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What is the current status of Emulation software?

Tizoc

Tizoc

Member
Sorry for the odd thread title, but here's what I wanted to ask about, if this discussion is not allowed, please lock the thread:
Right now Cemu is making great headway in its development such that it could end up running just about every Wii U release by this year alone.
We've recently seen Dolphin, the Wii and GC emulator, updated to perform far better than its previous versions.

PSOne emulation hasn't had many updates in years but is so far at a point where emulators run PSOne games pretty well. Same goes for PSP emulation from what I've seen.

PS3 emulation is making progress too, as now Catherine and Dark Souls can run on it.

Now what is the status of Emulation for these platforms/consoles-
Saturn
Dreamcast
Xbox

What are the hurdles that making getting proper emulation+injecting graphic filters or options to work on the games via emulation? Have any of those emulator's reached a build that is considered 'definitive' to run the games of those consoles?
 
C

Cartho

Member
I know for certain that OG Xbox emulation is pretty much dead right now. I think there are a couple of programs but I don't think any of them work properly - think Halo 1 at 15 FPS with lots of crashing and that's about it.

Apparently is very difficult to crack anyway due to the way it was designed and I'm sure I read somewhere that documentation for it is really hard to find. Plus there isn't a huge amount of interest demand to do it because there isn't a massive library of must play Xbox games which aren't more readily available in other forms. I mean Jet Set Radio Future is pretty much the only one I can think of off the top of my head and I've got Sunset Overdrive to scratch that itch anyway!
 
Chinbo37

Chinbo37

Member
Cartho said:
I know for certain that OG Xbox emulation is pretty much dead right now.

Apparently is very difficult to crack anyway due to the way it was designed and I'm sure I read somewhere that documentation for it is really hard to find. Plus there isn't a huge amount of demand to do it because there isn't a massive library of must play Xbox games which aren't more readily available in other forms.
Click to expand...


Ya its a shame I would love to play Panzer Dragon Orta and Ninja Gaiden Black
 
spons

spons

Gold Member
Cartho said:
I know for certain that OG Xbox emulation is pretty much dead right now.

Apparently is very difficult to crack anyway due to the way it was designed and I'm sure I read somewhere that documentation for it is really hard to find. Plus there isn't a huge amount of demand to do it because there isn't a massive library of must play Xbox games which aren't more readily available in other forms.
Click to expand...

Lead developer of Cxbx-Reloaded put up a patreon. I fail to see how money solves the problem you describe though (although I disagree on the games thing).
 
J

Joey Ravn

Banned
spons said:
Lead developer of Cxbx-Reloaded put up a patreon. I fail to see how money solves the problem you describe though (although I disagree on the games thing).
Click to expand...

I guess the mentality is that if they don't have to be thinking about making ends meet with a job, they can focus 100% on making the emulator, as if it was their day job. It's been working fine for CEMU, actually. And the idea of implementing "bounties" (small sums of money for certain work) posted by individual users who want to see specific issues addressed or features implemented is also a good incentive.
 
C

Cartho

Member
Chinbo37 said:
Ya its a shame I would love to play Panzer Dragon Orta and Ninja Gaiden Black
Click to expand...

Herein lies the problem - you can play Ninja Gaiden Black on PS3. Sure it's not the absolute original, but it's the original with better graphics so many people might think "why bother?"

Many of the OG Xbox games were available on PS2, PC or have been remastered / enhanced on 360 / PS3. If you actually look at the list of true OG Xbox exclusives where you literally cannot play them anywhere else, I'm not sure it's really big enough, or packed with enough classics, to make enough people interested to the point where it becomes worth overcoming the considerable technical hurdles. (Apologies for that hideously long sentence)
 
X

xealo

Member
Original xbox emulation is dead until microsoft gets around to implementing an emulator for it on the XB1. When that could be, is anyone's best guess however.
 
S

SparkTR

Member
PS1 emulation has had various breakthroughs recently, namely that plugin that eliminates the warped texture issue that every PS1 game had due to it's hardware limitations.
 
C

Cartho

Member
Saturn and Dreamcast emulation is further along I think - a quick google search reveals options there. I don't think any of them are particularly easy to use though. By that I mean I don't think there's anything which is "download, install, play". Think all of them require a fair bit of tweaking and technical know how to get working and even then, I don't think any of them are on the level of Dolphin etc.
 
Tizoc

Tizoc

Member
One would need to look at the Xbox's (exclusive) line up and see that there were various games available only on that system such as Otogi. I looked through a list of Xbox titles and found some that were quite interesting but are locked on that console.
I'll have to look up that list later tho :X

SparkTR said:
PS1 emulation has had various breakthroughs recently, namely that plugin that eliminates the warped texture issue that every PS1 game had due to it's hardware limitations.
Click to expand...

Is that in ePSXe? What emulator features that option?
 
spons

spons

Gold Member
Joey Ravn said:
I guess the mentality is that if they don't have to be thinking about making ends meet with a job, they can focus 100% on making the emulator, as if it was their day job. It's been working fine for CEMU, actually. And the idea of implementing "bounties" (small sums of money for certain work) posted by individual users who want to see specific issues addressed or features implemented is also a good incentive.
Click to expand...

You're right, and his $400 goal allows him to work 16 hours a week on the emulator. If that's incentive to reverse engineer the console (and especially the NVIDIA GPU which is largely undocumented), a patreon might work.

I'd love to see a proper Xbox emulator (I still have an Xbox here!). I'll check up on development things, might even support him. I see a lot of activity on Github so it's certainly going somewhere right now.
 
S

Sir_Crocodile

Member
Tizoc said:
Sorry for the odd thread title, but here's what I wanted to ask about, if this discussion is not allowed, please lock the thread:
Right now Cemu is making great headway in its development such that it could end up running just about every Wii U release by this year alone.
We've recently seen Dolphin, the Wii and GC emulator, updated to perform far better than its previous versions.

PSOne emulation hasn't had many updates in years but is so far at a point where emulators run PSOne games pretty well. Same goes for PSP emulation from what I've seen.

PS3 emulation is making progress too, as now Catherine and Dark Souls can run on it.

Now what is the status of Emulation for these platforms/consoles-
Saturn
Dreamcast
Xbox

What are the hurdles that making getting proper emulation+injecting graphic filters or options to work on the games via emulation? Have any of those emulator's reached a build that is considered 'definitive' to run the games of those consoles?
Click to expand...

Saturn
-Mednafen now has a saturn core with very good emulation, both it and Yabause are open source and the future for saturn emulation seems pretty good.
Dreamcast
-Demul is the best active emulator and is decent but not exceptional, nulldc plays a few games better then Demul but seems dead, Redream is an active project that in the future may be promising.
Xbox
-No major progress, things still seem pretty bad.
 
T

tomwhite2004

Member
Tizoc said:
Is that in ePSXe? What emulator features that option?
Click to expand...

Forget ePSXe, use the retroarch mednafen core for playstation instead, as well as being far more accurate it has a hardware variant that allows you to upscale the 3D graphics to eliminate the polygon and texture warping.

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/mednafenbeetle-psx-hw-alpha-version/

Xbox emulation is a pig as it uses a custom Nvidia GPU which there is little to no understanding of.

I'm actually quite sceptical about Cemu running every title by the end of the year, whilst all the cash is coming in for Zelda I don't expect there being much work to get Wonderful 101 booting for example.
 
M

MUnited83

For you.
tomwhite2004 said:
Forget ePSXe, use the retroarch mednafen core for playstation instead, as well as being far more accurate it has a hardware variant that allows you to upscale the 3D graphics to eliminate the polygon and texture warping.

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/mednafenbeetle-psx-hw-alpha-version/

Xbox emulation is a pig as it uses a custom Nvidia GPU which there is little to no understanding of.

I'm actually quite sceptical about Cemu running every title by the end of the year, whilst all the cash is coming in for Zelda I don't expect there being much work to get Wonderful 101 booting for example.
Click to expand...

CEMU continues to pump out improvements for all games, not just Zelda.

Wonderful 101 already boots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NogD5seyaFIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NogD5seyaFI
 
C

Cartho

Member
Found it. This is a quote from a Dolphin developer on REDDIT about OG Xbox emulation. Basically it sounds very, very difficult and there doesn't seem to be enough interest to get past that.

Sure, X86 might be one of the harder architectures to write an interpreter/jit for, but it's like twice as hard at the most.
Sure, the GPU might be undocumented, but this isn't exactly a unique situation. The PS3 has an even more complex Nvidia GPU with similar amounts of documentation, and look at the progress RPCS3 making.
Sure the Xbox might be a little light on the exclusives, with many games either having ports on other consoles or on windows. But there are still plenty of exclusives and often the xbox has the best version of a multi-platform game.
Sure there are other major components like the DSP that would need reverse-engineering before you get working emulation of sound. But undocumented DSPs have been reversed engineered on other consoles, like various SNES expansion chips and the DSP in the gamecube.
Sure, the xbox might have more random bits of (sometimes undocumented) hardware which need emulating than a typical system. (Did you know there is actually an unused 56k modem on the southbridge?) But each component can be reversed engineered with enough time.
Sure, the fact that both the game and kernel are running in supervisor mode makes HLE hard. The fact that some of the drivers (especially GPU drivers) are actually compiled into the game makes HLE even harder. But not impossible, and you always have the option of LLE (or mixed, LLE gpu + HLE kernel).
Absolutely none of these reasons strike a final blow. Instead the add into one complex shitstorm of issues which would take ages to work though. This really demotivate developers.
And developer motivation is perhaps the biggest issue affecting emulator development in general.
Click to expand...

And here's an extract from another post on the subject:
the graphics driver (which does access the GPU directly) is part of the game. If games are optimized the compiler will merge different functions and it will be nearly impossible to find out what each part of the code does without running it. You'll also have to handle many cases manually which makes the emulator hard to maintain. - That's exactly why development on Cxbx and Dxbx was very slow and some games never worked.
Click to expand...
 
S

ScientificPizza

Banned
Cartho said:
Saturn and Dreamcast emulation is further along I think - a quick google search reveals options there. I don't think any of them are particularly easy to use though. By that I mean I don't think there's anything which is "download, install, play". Think all of them require a fair bit of tweaking and technical know how to get working and even then, I don't think any of them are on the level of Dolphin etc.
Click to expand...
I use nullDC for Dreamcast emulation and it's pretty great and super easy to use. It's the easiest emulator I've set up past the 16-bit era, substantially easier than PCSX2 and even ePSXe. I honestly think I had more
trouble with Dolphin (even though that's still the gold standard imo)
Pagusas said:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/133846393@N03/sets/72157667551215111

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0X1GLkQbCo
Click to expand...
Wow, what is this using?
 
D

DealWithIt

Member
Cartho said:
Saturn and Dreamcast emulation is further along I think - a quick google search reveals options there. I don't think any of them are particularly easy to use though. By that I mean I don't think there's anything which is "download, install, play". Think all of them require a fair bit of tweaking and technical know how to get working and even then, I don't think any of them are on the level of Dolphin etc.
Click to expand...

Saturn emulation is in a strong enough state that you can play Shining Force 3 on Saturn Yabuse mostly accurately at higher resolutions with some texture filters. It's definitely "good enough" and my knowledge of it is from like 2013.
 
eso76

eso76

Member
SparkTR said:
PS1 emulation has had various breakthroughs recently, namely that plugin that eliminates the warped texture issue that every PS1 game had due to it's hardware limitations.
Click to expand...

I thought i read that was impossible to eliminate. Nice

Edit: hmm...I see lots of textures warping in that CTR video though ?
 
C

Cartho

Member
DealWithIt said:
Saturn emulation is in a strong enough state that you can play Shining Force 3 on Saturn Yabuse mostly accurately at higher resolutions with some texture filters. It's definitely "good enough" and my knowledge of it is from like 2013.
Click to expand...

Ooooh cool, might check that out.
 
C

CrashPrime

Member
ScientificPizza said:
I use nullDC for Dreamcast emulation and it's pretty great and super easy to use. It's the easiest emulator I've set up past the 16-bit era, substantially easier than PCSX2 and even ePSXe. I honestly think I had more
trouble with Dolphin (even though that's still the gold standard imo)

Wow, what is this using?
Click to expand...

The inaccurate but very welcome/convenient fix is PGXP. It does subpixel precision that fixes wobbling polygon issues and also does perspective correct texturing. It's available through the PSX Mednafen/Beetle core in retroarch but was first implemented in a PCSX-R branch. It is generally believed that the Beetle core has better implementation. Unfortunately PCSX-ReARMed doesn't have PGXP.
 
Toe-Knee

Toe-Knee

Member
I use SSF for saturn on pc. No upgrades but it has the least glitches.

On my smart TV I run uoyabause which works great for everything other than fire hard arcade the floor textures glitch and swoop about as you move.
 
nkarafo

nkarafo

Member
Tizoc said:
Saturn
Dreamcast
Xbox
Click to expand...
Saturn: Very good. Mednafen is the best for this atm. Better than SSF for the games i have.

Dreamcast: Very good as well if you use Demul.

Xbox: Almost non-existent but there is some minor progress lately.
 
S

smisk

Member
It's cool that there's a patreon for cxbx now, but seeing as there are no games that can actually run full speed, I dunno if I have much faith that it'll help. Seems like OG Xbox emulation has been almost dead for years now.
Maybe this'll spur some more interest in it though.
 
KainXVIII

KainXVIII

Member
Cartho said:
Saturn and Dreamcast emulation is further along I think - a quick google search reveals options there. I don't think any of them are particularly easy to use though. By that I mean I don't think there's anything which is "download, install, play". Think all of them require a fair bit of tweaking and technical know how to get working and even then, I don't think any of them are on the level of Dolphin etc.
Click to expand...

Demul - is the best Dreamcast emulator and its super easy to use.
 
Švejk

Švejk

Member
Tailzo said:
Does it run in full framerate on a Nvidia sheild porable? It looked ok on youtube, but it was hard to judge.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with what Nvidia sheild porable is, but I can sure say that, running on a Galaxy Note 5, Crazy Taxi and Power Stone run rock solid at 60fps. Plus, there's a widescreen toggle. Some games are able to take advantage of it. I'm currently playing Grandia II on my phone, and the widescreen helps alot.

The one big gripe for me though, is that it currently does not support save states... not sure why. PPSSPP does, why can't this? But it's got full VMU support and you can back it up with Dropbox.
KainXVIII said:
Demul - is the best Dreamcast emulator and its super easy to use.
Click to expand...
I need to check that out! Does it support save states?
 
M

M3d10n

Member
The GPU driver being compiled with the games on the OG Xbox isn't the problem. Up until recently that was how consoles usually operated.

The problem is that the XBox GPU driver is a precompiled black box binary provided by NVidia themselves: there's no source code for it and no documentation on how to access and control the GPU without going through it.

This is partially why OG XBox homebrew relies on leaked versions of the XDK and a pure legal homebrew SDK was never developed: the GPU needs to be reverse engineered with zero aid. For other consoles getting access to leaked versions of the official SDK usually gives you all directions you need to reverse engineer the whole thing, on the Xbox that is not the case.

The Linux community had major difficulties trying to write open source GPU drivers without manufacturer assistance, for a lone hobbyist emulator dev that's an uphill the size of the Everest.
 
B

Barrel Cannon

Member
I would hope that eventually we will be able to emulate all those consoles. There is much to be gained from just having another option of playing a game we liked.

Cartho said:
Herein lies the problem - you can play Ninja Gaiden Black on PS3. Sure it's not the absolute original, but it's the original with better graphics so many people might think "why bother?"

Many of the OG Xbox games were available on PS2, PC or have been remastered / enhanced on 360 / PS3. If you actually look at the list of true OG Xbox exclusives where you literally cannot play them anywhere else, I'm not sure it's really big enough, or packed with enough classics, to make enough people interested to the point where it becomes worth overcoming the considerable technical hurdles. (Apologies for that hideously long sentence)
Click to expand...
Eh it's arguable a bit. Due to numerous changes Sigma is nowhere near as good as black unlike sigma 2 to ng2 and there were many titles that got flawed ports to pc that could benefit from accurate emulation in my eyes.

Emulation in my eyes is more about the preservation of games. A day will come when it's impossible to play that copy of Unreal Championship 2 or Ninja Gaiden because of a DVD drive or hdd failure(it's not as uncommon as people think). And the only way to keep playing would either be to get replacement parts/console or mod the console so you can load your games off the console's hdd instead of relying on a failing DVD drive.

Even then the rabbit hole of preservation goes deeper. There was a project that was done to preserve as much of all the downloadable content ever made available across all xbox games. Once the OG Xbox live went out it became impossible to obtain nearly all DLC other than a few obscure packaged ones like the Halo 2 map pack. Without that preservation work future gamers would not be able to go and obtain DLC for their games anymore. It's a legal and morale grey area for me as much of that dlc was freely available, however I'm not going to discuss how to find it or what it's called. I decided to mention it because I feel like it's important for the discussion of this thread
 
Pagusas

Pagusas

Elden Member
M3d10n said:
The GPU driver being compiled with the games on the OG Xbox isn't the problem. Up until recently that was how consoles usually operated.

The problem is that the XBox GPU driver is a precompiled black box binary provided by NVidia themselves: there's no source code for it and no documentation on how to access and control the GPU without going through it.

This is partially why OG XBox homebrew relies on leaked versions of the XDK and a pure legal homebrew SDK was never developed: the GPU needs to be reverse engineered with zero aid. For other consoles getting access to leaked versions of the official SDK usually gives you all directions you need to reverse engineer the whole thing, on the Xbox that is not the case.

The Linux community had major difficulties trying to write open source GPU drivers without manufacturer assistance, for a lone hobbyist emulator dev that's an uphill the size of the Everest.
Click to expand...

Crazy, I always thought the original Xbox was just a glorified prebuilt PC, using basically a geforce 3.
 
T

Tain

Member
Tizoc said:
Now what is the status of Emulation for these platforms/consoles-
Saturn
Dreamcast
Xbox

What are the hurdles that making getting proper emulation+injecting graphic filters or options to work on the games via emulation? Have any of those emulator's reached a build that is considered 'definitive' to run the games of those consoles?
Click to expand...

Saturn is emulated solidly by SSF, but I've heard that it's a little laggy? Mednafen recently implemented an impressive Saturn core, though. MAME is also very good with its ST-V support, and I would assume that bleeds over into Saturn support as well.

Dreamcast is still mostly high-level emulation of course (though MAME/MESS has a developing low-level one). As such you'll run into similar issues as other newer platforms: minor glitches like visual and audio errors. You're able to run games in high resolutions, though.

Xbox is far away but things are getting hopeful. There's a promising emulator on the way in Cxbx-Reloaded, though, and I'm sure xqemu is still making progress.

Saturn emulation is the closest of these to being "definitive", but imo you can't have emulation better than the original hardware without a variable refresh rate monitor.
 
K

kaioshade

Member
EVA UNIT 01 said:
I wanna get into emulation soo bad particularly ps2 and GCN but it seems intimidating to a PC newbie
Click to expand...

PCSX2 can be a bit daunting with its options, but for GCN, Dolphin is pretty straightforward to use, and most of the games run without too much tweaking or modifications.
 
L

Luigiv

Member
Pagusas said:
Crazy, I always thought the original Xbox was just a glorified prebuilt PC, using basically a geforce 3.
Click to expand...

Hardware wise, it pretty much is (the CPU and GPU are lightly customised, but nothing that deviates too greatly from commercially available PC parts of the time) but I guess that doesn't mean much is the software side of things is all proprietary and closed source.
 
T

Tain

Member
EVA UNIT 01 said:
but i require the original system for either correct?
Click to expand...

Dolphin no, as it works without needing any BIOS.

PCSX requires a dump of the PS2 BIOS though. Most people just google that even if they own a PS2, as it's far easier to simply download it than dump it from the console.
 
L

Luigiv

Member
EVA UNIT 01 said:
but i require the original system for either correct?
Click to expand...

Yes, though, interestingly, for different reasons with each.

For PCSX2 you need to use the official bios, which you can only legally attained by ripping it from a system that you yourself own.

With Dolphin, the Bios has been fully reverse engineered, so the official one is not required but because GCN and Wii discs have some weird proprietary stuff going on, very few DVD drives are capable of reading them. As such you need the original hardware in order to rip the games (though technically, you don't legally need to own the hardware, just the games, so you could theoretically borrow one).
 
P

Platy

Member
SparkTR said:
PS1 emulation has had various breakthroughs recently, namely that plugin that eliminates the warped texture issue that every PS1 game had due to it's hardware limitations.
Click to expand...

Weirdly enoght I find this sad.

I mean it kinda kills the idea of preservation if you change it how it was =P
 
G

gelf

Member
I always feel a tinge of sadness when I hear a new system now has working emulation whilst OG Xbox is still going nowhere fast.

I fear the Sega exclusives on the system are going to be lost forever.
 
dr_rus

dr_rus

Member
Pagusas said:
Crazy, I always thought the original Xbox was just a glorified prebuilt PC, using basically a geforce 3.
Click to expand...
It is, but GeForce3 isn't exactly a standard well known h/w these days and the fact that there were way less abstraction between a console game and the h/w back then means that you need to know how the h/w works to be able to emulate it.
 
M

megarockexe

Member
Helacious said:
Citra 3DS is now a total mess. Everyone went on and forked their own versions and there's tons of them out there, each game as a citra build best for it.
Click to expand...
Didn't they mess up the graphics renderer which was basically vanilla OpenGL for some alternative interpretation of it?
 
petran79

petran79

Banned
Xqemu might have better chances in the future since it uses low level emulation and includes Sega Chihiro arcade board too, that is based on Xbox. It runs better on Mac OSX than on Windows.

Even Dosbox isnt the best for DOS games. Even high end PCs only reach performance level of a 100 mhz Pentium 1.

Another issue is that it is impossible to play many Win9x games with Direct3d acceleration on newer hardware through virtualization. Eg Xwing vs Tie Fighter and Jedi Knight. They only run in software mode.

Dreamcast emulation is fine but both NullDC and Demul are very CPU bound, compared to other gen6 emulators.

SSF is a very lightweight Saturn emulator. It even runs on old Intel graphics. Yabause is far more demanding. There are some minor gfx issues they are trying to sort out.
 
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