Is emulation talks allowed?

Not on where to get them but on the use of them?

 

I dont see any reason not to talk about emulation of consoles as long as no download links to games are posted.

We even had a PCSX2 thread but its buried somewhere around here.

 

Hmm it would be sweet to have a 360 emulator on my clevo, i would just play reach all day

 

as long as it's within the realm of the legal, should be fine. console emulation may be frowned upon by console creators, but that doesn't impact the legal status. Emulators can be perfectly legitimate.

Here's a complete list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_emulators

Personal favorite choices:

PCSX2 for the PS2
Dolphin for the Gamecube / Wii
PCSX-reloaded for the PS1
Kega Fusion for the sega 32x/genesis/cd/gamegear etc.
Mupen 64 plus for the n64
Snes9x for the SNES

 

I used Project64 for an N64 emulator, I never heard of Mupen 64

 

I used to play Mario Kart on Project 64 during boring lectures

Speaking of emulators, I need to find a good Dreamcast one.

 

Nulldc and Makaron/Makaron Ex are the best emus for Dreamcast. I advice the first since its more easy to configure and runs basically everything.
Get your fix at EmuCR.com .

 

I can't Dolphin to work on my computer. Or at least, it has very bad framerates. My obviously leagues ahead or previous gen consoles, so I don't see why it should have these kind of problems.

 

You should have plenty of power for emulators like pcsx2 and dolphin. It may just be the state of the emulator with the game you are trying to play, or maybe the settings you are using. Might want to ask over on their forums for detailed help.

 

Been lagging on this but its great I'm not the only one interested in this. For the longest time I've used SNES on my desktop but now that I have a more powerful laptop I just got into trying Dolphin

 

Dolphin and pcsx2 needs at least a 3ghz dual core or quad to work at approx 100% speed.
Sadly an i7 at 2,6 ghz or a first gen i7 doesnt cut it.
As an example my old g53sw with 460m and a 2630qm wasn't enough to run games at full speed.
With the 3ghz barrier broken by the 2760qm I can run almost anything without even using speedhacks.

"plenty of power" is a sentence not suitable for emulation. For most emus you're fine with an average pc, but for some consoles or arcade the needed speeds are from 3ghz to 4.
As an example a dual core i5 with a turbo boost of 3,4ghz will outperform an i7 with a base clock of 2,6.

 

I didn't say plenty of power for all emulation, I just meant pcsx2 and dolphin. They recommend a ~3 Ghz Core 2 duo, I figure any 2.x ghz + i5/i7 would fit the bill, but that could be wrong.

Obviously it wouldn't be enough to emulate every possible hardware configuration.

 

I wasnt referring directly to your sentence mate, i was just talking in general.

 

4.6ghz i7 2600K muahahaha

Though I have not done any emulation in a long time.

 

Quoting me directly must have thrown me off. No problem.

 

I have a first gen i7 and I dont have any issues with PCSX2 lagging.
Prob could be because its a desktop

 

What's the difference between an ISO, GDU and ROM etc.?

Which do I combine with nullDC? (Dreamcast). I'm kind of a noob in emulator area.

 

In general, an ISO is an image of a disk. For instance, emulation of disk-based consoles (ps, xbox, gamecube) typically use ISO. ISO is also used in general for any disk image (windows disk, ms office disk...etc).

ROMs typically refer to cartridge-based consoles (gba, n64, genesis).

Not sure on GDU.

 

Makes sense. Thank you ...ISO it is then

+rep

 

Desktop cpus are more than enough for emulation if above 3ghz.
First gen core i series is almost twice as fast as the mobile counterpart in some cases, so that's why it works fine on your end.
Being a notebook forum I was implying Mobile CPUs obviously

Since you know already what Iso mean, I can explain what Gdi means. It stands for gd-rom disk image. Gd-roms were the media used in Dreamcast. Basically they are an high density version of a common CDROM, they can store up to 900/1gb of data.

 

My 2960xm @4.3ghz runs all emus full speed. Mario Galaxy looks amazing at 1080p just wish dolphin emu supported quad core CPUs and SLI best emu is SNES & MAME now that was a era for games


Sent from my iPad2 using Tapatalk

 

My M18x runs PCSX2 at a more PS2-like speed compared to my G73. I get lags here and there when I play at full resolution on my G73. With the M18x however, I feel like I were playing on my PS2.

 

When buying a notebook the main reason I choose a strong CPU is for emulation . PCSX2 and Dolphin are both CPU demanding so I think CPU will be the main bottleneck then... So in order to run almost games in PCSX2 and Dolphin smoothly, at least an i7 2720qm is required? It can turbo boost past 3.0Ghz.

Wonder how will an i7 2630qm perform along with MTVU hack (which supports 3+ cores in the late beta versions) enabled...

 

If you use the SVN version of PCSX2, you will find better performance in many titles due to the newly implemented Quad Core support. A 2630qm is more than enough with that in a lot of cases and is the only reason why I can now play God Of War at full speed on the laptop in my sig.

 

To add to this, they have many updates which they did not officially put on their site. Just use the one which performs best for you.

 

I've been running console emulation for the longest time. My "suite" has NES, SNES, GB/GBA, Genesis and PS1 all covered.

PS2 emulation I've never really had success with, for some reason...

 

Here's Zelda Skyward Sword emulated on my Sig Laptop @1360x768, 2xAF, 4xAA ~__Zelda Skyward Sword__~ on Dual Core Laptop - YouTube

 

used to do MAME/nebula with brother and cousins, way more fun than MMO~~
But they all old man now lols( near 30)

YU-GI-OH on PS and GBA is great. Personally never touched Pokemon ever though `~( Am I 2 young XD?)

 

im curious how does the p180hm stack up for emulation? i choose 8gb ram 2x6990m crossfire and cpu is i7-2670

 

That looks awesome. I didn't know the dolphin emulator came so far. Last time I tried to play Wind waker on it, and the music didn't work and textures all wonked out. This was a few years ago though.

 

This time I wonder how will the 35W 3612qm perform on PCSX2 and Dolphin, if it's not enough then I think the 3720qm will do the job...

 

Yea man, loving it. I just noticed that I wasn't running at upped rez, it was still the low native Wii rez plus 4x AA.

So what I did is I changed the rez to my TV's Native and removed the 4x AA. Runs even smoother than before now.

Tried Super Smash Brothers Brawl and it looked AMAZING in high rez.

Plays super smooth too. It's amazing how much better older games can look like with a higher resolution that meets your Display's Native Resolution.

They definitely went leaps and bounds above what Dolphin could do a year ago.

 

Looking at most Wii games rendered in 720p or higher in Dolphin, it seems that most games are held back by the Wii display limit of 480p.
Would be cool if the next Nintendo console could support higher output on Wii games.

 

I remember the big break through was N64 emulation.
I went to my friend's house back in like 1997 and he was playing Zelda Ocarina of Time and it looked amazing on a Riva TNT video-card. No lag, perfect graphics and gameplay. I was jaw-dropped.
And then PSX emulation was perfected. I felt like emulation was going to follow every system but it became a lot more difficult with newer systems.

Which is fine because the best RPG's are on Playstation 1 anyway.

 

anybody care to comment? also this thread in general makes me wonder, why is emulation of consoles so difficult for computers?

As far as i know the latest xbox 720 will use AMD's HD 6670 card and AMD x86 CPU. These are relatively just...OK components and no where near my 6990 xfire and i7.

The hardware is clearly there, is it just the software to utilize the hardware in order to do perfect emulation is lacking?

 

Emulation is difficult on computers because they basically have to re-write the instructions of a program in real-time, in addition to running those instructions to do whatever they were supposed to do.

No one knows what the 720 will use at this point in time - there was another rumor stating it was going to use an 8-core hyperthreaded PowerPC chip. Good luck emulating that. If it uses an x86 CPU and traditional GPU, there's a fair chance that most games will simply be ported to PC easier than they are now, and not require emulation (and also less chance of crappy console port-itis).

 

The problem is that the hardware isn't really there. When you emulate a console, you have to create the entire physical console in software. Most consoles are based on PPC or arm processors, which are very different than x86 processors. It's reasonable to expect to need at least one order of magnitude more processing power than the original console had to even talk about emulating that console.

If new consoles use machine code that is compatible with modern processors, it might be possible to have a different style of emulator that just recreates the software environment rather than the entire console (software and hardware). This would be similar to wine, which translates windows API calls to unix API calls, and lets you run windows software on unix-like operating systems.

The performance impact of something like wine is much lower than a hardware emulator.

 

So something that looks so trivial as 360's hardware is actually hard to emulate? Damn.. I was looking forward to playing some Halo Reach on my PC ;-)

 

Crossfire won't make a difference but the rest is very good for emulation. I think that's a quad core, so when you use PCSX2 make sure you enable the multicore hack.

When you run an emulator keep in mind that you
1) Have to translate the code to code that your computer can understand.
2) You do'nt even know what the code that needs to be translated is, so you have to recreate it.
3) Your computer is running an operating system and 100 other processes. Console games take advantage of console hardware and they don't have to deal with a large OS layer in between, just a layer dedicated to the specific task of playing games.

 

It's not really trivial... it's a 3 core powerpc processor running at 3.2Ghz. You have to represent that specific CPU in another CPU.

It's kind of like trying to build a graphing calculator in minecraft and wondering why it isn't faster, considering that minecraft can do all sorts of things quickly, like render the whole environment, whereas the graphing calculator is relatively simple by comparison.

Minecraft Scientific/Graphing calculator - Sin Cos Tan Log Square root - YouTube

It's a giant and slow undertaking trying to represent one system inside of another. I kind of went over the details before.

 

Interesting... would like to learn more on the subject.