[General Discussion] The Emulation Thread

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question or not, but it's been bugging me.

What's the go-to site these days to find new and interesting translations of Japanese games? I lost interest in that scene shortly after Star Ocean was translated, so most of the sites I used to visit are now defunct. But there are a few hard-to-crack nuts like Mystic Ark and Lennus 2 that were always listed as "incomplete," and I've always meant to find a new translation news site to check in on them.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I stopped reading here for a while but try: http://donut.parodius.com and check if it is up still.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by orion_mk3

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question or not, but it's been bugging me.

What's the go-to site these days to find new and interesting translations of Japanese games? I lost interest in that scene shortly after Star Ocean was translated, so most of the sites I used to visit are now defunct. But there are a few hard-to-crack nuts like Mystic Ark and Lennus 2 that were always listed as "incomplete," and I've always meant to find a new translation news site to check in on them.

http://romhustler.net/
Has 7z versions of the ROMs (for Genesis, NES and SNES). Each ROM contains every known variant, such as the Jp/EU/US versions, plus any trainers, hacks, translations. It even has the bad dumps of the ROMs shown.

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Originally Posted by Summonmaster

I stopped reading here for a while but try: http://donut.parodius.com and check if it is up still.

That's one of the sites I used to visit. Very little in the way of updates since about 2003, though.

Originally Posted by www.sega.co.jp

http://romhustler.net/
Has 7z versions of the ROMs (for Genesis, NES and SNES). Each ROM contains every known variant, such as the Jp/EU/US versions, plus any trainers, hacks, translations. It even has the bad dumps of the ROMs shown.

Thanks a bunch. I'll check that out right away!

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I'm having trouble getting ePSXe to work right. First, it asked for a bios plugin, and I got scph9002-PAL for it. Then it asked for a video plugin, and I got Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.8 for it. No more problems after that point.

However, when I go to Run ISO and pick a game, this is what my screen keeps saying:





Then it says something about missing rendering or something and then it crashes. Can someone help?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by orion_mk3

That's one of the sites I used to visit. Very little in the way of updates since about 2003, though.



Thanks a bunch. I'll check that out right away!

Just realize that 7z files are readable on very few emulators, Zsnes and Kega Fusion/Gens not being one that supports it. Either extract the files or use QuickPlay so they'll be readable under your emulators that don't support 7z.

Also Lady Miyomi, I don't know what graphics plugins you used, but the ones found here should work perfectly well under ePSXe.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Summonmaster

Oh! I just got Rage of the Dragons, but you'll have to settle for Neorage.

Speaking of which, is there like an online client for Neorage or anything? I want to try dying against other people in Power Instinct: Matrimelee, Samurai Showdown V, or Rage of the Dragons as well.

Every (dumped) Neogeo game is supported by MAME. Kawaks has all of them up to 2002 (they havent added the newest bunch of 2003 stuff that was just put into MAME recently). Kawaks play them online, MAME doesn't cause no one updates the online ver anymore.

Thus, Neorage is officially obselete by now. I think the only game that it supports that other emus cant do better is Metal Slug 5, which needs a non-hacked-to-get-it-boot ROM dump first.

as for my picks of emus:

Kega for megadrive/genesis, as Gens is a piece of total turd and lacks tons of stuff both for video and sound. With it's own idiocy to switch desktop resolutions on every startup. Oh and Kega also has way the fuck better netplay. Is there honestly any reason to use Gens anymore?

FCE Ultra for NES. Well for the once-a-year event when i play Mappy.

Zsnes for snes. same as FCE ultra.

VICE for C64. Way more accurate then the other c64 emus I tried. And has sound emulation that actually sounds like the real machine.

pSX for playstation. It's a new emulator that just came out and its aim is to be 1:1 hardware accurate. Thus it doesn't have 9987927398273482934824 plugin options and 2048x1600 resolution with 8x fsaa and crap like that. It just WORKS instead.

SSF for Saturn. I need a faster CPU.

MAME for arcade and Kawaks for a few arcade fighter games (the Marvel vs series, Garou and Zupapa).

I also have Project64 for n64 but it can't emulate -anything- fine. Plugin based emulators all suck ass.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Anyone know whether the emulators can harm the computer? Seems a bite scary with those bios files..

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Huh? That's the first time I've seen this question.

The answer is no. I've been using them for years and I've never encountered any problems.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

The BIOS files don't tap into your actual BIOS. The emulator relies on them for booting things. It is a BIOS for the emulator. Go ahead and download them with no worries. Just be sure you're not downloading a virus =p You can think of these BIOS files like .dll's of sorts. Just separate files required to run things.

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Does anyone else use pSX instead of ePSXe? I find ePSXe to be very inaccurate in terms of sound and graphic reproduction, whereas pSX is pretty accurate. It isn't compatible with as many games as ePSXe, doesn't have nearly as large a userbase, and has no plugins, but I use it more than I use ePSXe when I can.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Anyone aware of a good emulator (and plugins for that emulator) to run PS1 games on Mac OS X? I have a quad-core G5 that I suspect could make PSX games look, sound, and run pretty damned awesome, but I can't seem to find an emulator that runs too well. PCSX is okay, but it seems difficult to get good plugins for it. FlareStorm was all but nonfunctional, and there was one other whose name escapes me that was functional but pretty generic. Dunno if I can get anything equivalent to the functionality of ePSXe with all the good plugins for the Mac, but if it's at all feasible...help?

I was speaking idiomatically.

ePSXe is good, but I use PSXeven to run some games that it glitches out on (ie: Lunar:SSSC).

I still can't find an emulator that runs Koudelka without the cutscenes locking up ;__;

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

NES - NEStopia is the emulator of choice for me, just seems to be the first one that popped up during a search of NES Emulators. Doesn't matter much, since I've only played Double Dragon I/II/III and Contra on it.

SNES - I personally use SNES9x because I prefer it's user interface over ZSNES's interface. Works fine for me.

Genesis/MasterSystem/32x/CD - Fusion is an awesome emulator for all of Sega's Systems in one (well, except the Saturn and the Dreamcast). Emulates fine, good speed, good sounds (well as good as the hardware, Genesis sounds horrible compared to SNES)

Playstation - ePSXe. No question about it, this emulator has served me well with a ton of different plugins for versatility. I like my games to look smooth, so I like the texture smoothing and Hi-Res options.

Nintendo 64 - Project 64. I haven't used anything else, but this one works fine for me.

GB/GBC/GBA - VisualBoyAdvance is the emulator of choice here, runs everything great and has loads of features. The only exception here is if I happen to be playing the Pre-GBA Pokemon games, in which case, I use TGB-Dual.

FELIPE NO

NesterJ is plain and simple with not much in the way of frills. Good for quickly just getting into an NES rom.

NESticle had a weird hand cursor that I didn't like.


I saw my friend playing Kirby64 on an emulator several weeks ago, and it looked high res and very smooth, although I'm guessing it was his laptop screen that made it look good. I wonder if N64 stuff still looks pixelly or whether it was a feature of the emulator or something.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Radical

Does anyone else use pSX instead of ePSXe? I find ePSXe to be very inaccurate in terms of sound and graphic reproduction, whereas pSX is pretty accurate. It isn't compatible with as many games as ePSXe, doesn't have nearly as large a userbase, and has no plugins, but I use it more than I use ePSXe when I can.

pSX is more accurate BECAUSE it doesnt use the plugin hackfest hell.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Radical

Does anyone else use pSX instead of ePSXe? I find ePSXe to be very inaccurate in terms of sound and graphic reproduction, whereas pSX is pretty accurate. It isn't compatible with as many games as ePSXe, doesn't have nearly as large a userbase, and has no plugins, but I use it more than I use ePSXe when I can.

Yes, I use pSX a lot more than I use ePSXe. I just got sick and tired of screwing around with the settings whenever I wanted to play a different game. My only problem with pSX is the dithering. I'm not sure whether the dithering appears on the actual PSX hardware (I was told by the pSX developer that it does), but it's kind of annoying playing a game, and constantly seeing this faint grid pattern. ePSXe doesn't emulate dithering, for some reason.

Another downside to pSX is you can't fix certain graphical problems because there's no plug-ins to configure. Suikoden, for example, has this annoying flicker at the top of the screen, and as far as I know, there's no way to fix this at the moment. I haven't used any of the newer versions of the emulator, though, so I don't know if this was fixed or if we can use plug-ins now.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I don't know why you have to keep changing the plugin settings for games and whatnot, but I haven't had to. My settings work for most games, and for those that don't work, the plugins are pretty self-explanatory on how to fix and such. I just turn everything on high, and it works for the most part. Then again, I don't play much outside of Final Fantasy, and those don't take much for the most part.

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Originally Posted by Omnislash124

I don't know why you have to keep changing the plugin settings for games and whatnot, but I haven't had to. My settings work for most games, and for those that don't work, the plugins are pretty self-explanatory on how to fix and such. I just turn everything on high, and it works for the most part. Then again, I don't play much outside of Final Fantasy, and those don't take much for the most part.

A lot of games need different settings.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Has anyone ever heard of a good homebrew snes emulator for GameCube?

I was speaking idiomatically.

I use ePSXe more often that pSX mainly because of the filters available. They can make the games look much better than on a real playstation or pSX.

Plus it isn't really hard to change the plugins.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Unforgiven

I use ePSXe more often that pSX mainly because of the filters available. They can make the games look much better than on a real playstation or pSX.

Plus it isn't really hard to change the plugins.

Seconded. I don't find it that hard to change things since everything has a description next to it (well, for Pete's Plugins anyways). It's very easy to use for me, and I'm not a big expert on computing.

As for a Gamecube Emulator, The best right now is Dolphin I think, but even then, it's more or less not playable. You'd be better off with a real Gamecube for that.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Wilhelm

Yes, I use pSX a lot more than I use ePSXe. I just got sick and tired of screwing around with the settings whenever I wanted to play a different game. My only problem with pSX is the dithering. I'm not sure whether the dithering appears on the actual PSX hardware (I was told by the pSX developer that it does), but it's kind of annoying playing a game, and constantly seeing this faint grid pattern. ePSXe doesn't emulate dithering, for some reason.

Another downside to pSX is you can't fix certain graphical problems because there's no plug-ins to configure. Suikoden, for example, has this annoying flicker at the top of the screen, and as far as I know, there's no way to fix this at the moment. I haven't used any of the newer versions of the emulator, though, so I don't know if this was fixed or if we can use plug-ins now.

I had an actual PSX for about a day (then it broke, I got it off eBay). I played Metal Gear Solid on it and compared it to pSX and ePSXe. If remember correctly, the PSX did show the grid pattern. I agree that it can be kind of irritating, but if it shows up through a real PSX, I don't mind it showing up using pSX.

And as for the certain graphical problems, that's when I have to use ePSXe. I think FF8 doesn't play correctly on pSX (there's a big black bar at the bottom of the screen), so I had to use ePSXe for that.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Radical

If remember correctly, the PSX did show the grid pattern. I agree that it can be kind of irritating, but if it shows up through a real PSX, I don't mind it showing up using pSX.

So you'd play a bugged game even if there is a patch to fix it?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Unforgiven

So you'd play a bugged game even if there is a patch to fix it?

It would depend on how much the bug bothered me. I don't consider dithering to be a bug, and I don't really mind playing while it shows. After a while I just forget about it.

There's nowhere I can't reach.