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Is the Nintendo 64 the hardest retro console to emulate?

Has the sound emulation improved? For a very long time nothing else even got close to Kega on accurate sound output.
I don't think there's been much recent progress on it's sound emulation, but since I started using the libretro core two years ago I couldn't tell the difference between the two emulators sound wise. The easiest test for me was the end act signpost spin sound effect in Sonic 2. In stand alone Mednafen's version of Genesis Plus it sounded very high pitched and off, while it's correct in Kega and GPGX. In the time I've spent playing games since switching over to it I haven't noticed anything that sounded off. Maybe there are other more detailed tests out there to better compare them though.
 
Yes, your premises are wrong. Cxbx can boot several games. Being able to boot a couple games to a title screen is not the lion's share of the work involved in creating a functional emulator.

Still though, it at least shows progress is being made. Cxbx's website hasn't been updated since 2009 and the latest version came out years ago (at least as far as I know) while rpcs3 is being regularly worked on. You would think that with 5 years that major progress would be made in developing a working Xbox emulator but alas.
 
Fuck no! Xbox is. Why do you think I stocked up on them for cheap? Though, to be fair, they do make good media boxes as well :)
 
lmao no it's not. Kega uses numerous game-specific timing hacks to get it going. It's roughly comparable to SNES9x. Exodus is the only cycle-accurate genesis emulator.

I wasn't aware that Exodus had progressed to the point where it was able to play every game. But saying Kega is roughly comparable to SNES9x is going a bit far. Kega may not be cycle-accurate, but in the realm of non-cycle-accurate emulators, it's very good, even relative to emulators for other systems. Just having some game-specific hacks doesn't make them equivalent.
 
Mupen64 runs Goemon fine on my phone.

Yeah I'm not too sure what the OP is on about Mupen64plus core in RetroArch has run everything I have thrown at it flawlessly.

So yeah Original Xbox is the mist difficult emulator to program for.....man I want to play some Buffy The Vampire Slayer in 1080p that game was the tits.

Regarding the talk about what's retro or not really depends on the individual, my nephew was born 4 years before the PS2 came out so was just about the right age to start to get into gaming when the PS2 started to hit its stride so to him the PS2 is retro and anything before that is also. For me the NES was my first console and so I consider anything up to and before the GameCube to be retro. The trouble with this is that the 8 and 16 bit generations were really short compared to the 32 and 64 bit (I'm classing PS3 and Xbox 360 as 64bit) generations so this complicates things even more

I really think there needs to be some universal confirmation of what is classed as retro, I'd be happy with something along the lines of, 'Is 2 generations old or over and can no longer be commercially brought brand new' to be classed as retro
 
If I won the lottery big time, I'd hire a team of crack coders to develop cycle accurate emulators for Saturn, N64, PSX, Xbox, Gamecube and PS2.

They might be unplayable on even the fastest of current PC's but that's not the point, the day will come, like MAME, when they will be.

They would be chained to their desks and not allowed out until they'd succeeded :))
 
Crazy that there seemingly isn't anyone interested in creating an Xbox emulator yet.

N64 is next, but after that kickstarter thing a few months back it looks like we are going to see some nice developments in N64 emulation very soon :)
 
There are people on this forum who were young enough to have started gaming with the PS2/GC/Xbox. In fact, I've seen some people say the Xbox 360 was their first gaming experience. Someone who is 16, for instance, would have been 7 years old when the 360 released.

It's trippy when you think about it. I would not consider Halo 1 a retro game, but it came out 13 years ago. In the year 2000, The Legend of Zelda was a 13 year old game (in the US at least) and I think everyone in the year 2000 would have considered it a "retro" game. The graphical leap from 2001 to now is certainly less drastic than from 1987 to 2000, but the span of time is the exact same.

Also this topic made me sad because we don't have N64 Virtual Console games on the Wii U and probably never will.
 
On PC i was able to emulate My n64 games perfectly,apart some problems with 2d images.
On android i had more of a few hiccups,strange if you count the power of today's devices
 
There are people on this forum who were young enough to have started gaming with the PS2/GC/Xbox. In fact, I've seen some people say the Xbox 360 was their first gaming experience. Someone who is 16, for instance, would have been 7 years old when the 360 released.

That's crazy to me even as a 19 year old, but then again I started really early. I used to go over to my friend's house and play Sonic 2 and SMB3 a lot, then come home to play on my Dreamcast and PS1. The 360 being someone's first console is so odd to me haha.
 
It does actually. On the 360. Where MS under promised and over delivered.

You mean over promised and under delivered right?

Prior to it's 2005 launch, Microsoft claimed that their goal was to successfully emulate all titles. They stopped working on this goal in 2007. There are numerous games which aren't backwards compatible (several of which are on the official list).
 
Still though, it at least shows progress is being made. Cxbx's website hasn't been updated since 2009 and the latest version came out years ago (at least as far as I know) while rpcs3 is being regularly worked on. You would think that with 5 years that major progress would be made in developing a working Xbox emulator but alas.

Yeah, the specific guy who was working on cxbx jumped out for various reasons. The issue getting further than that first step isn't technical, usually; it's more getting a critical mass of sufficiently talented people working together on it so it builds some of its own momentum.

Yeah I'm not too sure what the OP is on about Mupen64plus core in RetroArch has run everything I have thrown at it flawlessly.

N64 emulators don't run anything flawlessly, really, is the issue. Mupen64plus is way ahead of the pack but it still has serious issues with a lot of titles. I'd have to find some up-to-date compatibility lists to verify but I suspect it's significantly worse than Saturn compatibility these days.
 
The Jaguar and 3DO at least have something of a homebrew scene going for it, especially the former such that it is and it had one rather early on to boot given the tumultuous, baffling history of the Jaguar, but overall are probably the worst off---then the Saturn, N64, etc on the console front.

Exodus is super promising, while oft delayed, on the Genesis front---then you've got hopes for oddly random bursts of progress via stuff like RetroArch on anything and everything.
 
As a Puzzle League fan, it's always hard to emulate Pokémon PL and it's not perfect, so yes, I'd love to see some improvement in N64 emulation too.
 
Yeah, I remember how people couldn't believe it when UltraHLE came out... Zelda OOT was still a hot seller in the stores when this happened and suddenly you could play it on your PC (sort of... but for most people it didn't perform too well and you couldn't use rumble pak features so no detecting buried treasure)

But that was pretty awesome that it worked at all, and in 1999.

I had a great time with Zelda OOT much later, with Project64 and a PS2 controller with working rumble.

UltraHLE was nearly unbelievable. It put the hurt on my Pentium II with what I think was a Riva TNT2 (I think that was the first 3D GPU which I owned with full 32-bit color, as an aside).
 
As a Puzzle League fan, it's always hard to emulate Pokémon PL and it's not perfect, so yes, I'd love to see some improvement in N64 emulation too.
I've heard that one is one of the few that Mupen won't play. You can at least bide your time with Puzzle Challenge on the GBC. There's also Panel de Pon on the Nintendo Puzzle Collection, which plays well in Dolphin, and was what Puzzle League was going to be originally. Original Panel de Pon on the Super Fami is still really good too.
 
Yes, your premises are wrong. Cxbx can boot several games. Being able to boot a couple games to a title screen is not the lion's share of the work involved in creating a functional emulator.

Still though, it at least shows progress is being made. Cxbx's website hasn't been updated since 2009 and the latest version came out years ago (at least as far as I know) while rpcs3 is being regularly worked on. You would think that with 5 years that major progress would be made in developing a working Xbox emulator but alas.

The compatibility list was last updated in 2012 by Cxbx's developer.

Here is the last update:

Cxbx compatibility list:

Total Games: 61
Playable: 5
Ingame: 11
Menus: 11
Intros: 29
Nothing (doesn't crash): 5


So I assume 2012 was the last time he made any real progress with the project.

The developer said Cxbx was about 20% complete. It would be a lot further along if he actually had time to work on it throughout the years, or if he had more experienced emulation developers interested in the project.



There's also a separate Xbox emulation project called XQemu which is still actively being worked on.


GuE2ndt.jpg


I believe this is the latest compatibility list for XQemu:


Total Games: 11
Playable: 1
Ingame: 2
Menus: 1
Intros: 5
Nothing (doesn't crash): 1
 
That's crazy to me even as a 19 year old, but then again I started really early. I used to go over to my friend's house and play Sonic 2 and SMB3 a lot, then come home to play on my Dreamcast and PS1. The 360 being someone's first console is so odd to me haha.

If you are 19, you were playing the 8 and 16 bit generations after the fact, and were very young when the PS1 wrapped up. If you were the oldest kid in the family, didn't have parents who played video games (or who bought you a videogame system when you were very young), the PS2 generation would have probably been your proper introduction to gaming.

I had a Commodore 64 a couple of years prior, but I didn't receive my first console (an NES) until my 9th birthday. That would have been 2004 if I was born the same year as you. Based on that, I could see a 16 year old being introduced to gaming around the time that the 360 was being released.
 
PCSX2 is incredible for what it does, especially with how complicated the PS2 design is... that said, it's compatibility is 'only' about 90% with 'bug free' being substantially lower than that.

Given the size of the PS2 library, 90% is still a huge amount. And whilst a lot of titles might not be 100% bug-free, the bugs are, in most cases, not something that will impede gameplay.
 
You mean over promised and under delivered right?

Prior to it's 2005 launch, Microsoft claimed that their goal was to successfully emulate all titles. They stopped working on this goal in 2007. There are numerous games which aren't backwards compatible (several of which are on the official list).

KOTOR 2 was backwards compatible. I played through 75% of it until I hit a gamebreaking bug at a save file which rendered my ability to continue impossible.

From that day forward I swore to only play games on the hardware for which they were intended. That's why I have the Noah's Ark of consoles - I keep on hand two consoles for every generation.
 
It's trippy when you think about it. I would not consider Halo 1 a retro game, but it came out 13 years ago. In the year 2000, The Legend of Zelda was a 13 year old game (in the US at least) and I think everyone in the year 2000 would have considered it a "retro" game. The graphical leap from 2001 to now is certainly less drastic than from 1987 to 2000, but the span of time is the exact same.

Also this topic made me sad because we don't have N64 Virtual Console games on the Wii U and probably never will.

It's probably because advances in game design and graphics (the OG Xbox is pretty similar to the modern consoles in a way) have been fairly incremental and linear compared to the crazy upheaval that was the first 3D gen.
 
You mean over promised and under delivered right?

Prior to it's 2005 launch, Microsoft claimed that their goal was to successfully emulate all titles. They stopped working on this goal in 2007. There are numerous games which aren't backwards compatible (several of which are on the official list).
Heh yeah. Though the MS boss at the time did say in an interview that they'd under promised and over delivered as justification for not doing more. Always thought that was an amazingly terrible comment from MS.
 
KOTOR 2 was backwards compatible. I played through 75% of it until I hit a gamebreaking bug at a save file which rendered my ability to continue impossible.

From that day forward I swore to only play games on the hardware for which they were intended. That's why I have the Noah's Ark of consoles - I keep on hand two consoles for every generation.

Nice, man (and clever name for it). I've got a couple myself, though Xbox is the only one I have multiple of as it's my favorite; and, yeah, I had the same thing happen to me with the first KOTOR on 360, but I was closer to 90%. That's of course ignoring the constant audio problems and frame-dropping.

I think the primary reason why Xbox emulation hasn't been extensively worked on is simply because it's a perfectly functional system. To this day, many people still use them for multimedia and they're so simple to modify, it would almost be a step back to emulate. Hell, my Xbox has four times the memory of current gen consoles :)
 
I heard the Sega Saturn,
Original Xbox doesn't bother me as no word of a lie I could pick one up for ÂŁ1 any weekend and the games are all valueless where I live, so why take time to emulate it?
 
Every other retro console, even the Sega Saturn, has a pretty good emulator that can run most games perfectly
Far from it, just take a look at that list.
The CD-I, Sega Jaguar, 3DO and others are far from being well emulated.

With some luck, you won't have to wait 10 more years, because Cen64 seems to be doing great progress. MarathonMan probably has tons of work left to do, but the progress with the recents builds and bugfixes seems very impressive and encouraging.
 
It was one of the first of that gen to be emulated at all with UltraHLE, although the supported games were limited.

N64 was only 3 years old when it released.

I was in college when UltraHLE was released and it was mind-blowing at the time. I'm kind of surprised that N64 emulation has stalled out since then, but I admittedly don't know a lot about the technical details behind the original work.
 
There was a pretty good N64 emulator on the Wii last generation. The same dev team also had a PS1 emulator going. Unfortunately the dev team didn't have the time to finish either one but they were both still pretty functional.
 
some times you need the right people at the right time. One genius person can accomplish something unattainable by many. Unfortunately if the emulator is closed source it gets abandoned, like it happened with Callus.

As a result even today this hasnt been resolved:

http://mametesters.org/view.php?id=00408

There is something more that MAMEDEV needs to note here.

Setting the CPU to 65% (which results in arcade perfect speed--remember folks, SF2:HF plays too fast at anything higher than 8 mhz) in SF2: turbo hyper fighting, still does not fix the EEPROM test. Even setting the CPU to 60% (slower than a real machine) has the test run too fast.

Now, before I get flamed for posting something insignificant, WHY DOES CALLUS HAVE THIS SPEED ARCADE PERFECT? And, isn't the goal of emulation to have everything accurately emulated 100% ?

If something like the eeprom test is wrong, who knows what else can be affected ? What if in fact, the CPS1 SF2 games actually ran at 10 mhz (instead of the 7-8 mhz that is "proper" for accurate play in SF2:HF), but whatever is causing the EEPROM speedup, is also somehow affecting the throttling code, and possibly forcing a SLOWER cpu ?
68k bug? Some unemulated code that needs to be looked into?

Of course, the EASY answer to this would be to ask Sardu, since he got it right. But Sardu isn't around anymore. In addition, the source for Callus isn't available. And what CPU core did Callus use ? is it a different one from the one MAME uses? Could that be a factor?

 
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