got in trouble with my mom for having NESticle because of the name lol. i think it would have been a lot worse if she had seen the icon! Dad tried it out and pretty much suggested either hiding it better or finding something that did the same thing but with a “less offensive” name.haha imagine only realizing that its name comes from rhyming with testicle right now haha
>>11483685The best known games were perfectly playable, with some inaccuracies. But the majority did not work properly or had major glitches.I remember the default graphics plugin of project64 not working with Majora's Lens of Truth even until a few years ago.
>>11483685I was emulating Sega genesis nes master system and Atari flawlessly 25 years ago. Checked out a lot of games I never played. People started to say if you don't own a physical copy of the game you will get arrested haha. So because of that I along with others have about 2000 sealed games.
>>11494148Some Saturn games run at 704x480 - VF2 and DoA for example. On PS1 the games that want to use high res mode opt for 512x480 instead - Tobal 2, DoA, Bloody Roar 2 and some others. I don't remember which games push actual 640x480 but I know they exist. Maybe some smaller puzzle like or idk.
>>11492040ZSNES WAS AMAZING THATS JUST A CHERRYPICKED BUILD IT WAS A FLAWLESS EMULATOR.
>>11495528ZSNES was always shit, shut up nerd.
>>11495646zsnes let me play snes games on a pentium 120 in 16bit color with only 1-2 frames of frameskip when they released that version with a bunch of the core rewritten in ASM which was amazing, no more disabling the transparency layer in order to see anything
>>11495518>I don't remember which games push actual 640x480 but I know they exist.iS Internal Section is 640x480 ingame and uses basically no textures.
>>11485087Yeah I remember turning off transparent layers to play some games. Like the overcast clouds in 600ad Chrono Trigger. Also had to split that one across multiple floppy disks using pkzip to move it to a computer that didn't have network.
>>11495853Correct, anyone claiming otherwise is underage.
>>11483829>>11483880inb4 /er/ (emulators retro)
>>11491352you can still do that with finalburnneo
My dad had an IBM NetVista, it had a Pentium III n nVidia TNT 2. It ran zsnes and genecyst silky smooth. Imagine being a 8yo faggot during Summer 02' resulating Genesis and SNES with a Sidewinder, great times. I had a N64 but I only played it with friends, I'd rather emulate Yoshi's Island or Streets of Rage 2.
>>11495646It was never Byuu-tier perfect but that wasn't necessary either.
>>11485305Probably, but the anon I was replying to was implying that Saturn emulation was great in the early 2000s, which is a an enormous lie.
>>11490276Well, yeah, that's a good standard, but that's not one that old emulators followed - they were just relatively good at hiding it.
