Personal computing discussed
bthylafh wrote:Applewin - nice little emulator for the 8-bit Apple ][ series. Can't think of anything I wish it did.
WinVICE - same for the C=64.
Nestopia - nicest extras of the NES emulators I've tried.
higan - formerly bsnes, now emulates the NES, Game Boy, and GBA as well. It trades on obsessive accuracy; the accuracy profile can bring a non-OC'd i5-2500k to its knees.
Stella - the best Atari 2600 emulator. I wish it had some of Nestopia's extra features, like hq4x filtering and fast-forward/rewind.
dbgl - my favored interface for DOSBox. Java-based, so cross-platform.
Bliss - Mattel Intellivison emulator. For when I want my B-17 Bomber or Space Spartans fix.
I have a few others that are mainly "because I wanted to experience the emulated system" and are rarely used:
pom1 - Apple I emulator. Pretty basic, but so is the original.
VirtualT - for the Tandy 100 family.
kegs - The only Apple IIgs emulator I'm aware of.
Mini vMac - early 68K Macs, typically emulates a Mac Plus with System 7.0x.
I've fiddled a little bit with SimH, mainly emulating a VAX running the 4.3BSD-quasijarus distribution.
The few times I've tried MAME it was more troublesome to get working than I was willing to mess with.
Hz so good wrote:I've never tried dbgl, but to be frank, with all the security hullaballoo about Java, that's probably why I never noticed it.
Does Applewin support that AppleBASIC, or whatever it was they would use in schools to teach very basic programming, word processing, and spreadsheets with?
bthylafh wrote:Yes, it's got an implementation of Applesoft BASIC. It can also emulate an "Uthernet" Ethernet NIC[1] in Apple //e mode, and with the right software you can even take it out on the Internet.
[1] which is a real thing that you can buy for a //e.
I.S.T. wrote:Hz so good, you're using a lot of really old emulators that have glitches on more than a few games. I hope I can steer you on towards the path of less glitchyness.
For Genesis, use either Regen or Kega Fusion. Both are about the same, but Regen does not support SCD. I've noticed a ton of sound emulation differences between them and Gens, plus less buggy games as well. Kega was developed by an old Genesis and SNES developer, so that helps. His emulation efforts are long running, and even occasionally licensed by Sega themselves for various Genesis compilations.
SNES9x is a good solution for a low end system, but for something that's roughly Athlon II speed or higher, you should use an older verison of bsnes if you can track it down. Why older? I'm pretty sure the author of it had a mental episode and it began to effect his work years ago. For 99.8% of snes games, version 0.060 will be good enough. That one should support the Super FX and SA-1 add-on chips, which were the only ones to get significant usage. As a side note, even the best Super FX emulation in any emulator is still a bit off to this day. Star Fox will not run at the proper speed on any emulator, even Nintendo's own. bsnes/Higen run it a lot closer to accurate, but if you're a super hard core Star Fox 1 fan, might want to just buy the cart and an SNES if you do not have both on hand.
Magic Engine is payware and doesn't support a lot of things properly or run on modern OSes a lot of the time in my experience. Instead, try pcejin. This one is fairly obscure as it's basically the TG-16 emulation core from a command line driven emulator named mednafen stripped out and given an UI. Due to its obscurity, I'm gonna straight up link it http://code.google.com/p/pcejin/
ePSXe is still the best psx emulator, sadly. It got a really nice update a ways back that made the sound far more accurate(Which to someone who is picky as hell about this sort of thing, this is a very nice thing). The latest version is the only PSX emulator, to my knowledge, that gets a lot of the little battle sounds in Xenogears correct. latest is 1.8.0. unless you're using the android version. It's still got issues in a lot of stuff though... PSX emulation stagnated over ten years ago. Most popular games run well, though.
Neorage was good back in the day, but it for the most part only runs rom dumps that were later found to not be 100% correct or in some cases, far far off. It was a pain in the neck. MAME32UI or WinKawaks is best here.
IIRC, demul is a better emulator for DC but i've never messed around with DC emulation so I wouldn't know. As far as I know, the interface is in Russian so if anyone here can read it, y'all might want to try it. Otherwise, nullDC is the way to go. Compatibility is passable but it is a pain in the neck to set up. An IRC channel I hang out with has one of the former devs of it. Towards the end of nullDC's development life he wasn't too happy with it. Gee, I wonder why?
For GBA emulation, you really only have two choices. Whatever the latest version of VBA-M is, or no$gba. no$gba works well but the interface is very very sparse and sometimes hard to use. It doesn't allow you to set the resolution, but you can drag the corner to scale it up and keep the aspect ratio of the GBA games intact. It also has a custom save format for reasons known only to ancient demons who's names have been forgotten by every tongue of Man. It's not as far to the expert side of things as Higen is by any means, but it's not super duper simple either. VBA-M is pretty good, but it's not entirely known how accurate sound emulation and stuff is. All games appear to work well, but until someone comes up with a better emulator and does a comprehensive comparison, we won't really know. no$GBA's little details emulation is also up in the air, but is more likely to be accurate. Game developer friends of mine have told me he used to contact them whenever his emulator didn't run stuff right, and some of them(Not all) helped out and gave him info.
Still, it's hard enough to use that, so VBA-M, which should be just fine, is best to try first. I only present all this info in the interest of trying to educate folks if they run into an issue with either.
Dolphin is indeed the best GC emulator out there(Not that there were more than three or five), but it sometiems has issues, and is in a rapid state of development. If you try 4.0.2. and a game doesn't work well on it, try one of the development versions. Even though it hasn't been long, there's a significant difference already, enough to where if they really wanted to they could release a version called 4.5 and only insane people would complain about the numbering.
I.S.T. wrote:The GC side nowadays is getting as much effort if you look at the commits they do.
PCEjin does support PCE-CD games.
and yes byuu is the higen/bsnes guy. He's a genius but also a wacko(and when someone who occasionally halucinates is calling someone a wacko, things are bad). Don't read his forum. Ever. His actual work is fine if you keep to before he started doing his ROM cartridge folder nonsense.
byuu wrote:A little after v060, we were finally able to extract the firmware contained in SNES coprocessors located inside of game carts, such as the DSP-1. Ever since day one, I had always stressed that accuracy was my primary objective. So it was no surprise that I wanted to utilize this firmware. Problem is, it's copyrighted. It needs to be distributed with the games that use them, and not with the emulator itself.
I tried to suggest that we combine the SNES image with the firmware appended. Everyone went nuclear on me. Apparently, prepending copier headers for compatibility with a mid-90s Hong Kong device is fine (and daring to not support them made me "worse than Hitler", actual quote), but appending essential firmware is crazy talk.
So I needed some other way to store the firmware. We were also dealing with an increasingly growing "Paths" selection window. One for ROMs, one for save RAM, one for save states, one for cheat codes, one for movie recordings, one for screenshots, one for BIOS and firmware files, etc etc. So I decided, rather than group data by file extension, what if we group data by game? So, you have Mario Kart. Put the game image, and the save RAM for it, and the coprocessor firmware for it, in the same folder. Now I could even do cool stuff like store a manifest that has the native-language title for a game (eg スーパーマリオカート), exact board mappings, default controllers a game uses, etc stored in there. Want to move a game onto another PC? Just copy the folder for it. No need to dig through seven folders for all the pieces. I even tried to make it as easy as possible. You can load in your SMC image with the copier header stored inside a ZIP archive directly inside higan and play it. It even tries to figure out if your IPS patch was made on a headered or unheadered ROM, and applies it for you. You don't have to think about folders at all. Unfortunately, this makes me **** insane, moreso than a guy who hallucinates, apparently. Yet when OpenEmu did exactly the same thing, it received heaps of praise from everyone for its innovation in game organization.
IST, I didn't change. Your expectations of me changed when I stopped doing things exactly the way you wanted them done. Rather than show any civility or maturity, you've instead decided to denigrate me at every chance you get. I understand completely if you're dissatisfied with my software, and choose not to use it; but I really wish you wouldn't go around bad-mouthing me everywhere you can (here, RHDN, etc.) But if that's the cost of me spending ten years to give the world completely free open-source software, asking absolutely nothing in return, then I guess it's my cross to bear.
Please keep in mind while you continue to attack me that Snes9X uses my sound core, and dozens of fixes I've provided over the years. And that part of the reason I contribute so much there is so that people like you have alternatives that work the way you want.
I.S.T. wrote:The GC side nowadays is getting as much effort if you look at the commits they do.
PCEjin does support PCE-CD games.
and yes byuu is the higen/bsnes guy. He's a genius but also a wacko(and when someone who occasionally halucinates is calling someone a wacko, things are bad). Don't read his forum. Ever. His actual work is fine if you keep to before he started doing his ROM cartridge folder nonsense.