What Is The Best Nes Emulator Around?

[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.

[Agozer]

You are truly hellbent on getting Lagrange Point to work Eh, that extra sound chip does cause problems in many NES emulators.

[Dynamo]

I'm more impressed by the games sound. I'd say its around TG-16 quality, not borderline Sega Genesis quality like I thought before. I'm impressed by how much developers stretched the NES hardware to its limits (that is with the help of mappers, seeing as a stock NES was quite weak.) Parallax scrolling on an NES? Unheard of! The tons of flicker in most games is annoying though.........

 

I'd probably like the game even more if it was translated, but seemingly no one is picking it up out there.

 

 

Oh, and that NES palette you provided the link to is MILES better than the default/emulated palette that Nestopia has. Its a keeper.

[Agozer]

The game has far better sound than any of the other NEs games thanks to that extra chip, and you aren't the only one who says that it's almost like TG-16. While extra chips in SNES carts are no big deal, and extra chip in a NES cart was/is truly revolutionary.

 

And yes, that custom palette blows the emulators' original palettes out of the water. AspiringSquire tested his palette against his own NES when he made sure that the colors would be as accurate as possible.

[Unessential]

I'm surprised noone has mentioned Famtasia.. or something to that effect

 

It used to be the most used for tool-assisted speed runs. I think it has a good balance of options, compatability, and accuracy. Hella flexable too.

[Agozer]

I'm surprised noone has mentioned Famtasia.. or something to that effect

 

It used to be the most used for tool-assisted speed runs. I think it has a good balance of options, compatability, and accuracy. Hella flexable too.

True, but emulators have gone past it... Most people don't care about speedruns anyway, they want compatibility and usability

[Human-Bahmaut]

I have a RockNESX. It works pretty good.

[djrobx]

The big problem that I was having (and that I ALWAYS recall having with FCE Ultra, which is why I've given up on it many times before) is the sound. Now I think I have a very competent PC for 8/16-Bit emulation (Windows XP, 1.6Ghz Pentium 4, ATi Rage 128 Ultra 16 MB, Integrated Sound) even though my video and sound equipment sucks. Still enough to get the job done for older systems. The issue that I've been having is that most of the time the sound crackles & pops and then turns to ****, as if my PC couldn't handle the emu. I think it has to do with sound to buffer gauge, which I left at the default of 50 ms (I NEVER understood those gauges, which is one of the main reasons I dislike SNES9X). I dunno how to work that so I just left it alone (its between 15ms and 300ms IIRC). Anyone got any tips on how to keep the sound clean? Other than that I've had no other problems with the emulation. If all goes well then this might just be the keeper.

I know this is a very old topic, but this post shows up in a google search.

 

I had exactly this same problem with FCE ultra on a new Vista installation after years of trouble free use.

 

I worked on the source for a while to try and track down the problem and managed to solve it (at least for my machine )

 

The issue seems to be that FCEU doesn't "react" to a sound buffer underflow condition quickly enough. It waits until the sound buffer is completely empty before accelerating the framerate (uflow=1) to compensate for it. By then it's too late. So, I changed the check to look for a half-full buffer.

 

Further, if you have your "Frameskip" value set to 0 (which seems logical, if you're using Vsync), the mechanism to "fill" the sound buffer becomes limited by vsync/double buffer and the buffer is unable to properly fill itself (uflow condition does nothing). Solution there is just to set frameskip to something greater than 0. I also made some additional changes to the update loop to make sure a frame refresh isn't called when recovering from underflow.

 

Some people will never see this happen. If your sound card's clock is exactly right or slightly slow, your buffer will always remain full. It has no problem delaying for a frame to wait for the sound buffer to empty (that's how the sound throttling works). It's just the code to skip a frame when the sound is running a little faster than the framerate that didn't quite work right.

 

I've uploaded my modified fceu here: http://www.tvrules.net/misc/fceu.zip

 

Also note that in this version the game controllers are not stored by GUID but by controller number (that was the reason I figured out how to get the source compiled years ago). So you may need to reconfigure you game controllers to use with my version.

[Shibathedog]

somebody get this guy an emu author tag (Not sarcasm - Good work)

[ken_cinder]

For reference to other posters, THAT was a worthwhile "Evil bump". Bumping a year old topic to say "Yeah, I know" gets you in trouble.

 

Too bad I don't care for FCEUltra.