Anyone Working On The Nes Emulators?


GeminiDomino

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With all the press that Squidge and Zottd get for thier emulators (and well deserved, I might add), I notice that there's not a lot of talk about NES emulators. There're two of them in the archive, but they don't seem to be particularly active in development. Anyone know if they're still alive?
 
I'm 90% sure nkNES and Phamicon are no longer being worked on. FCE Ultra by noname, which seemed to me to be the NES emulator with the most potential, hasn't seen a new release in quite some time either, but I'm not sure what it's status is. I had been hoping for a NES emu in the coding competition, but nothing there either. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that someone out there will pick it up, because NES and MAME are what I like to play the most.
 
What is missing or incomplete in the current emulators?

It might be fun to work on this as a project but if there are two emulators already what's wrong with them?
 
They're both a bit slow at the minute. Also InfoNES (which nkNES is based on) doesn't seem to have the best compatibility in the world. That or my ROMs are bad ;)

I ported InfoNES from scratch and got it running faster, but I'm really going to need to hit some NES technical docs to get it any further along. Surprisingly complicated little beastie :)
 
The best of the emulators is just a port of FECUltra, so I'd guess it needs some optimization, cut out some features that aren't of any use to GP2X owners, basically just optimizing the code would give a little speedup.

I only say 'just optimizing code' because I have no clue what that entails. Probably more than I care to know ;)
 
FCEU also has crap sound quality

it would also be nice to see a picture crop feature similar to that of netopia so on specific games you can cut off the left or bottom or top 8 pixels and then center it

also is it possible for the gp2x to do bilinear filtering? cos the only stretching ive seen is ugly non filterd stretching
 
nkNes is more playable, speed-wise, than FCEU, but unfortunately the programmer used the button names rather than button locations to determine A and B buttons, which makes it rather difficult to play. It also lacks savestats and savegames. I tried to fix the former problem (a simple edit of 2 lines of code) but I couldn't get it recompile correctly (apparently a disparity between the libraries the original author used and Oopo's toolchain).

It's really sad that these projects apparently died. The NES was a great system and should be much easier on the CPU. I wish I knew more about EMU coding so I could give it a stab. Maybe squidge, reesy, or zodttd need an apprentice. :D
 
I did some work on InfoNES today. No GUI, no features at all really yet (apart from an FPS counter), but I thought I'd let you see the results anyway:

fishyNES

Due to the lack of interface and command line support, the ROM must be called rom.nes and be in the root directory of your SD card.

For reference, nkNES defaults to fs2 whereas this is currently locked at fs0.

Seeing as it's not ready for public consumption, please don't post it in the archive or anything like that, but I'd appreciate some feedback :)

Edit: borked the link
 
fishybawb posted on Feb 28 2006 at 04:08 PM said:
I did some work on InfoNES today. No GUI, no features at all really yet (apart from an FPS counter), but I thought I'd let you see the results anyway:

fishyNES

Due to the lack of interface and command line support, the ROM must be called rom.nes and be in the root directory of your SD card.

For reference, nkNES defaults to fs2 whereas this is currently locked at fs0.

Seeing as it's not ready for public consumption, please don't post it in the archive or anything like that, but I'd appreciate some feedback :)

Edit: borked the link

sound is perfect, speed is so close you can taste it. great work.

edit: over-clocking to 266 gives me full-speed (and then some)! woohoo!
(i'm using duck tales to test)

edit2: more playing, more thoughts

i think it IS ready for public consumption! but you asked for feedback, so here goes:
- needs a selector, selector is probably pretty painless to add in (edit: i mean the one that's really called 'selector', not selectors in general)
- needs a way to exit

less important stuff:
- when overclocked, sometimes the framerate spikes and the game runs too quickly for a split second. this only seems to happen at game loading screens.
- volume control (although the current setting is pretty good)
- button mappings (again, not bad in current state)
 
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bump to call attention to a near-perfect nes emulator

istockphoto_140589_bump_sign.jpg
 
I am extremely pleased.

What needs to be added? I'm guessing a frame limiter, and a simple UI, and that's it?

I really want to test this, but don't have the time yet...

Great work.
 
Jarska333 posted on Feb 27 2006 at 04:55 PM said:
Rlyeh. ;)

I was/am an official beta tester but haven't heard anything for ages. Always got my info from Rleyh's own dev forum, but that has been silent for ages.

Evildragon seemed to have a gp2x port of one of the emulators running.
 
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I believe PocketNES has some machine code, which would not be portable.
 
rokdcasbah posted on Feb 28 2006 at 11:23 PM said:
sound is perfect, speed is so close you can taste it. great work.

edit: over-clocking to 266 gives me full-speed (and then some)! woohoo!
(i'm using duck tales to test)

edit2: more playing, more thoughts

i think it IS ready for public consumption! but you asked for feedback, so here goes:
- needs a selector, selector is probably pretty painless to add in (edit: i mean the one that's really called 'selector', not selectors in general)
- needs a way to exit

less important stuff:
- when overclocked, sometimes the framerate spikes and the game runs too quickly for a split second. this only seems to happen at game loading screens.
- volume control (although the current setting is pretty good)
- button mappings (again, not bad in current state)

As luck would have it I've hit a busy time in my life just as I get into this (new job, relocation). Anyway, I'll get a basic GUI sorted over the weekend hopefully. And yeah, a way to exit would be nice :D

I needed a project to get my teeth into, so I'm definitely going to keep working on fishyNES.

Thanks for the comments rokdcasbah, much appreciated :)
 
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