At what point did emulators get good enough where you could play most 3rd and 4th gen console games at full speed? Would you have needed a top of the line processor for such playability or were you able to get by with an average consumer PC of the time?
I used to play any SNES ROM that I wanted during the 90s. You didn't need a top tier computer, but it couldn't be total trash. It wasn't very costly for parents, most people would have had a strong enough computer.
This. My computer wasn't the latest bestest, but it had no problem emulating.
a Pentium 3 with integrated graphics could run NESticle and ZSNES without any slowdown and we didn't notice how inaccurate they were.
A freaking K6-2 @ 266 could run anything on ZSNES.
i wouldn't know. my introduction to emulation was the EGM article
You show me Yoshi's Island running 60 on that and I'll eat my goddamn hat.
It does better than I thought it would anyway. Significantly less on the map and vsync is an ugly performance hit, but playable for sure.
Pro-tip: you don't notice "how inaccurate" they are now, either. The supposed inaccuracies of emulation are all 1-frame differences and the like that only matter under intense technical scrutiny.
The proof is that mister cores, which are touted as being 100% perfect replicas of the original hardware, still receive updates. Oh, this 100% perfect core become perfecter? It's 101% accurate? Emulation deniers are this board's holocaust deniers.
Only an idiot claims mister cores are 100% accurate. Similarly only an idiot claims software emulation == fpga emulation.
Software emulation has a problem with concurrency. Emulating multiple discrete chips with cycle accurate timing in a realtime context is a non-trivial problem that doesn't actually have a real world general solution. Like seriously, forget your video games for a moment and go look up concurrency and atomicity in distributed software and you'll realise that people with IQs that we couldn't reach by adding all of ours together have been working on this problem since computers were invented and have yet to find a solution.
Meanwhile FPGAs get this concurrency for "free". THAT's what a sensible person is referring to when they say "100% accurate". It's accurate in that IF we got the clock rates correct and IF we don't have a bug in the VHDL/Verilog then this core will result in the precise output down to the 15kHz scan beam voltage levels as real hardware in a way a software emulator literally cannot no matter how many hacky workarounds you use.
And in the real world 99% of patches for RA cores and Mister cores alike are for QoL fluff and not actually accuracy related.
I see the potential but for now they're mid 2000s tier emulators flashed to hardware and gimped by the DE10. The benefit in 2024 just isn't there outside of SNACs/being able to plug in any wacky peripheral you want and latency... and even that's debatable on a display worth a shit with VRR and a frame of run-ahead.
and even then, at least for software emulated retro systems, I'm not buying into this cult. Big whoop everything on the Mister is better emulated on PC and even if it's 'perfected' on fPGA cores we're talking like .1% benefit over what's possible on a PC, concurrency be damned. Wake me up when it does 6th gen+ better than PC.
>Oh, this 100% perfect core become perfecter? It's 101% accurate?
I can confirm, the Mister Genesis core is more accurate than my real model 2 since the Mister is based on model 1 HW.
this board's holocaust deniers are just holocaust deniers, anon.
The numbers just don't add up
top post well done
I was so happy when SNES and Genesis emulators finally got correct sound emulation.
I played FF6 on the version of ZSNES or SNES9x that didn’t emulate the white noise generator correctly.
>improving things that are already very good is very bad, actually
i also would notice if other games weren't constantly slowing down like they do on a real SNES
>Pro-tip: you don't notice "how inaccurate" they are now, either
But muh three-point sampling.
N64 is not worth playing at all today, especially N64 Zelda
no amount of sampling could possibly get over the super low res and heavily res-used N64 textures to cope with the very limited storage medium
Lmao you clearly have no idea what he's talking about. Here you go zoomie: http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2014/12/n64-3-point-texture-filtering-in.html
That looks absolutely horrible, uncanny valley of Lookin' Good smoothing, and the top image looks closer to how it is on real hardware (pic rel)
No, it literally looks like
on real hardware, because it's not "smoothing", it's the fricking way how texture rendering works on N64. You fricking zoomies are truly braindead.
what a moron ffs, what's so hard to understand that the textures were so small they look bad on the console and look bad on a superscaled pc emulator?
That's not superscaling you fricking moron, three-point sampling is a cheap technique that was used by the real N64, it didn't use normal bilinear filtering
A P2 Celeron @433MHz could do the same without an issue.
>we didn't notice how inaccurate they were.
Yes we did.
>a Pentium 3 with integrated graphics could run NESticle and ZSNES without any slowdown and we didn't notice how inaccurate they were.
Says you. I sure did. I largely avoided them because of that fact, they were often pretty wonky, with busted colors, audio, etc... they weren't so good until after the 90s.
NESticle ran fine on a 486 DX2.
No we noticed, we just didn't care because the fact that we could play games for free was more important.
>chrono trigger on zsnes as kids
>the fog in the future was solid and it was only luck one of us found out about disabling layers
>lavos' scream sounded like a screeching beep
we noticed some discrepancies
>lavos' scream sounded like a screeching beep
kek
If you know, you know.
zsnes had problems with some games like SMRPG.
NESticle wasn't great, but it's been forever since I've used it - so I forget why it was trash even running Zelda and Castlevania, but it was. Tried, but it wasn't good.
And to make the point - there's a reason I had a directory with like five NES emulators. Because most of them had some issues. FCEU, FCEUX, RockNES, Nesticle, PuNES<, NNNesterJ, Nemulator, Nestopia.
Eventually Nestopia became the best of the lot - especially for palette options since most NES emulators had shit palette options or the default locked was garbo anyway. SMB1 doesn't have a fricking cyan sky and orange bricks. It has purple sky and brown bricks.
Which one is that supposed to be? The bricks are orange-brown, and the sky is barely periwinkle let alone purple.
>playing smb with the vomit colors
pathetic, anything else is better. even the VS palettes where everything has a shade of piss and fire mario is just yellow is better than that ugly ass shit.
Also, just tested Nesticle with DOSbox... yeah if you couldn't tell the graphics were wrong, the raw pixels were shit, busted graphics even on the title screen, and the sound was completely incorrect...
I've got news for you - you might be legally dead. It was... not a great time. I'm sure some people played what they had to to get by, but honestly if you had a PC in that era, DOS or otherwise you were probably playing much better working games on the thing rather than p[laying broken NES wonky gravis pad configs and finding roms which were harder to get back then anyway. Nesticle was a proof of concept, not a whole cultural hobby. And if you've played NES before using Nesticle, it was clear as day.
Also, just tested Nesticle with DOSbox... yeah if you couldn't tell the graphics were wrong, the raw pixels were shit, busted graphics even on the title screen, and the sound was completely incorrect...
I've got news for you - you might be legally dead. It was... not a great time. I'm sure some people played what they had to to get by, but honestly if you had a PC in that era, DOS or otherwise you were probably playing much better working games on the thing rather than p[laying broken NES wonky gravis pad configs and finding roms which were harder to get back then anyway. Nesticle was a proof of concept, not a whole cultural hobby. And if you've played NES before using Nesticle, it was clear as day.
Anyone telling you this shit wasn't fricking obvious is a lying piece of shit.
This shit was quickly fixed. When people say they used Nesticle, they had the final version from 98 or close to it. It's only by the time that it became viable that it became a worldwide phenomenom, before that it was only for people in the know.
This is like saying "your game is shit, my proof is this alpha footage that nobody had!!". The popularity of those alpha videos is inversely proportional to the popularity of the emulator at the time.
>SMB1
ok but specifically to the nes, that has been proven wrong already, according to some miyamoto obscure reference the intent was the sky looked lavender, something impossible because there really wasn't an uniform ntsc standard back then.
you can easily dig the info on the web.
We have yet to reach that point for me
you really like that gif, huh op? I know that 90s culture is new to you, but you don't have to keep remaking the thread
no, i just reused the gif from the other guy. I was born in 90, but didn't know about emulation until the mid 2000s.
A p166 could run neo geo and the 16 bit consoles good enough to be considered full speed for the time but it didn't look proper smooth, you could tell the pc was just barely managing it. A real console would look far better which is what drove me to flash carts and copiers. Many actual 2D pc games were often 30 fps so a bit of stutter and messed up timing was not seen as a big deal.
>At what point did emulators get good enough where you could play most 3rd and 4th gen console games at full speed?
22 years ago. Any low end consumer "family pc" (gateway, emachines, hp pavilion, etc) could run roms on win32 zsnes or snes9x. I remember back then there were all these autists claiming msdos version superiority, but they were full of shit.
Yeah, I had no issues running genesis and snes games on my celeron e-machine when I found out about emulation in 2002. MAME was a hit or miss. I remember running MK1 at single digit frames on that computer, but it ran TMNT okay.
Actually, MK1 - UMK3 could run on low end setups using an old build of MAME32 and old romsets. They removed the "speed hacks" around 0.57 or so. It's one of the reasons why there's a MAME2003 libretro core and why classic arcade MK is playable on chinese handhelds today.
I remember playing N64 on my grandpa's computer that my aunt had set up in around 2001-2003. the computer at that time would probably have been top of the line for more or less business use vs gaming too. It was only Mario kart though. I do also remember it running 3D mark 2001 on it too because the weird sand dragons (pic related) scared the shit out of me as a kid, but I really liked playing the game where you drive the truck around and shoot shit.
I think honestly that computer ended up being our own PC later on too and it should still be in my dad's basement.
Why even emulate when we can decompile?
NESticle could work on a 486, same with ZSNES and Gens
MId late 90's Pentium 1 ran all 16bit and some MAME.
>SNES and MAME
486 and Pentium 1 barely ran those. You were frameskipping at best and slowing down at worst.
t. Pentium 75 gay
486-Pentium 1 handled NES well and Genecyst/Kgen okay. You needed a Pentium 2 for 60fps in SNES9x + ZSNES though, 400mhz+ for transparencies and FX games.
With ZSNES I had music off and it worked well enough. Not at the point where I was able to play Super FX games but for most games it was well enough.
Gens for some reason worked very well with most games.
1998.
I remember wanting to visit certain friends just because they had a family PC a ton faster than mine and bringing 16bit emulators and ROMs over on a diskette. I "that kid"-maxed pretty hard.
Mid-late 90s. Towards the end of the PS1 lifespan, but I know it was possible earlier because the ROM sites already existed and there were fan translations of Japan-only titles.
Emulation made most 90s PC games look like a fricking joke. There's like a couple dozen PC games from that era worth returning to beyond curiosity's sake, and it REALLY made most shareware games look corny.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161116081727/bloodlust.zophar.net/NESticle/nes.html
You can see the history of Nesticle releases here. IIRC it started to become really popular mid 97, around 0.3 and 0.4. Those versions are only 4 months after the initial releases that nobody knew about those joke videos are from. By 0.42, september 97, it's really close to the final release.
so to answer's OP question, if you wanna say emulation in general, 98 was the booming date. But for Nesticle, septembter 97 was when it started getting real.
>quickly fixed
>still most of those problems exist in Nesticle x.xx last known DOS version later than Win95 version 0.42.
OK buddy.
I had an old 486 66mhz and you could run games on ZSNES, but it was pretty rough, with the frameskip needing to be on all the time. Decent for RPGs and slower games, but terrible for any action games.
I also had a pentium 200mhz (no mmx), and it ran snes without issue. The thing ran NeorageX beautifully, and with a voodoo 2, even managed about 50% speed on the ps1 emulators at the time. UltraHLE was far too slow, and I remember being really jealous of the people who could run it.