What were the early years of emulators like?
>>128524381989, the Speccy was still available on stores
I used nesticle a lot. I still have it on an old laptop around here somewhere. I thought it was the most advance thing I ever saw in my life back in 2001-2002
I've seen a magazine article I think it was Next Generation talking about emulation in 96 or 97, before Nesticle was a thingePSXe is not early
>>12852446*in storesMy ESLness betrays me.
>>12852449>ePSXeis pre 2003 same as emurayden
Are we really doing "What were the old days like?" threads again? You were either there or you weren't, we're not your fucking grandparents.
>>12852449I just searched for "pasofami" and turned up this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFsoIYHf-PMThe Pasofami I used a little back then was for Windows 3.1 or 95 and was, I think, a bit janky. Later I found NESticle and then I began genuinely playing games with emulators rather than merely marveling at the novelty of emulation.
i've used snes9x since 2001 and haven't looked backor forwardsit just werks
>>12852438Depends what you mean by early. It was pretty decent by around 2003. The Genesis emulator Gens for example still holds up pretty well.But now lets address the elephant in the room. ePSXe is the worst piece of software ever written. Its has never worked. It should not be used as an example of early emulation. ePSXe should be confined to its own singular category. It is not an early emulator, its not even an emulator. Its a piece of dog shit.
nesticle in ~98 was mindblowing
>>12852438It was cozy. I remember when i got the run MM2 on Nesticle and i was so happy to play it on pc, i couldn't believe it worked
This image is 28 years old
When you're a dumb kid with no knowledge of what computers could be fully capable of, emuators were kinda magical even if imperfect. Used to visit my cousin's place and played Zsnes on his PC a lot, and a kid from school gave me a USB of snes and gba roms. Hits a lot harder back then considering the advancements in modern emulation today and how spoiled we are for options.
>>12852582There's just something about having complete archives of multiple consoles that kills the fun of gaming.I've had a lot of success in keeping only 2 or 3 games downloaded at any given time. Makes you feel like a kid again, where you'd only get a game once or twice a year. Even if you still have that full library on hand, if it's not installed you're able to rekindle some of that lost magic.
>>12852438It was rough, but it was all we had at the time. People didn’t really know or care about emulation accuracy before byuu and bsnes came on the scene. We were content with what we had, which in hindsight wasn’t very good (including all the PSX / N64 plugin garbage).Many aspects of personal computing were like that back in the 90s. We just didn’t know any better, until eventually we did.
‘Memba when ZSNES fixed that weird moaning sound you’d hear in the FF6 and Chrono Trigger intros?
>>12852438it was pretty horrible. more often than not you had to use your keyboard. the controllers that were available for PC were often dogshit. we're in a golden age of emulation now
>>12852489These are more educational than the schizo nonsense that compromise the board on any given day
>>12852649>we're in a golden age of emulation nownot until fpga becomes the standard
>>12852671It's still shit though, I'm not spoonfeeding zoomer tourists
>>12852438Early? That gets to be kinda relative, I think the first ever Famicom emulator came around in 1989, and it had a single digit framerate. I know that there existed some Game Boy emulator on Amiga around 1995, also.The late 90s is when a lot of things start to really happen and things built up steam. This part was RIGHT before my time, so this is passed down to me, but Bloodlust Software were critical players here. Who were Bloodlust Software? Imagine if Beavis & Butthead were smart and gifted; two 15 year olds who specialized in juvenile, crude, and edgy humor. Artist Ethan Petty, and programmer Icer Addis.Aside from having hammered together and even sold a surprisingly well rounded fighting game for DOS, Time Slaughter, which was ugly as fucking sin to look at, yet had roughly comparable complexity and depth to a real and proper console fighter, they also developed and released Nesticle and Genecyst.Nesticle and Genecyst were big deals because they would emulate NES and Genesis games on an i486 processor and actually give decent performance, which was really novel at the time. Accuracy was kinda dogshit at first, but they iterated on them and they got decent (by the standards of the day). This was watershed moment which really inspired a lot of people, and it lead to all kinds of development from there on.>>12852582It really was magic. My big brother introduced it to me, and it became a big thing with both of us and our friend groups.Emulation was our introduction to Pokémania (before it even launched here in Sweden), and also the SNES. SNES9x wasn't that great back then (when I found ZSNES, I thought it was WAY better), but I didn't even have a real SNES, so even if some roms just didn't run (or occasionally just stopped working for some mysterious reason), I was still stoked to be playing all these incredible games, and FOR FREE.I don't remember which Genesis emulator we used, but we did play those games too. I really liked Shining Force.
>>12852637That and the missing or glitched effects singlehandedly caused me to buy the PS1 versions back in the day. Yeah, they had loading times, but at least they looked and sounded more or less right.
>>12852438i remember in around 2001 or 2002 my cousin showing me this Gensis emulator on his pc with 100 games, i literally thought it was the coolest shit ever and played with him all the afternoon.Then later when i got my first PC one of the first things i did was download Project 64 and play those classics for the first time (cuz i had a Ps1 growing up)That morning was raining a lot and i asked my mom if i could skip school, she was okay with it so i spent the whole day playing Super Smash bros, Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time. good shit
>>12852558I admittedly missed the very early pre-ePSXe years of PS1 emulation, but I believe the reason ePSXe became popular is due to it taking PSEmuPro's plugin scheme and building upon it. It was one of the earliest PS1 emulators that had both decent compatibility and the ability to use hardware rendering for hi-res graphics. Psxfin was vastly simpler to use, but it was stuck with software rendering. But yeah, when I say decent compatibility, I mean mostly with popular games, and you had to do the plugin hell dance for some shit to work right, which always sucks.
>>12852438I'm glad ePSXe is rotting in hell. Fuck that emulator, and fuck its plugins.
>>12852649>more often than not you had to use your keyboard. the controllers that were available for PC were often dogshitThat part is true. No fucking idea how I beat Super Metroid with a keyboard as a kid, that was NOT a good keyboard. We had a gamepad but it was a dogshit (I think) Gravis one with too few buttons for SNES or Genesis. It was some black thing with smooth edges and teal buttons and print, but I can't find an image of anything that looks like it.The games were still great, but finally getting a half-decent gamepad years later was such a big upgrade.>>12852705Chrono Trigger on PSX had absolutely criminal loading though, had to stop and read the disc nearly any time the game changed music, among other things. I don't understand how Square could ship a game like that, it didn't need to be as bad as it was, other games weren't.
>>12852726Do not play SM64 on PJ64 iykyk
>>12852438from Connectix, the makers of the RAM Doublerâ„¢
>>12852776the performance from this bad boy was unreal, it let me play CTR where epsxe could not
>>12852750The gamepad situation as a whole sucked ass until like the early to mid 2000's. It was around then that I found a PS2 to USB adapter that actually worked really well, which I used for years and years. Prior to that I was coping with a USB sidewinder pad with a horrible dpad.
>>12852637You're telling me that's not meant to be there??lmao
>>12852438Loading Mario 64 on UltraHLE in the computer lab in 99 was memorable. PC at home at the time wasn't quite as powerful, but fun was had with Meka and Nesticle (ZSNES and KGens ran, but required frameskipping). Definitely some of my favourite NeoGeo games with MAME were fine too. Not much different to now, except now the emulation is marginally more accurate but requires 100x the processing power to do it.
>>12852771PJ64 was boiled dogshit. god what a fucking awful emulator
I first used SNES9x around 2003 and never had issues with it.
>>12852582>that giffuck that takes me back.>.t old anon
>>12852438ePSXe is great and well optimised.now go datamine somewhere else like.... /vrpg/
>>12852629>bleem!how did the morons behind this emulator managed to win the legal battle and sell a fucking emulator at retail stores back then lol
>>12852771today? fuck no, i use Mupenbut back then in 2009 it was the only good one, or at least the only one my teenager self could find
>>12852945There was a good stretch of time from around 2005 to 2013 where there was close to no meaningful progress in N64 emulators and Project64 1.6 was the only remotely decent option. There was some work done on the plugin front during this time, but this too peaked around 2012. Then from 2013 to about 2019 we started seeing some good alternatives pop up, and it wasn't until like 2020 that we first got Just Werx solutions that finally did away with the plugin hell from before.
>>12852552SameI also had no idea there was something better than ePSXe
ctrl-f "dog"what the hell is wrong with you people
>>12852552>>12853257Do you people only upgrade your OS or computer when you can no longer access government websites in a browser?
>>12853284it wasn't me. i love inaccurate untrannied emus!
>>12853289it just werkz. like VLC open sauce player.
>>12852449bleem was paying for mag ads back then. even while they were already getting suedif you wanna see some rly impressive early emulation, its that one. i think i had windows 98 and was emulating spyro with a reasonable degree of accuracyand while the commercial version required the disk in the drive, with a lil digging online, that no longer became a requirement
>>12852489pro-tip: it's the same lolcow schizo spamming the board for years with the same low iq bullshit threads
Getting just the right mix of plugins on ePSXe just so the game looks and sounds decent enough
>>12852918By having big brass balls.>>12852726>i literally thought it was the coolest shit everAnd it still is!
>>12852438ePSXe was notoriously shitty to work with because of the plugin system but most early emulators were easy to use even if not that accurate
I was able to pop a psx disc into my power ibook and play with an licensed emulator
>>12852438amazing, because it actually worked, unlike psx2 today which doesn't work because some tranny decided to update it with jeet vibe code
PSX savestates took several seconds to load.Mid-range computers were so starved for power that the DOS version of ZSNES came with transparencies disabled by default. This seems like utter mental retardation 26 years later, but disabling transparencies made games playable on a K6-2 with 500 MHz instead of needing a Pentium with 750 MHz.Fiddling with plugins became tiresome after a while, and most people just disabled some sound capabilities (XA/SEQ/VAB seeking for example) because they never sounded like the original console and just fucked something else up.It was wild playing on the Gamecube and Wii online against console owners.
>>12852438I remember cranking the hertz of the audio to max on Genecyst and other emulators to make the music sound better than the original consoles and now that doesn't even seem like an option you can use anymore.
>>12852742I have good memories with it. I can't tell you how many times I played BoF 3, 4, Valkyrie Profile, SO2, and others on it. It ran super well ony XP machine too. That was a long time ago, I'm sure there were performance and accuracy issues, but it worked and I beat those games on it no problem.PJ64 on the otherhand chugged and massively bugged out on Paper Mario. That was a known problematic game at the time though.
I'm late to the thread, but here's an extensive website with lots of details regarding the history of emulation of different systems.https://historyofvideogameemulators.blogspot.com/2025/02/blog-index.html
i remember the n64 emulators working better than the playstation emulators in the beginning.project64 worked better than pcsxnow the n64 emulators suck and are the worst emulatorsn64 emulation was better i think because it was less accurate. it performed better. new n64 emulators require more processing power for accuracyplaystation emulation is perfect now
i use pcsx-rearmed with my raspberry 2 even though it's not the most accurate emulator according to emulation wikii have beaten 30 games with it and haven't noticed any glitches or slowdowns
i was able to get conkers bad fur day to run in the 2000s. now i can't even get it to run
>>12853412>plugin systemjust use the "software" plugin and default audio SPU.
>>12852438Not really different tbqh. You found out about emulators on forums, and later Zophar's Domain (which I wrote a bit for), and you downloaded ROMs on various sites or via file sharing.Systems that are emulated perfectly now, like SNES, still had bugs. One example was instrument samples from the current music track would play randomly sometimes.
>>12853816At least on SNES9X and bsnes you can use different audio interpolation filters. The default one (gaussian) is what causes games to sound muffled as fuck, so changing it to something like Sine makes games sound much clearer. Kinda hard to go back to gaussian now for me desu.
>>12853289What are you talking about? SNES9x and ePSXe both work on Windows 10
>>12852610I sorta get where you're coming from, but I sorta changed my opinion on this once I realized this is a user issue more than anything. I have a habit of picking up too many games at once and get too overwhelmed or don't care enough to finish games I start, but when I force myself to direct my attention to a single game until completion, I get over the excess of choice pretty easily. But also, some games just don't scratch your itch and you wanna move onto something else, game libraries should be explored, but doing so mindlessly can lessen the value of a particular game experience. I had gone through a majority of the Ace Combats and Dragon Quest games in spite of being kinda lofty endeavors (Still have a couple newer mainline entries in both series before I can say I've played all of them) and I emulated both.
>>12854139Thanks, this looks pretty interesting. Hoping to find something about early 3D arcade emulation since that was a bit of a clusterfuck supposedly
I was emulating NES 25 years ago but can't remember what emu I used, I don't think it was nesticle.But for the most part it's a similar experience today if you use standalone emulators like I do. The rom sites look somewhat similar to how they did, the setup is about the same, there's just a lot less screen tearing and no crunchy noises anymore when multiple sounds are playing.>>12852582That is what I see when I think "emulation." That will forever be the face of emulation.
I like how ZSNES looks and handles, and I don't want to move away from that. Has anyone made an updated fork of it which is more accurate and compatible with stuff?
>>12852438Glitchy but exciting. I remember being blown away that you could see the raw pixels in all their unblurred glory. I think that initial wow factor is why a lot of us still don't use filters even now. it felt like you were getting the games in a more undiluted form.Also it's hard to convey how game changing savestates were, not just in terms of making games easier but because you could save state and try 20 different things from the same point to work out a how a game's inner mechanics and RNG worked, which you could not do at any point before then.
>>12855849Enjoy!
>>12855917Literally the original ZSNES devs revived it recently, so maybe look that up.
>>12852780>Prior to that I was coping with a USB sidewinder pad with a horrible dpad.I used to buy Trust products it was mostly shit but some models were awesome. Apparently the company still lives. It was a Europe thing only is my guess.
>>12852780Yeah it was bad. I remember there were a few DIY parallel port adapters you could make for some console controllers but it was a lot harder to source the parts back then if you even knew what you were doing. But otherwise you were stuck with the godawful PC controllers of the time.USB adapters were a game changer when they landed but even those had really limited support until later on. It wasn't as simple as buying an adapter, plugging it in and expecting it to work in a given emulator.
>>12852780xbox and PS3 controllers in the later 2000´s were a godsend for emulation.now we have it so easy, literally besides me right now i have an SNES usb controller and a saturn USB controller, i´m wondering if i should go for a N64 usb controller next or the gamecube one. playing N64 games with a gamecube controller works fine right?
>>12856025I remember I found a PSX-ish style gamepad for like $15 at some point in the late 2000s, and it used USB, so I bought it. It was far from excellent (kinda bleh D-Pad), but far from awful, and I actually kept using that fucker until a few years ago, when I decided I wanted something that was both nicer quality and wireless.Still have it as a spare.
>>12855929Raw pixels on LCDs was a bit weird to me at first (because LCDs were a bit weird too), only the Game Boy was supposed to do that, but it grew on me pretty quickly.I think they look good, it's how I've emulated for decades.
>>12856276>playing N64 games with a gamecube controller works fine right?From my experience with the N64 Zelda ports on GameCube, yes.
>>12856662I also bought a PS1 style USb controller but it had this weird cable-winding mechanism that sucked the cable (which was a ribbon cable) into the back of the controller for easier storage. When I unwound it, it always curled up like an old telephone cord, and after about a year the coating over the plastic began to decay and it got really sticky. I ended up throwing it out without ever really finding a use for it.I'm pretty sure this kind of experience was common back then. Every controller had some retarded gimmick that just made everything worse, with the worst possible D-pads and everything else, and they didn't work in almost any games or emulators. The absolute shit we had to deal with.
>>12856276I have a few adapters but mainly use a PS2 controller for everything. If a game needs analog triggers I just switch to my OG Xbox S-controller. I don't think I need anything else.>playing N64 games with a gamecube controller works fine right?I'd go for the N64 one since the Z button doesn't really feel the same on any other controller.
