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[tomwhite2004]

Can original nintendo wii run higan & mgba well?

MGBA has a Wii version which runs very nicely. Higan is too cpu intensive for the Wii but it still has an older version of snes9x in retroarch which is ok.

The more I hear about BNES (Higan) the more I want to try it.

If you don't have a gsync monitor be sure to use bsnes in retroarch, the stand alone is a bit of a stuttery mess otherwise. Whilst bsnes in retroarch is an older version of Higan all the changes get backported so its up to date.

I didn't know about Squarepushed's comments. To be honest, I didn't even know he was a dev for Libretro. Even though what he said is deplorable, I'm not ready to condemn a whole project for the words of one individual. RetroArch is a collaborative effort and I'm sure that his ideas are not part of the group's philosophy. If it were the case, though, I wouldn't support it.

Squarepusher / Twinaphex is one of the lead developers and considering the absolute contempt he holds both users and emulation authors in I wonder why he is doing it at all....

https://retroarchleaks.wordpress.com/

 

[fester]

It's a hack job? Okay, I guess I will use the other one then. Is there some kind of massive input lag in BSNES? I have never heard of retroarch accepting any hack job emus but I don't know. I know it was a fork, so maybe I will just use BSNES balanced.

One person's "hack job" is another person's fork. The Libretto team has a different take on it and from personal experience I think the Mercury cores are worth trying.

"bsnes-mercury is a fork of bsnes aiming to restore some useful features that have been removed, as well as improving performance a bit. Maximum accuracy is still uncompromisable; anything that affects accuracy is optional and off by default."

https://wiki.libretro.com/index.php?title=Bsnes-mercury

 

[Neith]

Look, I think that's great that you've found a way to enjoy these games with a filter that you love. I've seen the examples, I looked at a few videos and yes, they look "smooth" and if that's what you're after, that's great. But it's not for everyone.

The issue is that you're getting really defensive using words like "objectively" as to say: you MUST love Yoshi's Island with this filter or you're an old "purist" as if that's a bad thing.

I like my snes games with a light CRT filter - nothing too extreme - and in 4:3. I prefer to have the optimal vintage look because that's how I grew up playing them.

Some like nearest neighbor in a pixel perfect aspect ratio. They love the individual pixels and want each of them to be a perfect shaped square on their screen.

You like ScaleFX because you want smooth gradients.

But there's no need to get all worked up and bash everyone else. I think we can all express our opinions, give our reasons why and do so in a civilized manner.

Number one I'm not worked up, I didn't bash anyone, and stop trying to portray a random post so negatively. I made multiple examples in my post that defended both sides of the argument. But yes it is a little weird when people just jump to conclusions based one image.

Also, as far as I know a lot of games are not even 4:3, but 8:7 and many games do not make up for that conversion. So you might want to check that if you are into the purist old school thing at least on SNES.

I said "in a more objective case" because I feel Yoshi's Island qualifies as a bigger upgrade than other games. You really aren't going to convince me that the sketch book style is supposed to be jaggy and pixelated. It doesn't fit in with their vision at all. It's my opinion, but it has more going for it than yes we like individual squares a centimeter wide to represent a coloring book dream world lol. It's more like if the game were made today it would look like what ScaleFX provides. It would look even better than that, but that it even gets that close is a miracle.

The opening title screen unfiltered on YI looks absolutely hideous on an HD screen. There really isn't two ways of expressing how it looks. It's objectively terrible looking with aliasing everywhere and random jaggies on every line.

At any rate you can like what you want. But most people are unaware that there is a filter as good as ScaleFX out there, hence the posts about it.

I like purity in vision as well, but I'm a little tired of the same old we need CRT or bust posts because they don't even make any sense in a lot of cases. In some cases they do make a lot of sense. Yoshi's Island is not really one of them IMO. there is a purity in the cartoony sketchy styles that become solidified and immersive with the filter.

A good CRT filter also can look very good no doubt about that. But unfiltered? Yeah no.

 

[Neith]

I'm gonna post this alone since it has nothing to do with that.

I found this piece curious:

06:56 <@Twinaphex> and I would not recommend anybody play a gamecube game on dolphin first

The Thousand Year Door looks absolutely amazing with the new texture pack they have been working on. So I will disagree with him there. He seems overly negative about things.

Holy shit what produces this:

Thursday, 2017-05-18
09:54 <@Twinaphex> I will never forgive or forget the &#8216;emulator authors' who sided with them
09:55 <@Twinaphex> that gave me a good eye opening into what they were truly like - all of that stuff about &#8216;preservation' and &#8216;morals' and &#8216;muh GPL' was all a bunch of bullshit from Miss Mednafen and byuu
09:55 <@Twinaphex> and all these other cocksuckers

Why is he so mad at everyone? Is it because he was not trying to make money and they were?

Can somone perhaps tell me what is all going on here. I get the base of it, but I'm not sure I understand who is on who's side and all and why there are sides in the first place.

 

[Jebusman]

I said "in a more objective case" because I feel Yoshi's Island basically objectively qualifies as a better looking game.

I mean you feel that way, but it doesn't.

Why is he so mad at everyone? Is it because he was not trying to make money and they were?

He's a generally mad person. His attitude is 100% toxic in every way, to every person he ever speaks to. There's a long, LONG history of it. If you don't do exactly what he wants, when he wants it, you're garbage to him.

It honestly soured me a bit on the emulation life seeing how most of these coders act behind the scenes. Pushed me back in the direction of physical hardware + upscaler.

 

[nkarafo]

Yeah, not a fan of the scalefx filter either. Looks weird to me. Just give me a good crt shader with evenly distributred scanlines and some crt glow and im golden.

 

[RedZaraki]

Retroarch scares me


I don't know why


I'm so used to stand-alone applications for emulators. Cores and etc. seems different to me.


If Retroarch can work on my Windows 7 laptop from 2012, then that would be cool.


I will say one thing: PPSSPP is one of the best emulators I've ever used (it's for PSP).

 

[tomwhite2004]

I'm gonna post this alone since it has nothing to do with that.

I found this piece curious:

06:56 <@Twinaphex> and I would not recommend anybody play a gamecube game on dolphin first

The Thousand Year Door looks absolutely amazing with the new texture pack they have been working on. So I will disagree with him there. He seems overly negative about things.

The dolphin core in retroarch is still very much a work in progress and missing a ton of features, right now the stand alone is the best way to play.

 

[Neith]

I mean you feel that way, but it doesn't.



He's a generally mad person. His attitude is 100% toxic in every way, to every person he ever speaks to. There's a long, LONG history of it. If you don't do exactly what he wants, when he wants it, you're garbage to him.

It honestly soured me a bit on the emulation life seeing how most of these coders act behind the scenes. Pushed me back in the direction of physical hardware + upscaler.

In some ways it actually does. As I said take the title screen. You aren't ever going to convince anyone that the unfiltered mess looks better than ScaleFX there. This is an objectively better image as far as quality goes. The filtering is just taking out the artifacts of the image. And it does this all the time.

Now, I'm not gonna get into an argument about CRT stuff, but ScaleFX comes out the winner in many games that I play IMO.

https://imgur.com/a/a1ayu

 

[tomwhite2004]

your unfiltered screen shot with the extraordinary amount of jpeg compression is in no way representative of how it really looks with decent settings.

 

[Neith]

your unfiltered screen shot with the extraordinary amount of jpeg compression is in no way representative of how it really looks with decent settings.

https://imgur.com/a/a1ayu

Those are PNGs taken directly from BSNES lol.

Literally, game with Bilinear on both. One has a shader. One is unfiltered. What would you like me to do to that image? My whole point is that unfiltered looks terrible on games. That point is clearly made there.

As I have said you can get a good CRT image with some tweaking. But it's not as good as ScaleFX on YI to me.

How did you come to the conclusion that had an extraordinary amount of compression? I'm very curious about this.

Yeah, not a fan of the scalefx filter either. Looks weird to me. Just give me a good crt shader with evenly distributred scanlines and some crt glow and im golden.

Where have you seen the ScaleFX filter in action? What games? Have you actually ever tried it yourself before forming that opinion? I doubt it.

I am sure you do prefer the CRT way of doing things, but you know, you could actually try things before you denounce them.

 

[tomwhite2004]

Literally, game with Bilinear on both. One has a shader. One is unfiltered. What would you like me to do to that image? My whole point is that unfiltered looks terrible on games. That point is clearly made there.

Apologies, I was initially viewing on a phone which made it look much worse. However unfiltered means no bilinear filtering, that's just another post process and one that I personally chose not to add.

 

[Vertti]

A good CRT filter looks so much better than any of those ugly smoothing filters. With ScaleFX you lose image details and many sprites look disformed. CTR filter already smoothens sharp edges while keeping the image still sharp without losing any details. You also get nice bleed and bloom effects that the dev wanted you to see.

I don't see the point comparing unfiltered snes screenshots to those scalefx pics. Retro games were never meant to look like the unfiltered pics you posted. So it's kinda pointless.

But each of his own. I would never use scalefx. CRT shaders look so much better.

 

[Jebusman]

Literally, game with Bilinear on both. One has a shader. One is unfiltered. What would you like me to do to that image? My whole point is that unfiltered looks terrible on games. That point is clearly made there.

It's not.

You've seemingly convinced yourself that the shader improves it, and I bet a fair number of people may share your opinion.

But not nearly enough people share that to make it an objective statement, and your repeated insistence that it does, or jumping to the "You obviously haven't tried it yourself" defense as a means to deflect people's criticism, doesn't do you any favors. I mean you actually wrote "You aren't ever going to convince anyone that the unfiltered mess looks better than ScaleFX there." in the very thread that people have been unconvinced about your ScaleFX examples.

I think that filter looks garbage. I think all filters look garbage. Literally any filter designed to smooth out the original pixel art is garbage. A properly scaled image of raw pixels is the best that game is ever going to look, outside of a full blown remake. That is an opinion that I, and enough others, hold, to make "this is objectively better" not an objective thing. It's very much personal bias. You have yours, I have mine.

On top of all this, this discussion is arguably irrelevant to the topic at hand, which was the OP asking which emulators were the best, not which jar of vasoline you most prefer applying to your screen before playing.

 

[Neith]

Apologies, I was initially viewing on a phone which made it look much worse. However unfiltered means no bilinear filtering, that's just another post process and one that I personally chose not to add.

https://imgur.com/a/z7ZAz

Yeah, I just forgot to leave it off. Sorry about that. I know how that messes the pixels up.

Look, I agree that an unfiltered image can look good. The problem is when you start blowing it up bigger and bigger. It starts to get ugly IMHO.

As you can see here all ScaleFX is doing is giving you a clear image into the art. At least it is IMO. Bilinear + unfiltered is awful. No one in their right mind would play the game like that LOL. So yea my point still stands for that flawed comparison.

100% Unfiltered is okay to me but still pretty messy on large screens.

@Jebus: Yeah, we'll just have to disagree then. To me the image I gave you there was pretty cut and dry. The bilinear alone image looks like trash. The ScaleFX one looks immersive and clean without smudging anything really.

The truly unfiltered image I put in this post looks okay, but the to me the ScaleFX wins on larger displays. I can see how some people like the pixelated look. I don't always care for it, and yes I think we objectively get closer to the artist's original vision like this. But you are not convinced. So be it. The larger display the worse that unfiltered image starts looking. Even on my 42 inch it's too big for me. On a 20 inch TV sure it can look really good IMO but no truly unfiltered and no bilinear. Bilinear to me only works well with other shaders.

As for the topic I think this fits fine into the discussion. These are direct BSNES images. OP wanted to know what emulator to use, and here are a couple images that show him how the best emulator looks with YI.

 

[Joey Ravn]

Scalefx.slang:

Caligari.slang:

Light scanlines win for me every time. Caligari and CRT Geom (flat, without hallation) are the best, IMO. It's either that or unfiltered. I can't stand the vaseline look of bilinear or how much detail is lost with ScaleFX. Sure, some of the edges are more rounded, but everything else is distorted. Not my cup of tea at all.

 

[Jebusman]

without smudging anything really.

Turning the filter on Yoshi apparently decided to give Baby Mario a black eye (maybe tired of all the crying?), along with fuse one of his feet to his body. Yoshi's also apparently lost his left leg and gained a noticeable hanging gut instead

Filters can never achieve "closer to the artist's vision" because they have zero context into what that vision is. All they see is pixels and are trying to guess which line they should be a part of. In many cases, they fail to guess the artist's intent and end up ruining the sprite. No filter is going to get around this, especially in an era where pixel artists were using every visual trick in the book to grant the illusion of an object's form and properties while using as few pixels as they could.

 

[Neith]

Scalefx.slang:


Caligari.slang:


Light scanlines win for me every time. Caligari and CRT Geom (flat, without hallation) are the best, IMO. It's either that or unfiltered. I can't stand the vaseline look of bilinear or how much detail is lost with ScaleFX. Sure, some of the edges are more rounded, but everything else is distorted. Not my cup of tea at all.

Good comparison. I like both images. I might like the CRT one a bit more, but that is not certain. I like the purity of the ScaleFX image, though there does not seem to be quite enough detail. The CRT one looks rough and dirty, which some may prefer for a war game like that.

This is what I described in my posts though. The artstyle for this game is fairly basic, and has a quality to it that Yoshi's Island lacks.

If you were to post this exact spec in YI I would pick ScaleFX every time. Because it often fits with cartoony artstyles, and to me it just makes Yoshi's backgrounds and art look gorgeous.

I'd even play this one totally unfiltered to be honest.

Turning the filter on Yoshi apparently decided to give Baby Mario a black eye (maybe tired of all the crying?), along with fuse one of his feet to his body. Yoshi's also apparently lost his left leg and gained a noticeable hanging gut instead

That comparison doesn't work in your favor as much as you think it does IMO. And it's just a character. The backgrounds and the levels all look much better for me.

You blew the image up to the point those pixels are basically a solid mess. Apparently, Yoshi's nose is made of right angles and the ground is a bunch of random shapes placed together. In no way does that pixel art resemble anything but pixels for the most part.

Look how much better the gradient is on Yoshi's white skin. Mario's hat is rounded like it should be. The ground actually looks like the glowing pebbles or whatever it is supposed to be. We could disagree with this all day.

I already said I don't mind 100% unfiltered on smaller displays. But on my 42 inch I prefer a filter, though, I do still sometimes play levels without one.

 

[Jebusman]

That comparison doesn't work in your favor as much as you think it does IMO. And it's just a character. The backgrounds and the levels all look much better for me.

You blew the image up to the point those pixels are basically a solid mess. Apparently, Yoshi's nose is made of right angles and the ground is a bunch of random shapes placed together. In no way does that pixel art resemble anything but pixels for the most part.

Look how much better the gradient is on Yoshi's white skin. Mario's hat is rounded like it should be. The ground actually looks like the glowing pebbles or whatever it is supposed to be. We could disagree with this all day.

I literally took these from your exact screenshots, unscaled from how you delivered them. You delivered a 1384x1038 image, and I took the ~200x200 piece that Yoshi consisted of.

If you honestly can't make out an image in the unfiltered one, go see an optometrist. Your eyes are broken.

Edit: Because I'm not going to keep adding new posts to this thread before the mods either ban us both or lock this thing (I don't want to bump it more unless someone else has an actual question or comment), you wrote, verbatim:

You aren't ever going to convince anyone that the unfiltered mess looks better than ScaleFX there. This is an objectively better image as far as quality goes.

I was not the one who came into this thread with an ultimatum that a scaling filter was objectively a superior experience, full stop. And when people told you they did not think it was, your answer was to dismiss them out of turn for not "trying it yourself" or "trying it extensively". You were not interested in listening to anyone's arguments. You were here to tell us that ScaleFX is better as an objective truth.

It's not. Go find a dictionary, look up "objectively", find out that your use of the word isn't accurate, go see an eye doctor, and then come back and have a rational discussion about filters.

Edit 2 Electric Boogaloo:

You are taking my words out of context. I said objectively better toward the actual vision of the artists in those posts. The artists that are drawing art that is not pixelated in the slightest. That is what I mean by objectively more faithful to the actual art. Not the pixel art. The unfiltered image is a technology limitation.

Except you literally can't have a clue what the "artistic vision" was. And neither can the filter. They could have designed the art knowing specifically it would have to fit within a 256x224 pixel window. That's why your use of objectively is still wrong. You can sit here and argue all you want about your preference for it. And you won't be wrong for it. But you cannot, as a matter of actual fact, declare any bit of it's effects to be objectively better in any way, whether it be from a directly visual standpoint, or an argument about the intent of the artist. You just can't.

TL;dr Read a dictionary. Go see an eye doctor. Stop projecting your defensiveness when people tell you they don't like the look of the filter you claim is unarguably better.

 

[Neith]

I literally took these from your exact screenshots, unscaled from how you delivered them. You delivered a 1384x1038 image, and I took the ~200x200 piece that Yoshi consisted of.

If you honestly can't make out an image in the unfiltered one, go see an optometrist. Your eyes are broken.

https://imgur.com/a/z7ZAz

Exactly, it looks like a pixelated mess of random shapes on my 42 inch. I can deal with it, I can play it like that, but I definitely prefer not to. I was actually looking at it in a smaller window, and I still preferred the ScaleFX. It looks good to me on super small screens at least.

My eyes are fine. But it seems like you really have a problem with someone that prefers something else. I've already stated I don't mind purely unfiltered, but here you are now getting rude and pissy. Maybe you need to take a break or something. Yer also taking the entire image out of context but whatever. Both have their pros and cons.

You said some random stuff about ScaleFX, and I just put it right back at you with the other side of the argument. People can like both things as I have said all along. For YI yeah I do feel strongly the unfiltered one does not look nearly as good.

You are taking my words out of context. I said objectively better toward the actual vision of the artists in those posts. The artists that are drawing art that is not pixelated in the slightest. That is what I mean by objectively more faithful to the actual art. Not the pixel art. The unfiltered image is a technology limitation.

As I explained further up: "I said "in a more objective case" because I feel Yoshi's Island qualifies as a bigger upgrade than other games. You really aren't going to convince me that the sketch book style is supposed to be jaggy and pixelated. It doesn't fit in with their vision at all. It's my opinion, but it has more going for it than yes we like individual squares a centimeter wide to represent a coloring book dream world lol. It's more like if the game were made today it would look like what ScaleFX provides. It would look even better than that, but that it even gets that close is a miracle."

And yes what I am talking about is the Yoshi's Island concept art. The art that the artists drew before they made the actual game. So yes we do have a good idea what their vision was like, and it was not pixelated.

Also, you are overreacting, which is typical. Chill out dude. Fucking hell it's like you are frothing at the mouth right now. Talking about bans, screaming at me to go see an eye doctor, and yadda yadda. This will be my last post to you. Have a nice day.

 

[NipplesAndToes23]

I didn't know there were so many of these. What's good for PS1 and 2? I could never figure out how to get PCS2 to run.

 

[Paragon]

I don't really like filters, so the standalone emulators are fine for me.

One of the issues I have with most stand-alone emulators is that they don't have good options for cropping and scaling to display games in the correct aspect ratio. As a front-end, RetroArch has the best options I've found.
It also has the best options for audio and video sync - though it still doesn't seem to support G-Sync well. It's the only front-end or emulator I've used which can run games without any stuttering/skipping audio and video.

Most of the time you need to filter the image if you are making sure that the aspect ratio is exact, and if you want to have the image fill as much of the screen as possible, since old systems did not render with square pixels. I prefer pixellate to bilinear filtering, as it retains most of the image sharpness.
You also need to apply gamma correction. Modern displays are typically calibrated to 2.22 gamma, while a properly set up CRT would be 2.35. The only stand-alone emulator I've seen with a gamma correction option was Higan, and last time I tried it, it converted 2.20 to 2.50 which is wrong. (too dark)

It's PSX rather than NES/SNES/GBA, but here's an example of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, showing what the image would be like in an emulator that displays an unfiltered image in the pixel aspect ratio, compared to the corrected output from RetroArch.

And that assumes the PSX emulator even got the aspect ratio correct. Many seem to assume that all PSX games are 320px wide, while SotN is 256px wide.

https://imgur.com/a/a1ayu
Those are PNGs taken directly from BSNES lol.
Literally, game with Bilinear on both. One has a shader. One is unfiltered. What would you like me to do to that image? My whole point is that unfiltered looks terrible on games.

I'm generally not a fan of that sort of filter, and I'm not sure that it's going to work well with most other games, but I do have to admit that it seems to work for Yoshi's Island's art style.

Whether you would use it or not, I think most people could at least agree that what it's doing is impressive.
I generally favor Trinitron-style CRT emulation like the CRT Royale Kurozumi preset (with my own tweaks) to raw pixels or other sorts of filter though. And de-dithering Genesis games with MDAPT before that filter is applied can look even better.

 

[Neith]

I didn't know there were so many of these. What's good for PS1 and 2? I could never figure out how to get PCS2 to run.

I'm not sure about PS2 as PCSX2 is in active development and is getting better. I think that is about all we have for a mature emulator.

For PS1 Beetle non-HW worked great for me.

 

[LewieP]

Those ScaleFX Yoshi's Island screenshots look awful to me.

 

[Jebusman]

I didn't know there were so many of these. What's good for PS1 and 2? I could never figure out how to get PCS2 to run.

PCSX2 needs a BIOS to run. So unless you have a PS2 lying around (and a method to get the BIOS from it), you're out of luck, it's the only option. Compatibility is pretty good though nowadays. Some games are still pretty sketch but for the most part it's alright.

For PS1, Mednafen (in RetroArch known as Beetle PSX) is pretty good. Mednafen standalone is command line only though, so kind of annoying.

And also requires a PS1 bios as well.

 

[nkarafo]

Yeah i play with emulators since 1998 i have tried every filter there is. Im not a fan of jaggie smoothing filters like this no matter how clean it looks. These games are too low res for that and i feel like the end result is missing detail and messes with the sprites.

And this is why i ended up using Retroarch as my main. Crt shaders are simply the best way to experience these games for me unless you use a good quality crt tv.

 

[tomwhite2004]

Mednafen standalone is command line only though, so kind of annoying.

There are loads of frontends and gui's available though, no need for it to be command line only.

PCSX2 needs a BIOS to run. So unless you have a PS2 lying around (and a method to get the BIOS from it), you're out of luck, it's the only option.

Lets be honest though, no one is ripping the bios from consoles to use with emulators are they....

 

[Neith]

I'm generally not a fan of that sort of filter, and I'm not sure that it's going to work well with most other games, but I do have to admit that it seems to work for Yoshi's Island's art style.

Whether you would use it or not, I think most people could at least agree that what it's doing is impressive.

Hi, I appreciate your post.

The concept art, the style of YI, and the artists seemingly wanted a paint brush style aesthetic. Whether someone wants to argue that the brush was not limited by pixel art or it was I guess it up for debate. But to me yes the filter objectively gets closer to the actual vision that the artists drew on the page before it turned into a videogame.

That was my only point. I see the pixel art in this game, and a couple others, as an example where the filter is modernizing their tech to the point it gives us more insight into what the artists were actually thinking before the technology warped their vision. Nintendo generally does not do pixel art anymore for their main consoles, at least not for Yoshi, and Yoshi games have always been a series where they have unique artstyles that are seemingly made of, or by, common materials. To me ScaleFX plus Bilinear really drives home the paint brush aesthetic very well. To some it may appear as a desecration I guess lol.

But again I actually enjoy the 100% unfiltered image on smaller screens. I enjoy other games with unfiltered images too. With CRT I need to do a lot of tweaking. Does Retroarch have a good CRT shader without too much tweaking?

 

[NipplesAndToes23]

One of the issues I have with most stand-alone emulators is that they don't have good options for cropping and scaling to display games in the correct aspect ratio. As a front-end, RetroArch has the best options I've found.
It also has the best options for audio and video sync - though it still doesn't seem to support G-Sync well. It's the only front-end or emulator I've used which can run games without any stuttering/skipping audio and video.

Most of the time you need to filter the image if you are making sure that the aspect ratio is exact, and if you want to have the image fill as much of the screen as possible, since old systems did not render with square pixels. I prefer pixellate to bilinear filtering, as it retains most of the image sharpness.
You also need to apply gamma correction. Modern displays are typically calibrated to 2.22 gamma, while a properly set up CRT would be 2.35. The only stand-alone emulator I've seen with a gamma correction option was Higan, and last time I tried it, it converted 2.20 to 2.50 which is wrong. (too dark)

It's PSX rather than NES/SNES/GBA, but here's an example of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, showing what the image would be like in an emulator that displays an unfiltered image in the pixel aspect ratio, compared to the corrected output from RetroArch.


And that assumes the PSX emulator even got the aspect ratio correct. Many seem to assume that all PSX games are 320px wide, while SotN is 256px wide.




I'm generally not a fan of that sort of filter, and I'm not sure that it's going to work well with most other games, but I do have to admit that it seems to work for Yoshi's Island's art style.

Whether you would use it or not, I think most people could at least agree that what it's doing is impressive.
I generally favor Trinitron-style CRT emulation like the CRT Royale Kurozumi preset (with my own tweaks) to raw pixels or other sorts of filter though. And de-dithering Genesis games with MDAPT before that filter is applied can look even better.

Does Yoshi's Island run well? I played it on Zsnes and the lava levels have weird effects going on and I think Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy lagged.

 

[SapphiCine]

Is there any disadvantage to using Retroarch? Having only one program to run with different modules sounds great but I am skeptical.

 

[Neith]

Is there any disadvantage to using Retroarch? Having only one program to run with different modules sounds great but I am skeptical.

Honestly, I just configured three emulator cores and transferred over all my saved games from three different emulators.

It is exceedingly easy to set up, uses a PS3 style XMB, and you can save all of your configurations quite easily and efficiently.

The only downside is with modern emus like Dolphin and maybe even PCSX2. You might want the standalones there. I kept my standalone for PSPPP for now too, but that one probably is fine with RA too.

 

[tomwhite2004]

Does Yoshi's Island run well? I played it on Zsnes and the lava levels have weird effects going on and I think Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy lagged.

Zsnes is utter trash by todays standards.

Is there any disadvantage to using Retroarch? Having only one program to run with different modules sounds great but I am skeptical.

The only problem people have with it is they don't like the user interface, everything else is a win.

The only downside is with modern emus like Dolphin and maybe even PCSX2. You might want the standalones there. I kept my standalone for PSPPP for now too, but that one probably is fine with RA too.

PCSX2 isn't in retroarch. PPSSPP is getting an updated core but for now the stand alone is far better, the core in retroarch isn't fine at all.

 

[MysticX]

For advanced couch play I recommend Hyperspin!

It's very condusing to set up, but extremely satisfying when done right.

 

[Neith]

Ahh okay good to know then. I'll just keep my standalones as those emus are updated so often I don't even care to have them in retro.

Looks like PSPPP 1.4.2, which wasn't a terrible release or anything. But yeah they have advanced past that.

 

[nkarafo]

Is there any disadvantage to using Retroarch? Having only one program to run with different modules sounds great but I am skeptical.

Some cores may be out of date or have some additional bugs compared to the standalone versions. But for the most part its worth it.

 

[kaioshade]

Yes, it is.

But on Mac you might prefer OpenEmu www.openemu.org

RetroArch is the better choice for macOS. OpenEmu has very outdated cores (MAME is still at .149*). Retroarch is updated far more frequently. OpenEmu looks noce though.

*RetroArch MAME core for macOS is busted too, but is at least at .174

 

[Elfstar]

Is there any advantage in using vulkan over opengl?

 

[tomwhite2004]

Is there any advantage in using vulkan over opengl?

only with the mednafens psx hw core as it was specifically designed around vulcan. and one of the n64 emulators called parallel, but is still really early days for that one so no point in using it over the stand alone m64p.

 

[NipplesAndToes23]

Zsnes is utter trash by todays standards.

Why? I don't ever understand why people turn their noses up at certain softwares maybe it's just cause I'm shit at coding and don't know all the little intricacies. I just want to play the shit, but anyway does that answer my question about Yoshi's Island?

 

[Sir_Crocodile]

Why? I don't ever understand why people turn their noses up at certain softwares maybe it's just cause I'm shit at coding and don't know all the little intricacies. I just want to play the shit, but anyway does that answer my question about Yoshi's Island?

If you played it and a snes side by side you'd understand.

Here's some visible bugs in zsnes:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120724122435/http://byuu.org/bsnes/accuracy

and there's all kinds of audio issues with it too. There's tons of games which don't play properly with zsnes, many in ways you wouldn't even realise unless you'd played it on a real snes.

 

[tomwhite2004]

I just want to play the shit, but anyway does that answer my question about Yoshi's Island?

Zsnes is trash so it doesn't play the game properly, how does that not answer your question?

 

[gngf123]

Why? I don't ever understand why people turn their noses up at certain softwares maybe it's just cause I'm shit at coding and don't know all the little intricacies. I just want to play the shit, but anyway does that answer my question about Yoshi's Island?

People turn their noses up at ZSnes because it is an inaccurate piece of shit that was only impressive back in the 90's and early 2000's when there was nothing else available that would run on people's PC's.

There is literally no reason to use it any more.

Some details:

- Sound emulation is completely off. A number of games have glitched audio because of it and some actually have no audio at all.
- Some games crash or suffer from frequent freezes (Super Mario RPG, for example)
- It fails a number of SNES Diagnostic tests
- Issues with transparency
- Super FX chip poorly implemented, causing games using it to sometimes run faster than they should do.
- Other timing issues (like the Triforce sequence in LTTP running nearly twice as fast as it should do)
- It is so inaccurate that old ROM hacks which used ZSnes for their testing actually often crash on real hardware/other emulators.

To relate it to your original question:

If a game has weird shit going on, it is probably ZSnes's fault and you would be better off trying to play it elsewhere.

 

[Radius4]

Mercury is a hack job, use bsnes balanced. Small tip, turn on hard gpu sync and set it to "0" and make sure you are in windowless full screen to reduce input lag.

Mercury is a hack job

Uh no, it's just a few optimizations, it doesn't differ from bsnes all that much, and reenables the possibility to use HLE special chip emulation.

- The biggest change is getting the interface sane, which is accomplished through libretro.
- 'inline' was added all across the PPU subclasses. Framerate went up by 20% from such a trivial change! (Spamming inline elsewhere does little if anything, so it wasn't done.)
- A fast path was added to various parts of the CPU bus, improving framerate by about 2.5%.
- libco has been changed quite a bit, both for performance, readability, and portability to more platforms.
- A seven-line function in sfc/memory/memory-inline.hpp was replaced, which speeds up ROM load by roughly a factor 6 (1.2s -> 0.2s). (This change was developed for upstream, and the author of higan was mostly positive; it is likely to appear in bsnes v095.)
- A section in sfc/memory/memory.cpp was specialized for the common, easy, case. This speeds up ROM load time by about a third.
- HLE emulation of some special chips is optionally restored (defaults to LLE), to improve performance and reduce reliance on those chip ROMs (they're not really easy to find). Chips for which no HLE emulation was developed (ST-0011 and ST-0018) are still LLE.
- SuperFX overclock is now available (off by default, of course); if enabled, it makes Star Fox look quite a lot smoother.

 

[tomwhite2004]

Uh no, it's just a few optimizations, it doesn't differ from bsnes all that much, and reenables the possibility to use HLE special chip emulation.

fair enough, my opionion was shaped by what byuu himself said about it though.

https://twitter.com/byuu_san/status/852631058478661632

 

[MattKeil]

As I explained further up: "I said "in a more objective case" because I feel Yoshi's Island qualifies as a bigger upgrade than other games.

It doesn't. It still looks like a blobby mess in comparison to the original, proper display option.

You really aren't going to convince me that the sketch book style is supposed to be jaggy and pixelated. It doesn't fit in with their vision at all.

But it was what they made, not that oversmoothed homogenized filter that so obviously is an algorithm and not a human hand. If I'm going to play an old game I want to play it as it was made, as it was displayed, and as it was meant to look on the original hardware, or at least as close as possible. I'm there to play that game from 1987 or 1991 or 1994 or what have you, not some weird simulation of what it might look like if it were made today by someone who doesn't know how to draw a proper character sprite. If Nintendo remakes Yoshi's Island with new graphics designed for 1080p/4K displays, I'm all in. But this doesn't look like that, it looks like a half-assed filter that drains all the personality out of the spritework.

Honestly this is like the game equivalent of the old "letterbox vs pan & scan" argument from the VHS era. The letterbox people want to watch the movie as it was originally shown and intended, and the pan & scan people want to watch some arbitrarily altered version of it because their display device is different than what was originally used to show the content.

 

[MrCunningham]

Caligari.slang:


Light scanlines win for me every time. Caligari and CRT Geom (flat, without hallation) are the best, IMO. It's either that or unfiltered. I can't stand the vaseline look of bilinear or how much detail is lost with ScaleFX. Sure, some of the edges are more rounded, but everything else is distorted. Not my cup of tea at all.

I kinda like using the NTSC 240p composite shaders myself, with CRT Geom.

I have been kinda enjoying that faux fuzzy composite look.

 

[SOLDIER]

MGBA has a Wii version which runs very nicely. Higan is too cpu intensive for the Wii but it still has an older version of snes9x in retroarch which is ok.



If you don't have a gsync monitor be sure to use bsnes in retroarch, the stand alone is a bit of a stuttery mess otherwise. Whilst bsnes in retroarch is an older version of Higan all the changes get backported so its up to date.



Squarepusher / Twinaphex is one of the lead developers and considering the absolute contempt he holds both users and emulation authors in I wonder why he is doing it at all....

https://retroarchleaks.wordpress.com/

Is Higan already included in Retroarch or are you supposed to apply it?

I downloaded it seperately but I couldn't figure out how to put it in the core folder.

 

[Solrac]

nes mini
snes mini
psp with gpSP kai

 

[Sir_Crocodile]

I kinda like using the NTSC 240p composite shaders myself, with CRT Geom.



I have been kinda enjoying that faux fuzzy composite look.

I'm surprised people want that rounded edges look.

When I first started working, the first thing I bought was a Sony Trinitron TV because I hated those rounded edges. Had a square picture, I loved that little telly.

Is Higan already included in Retroarch or are you supposed to apply it?

I downloaded it seperately but I couldn't figure out how to put it in the core folder.

There's some kind of higan there, but it's not the latest. Dunno if that's due to squarepusher's hatred of byuu or just a lack of people to maintain it. Possible one of the forks they offer is up to date, though I don't use it so can't say one way or the other

 

[MrCunningham]

I'm surprised people want that rounded edges look.

When I first started working, the first thing I bought was a Sony Trinitron TV because I hated those rounded edges. Had a square picture, I loved that little telly.

I still have nostalgia for playing SNES games on my parents old 1970's era Quasar TV, which had a really rounded tube. Though I wonder if there are any shader presents to emulate the look of a Trinitron TV?