Series of articles idea – need input

[Anapan]

Great idea! I have some tips and settings on getting smooth gameplay on older systems I wrote up for getting most emulators going on an OQO 01+ (palmtop pc at a slow 1ghz with 16mb onboard gfx card) that may be of some use. I'd especially be interested in the N64 stuff because that particular system seems to need several hours on various message boards going through 40+ page threads just to get a portion of the games going. I did find some good articles on getting texture packs running well for supported games. I wish the PC versions worked as easily and intuitively as the xbox port. I'd be happy to help in any way.

[miked]

I seriously need an updated easy guide for MAME. Everything I find online is from 2005 and crap.

[fastbilly1]

Here are the emulators I was looking at:
Console:
NES – FCE Ultra & Nesticle
SMS/Genesis/32x/Sega CD – Kega Fusion
Atari – Stella & Atari800win
SNES – SNES9x & ZSNES
TG16 – Magic Engine
N64 – Project64
Sega Saturn – SSF
PSX - epsxe

Handheld:
Gameboys – VisualBoyAdvance & NO$GBA
Virtual Boy – Red Dragon
Game Gear – Kega Fusion

Arcade:
MAME – MAME32/UI
Laserdisc – Daphne
Pinball – PinMAME
NeoGeo – NeoRagex

Several of these, (Namely pinmame, reddragon, and Daphne) I do not know how to use yet, but would love to know.

More can be added and some may be taken away, but I think the highest priority are Mame, KegaFushion, and SSF - those are the three I get the most questions about.

[GSZX1337]

NES – FCE Ultra & Nesticle
SMS/Genesis/32x/Sega CD – Kega Fusion

For the NES, I use NEStopia. I used to use FCEU (I still do in Linux), but for some reason I would get random graphical glitches.

Instead of having KEGA Fusion for both the Master System and the Genesis, I would suggest a separate emulator for the SMS. Unless something changed in the new version of KEGA, there's no option to adjust the input to emulate the SMS controller, just the 3 and 6 button Genny controllers.

[fastbilly1]

Valid points, I will add Nestopia to the list for NES and will try to find a better SMS emulator. To be honest it is one of the few major consoles I never really emulated.

[racketboy]

I can't wait to see the results of this project -- I'd be honored to be able to publish something like this.
Keep us posted

[GSZX1337]

Valid points, I will add Nestopia to the list for NES and will try to find a better SMS emulator. To be honest it is one of the few major consoles I never really emulated.

The only SMS emulator that doesn't also do the Genesis/addons is MEKA, and that hasn't been updated in almost 4 years.

[fastbilly1]

MEKA, now that takes me back. According to their homepage, a new version came out in 07:
http://www.smspower.org/meka/

I know what I am going to be playing with very soon.

[Anapan]

Here's the emus I use that are different from your list

Atari: Z26 with x26 frontend
Arcade: Raine32
PC-Engine/TG16: HuGo
Genesis/32x/SegaCD: Gens32 Surreal
Sega Saturn: GiriGiri/Gsaturn mod - the only one fast enough for me to emulate games @ realtime speed on any of my computers. I can provide a good version
MSX: BlueMSX

I second Nestopia for NES - the NTSC emulation is so great. Really adds to the feel when you turn up the artifacting and fringing. I too used to use FCE Ultra because it was faster, but in the last few versions of both Nestopia is faster, and has better graphical support (something they did to FCEUltra screwed up full-screen support/switching). Nesticle used to be the best around 1997, but compared to the newer ones it's worse in every way except speed in dos.

PinMame only emulates the chips and light-up display working behind the scenes on pinball machines. Without a frontend all you'd get is the LED display box and some of the music/sounds AFAIK. Visual Pinball integrates PinMAME's outputs to a table editor/loader to actually let you play the games.
http://www.randydavis.com/vp/intro.htm

[fast]

Alright the first goals are going to be the 3 NES emulators (Nesticle, FCE Ultra, and Nestopia) and ofcourse MAME (starting with 32/UI and moving from there).

The reason I continue to bring up Nesticle is that out of all the emulators Ive seen over the years, for some reason Nesticle is still the most used apart from MAME. Even on some of the Vista boxes Ive seen, people are still using Nesticle. Sure it is time for them to upgrade, but reluctance is a virtue I guess.


Anapan, I have to be honest, I could never get Hugo to work. And if you could provide me wtih a good version of Girigiri I would be much olbiged. I used Casinni, which was a ripoff of Girigiri with a good frontend, for sometime but all the installs seem to have virii attached. I shall add them to the list when I get home.