Emulators are amazing. My nintendo, stuffed away in my closet because it's the original version and something of a "museum piece" to show my kids or grandchildren one day, no longer works. My Sega Genesis barely works. I've got a PS2 to play my PS1 games, but the newest PS2s don't play PS1 games anymore so I doubt the PS3 will. So the only way to protect my old investments is to play them emulated. One of the great things about the disc mediums is that I don't have to download ROMs of the games, I can play the ones I have legally bought. Of course, I'm not so naive as to believe that everyone who uses emulators owns the games they play. However, with that caveat aside, I was wondering which emulators people use and what configurations tend to provide the best play.

I find it hard to believe that my Pentim 1.5 GHz can't play Playstation 1 games as well as the PS can. I mean that system came out in 1996! I MUST have at least as good of a system on my computer. Same with certain SNES games.

So -> which Emulators do you use? (for any system NES, SNES, PSX, MAME, etc although I'm most interested in PSX)
Which configurations do you use? (Pete's OpenGL, for example)
How well do the games run on your system? (same as console, better, worse, etc)
(and, for calibration purposes) how good is your system?

To keep things legal and abide by lq.org rules please no sites for downloading roms or images or anything else illegal. Unless I understand incorrectly an emulator is perfectly legal to use as long as the user owns the games they are playing so it shouldn't be against policy to talk about emulators.

If this thread gets enough replies it could be a wonderful resource for those trying to revisit the old games they can no longer play on their consoles.

Thanks,

Wow mate, emulators are the thing I play perhaps the most today, except for Enemy Territory . I even run emulators on my Xbox, which brings back that TV-joypad feeling. Even though PC's can emulate way better then Xbox for some systems (as N64), it's still great .

For Snes, there're two great emulators. Zsnes and Snes9x. Snes9x is known for being relatively faster then Zsnes, but I've also noticed some sound distorcions with a few games, as Mega Man X and Super Street Fighter. No sound problems with Zsnes. Some Snes chips, as FX, used for games like Starfox and Doom, were difficult to emulate before, but work without a problem today. C4 chips (used in Mega Man X2) works flawlessly.

The difference between Zsnes and Snes9x for Linux is that Snes9x does not have a front-end. You need to use a third part one as snes9express (which is buggy). Command line, no problems. Zsnes works and looks just like the windows version. In Linux, Zsnes seems to compile (or not) randomly, so I recommend the binaries.

http://www.snes9x.com

http://www.zsnes.com/

For NES, I like a lot FCEU. It emulates very well even Castlevania 3. The drawback is that the documentation is poorly written. The very best documentation around is written in Japanese, however. I recommend getting the binaries.

http://fceultra.sourceforge.net

For N64, I'm still looking for a good emulator for Linux. The "best" ones are Muppen 64 and Fake64. But they are a shame when compared to Surreal64 (Xbox) or Project64 (Windows)

http://www.pj64.net/

For Sega Megadrive/Genesis, I think gens is the best one. It can also emulate Sega/MegaCD and 32X. It can even play .iso+mp3 format, in case of SegaCD's games.

http://gens.consolemul.com/

The Linux port for Gens is a bit disappointing. It works much slower then the Windows version. I could not get it to work with .iso+mp3 games. I blame the "slower" performance for the gtk-gui. For the Xbox, I like a lot NeoGenesis...

For CPS1 and CPS2 games, I would say that Final Burn is the best for Linux. WinKawaks (Windows) and Kawa-X (Xbox) are the very best ones.

http://www.finalburn.com

http://kawaks.retrogames.com/

Kawa-X and WinKawaks are also capable of running (and very well), SNK NeoGeo games. Not Final Burn though, which only emulates CPS1 and 2. Mame is also capable of emulating CPS1 and CPS2 games, and thousands of others games/machines from Vertex games to Ultimate Mortal Kombat III and The King of Fighter's 2001. It's an outstanding emulator. There're ports for everything, Linux, Windows, Xbox... you name it. There're some hacked versions of Mame, theoretically optimized for CPS2 games:

http://mac.emuhq.com/cps2mame/

The coolest thing with Kawaks, Mame and Final Burn, in my honest opinion, is it online gameplay (Thanks to kaillera). I'm used to spend a great deal of time playing online games, specially Marvel Vs Capcom with Mame and 4 players. It's awesome. Not quite that "Arcade feeling", but still, the four player things rocks . Last time I've tried, only Mame had the four player feature for X-Men Vs Street Fighter, Marvel Vs Street Fighter and Marvel Vs Capcom games. Other emulators also has online feature, but I never tried.

http://www.kaillera.com/

There you can also download emulators with the Kaillera client or server.

For Gameboy Advanced (GBA), Visual Boy Advanced is awesome, both for Linux and Windows:

http://vba.ngemu.com/

It can also run GB and GBC games, though, you might want to use something like Visualboy (Windows), Kigb (Linux) and Gnuboy (Xbox) for GB and GBC games:

http://kigb.emuunlim.com/

http://vboy.emuhq.com

http://www.beemulated.net/console/gameboy.phtml

I run Hugo (Turbo Graphics Emulator) just for one game. Castlevania X: Rondo of Blood. Outstanding game by the way.

For PS1 games, I like epsxe. I use it in Linux and Windows. On the Xbox I like pcsxbox. It has a really cool Castlevania Default skin. Works fine with a few games.

I think those are the emulators I run the most. Remember that Xbox emulators are difficult to find and are also illegal to distribute, because they are created with an illegal version of Xbox SDK.

Since emulators are hard to compile, I recommend using binaries. Here you can find some:

http://rpm.pbone.net/

Even if you find a Mandrake .rpm, you can use a program like Alien to convert it to your distribution default package, as .tgz (Slackware) or .deb (Debian). It has always worked fine for me.

I hope this helps.

Regards!

Thanks for the great info Megaman X.

Just wondering:

1) How well does epsxe play your games and what configurations do you use?

2) What are the specs on your computer?

Thanks for the great info. I think that's one of the best answers to a question ever and I think a lot of people will find it quite useful.

Thanks DJOtaku. I'm glad you found it useful. I can suggest more emus, like Atari and stuff, but I thought my previous message was already too big and boring, lol .

Well, it has been a while since I run epsxe on Linux and Windows, but my machine was a Pentium 4, 2GHZ with 256 RAM and a Geforce 4 MX 440/64mb graphics card. Even though the processor was "ok", the rest was very low, I guess.

I found PSX games to run actually better on the PC, then on the PSX itself. That's because you can use real 3D acceleration and rendering options/filters not available for PSX. Same goes to Project64 (N64). Anti-aliasing and Sai make a very smooth, clean rendering.

What graphics card do you have?. You system sounds good enough to run PSX games. Are you using the official drivers for your system? Nvidia has great drivers. Tell me if you need help installing then.

I remember running PSX games in OpenGL mode, 800x600 and Pete's plugins for everything but the joypad. In Linux, I could not get my PSone joypad to work with ePSXe. I use a cheap USB adapter(Rockfire) and it works fine with everything else. However, I've found a joypad plugin for ePSXe and it works great now. You don't need any additional plugin for ePSXe on Windows. All buttons worked fine. Here you can get Pete's plugins:

http://www.pbernert.com/

I also remember that disable things as CDA (or something like that under "Sound") to speed up things. Also use the frame-limiter feature to keep stable frame rates. You might want to read this too:

http://www.epsxe.com/help.php

Sadly, I did not save my ePSXe configure file when I had it installed in Linux . Sorry...

have you had any problems with this:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=323905

Nope, but I had a suggestion, check that thread out

Regards!

I have to double-check where the gxmame is pointing to, but it also seems not to be reading my high scores that I achieve when just using xmame.

oh, one other thing, when I ran as root under the Gxmame logo on the right was a text description of the game. I'm not sure why it showed there, but how would I make it show? I couldn't find that option under "view"

Ok, I know for sure now that when I play in gxmame it's not saving my high scores. Does anyone know how to fix this? I had the same problem in the Win version.

Ok, I figured out how to do this. I made my hi score directory under

~/.xmame/hi world writable.

Don't know about you guys, but I'm all about the old school way of playing games - if you can't earn a hi score, what's the point?

That's true. Even Mega Man for NES had a score system . Score was really important before

It has been a while, so I dunno if you are still looking at this thread DJOtaku, but I've reinstalled ePSXe today and I was wondering if you've got it to run better. I must say, even though I have a newer system then I had when I tested ePSXe, you were right: it runs slower then it used to. I blame that on xorg . Nah, it can be a lot of things.

Well, only one graphics driver worked for me so far: "Pete's MesaGL Driver 1.75". All the others would not even start the emulator. I remember being able to run in software mode before, but not anymore. No idea what happens in between :\ I would recommend you to copy the .cfg from your plugin directory to you cfg directory and tweak it from there:

cp /whereever your epsxe is/plugins/gpuPeteMesaGL.cfg /whereever your epsxe is/cfg

with your preffered text editor. It's very self explanatory. I'd recommend you to enable fps limiter. I get stable 50FPS when running Mega Man X5, in game. The scenes between the stages are horrible, it dropped to like 5fps sometimes, but that does not sacrifice the gameplay, besides being annoying

For the joypad, I've used an external plugin. It's called "AmmoQ Joydevice Pad Driver 0.6", AKA "libpadjoy". I'm using an USB/PSX adaptor to play the game. Analog buttons won't work, nor forcefeedback. Disappointing.

I've also tested Medal of Honor, everything runs fine, nice and fully as it should. As soon as the game starts, frame drop to 5fps, which is unplayable. Even if it were, playing that game without analog support is horrible.

Here is one screenshot:
http://www.geocities.com/kooltux/sna...e1280x1024.jpg

It's very disappointing indeed. Looks like we've moved backwards with ePSXe, but then again, it could have something to do with xorg or nvidia drivers, but I doubt that. I remember having a lot of fun with ePSXe a while ago with Gran Turismo. I think I better set up my dusty PSOne again .

Here is the system I used to test:

AMD AthlonXP 3000+
1024 MB RAM
sATA (8MB cache)
Ubuntu Linux Hoary 5.04
Nvidia GeforceFX 5200 128MB
Sound Blaster Audigy 2

The system I run before and got better results was:

Pentium IV - 2Ghz
256 MB RAM
80GB IDE
Slackware 9.0
Nvidia Geforce IV MX 440 - 64MB
Sound Blaster Audigy 2

The only thing I can think about is without a doubt, xorg, since back in the Slack 9.0 days, it used xfree. Since xorg is nothing but a fork to xfree, that should not matter but... either it does matter or something else has drastically changed.

Regards!

Just recently my brother's Xbox broke. Any way him or I have no interest getting another one. I thought after reading this thread that I'd try getting a emulator to run on Linux. I got the thinks you all posted and I'll check those out later. My question is, is there any way to jury rig controllers from old and new game consoles so I can plug them into my PC? My sister still has the first Nintendo and the Nintendo64. I'm mostly interested in playing Xbox games on my computer with xbox controllers. But I wouldn't mind learning how to do the same with older consoles.

Megaman - I have yet to try any version of PsxE yet, but it stinks to hear of these problems recently. Hopefully they can be solved soon.

@ AvatarofVirgo:

Hi there! You can find for an affordable price, USB adapters to connect console joypads on PC's. I use myself a PSone joypad and it works great. I'm thinking to get an Xbox adapter soon though. There were some hacks (by that, I mean soldering) available on the net to help peoples to use their Snes/Genesis joypad on PC's through seriel port. I highly recommend getting an USB adapter though. The Xbox one is about 10 bucks and since you already have the Xbox pads...

You can't run Xbox games on PC yet. Maybe in 10 years ^_^. There're some emulators already, one is supposed to convert Xbox executables into Windows executables. Halo has been reported to be the only "working" game, but crashes often. Can't remember the name of the emulator though... So far, I found it far from interesting though, since it's a Windows emu and Halo is available for Windows in a stable and native way =)

@ DJOtaku:

Call me stupid, but the lag on the emulator was my fault. I had some sensors applets on my desktop checking for the temperature and every second, it updated and displayed the temperature/fan speed on my desktop. That was the reason of the slow down on ePSXe. I highly recommend it now, it runs as fast as the way it was ^_^

Regards!