nemulator

[-james-]

I've recently released a new version of my NES emulator, nemulator. It's differentiating feature is it's game selection interface. All games are being emulated in real-time:



Recent updates include cycle-accurate PPU emulation. Check it out and let me know what you think!

http://nemulator.com

Thanks,
James

[dfreer]

Wow that's an interesting take, what kind of system is that running on, a Core I7 with 16 GB's of RAM??!

[-james-]

Actually, yes, this is running on a Core i7 920. I get about 90fps in the menu.

On my laptop, a Core 2 Duo U7500, I only get about 15 fps. Individual games, of course, run at full speed.

Give it a try, if you have a chance, and let me know how it runs on your setup.

[byuu]

All games are being emulated in real-time:

Can I run all 4,000+ officially released titles and revisions at the same time, or is it limited to some paltry number like 50-200? :/

In all seriousness, I do really like the custom GUI. A media-center style view is very refreshing in a world of dialog boxes.

[DEFIANT]

You know, if you switched to images and the ability to scroll through them to select games you want to play, you might be on to something there.

Having all those games running in real time, seems to be novety at best.

Otherwise, good luck to you on your project.

[-james-]

All games are being emulated in real-time:

Can I run all 4,000+ officially released titles and revisions at the same time, or is it limited to some paltry number like 50-200? :/

You can run as many as you'd like. Only the games in view are loaded and emulated. That said, I only support ~10 mappers at this time, so some of those titles won't work yet.

[-james-]

You know, if you switched to images and the ability to scroll through them to select games you want to play, you might be on to something there.

That's no fun!

[byuu]

Only the games in view are loaded and emulated. That said, I only support ~10 mappers at this time, so some of those titles won't work yet.

Totally lame :P
What about the option to multiplex the audio streams from every game at the same time? How can that work if the out-of-view ones are paused? :D

Again, I am of course only joking. Would sound really cool, though. There has to be something even more interesting than just watching them play ... hmm ... perhaps a database of movie files to simulate attract modes for each title, built into the emulator? Would need a core that was never touched again for that to work ...

[grinvader]

Is the input distributed to all running games ?

[Gil_Hamilton]

I can't decide if this is awesome, insane, or insanely awesome.



byuu, you should do this in bSNES!

[byuu]

Is the input distributed to all running games ?

Heh, you know ... I love what they do, and I love watching the results for a few minutes at a time ... but this really is crazy. I mean spending days, weeks, months even; tearing apart game engines, abusing random number generators, and playing four games with the same input ... and it doesn't even mean much since it's 100% emulator revision specific.

byuu, you should do this in bSNES!

Good idea, will work great with a multicore chip.

But in seriousness, no. There's a lot of novelty and innovation, but little usefulness.

[-james-]

What about the option to multiplex the audio streams from every game at the same time?

Like this?

The general response was negative, but I think it's kinda cool. Just like being in an arcade...

[-james-]

But in seriousness, no. There's a lot of novelty and innovation, but little usefulness.

I agree that it may not be the most useful thing to some, but it does work well where I want it to -- under Windows Media Center on my TV, where I don't have a mouse/keyboard. I wanted something that could be completely controlled with the gamepad and, for this purpose, it works quite well.

[byuu]

Does it need to be live, though?

If you wanted a game switcher controlled by gamepad, wouldn't it make more sense to use static images of the games' title screens? By running the emulation for each game, you lose the ability to instantly recognize visual cues to tell which game is which. Plus it uses a lot of extra CPU power. With static images, you wouldn't need that very slight "pause" delay to emulate the new games as you scroll around in the list.

Hm, perhaps you could keep static images of the title screens, and whenever you mouse over a game, it zooms in on it like now, and begins playing it with 25% sound? Choosing it will zoom in all the way and the game will not reset during this process.

[-james-]

Does it need to be live, though?

No, doesn't need to be. But I didn't want to use static images because I didn't want to deal with creating/storing them. And, frankly, I get a kick out of being able to emulate them all at once.

[byuu]

Oh, I did like the mixed audio myself. Quite trippy.

And yeah, a database of screenshots is not only difficult to create, but quite a feat to distribute. I still want to do something like that eventually myself. Perhaps I can work with Matthew Callis on that :)

And, frankly, I get a kick out of being able to emulate them all at once.

Definitely, the novelty is very high.

[Gil_Hamilton]

byuu, you should do this in bSNES!

Good idea, will work great with a multicore chip.

But in seriousness, no. There's a lot of novelty and innovation, but little usefulness.

Allow me to rephrase...

You should do this so we can see how slow it would run.

[Thristian]

And yeah, a database of screenshots is not only difficult to create, but quite a feat to distribute.

And yet, people have done it (SNES images here). Of course, the game -> ID mapping requires a database.

[kick]

Lovely emulator. I just LOVE the innovative real-time menu Just for kicks, I tried nemulator on an 8-yr old single core junker and the menu runs (slowly, but it doesn't crash )

I have a few suggestions and complaints though:

- Could you add an option to disable VSYNC when browsing through the menu, but enable it when a game is started?
Since the menu needs a lot of CPU power, this option would allow for faster performance in the menu, but still provide tear-free video during gameplay.

- Could you add an option to increase the maximum number of games emulated at once? Only 24 games displayed at once is too low for a 'Beyond HD' high-resolution screen (the 2560x1600 30-incher or the good old 2048x1536 CRT). Having even more games emulated at once is also a good stress test for a quad-core (Phenom II BE or i5/i7-series) CPU.

- Does nemulator *REALLY* need Direct3D10 for the menu? Is it possible to do the same with DirectX 9.0c or OpenGL 3.x?
* By making the emulator Win7/Vista only, you're effectively eliminating 80% of the potential users (still sticking with Windows XPSP3 until MS releases 2 service packs to fix the hundreds of nasty bugs and improve the piss-poor 2D performance of Win7)
* Direct3D9 also performs way faster on XP than on Win7 / Vista so the menu will run much smoother.
* OpenGL 3.2 is supported by all modern cards,even the crappiest ones. And with the latest drivers, all ATI cards perform surprisingly well in OpenGL apps/games. OpenGL3.2 works on *all* operating systems, so XP (and Linux) users can run it as well.

[kode54]

Somehow, I don't think the bottleneck is the graphics API in use.

Also, what is this about Vista/7 having slower 2D performance? What exactly is it that taxes 2D enough for the frame rate to dip below the refresh rate?

Personally, I wouldn't install anything older than Vista on any hardware newer than 2 years old. Actually, considering the slipstreaming nightmare I had to go through to get XP installed on my 2004 machine without a floppy drive handy to feed it SATA drivers, I wouldn't install XP again on that either.

[-james-]

kick -- glad you like it and thanks for your comments.

add an option to disable VSYNC when browsing through the menu

I'll consider adding this in but my first reaction to this is that a system that can't run the menu at 60 fps simply doesn't meet the minimum requirements.

add an option to increase the maximum number of games emulated at once?

This is in the works already -- look for it in a future version.

Does nemulator *REALLY* need Direct3D10 for the menu?

No, but in making the switch from DirectDraw to Direct3d, I had to choose one API to learn, and I chose DirectX10. DX10 has some advantages over DX9 that make programming with it easier, and since what I'm doing with DirectSound doesn't translate well to the cross-platform audio libraries I've looked at, it doesn't make much sense to switch to OpenGL for portability reasons.

By making the emulator Win7/Vista only, you're effectively eliminating 80% of the potential users

Yeah, I'm ok with that. In a short amount of time, 80% of the users will be on Win7 and this will be a moot point. Sidebar: I don't get the 'hanging on to XP until it's pried from my cold dead hands' view that so many people have. Granted, I haven't run into any real problems switching to Vista or Win7, but the whole thing seems pedantic to me.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not completely downplaying the D3D10 compatibility issues. In an ideal world, I'd have the time to work on these issues. However, nemulator is very much a spare time project for me and these are compromises that I'm willing to (have to?) make.

James

[kick]

nemulator 2.2 is out.

The audio and accuracy improvements are great, but there's still no option to increase the maximum number of games emulated at once

[-james-]

the next version will be out shortly

[Gil_Hamilton]

the next version will be out shortly

Press up three times, then left once. There's no reason to be playing anything else when you're that close to Guardian Legend.

[kick]

Press up three times, then left once. There's no reason to be playing anything else when you're that close to Guardian Legend.

Guardian Legend is legendary... but Gremlins 2 and Journey To Silius are just as good