The State of Emulation topic

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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soprano1
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by soprano1 »

Shepardus wrote:I've never used their regular software so I can't say how it compares to that, but I haven't had any issues with Alcohol Portable. The screenshots on that site is pretty much all there is to it, you just drag+drop an image file to mount it and right-click on it to unmount it. There's a bit more on its online help page but there's not much to see because it's a pretty simple program.
Seems to have more format support than VCD, i'm switching to it.
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Blinge
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by Blinge »

Shepardus wrote:I've never used their regular software so I can't say how it compares to that, but I haven't had any issues with Alcohol Portable. The screenshots on that site is pretty much all there is to it, you just drag+drop an image file to mount it and right-click on it to unmount it. There's a bit more on its online help page but there's not much to see because it's a pretty simple program.

Cheers shep, sounds pretty good.
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OmegaFlareX
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by OmegaFlareX »

Xyga wrote:@BP: Yes Mame Plus seems dead, well good luck. ^^
Apparently MAMEUIFX should survive as a derivative, don't know how nor if they'll maintain the Toaplan samples support...
Hope both of you will manage to bring back custom buttons in a way or another.

@Obiwan: yes indeed anyway sprite buffer hacks weren't a good thing, GroovyMAME using the queue-less 9ex with 'throttle-able sync' thingie is the perfect and right replacement, I don't know why people still use ShmupMAME honestly.
MAMEUIFX64 has buggy samples support. In Vimana, the stage 1 BGM plays throughout the entire game (minus the ending), and Fire Shark/Same Same is missing the landing jingle. I'm not familiar enough with Ghox or Teki Paki to test those. Gonna stick with ShmupMAME for Same/Vimana until vanilla finally supports the samples, which since they now have a functional UI + snaps/dats, hopefully will be soon.
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Pedro Lambrini
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by Pedro Lambrini »

I just set up MAME on my main PC It has a 5.1 surround set up outputted through a single coax. For some reason every game I try has the sound coming out through the centre speaker only. Looking through the MAME options (MAMEUI 64) there isn't a great deal of choice in what I can do. Pretty much a choice of sound or no sound.

Anyone else have this issue on a 5.1 set up? Any ideas how to get proper stereo?
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copy-paster
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by copy-paster »

Thanks for the PCE emu recommendations!

Finally give Mednafen pce fast a go with Super Darius and Gradius II as testers, running great though.
Pedro Lambrini wrote:I really haven't found a better PCE emulator.
Magic Engine runs HuCard games accurately AFAIK, but it's not freeware.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by Pedro Lambrini »

^
I used Magic Engine for a long time and it's pretty good. It was certainly my go-to emulator for years. The UI is a particular bonus. If only more emu devs thought more about the average end user like that. However, after using PCE Fast I found that the audio emulation is more accurate. It's warmer and fuller than ME. ME seems a bit harsh and tinny. Still, that's maybe just me and I definitely don't regret paying for it - God knows, I got my moneys worth out of it. :)
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Obiwanshinobi
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by Obiwanshinobi »

Pedro Lambrini wrote:I just set up MAME on my main PC It has a 5.1 surround set up outputted through a single coax. For some reason every game I try has the sound coming out through the centre speaker only. Looking through the MAME options (MAMEUI 64) there isn't a great deal of choice in what I can do. Pretty much a choice of sound or no sound.

Anyone else have this issue on a 5.1 set up? Any ideas how to get proper stereo?
Can't you disable 5.1 in your sound hardware driver settings?
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by BPzeBanshee »

OmegaFlareX wrote:MAMEUIFX64 has buggy samples support. In Vimana, the stage 1 BGM plays throughout the entire game (minus the ending), and Fire Shark/Same Same is missing the landing jingle. I'm not familiar enough with Ghox or Teki Paki to test those. Gonna stick with ShmupMAME for Same/Vimana until vanilla finally supports the samples, which since they now have a functional UI + snaps/dats, hopefully will be soon.
Vanilla MAME will never ever support the sample hacks for the Toaplan games, they've made it very clear to anyone that brings up the subject. The better solution is to make the hacks unnecessary, which requires purchases of said PCBs and decapping/dumping/whatever the missing sound chip data that is needed to emulate the games properly or forward them to someone who does.

MEWUI was decent enough programming to warrant inclusion, the sample hacks are just that.
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Xyga
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by Xyga »

Yes of course they've said that over and over, but they've also said that it could be years before proper complete dumps of the remaining ones happen.

I don't see the problem with allowing support temporarily, they could slip a clear warning about the use of samples until then, people would be happy and stop begging.
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BrianC
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

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BrianC wrote: (TMNT II and III NES are the worst offenders with inconsistent inputs, both with physical controllers and overlays, but other games like River City Ransom and Double Dragon II are fine)
Doh. I have the actual carts, but haven't played for awhile. The behavior is actually the same on the actual carts. Just pressing A+B doesn't do the moves in the US/EU TMNT Arcade or TMNTIII. Retroarch Android has no issue with simultaneous inputs for its NES emulation (wish I could say the same for the Genesis and FBA emulation via physical gamepad).
Last edited by BrianC on Tue Mar 15, 2016 5:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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OmegaFlareX
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by OmegaFlareX »

BPzeBanshee wrote:Vanilla MAME will never ever support the sample hacks for the Toaplan games, they've made it very clear to anyone that brings up the subject.
Please forgive my ignorance on the subject, but why? There are like, two dozen other games that have samples support, what's the difference between they and the soundless Toaps?
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by BPzeBanshee »

OmegaFlareX wrote:
BPzeBanshee wrote:Vanilla MAME will never ever support the sample hacks for the Toaplan games, they've made it very clear to anyone that brings up the subject.
Please forgive my ignorance on the subject, but why? There are like, two dozen other games that have samples support, what's the difference between they and the soundless Toaps?
The older games (Space Invaders etc) require discrete circuit emulation to be considered accurate, they had samples were placed in long ago. Furthermore file size for such things is small. Even with FLACs in 7z archives keeping sound samples for the Toaplan games is hundreds of MBs in size, and MAME has no stereo or loop point support for the sample system anyway so it's far from ideal. Also as the one that got the old ThunderMAME code working for ShmupMAME I can tell you the code was far from "clean".

As for taking years, that depends. This community once pitched in to get Ketsui dumped for emulation although I don't know how successful it was as it was before my time, but knowing the current situation I'm hopeful that a group can help take action on it. Some on this forum own boards, and it's already been done with Batsugun, it's just a matter of financial support and someone that can decap said board. I'm not an expert though so don't take my word for it.
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BrianC
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by BrianC »

I noticed another oddity when trying out emulators on Android. Unlike the arcade and SNES, Final Fight One GBA doesn't do the special movie when both buttons are pressed at the exact same time. I tried the real cart and the behavior is the same. To do the move, you have to either press one button while the other is pressed or use "super joy". I tried other games on mGBA on Retroarch Android like River City Ransom EX and King of Fighters EX2 and simultaneous button presses work great.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

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Ehh alcohol portable is setting off malware alerts. :|
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

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Hmm I haven't seen any signs of malware myself, but if you're apprehensive about it another alternative which I just discovered is WinCDEmu. I might actually end up switching to this one myself - it supports the formats I need, looks pretty simple, is small (less than a megabyte for the portable version), and is open-source too.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

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Yeah, I'll switch emulators to one that's compatible, and try that too.
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ZellSF
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by ZellSF »

I really want a good adware free cd mounting tool, but:

Virtual Clonedrive: fine if you're only using your own images. If not, lack of NRG support might be a issue.

WinCDEmu: If you have an image already mounted, you have to unmount it before mounting another image if you want to reuse the drive letter.

And there's a few more uncommon iso formats you might run into that neither of them handle. I just use Daemon Tools.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by Blinge »

Well oddly enough I tried running a game in Yabausa and it just played the .cue, fine.
No need to mount anything.
I'm glad n' all, but I don't quite get how this all works :?
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by BPzeBanshee »

Yabause actually works with something now? :o
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by Blinge »

Well it's been a while since I've seen sotn working on a real saturn. To me it works fine, aside from a few audio glitches here and there, or a background might freak out for a few seconds.
I'm not sure how much of the jank is the game and how much is the emulation.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by ZellSF »

Yabause is still far from SSF in terms of compatibility. It does have one advantage though: it can render 3D in higher resolution.

One more thing on disc mounting things I forgot to mention: if you decide on Alcohol, do not use it to rip your own discs to bin/cue images, unless you like manually editing cue files to fix the mistakes it makes.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by soprano1 »

ZellSF wrote:Yabause is still far from SSF in terms of compatibility. It does have one advantage though: it can render 3D in higher resolution.

One more thing on disc mounting things I forgot to mention: if you decide on Alcohol, do not use it to rip your own discs to bin/cue images, unless you like manually editing cue files to fix the mistakes it makes.
imgburn does a better job at that, imo.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by null1024 »

I've had issues with VirtualCloneDrive and SSF. Games will boot, and then eventually crash for me.
Shepardus wrote:Hmm I haven't seen any signs of malware myself, but if you're apprehensive about it another alternative which I just discovered is WinCDEmu. I might actually end up switching to this one myself - it supports the formats I need, looks pretty simple, is small (less than a megabyte for the portable version), and is open-source too.
Man, I wish I had known about this before reinstalling Daemon Tools to mount discs.

I used gCDEmu with SSF under Linux+Wine, which worked beautifully. If WinCDEmu is based on that codebase, it's probably just as excellent. gCDEmu mounted just about every format I threw at it, and I'd use it in combination with Brasero to convert images from other formats for use in other system emulators [ones without direct disc support, like Mednafen]. One of the pieces of software I really missed after switching back to Windows as my daily OS.
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BrianC
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by BrianC »

ugh. I try to be helpful by pointing out that simultaneous inputs work on some cores for me on RetroArch Android and I get defensive and condescending replies. I go by what I see and it's annoying when people assume I don't know anything just because they don't have the same experience.

Anyway, Retroarch Android has some serious issues. It doesn't seem to support lightgun games and the virtual keyboard doesn't work for many of the cores (MSX being one of the worst offenders). I still like it despite this, but I don't have much hope for it when the developers refuse to listen to what you have to say.

Here is a video of the special move being pulled off consistently in Mighty Final Fight on RetroArch Android with the 8bitdo Zero.

edit: spoke too soon. I think it was just a misunderstanding and some platforms do have inputs off with NES and GB as well.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by Sir Ilpalazzo »

I have two emulation-related questions - can anyone help me out here?

Trying to run SSF (for Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru) but it runs from 50% speed to, like, 80% speed no matter how I configure it. I'm working with an AMD Phenom II N640, 4 GB of RAM, and 2.9 GHz - is that not enough to run SSF well?

Also messing with X68000 emulation. I am 100% clueless here so this might be an obvious question - but I was testing out XM6 Pro-68K with Castlevania, and although the game largely ran fine, the background layers weren't displaying properly (some backgrounds were just black, and some moving background objects were appearing in the foreground). What can you do to deal with that?
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by Obiwanshinobi »

Aquales is displayed correctly only by certain older build of WinX68kHighSpeed (or so was the case some years ago). I don't know the number, but it might be just what you're looking for.
P.S. Could be winx68khighspeedv094 (as opposed to 95) - don't quote me on that.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by null1024 »

Sir Ilpalazzo wrote:I have two emulation-related questions - can anyone help me out here?

Trying to run SSF (for Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru) but it runs from 50% speed to, like, 80% speed no matter how I configure it. I'm working with an AMD Phenom II N640, 4 GB of RAM, and 2.9 GHz - is that not enough to run SSF well?
That's odd, that should be enough. I played Taromaru on a laptop from 2009 in SSF, had a 2.3Ghz or so Pentium Dual Core [can't be arsed to drag it out and get the specifics]. Even had compatibility set to max.

check your power settings, make sure your CPU is actually running at full speed and isn't in low power mode
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

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Use XM6 Type-G for all X68000 emulation endeavors.
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by KAI »

Dat 3DS emulation...
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OmegaFlareX
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Re: The State of Emulation topic

Post by OmegaFlareX »

BPzeBanshee wrote: The older games (Space Invaders etc) require discrete circuit emulation to be considered accurate, they had samples were placed in long ago. Furthermore file size for such things is small. Even with FLACs in 7z archives keeping sound samples for the Toaplan games is hundreds of MBs in size, and MAME has no stereo or loop point support for the sample system anyway so it's far from ideal.
Your reply doesn't make sense. I was referring to the games listed here that require external samples. They don't need to "keep" anything, just some pointers in the code where to play the files. I'm trying to understand why they won't do this for the Toaplan games when the aforementioned titles are supported.
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