Console emulation

Superkid11 · #1 February 18, 2009, 1:46 PM

Console emulation has been a source of interest for me the past few days. VBA-M is constantly improving(though it has no official release yet

) and there are a lot of interesting older games that these days you can only download.
(I mean, you buy a lot of them on the Wii virtual console shop, but that's still downloading... o_o)

So what emulators do you use and what games do you play on them?

At the moment I'm playing Earthbound Zero on NEStopia. I also have all 3 of the NES Super Mario games(on world 8 of Mario 1 and... somewhere on Mario 3 right now. Vastly prefer Mario 3.).
I'm also using DarwiinRemote to use my Wiimote to play it. Cause when you turn the Wiimote on its side it's basically like an NES controller. Gives a more authentic experience. :p

Once I finish Earthbound Zero(also known as Mother), I'll move on to Earthbound, which is an SNES game. I have three different SNES emulators, I do think I'll be using ZSNES. (Yes, ZSNES does have a Mac port compiled.)
BSNES, ported to Mac by the same person that ported Nestopia, is a more accurate emulator but it's also a lot slower. Given the speed of my iMac I didn't think that would really matter, but I did notice BSNES was somewhat jerkier when I walked around with Ness... even though the displayed framerate stayed solidly at 60. ZSNES is perfectly accurate anyway in all areas except sound. Sound emulation is alright, nothing bad in Earthbound, though it tends not to handle sounds from Mario World or All-Stars very well.
There's also SNES9x, which is a lot prettier and mac integrated. Still, I mainly use ZSNES.
(ZSNES doesn't work on PPC Macs because it's written in x86 assembly.)

For Gameboy and Gameboy Advanced I use KiGB and VBA-M respectively. On KiGB I've played Super Pika Land(a graphical hack of Super Mario Land) and keep on hand to play ROM copies of the various GBC Pokemon games I have.
VBA-M is a project that merges all the different versions of Visualboy Advance together. It seems to work a lot better for Mac OS X than the regular VBA. There's no official release yet, and it frequently updates. Though OS X releases are less frequent...
I've been playing Pokemon ShinyGold on it.

For the DS... well, DS emulation isn't all that good yet(that's why people use flash carts), but it's getting there. I have No$GBA and Desmume. I haven't really played anything significantly on either of them. Though only No$GBA can play Pokemon Diamond.
No$GBA is Windows only but it works just dandy in Wine. Just can't use opengl rendering(though on my Windows computer using opengl rendering causes it to slow down...), its own software renderer causes a few annoying graphical glitches but it's playable.
I haven't really tested Desmume on much yet but it seems to be more capable in the 3D graphics department. It just can't play the one game I'm familiar with yet. Plus it has a native Mac port, which is a plus. No$GBA was the best for a while, but it's no longer updated, and Desmume seems to be catching up.

By the way, here's the site with Nestopia, KiGB, and BSNES on it. Well, the Mac ports anyway. A guy named Richard Bannister ported those emulators to OS X and they do work very well. However, they have one flaw in that distortion lines tend to cross the screen... I don't know what else to call them. They're not black lines, they're like the game screen being chopped in half breifly or something. Anyway, this is fixed by using the "Synchronise video to monitor refresh" option... which you can only get if you install the "emulator enhancer". (which has that and a few other features that were in Nestopia's Windows version.) He's trying to sell emulator enhancer for $30, but thankfully the unregistered version is mostly fully functional(it has the function I mentioned) and can be used for an unlimited time. It just lacks support for some of the other emulators(not any of the ones I use) and nags you every time you start up one of them. Which is no big deal.

Bannister does have competition however. Openemu has its share of bugs(GBA emulation is terrible and NES emulation can get somewhat slow.), but it shows a lot of promise. Plus it already fixes the issue Bannister's emulators have without you having to install something that nags you at startup.

... *gets a drink of water* So uh... what about you guys?

Danny Stewart · #2 February 18, 2009, 10:40 PM

I was never a big console guy. I've never even owned a console. I've always done all my gaming on the computer. But I have been known to play GoldenEye on sixtyforce (N64 emulator) and a few random games on ZSNES (although that was back on Windows... I haven't tried the Mac version).

Jamie Minty · #3 February 19, 2009, 2:58 PM

Originally Posted by Danny Stewart

I was never a big console guy. I've never even owned a console. I've always done all my gaming on the computer. But I have been known to play GoldenEye on sixtyforce (N64 emulator) and a few random games on ZSNES (although that was back on Windows... I haven't tried the Mac version).

For Mac?

Danny Stewart · #4 February 19, 2009, 6:02 PM

Originally Posted by Jamie Minty

For Mac?

http://tinyurl.com/cv6m32

Superkid11 · #5 February 20, 2009, 10:09 PM

Originally Posted by Danny Stewart

http://tinyurl.com/cv6m32

Very useful site.

Just thought I'd add one thing, I got my hands on the wii Classic Controller the other day, so now I can play SNES games properly too.

I'm also playing EB0 with it, just cause it feels more comfortable to play with than the Wiimote.
It's easy enough to google, but here's Darwiinremote anyway incase anyone wants it.

(Granted, it isn't picked up as a joystick by the emulators or any other games, you have to map it to the keyboard keys it's using. Still, useful for things that don't normally support gamepads...)

Jamie Minty · #6 February 21, 2009, 6:18 AM

Originally Posted by Danny Stewart

http://tinyurl.com/cv6m32

I am that lazy! Thanks!

Ad Massive · #7 February 22, 2009, 7:08 AM

Well I found mine in a strange place, I was looking for a website where I could download music and stuff for my PSP, I found this forum site called pspiso, it has a lot of emulators and games for things like NES, SNES N64 and gameboy, they work you just got to figure them out first http://www.pspiso.com/showthread.php?t=104467 bare in mind youve got to make an account first, hope you can work the things better than I can.