Accurate NES Emulation

[ZH/Franky]

I've played hundreds of NES games through emulation (though I've probably only completed under 100 of them).

Anyway, I'm looking for the most accurate NES emulator.
For SNES emulation, there is BSNES, which emulates everything to exact precision. This is the kind of accuracy I'm looking for, but with NES.

Now, I've read that bsnes makes use of a scanline renderer, rather than the dot-based renderer of a real snes. Does the NES make use of a dot-based renderer? And if so, does the most accurate nes emulator emulate that correctly, or just use a scanline one.

i'm not talking about "totally compatible, using hacks and whatnot", I mean real, down the last detail, accuracy. To the bare bones, every mapper and whatnot included.


So, can anyone give advice?
I'm going to go all cliche here and say "thanks in advance"

[King Of Chaos]

If I'm not wrong, Nintendulator or Nestopia is as close as you can get.

[franpa]

Rocknes is another project to keep your eye on, it does suffer audio stutter issue's but that is being worked on as we speak plus various stuff is being fixed as well which can be seen over on the nesdev forums. (this also had the best sounding audio ouptut and will soon again have the best sounding audio output once the audio stutter is solved =)

I think Rocknes is a cycle accurate Nes emulator where as Nestopia is opcode based.

[King Of Chaos]

Yea, but doesn't RockNES use 'hacks' and trickery to fix game bugs (SMB3 for example)? If anything, things like that would hurt it from being hardware accurate.

[mudlord]

Rocknes is a cycle accurate Nes emulator i think where as Nestopia is opcode based.

Uhh..Nestopia IS a cycle accurate emulator.....


OT: I'm beginning to see why all the misinformation alert signs are around.....

[franpa]

if it did tricks in the past, it doesnt now. or the author is trying to remove them all.

typo in my post ^

[byuu]

For SNES emulation, there is BSNES, which emulates everything to exact precision. This is the kind of accuracy I'm looking for, but with NES.

Both Nintendulator and Nestopia emulate the NES better than bsnes emulates the SNES.

As I've been told, both emulate the PPU dot-by-dot. It's actually kind of required to get a lot of games working properly. But as a whole, NES emulation is way ahead of SNES emulation.

The only excuse we have is that the SNES is a lot more complex, but even with that, we've still been a lot less active in researching the dark corners of the system than the NES dev scene has.

In fact, at the moment, I'm not aware of any active SNES emu devs who are running tests on actual hardware. Quite the shame.

[tcaudilllg2]

For SNES emulation, there is BSNES, which emulates everything to exact precision. This is the kind of accuracy I'm looking for, but with NES.

Both Nintendulator and Nestopia emulate the NES better than bsnes emulates the SNES.

As I've been told, both emulate the PPU dot-by-dot. It's actually kind of required to get a lot of games working properly. But as a whole, NES emulation is way ahead of SNES emulation.

The only excuse we have is that the SNES is a lot more complex, but even with that, we've still been a lot less active in researching the dark corners of the system than the NES dev scene has.

In fact, at the moment, I'm not aware of any active SNES emu devs who are running tests on actual hardware. Quite the shame.

What more remains to be found? (aside from the expansion chips?)

[ZH/Franky]

Ah, thanks for all the helps guys. I looked around on the internet and it seems Nintendulator stopped progressing, while Nestopia still is.
I'll get Nestopia.

[etabeta]

Nintendulator is still developed, but it gets released only when something new is discovered and added about the hardware... anyway, it is already perfect in everything it emulates (i.e. all the main official games)

OTOH, Nestopia supports many more chinese obscure pirate games and cheesy features as online gaming, graphic filters etc.
it is also more actively developed, quite often because those chinese boards are not well documented at all and emulation has to be fixed and made closer to the original

both are way better than the alternatives (even if some emu is improving a lot)

[Rashidi]

which emulator who has most accurate mapper support?
since wrong mapper = broken game?

[grinvader]

In fact, at the moment, I'm not aware of any active SNES emu devs who are running tests on actual hardware. Quite the shame.

Even Overload ?

[FirebrandX]

In my opinion Nestopia wins the NES emulation scene by far. I've been playing and testing out many different NES emulators for several years going back to the original days of Nesticle, and I was never more impressed with an emulator than I was with Nestopia.

[byuu]

What more remains to be found? (aside from the expansion chips?)

The PPU1 and PPU2 are the last neglected chips on the SNES. If we can get those emulated at the clock level and maintain 60fps, I will finally at least be happy with SNES emulation. After that, CPU mul/div partial results would be a nice 3-6 month excursion, and then we could try and simulate bus conflicts and hardware bugs (eg CPUr1 HDMA lockup.)

Even Overload ?

The last time I've seen him active was in 2006. I know he posts on occasion, as does anomie, TRAC, etc. But there's no denying that the momentum from 2003 at the Snes9X forums is long dead.

Please don't take this as a complaint, I'm eternally grateful for all of the work everyone has done for SNES emulation, of course. Obviously real life comes before hobbies.

[neo_bahamut1985]

Wow, the Snes9x forums still exist? I thought Snes9x was dead altogether...

[creaothceann]

Wow, the Snes9x forums still exist?

Sure.

[Neo Kaiser]

Wow, the Snes9x forums still exist?

Sure.

http://www.snes9x.com/phpbb2/index.php

The correct link to the forums.

[neo_bahamut1985]

I stand corrected....I'm surprised the author didn't give up on Snes9x; has it been put on hiatus or what?

[franpa]

Uh, it is getting a new sound core. both zsnes and snes9x are getting similar things done.

[mudlord]

Not again...

Snes9x already has a updated sound core....

Sure, its not much up to what blargg researched, but still, its better than what was in before 1.42......

I'm curious though whats the Windows port's problem with sound is. The sound in the Linux port is miles ahead of of the Win9x/2K port....

[Neo Kaiser]

I stand corrected....I'm surprised the author didn't give up on Snes9x; has it been put on hiatus or what?

WTF are you smoking? SNES9x is as active as the ZSNES emulator. The activity of a forum don't determinate the activity of a developer team of said emulator. Also some times the 2 teams join forces for a common goal including writing code for the other team emulator. ZSNES and SNES9x are brothers!

[ZH/Franky]

After that, CPU mul/div partial results would be a nice 3-6 month excursion, and then we could try and simulate bus conflicts and hardware bugs (eg CPUr1 HDMA lockup.)

Wait a minute, you want to reproduce bugs in the hardware? why?
wouldn't it be better to emulate a SNES where these bugs are fixed?

[Rashidi]

.. we could try and simulate bus conflicts and hardware bugs (eg CPUr1 HDMA lockup.)

Wait a minute, you want to reproduce bugs in the hardware? why?
wouldn't it be better to emulate a SNES where these bugs are fixed?

• for sake of "accuracy"
• some game developer know about the bug but use it for their programming "hack"

[Gil_Hamilton]

After that, CPU mul/div partial results would be a nice 3-6 month excursion, and then we could try and simulate bus conflicts and hardware bugs (eg CPUr1 HDMA lockup.)

Wait a minute, you want to reproduce bugs in the hardware? why?
wouldn't it be better to emulate a SNES where these bugs are fixed?

The best example is the NES 8-sprite limit. It's used in a handful of games to create graphical effects. A bug or limitation can be put to legitimate use.
Fixing a bug can BREAK a game that depends on said bug.
So the "ideal" SNES could, in fact, be LESS compatible than the "broken" SNES.

Aside from that, an emulator that does not emulate all restrictions of the real hardware is completely useless for testing code that is intended to work on a real SNES.

[Thristian]

I stand corrected....I'm surprised the author didn't give up on Snes9x; has it been put on hiatus or what?

WTF are you smoking? SNES9x is as active as the ZSNES emulator. The activity of a forum don't determinate the activity of a developer team of said emulator. Also some times the 2 teams join forces for a common goal including writing code for the other team emulator. ZSNES and SNES9x are brothers!

I don't think it's a coincidence that bsnes has rocketed in popularity over the past few years, and that bsnes is the only SNES emulator I know of where the author(s) regularly post detailed progress updates and generally make themselves available to answer questions.

I've heard that the SNES9x and ZSNES devteams retreated from the public eye when their development forums were flooded with uneducated users and their wild-eyed demands, and I might well have made the same decision in their place. I just want to point out that the price of staying out of the spotlight is that people ignore you - nobody should be suprised if users assumes SNES9x is dead after being deathly quiet for almost a year since the last release (if the last-modified date on my copy is correct).