Emulators etc.

[pg]

there are a few. i think the best one needs a voodoo glide card(UltraHLE). there is also an opengl n64 emulator(project 64) but it runs extremely slow on my pc when i tried it. just for reference i had a 750mhz/128mb/gf1 ddr so it's not the fast pc in the world. i imagine n64 emu would be playable on a current top end pc. i imagine there are more newer emulators now too.

[General Ludd]

There are apparently some decent Play Station 2 emulators around, although I haven't tried any.

There are some X-Box ones under development, but none that I've heard of being very functional beyond a few games.

[DrSpike]

Someone technical explain how emulators work please.

[pg]

they emulate/imitate console hardware, hence emulators. basically as i understand it the software acts as if it's the hardware and performs the same, except you are using your cpu/video. if you have a fast enough cpu/video card you can emulate any hardware more or less. it's all just math. i imagine we'll see xbox/gamecube/ps2 emulators in a few years after cpus after fast enough to make it easier.

[alva]

It actually slows down your PC, if not, those games would run at insane speeds.

[pg]

Originally posted by alva
It actually slows down your PC, if not, those games would run at insane speeds.

huh? not for n64 on my pc. i doubt it's fast enough to run it. emulators take a lot of extra cpu power generally over consoles. in the older games(16bit and lower games) it locks the framerate so it doesn't get insane. you need a beefy pc to run last generation consoles(especially when the emulators you are running is not optimized). look at these anandtech benches for ps1 -

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1986&p=8

the image below from ffix on ps1 only gets ~80 fps on an athlon 64 3400+ w/ radeon 9800 xt. of course i chose the slowest example but even the fastest benchmarks still aren't insanely fast considering the systems they are running on and how simple ps1 graphics are.

[General Ludd]

It depends on the game, and often varies during the gameplay. If you use ePSXe without a forced frame rate particular areas or low-requirement games (like Final Fantasy Tactics with it's primarily sprite based graphics) will go extremely fast. And yet there are some games (like Final Fantasy 9) where it will tend to slow down and get slugish at moments. (The music slows down due to a framerate drop while loading battles on my computer, for instance)

[bipolarbear]

the Znes emulator didn't wrok, does anbody know a good website that would have an adequate snes emulator?

[DrSpike]

Probably best to try harder to make it work.

[bipolarbear]

yeah, I think I'll jsut buy an old snes, with a copy of Donkey kong.

[pg]

heh, how could you not get zsnes to work? that's a simple program. you just unzip it to a directory and place a rom in the same directory. voila! unless it doesn't run on windows xp or something... i've never had any problems with zsnes since i used it years ago. it's never even crashed once.

[Verto]

Originally posted by bipolarbear
yeah, I think I'll jsut buy an old snes, with a copy of Donkey kong.

I never got rid of my SNES.

In fact, I sold my PS1 and have the Super hooked up.

Super Nintendo

[bipolarbear]

heh, how could you not get zsnes to work? that's a simple program. you just unzip it to a directory and place a rom in the same directory. voila! unless it doesn't run on windows xp or something... i've never had any problems with zsnes since i used it years ago. it's never even crashed once.

I'm not to hip[ to the shizzy on compys, what the poop is a directory? I saved them to the same file.

[DrSpike]

All you have to do (if pg is right) is double click the zipped (you need winzip) emulator and whack it in a folder somewhere, then put the ROM in the same folder as you unzipped the emulator to.

[General Ludd]

You don't even need to, actually. When you go to load a rom you can change directories to wherever the rom is. And hell, you don't even have to unzip the rom 'cause ZSNES can run it from that state aswell.


It really is amazing that you couldn't get it to work.