Hey guuys (and gals) I am working on tossing together a dvr, and was wondering if anyone had any good/bad opinons or experiences with any specific NES emulators for linux (especially ones that are in the gentoo portage)? I am looking for one that works well with a lot of games, has sound, and configurable joystick support (I want to be able to use my gamepad :P ). Thanks!

FCE-Ultra is by far the best emulator for NES available for Linux. Unfortunately, it has also the worst documentation ever made for Linux. If you are good with Japanese, you may disagree with me though... Still, compiling it is no easy task...

iNES and InfoNES holds a nice tied second place when comes down to compatibility, and TuxNes, still growing and looking promising, a third place.

Although, most of the emulators above are difficult to compile. I'm not sure why emulators are still an issue for Linux. Gens, for example, is an awesome Megadrive/SegaCD/32X emulator for Windows, and has been ported for Linux. It's ratter disappointing: First, anything lower then a 1GHZ machine makes the emulator unusable. Second, SegaCD iso+mp3 plays without sound....

Back to NES emulator question, I've found some rpm's packages here for FCE-Ultra and TuxNes as well as front-ends, making easy to configure video and joypads:

http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat.../idg/Emulators

I've no idea if Gentoo handles rpm's, but a member of this site reported that he had successfully converted those rpm's to tgz (Slack's package) using rpm2apt.

If you can't "emerge" those emulators, try taking a look into those rpm's .

Good luck!

Gentoo uses ebuilds, which are scripts to custom-compile applications from the source tarballs.

If you check the online Portage database by category, FCEUltra, TuxNES (and gtuxnes), infones, nestra, darcnes, and fakenes (which is what I'm using since gtuxnes broke for some reason) are listed as available in the games-emulation category, and can of course be installed with an emerge. The Portage detailed listing for each app links to the homepage of the app, so you can check to see which one suits your needs.

Hope this helps.

,Yes, I am familiar with using portage and ebuilds, I am mostly looking for a recomendation from people hwo have used more than one. tuxnes seems to crash on me, I'll check out fakenes, see how it works. Thanks for the info :P

Gentoo builds everything, unless you specifically say I want to use a binary package. It does this through ebuilds as holly described, which is basically bash scripts that run the make files for all the software. This allows you to specify compiler optimizations and other flags to imporve performance and add other nifty stuff to your software (like spell checking in gaim :P ).

I never tried to use an rpm on gentoo, but I've install my share of tarballs...

Thanks for all the info on the emulators, and I installing FCEultra now, then, its off to play some mario 3 :P

I'm wondering how can you turn on joystick support with fceultra >0.98 , as i don't see an option to do so, whilst in 0.97 i was able to play with joystick.

I still have the script to launch fceu0.97 with joystick, but it doesn't work anymore with the newer version.

If you find a way to do so, please post it. Thank you in advance.

According to this thread on the FCEUltra forums, the -inputcfg command line switch is what you're looking for...

From the FCEUltra docs:

Wow, thanks a lot motub and secho for the tips about Gentoo. Hmmmm, maybe I've to give gentoo a shot before settle down... Sounds like a good distro for a Gamer Freaky like me

If you like Slack (and who wouldn't? ), you'll love Gentoo. If you love Slack, you'll adore Gentoo.

All of the simplicity, possibly even more documentation, with the ability to customize and tweak up the wazoo for your system and real package management. It's like heaven if you're into that kind of thing .

I couldn't have put it better

Thank you, now i have understood how it works .