Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Great Deceiver]

Back in a day I was emulating NES and SNES shit on Pentium 200 MMMX / 32 MB RAM, now Nestopia requires 800 MHZ to run properly, wtf? Can we point out lightest emulators of each platform for low end PC?

RockNes (at least old versions) run even on 486 but required Pentium to decent fps rate.
ZSNES was much faster than Snes9x back then, it could be run even in pure DOS.

How about Genesis, PSX, GBA... ?

Old emulators used a lot of hacks to run at a decent clip. Newer emulators have been focusing on accuracy, which is a good thing.

 

[Duraframe300]

Back in a day I was emulating NES and SNES shit on Pentium 200 MMMX / 32 MB RAM, now Nestopia requires 800 MHZ to run properly, wtf? Can we point out lightest emulators of each platform for low end PC?

RockNes (at least old versions) run even on 486 but required Pentium to decent fps rate.
ZSNES was much faster than Snes9x back then, it could be run even in pure DOS.

How about Genesis, PSX, GBA... ?

Old emulators used a lot of hacks to run at a decent clip. Newer emulators have been focusing on accuracy, which is a good thing.

Nevermind

 

[Nikaido]

Back in a day I was emulating NES and SNES shit on Pentium 200 MMMX / 32 MB RAM, now Nestopia requires 800 MHZ to run properly, wtf? Can we point out lightest emulators of each platform for low end PC?

RockNes (at least old versions) run even on 486 but required Pentium to decent fps rate.
ZSNES was much faster than Snes9x back then, it could be run even in pure DOS.

How about Genesis, PSX, GBA... ?

There is a time and place for all type of emulators. With that said, things that go to the greatest lengths of speed at the cost of high amount of various glitches, like zsnes (which, in many cases, even required hacked roms to fix some potential emulation issues. Thankfully, things like GoodSNES allows you to identify which roms are from the old, bad variety, and which one are the pristine dumps) don't really serve a purpose in 2015 when even a raspberry pi can run snes9x and even the cheapest desktop computer these days can handle something like higan. Even more so true when you consider that the weakest platforms sold these days are ARM and would not be able to run these things.
Still, if you're interested in modern optimized emulators, the various no$ ones are quite amazing in their own right. During the netbook craze with first generation atom CPUs I used no$gba to emulate various DS games at full speed on a dell netbook, which was impossible with desmume on such a crappy computer.
I haven't tried the others but I would be surprised if they weren't as speedy as the gba/DS one (the same author made one for the nes, gb, snes and ps1! what a productive guy)

Aside from the glitch/lack of accuracy issues, there's also the fact that the fastest variety of emulators are also not really portable across platforms. Things like zsnes will never be ported to android because they are written almost entirely in.. x86 assembly. "Porting" that to other platforms, like android, would basically mean a total rewrite (as there'd be no point in suffering the overhead from x86 emulation to run another emulator).
As much as people these days like to hide behind the "sufficiently smart compiler" blahblah, assembly is still king. I'm sure you could make the modern, accurate emulators much faster with a rewrite into assembly, but most of the people working on preserving accurate emulation would probably not want to tie their work to a single platform. They're made by authors that tend to have a "future preservation mindset" and who knows if we'll always be using x86 computers in the future.

 

[A user named cat]

Back in a day I was emulating NES and SNES shit on Pentium 200 MMMX / 32 MB RAM, now Nestopia requires 800 MHZ to run properly, wtf? Can we point out lightest emulators of each platform for low end PC?

You must have the ultimate bottom of the barrel hand-me-down IBM from your great grandma if you can't run Nestopia. You scoff at 800 MHZ like it's requiring an overclocked i7. You could jump on ebay and grab a used or refurbished i3 rig for a couple hundred bucks that'll run pretty much every accurate emulator you throw at it if you set it up properly.

 

[Nikaido]

You don't even need an i3. You can run pcsx2 at a decent level with a Pentium G3258 and a little overclock. It's a $62 CPU brand new.


Its PC game performance for an ultra El Cheapo CPU isn't too shabby either.
And if you can run pcsx2, you can run anything as far as current emulation is concerned.
We've really gone far in terms of what you can do with a cheap desktop machine these days.

As I said earlier, the only platforms that are low on power, are platforms that can't run those ultra fast emulators anyway. Can't do zsnes on an ARM cpu. The cost of writing your stuff in ASM.

 

[Puukko]

I ran PCSX2 on a slightly overclocked X4 955, even. Not completely hitch-free but I got through Gladius with that. Now I have an i7-3770K and could give Dolphin a proper go, I guess. MadWorld is a game I've been wanting to try.

 

[A user named cat]

Dolphin is much more demanding than PCSX2. I don't think you'll be running Metroid Prime or Super Mario Sunshine for example on a weaker dual core as the one linked above. Even my 4670k struggled before I overclocked, from what I recall. You might be able to at native res if you're lucky but you'll likely encounter a ton of stuttering and audio issues. Otherwise a better core i3/5/7 is needed.

 

[Puukko]

I remember trying to get NMH2 to run on my FX-8320. It was suffering.

 

[Nikaido]

Dolphin is much more demanding than PCSX2. I don't think you'll be running Metroid Prime or Super Mario Sunshine for example on a weaker dual core as the one linked above. Even my 4670k struggled before I overclocked, from what I recall. You might be able to at native res if you're lucky but you'll likely encounter a ton of stuttering and audio issues. Otherwise a better core i3/5/7 is needed.

1/ The G3258 is an extremely overclock friendly dual core. This madman got it running at 4.4ghz on the stock cooler and at that frequency it performs remarkably well with emulators.
2/ pcsx2 most demanding games, like SotC, Xenosaga, ZOE and MGS3 aren't any less demanding than Dolphin edge cases. You can find games on both emulators that would not run smoothly on a non-overclocked CPU unless you buy one that runs on 4ghz+ stock, like the i7 4790k.

I remember trying to get NMH2 to run on my FX-8320. It was suffering.

AMD CPUs are suffering. Unless you're solely using your computer for things like video encoding and other highly parallelized tasks, you're wasting your money with that crap. Better get a dual core intel than a quad+ amd on a low budget. Of course, if you do have the money to get a quad intel (i5, i7) get that instead. AMD is not a good alternative no matter the price point.
Here's a comparison on PC games between the G3258 and the FX 8350.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEEuXQf29Z4
One is a $62 CPU, the other a $180 CPU.
The AMD performs better on recent games that make good use of multithreading but its per-core performance is fucking abysmal. Visibly worse on CPU intensive, not very multithreaded games, performs equal to the G3258 on games like Tomb Raider (which is pathetic when it cost more than double the price of the pentium). Overall a nice way of wasting $180 when it could get you an i5 instead.
The difference is much bigger on things like emulators.

 

[Puukko]

Yeah, I originally had an X4 955 when I built my budget rig, then upgraded to an FX-8320 since I didn't have to upgrade the mobo (which I ended up doing anyway), then I sold those when I found a good deal on an i7-3770K + mobo. At this rate, I won't have to upgrade it for years.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Dolphin is much more demanding than PCSX2. I don't think you'll be running Metroid Prime or Super Mario Sunshine for example on a weaker dual core as the one linked above.

It depends on game, really. Tenkaichi Budokai 3 (Wii game!) or Super Mario Sunshine run perfect on Dolphin on my Core 2 Duo 2,66 GHz, better than anything I've experienced form PCSX2. Metroid Prime was a slideshow though.

 

[A user named cat]

Dolphin is much more demanding than PCSX2. I don't think you'll be running Metroid Prime or Super Mario Sunshine for example on a weaker dual core as the one linked above.

It depends on game, really. Tenkaichi Budokai 3 (Wii game!) or Super Mario Sunshine run perfect on Dolphin on my Core 2 Duo 2,66 GHz, better than anything I've experienced form PCSX2. Metroid Prime was a slideshow though.

That's strange. I thought Super Mario Sunshine was one of the most demanding games to run in Dolphin, much like Gran Turismo 4 is in PCSX2. Either way, you really need to upgrade. Core 2 Duo is archaic. If money is tight, then find some stuff to sell on ebay or something. There's always a way.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

I don't care for now, most of stuff I'm interesting at is fully playable on my rig, maybe after finishing recent shit that's in my range now... BTW what a sad times when my only motivation for hardware upgrade would be an urge to emulate 2000's technology of 6th gen consoles. Maybe when 3DS emulation become reliable....

 

[Dreaad]

I only used Dolphin for Fire Emblem and Xeno Blande, both worked better than anything I tried in pcsx2, which probably means I am somehow actively fucking up pcsx2 without realizing it

 

[Crooked Bee]

In my own experience, Dolphin is one of the most well-optimized and smoothest emulators, and pcsx2 is the opposite, so no surprise there.

 

[Duraframe300]

In my own experience, Dolphin is one of the most well-optimized and smoothest emulators, and pcsx2 is the opposite, so no surprise there.

From 2008 (dolphin lol at that time) to 2010 I would argue the complete opposite. And even today I would argue that its more so-so.

Not to mention Gamecube emulation on dolphin (WII games played better on Dolphin when WII emulation was introduced. Which is when Dolphin took off and got that reputation it has today) has been terrible for a long time and only recently improved if we want to do a direct comparison.

 

[flyingjohn]

In my own experience, Dolphin is one of the most well-optimized and smoothest emulators, and pcsx2 is the opposite, so no surprise there.

From 2008 (dolphin lol at that time) to 2010 I would argue the complete opposite. And even today I would argue that its more so-so.

Not to mention Gamecube emulation on dolphin (WII games played better on Dolphin when WII emulation was introduced. Which is when Dolphin took off and got that reputation it has today) has been terrible for a long time and only recently improved if we want to do a direct comparison.

Which games are you having trouble with on dolphin?
Almost any game(either gamecube or wii) runs flawlessly in these 3 years.
Even eternal darkness run fine(minus cut scenes being slower) on my old dual core amd of 2.8 ghz, 5 or 4 years ago.

 

[Duraframe300]

In my own experience, Dolphin is one of the most well-optimized and smoothest emulators, and pcsx2 is the opposite, so no surprise there.

From 2008 (dolphin lol at that time) to 2010 I would argue the complete opposite. And even today I would argue that its more so-so.

Not to mention Gamecube emulation on dolphin (WII games played better on Dolphin when WII emulation was introduced. Which is when Dolphin took off and got that reputation it has today) has been terrible for a long time and only recently improved if we want to do a direct comparison.

Which games are you having trouble with on dolphin?
Almost any game(either gamecube or wii) runs flawlessly in these 3 years.
Even eternal darkness run fine(minus cut scenes being slower) on my old dual core amd of 2.8 ghz, 5 or 4 years ago.

Situational and stretched over time so not reallly representative.

If you want examples though a few years ago when Dolphin's audio backend still sucked ass and you needed LLE (which had problems as well) to play most games if you didn't want to mute them which slowed games down to 4.5 GHz affairs.
Or more specifically when the gamecube Pokemon games on Dolphin were still full of graphical glitches.

OtoH I played many games on pcsx2 which more or less (settings) played flawlessly as well on a 2.8Ghz. However I didn't come much into contact with the critical ones (for example I never had the desire to emulate J&D)

Again it's situational anyway, most of all though go back seven years and Dolphin was a complete joke, pcsx2 just came out with 0.9.2-4 and you could reverse the situation. In fact Dolphin going open source back then and living up again was largely due to pcsx2 success in showing: "Yes, that generation is possible*. And after that Dolphin had always more contributors (especially after the WII thing happened) while PCSX2 lost important ones (like cottonvibes). They also did project management better.


It seems like I'm ranting endlessly here or have a vendetta against Dolphin, but... I don't. I do hate the whole *emulator warz* bullshit that has been going on between the two (and sadly encouraged by devs). It's hypocritical fanboying bullshit.

 

[flyingjohn]

 

[deuxhero]

Some serious graphical glitches in 3D games, but gameplay and sound are fine. THat's pretty impressive given the videos are apparently not sped up AND there's recording software in the background hogging lots of resources.

 

[ghostdog]

Dolphin is much more demanding than PCSX2. I don't think you'll be running Metroid Prime or Super Mario Sunshine for example on a weaker dual core as the one linked above.

It depends on game, really. Tenkaichi Budokai 3 (Wii game!) or Super Mario Sunshine run perfect on Dolphin on my Core 2 Duo 2,66 GHz, better than anything I've experienced form PCSX2. Metroid Prime was a slideshow though.

Those old Core2Duo 2,66 CPUs are fucking beasts. They've got hyperthreading and can be easily overclocked to 3,2. Dolphin run smoothly as fuck in my old rig with Xenoblade in HD. As for PCSX2 I even got MGS3 to play fine in HD (minus some cutscene slowdowns, but you can switch to software for those). Of course Kudos to the emulators because some years back MGS3 needed NASA computers to be emulated.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

BTW Since you have similar system spec, did you manage to run Pandora's Tower on Dolphin at full speed?

 

[ghostdog]

BTW Since you have similar system spec, did you manage to run Pandora's Tower on Dolphin at full speed?

Never tried to. And I have upgraded since then, so I can't help you there.

 

[A user named cat]

Those old Core2Duo 2,66 CPUs are fucking beasts. They've got hyperthreading and can be easily overclocked to 3,2. Dolphin run smoothly as fuck in my old rig with Xenoblade in HD. As for PCSX2 I even got MGS3 to play fine in HD (minus some cutscene slowdowns, but you can switch to software for those). Of course Kudos to the emulators because some years back MGS3 needed NASA computers to be emulated.

I've actually been playing Xenoblade for the first time using the HD texture pack, pretty decent game so far. It's not exactly what I'd call "smooth" with this pack installed though, even on an OCed 4.2GHz 4670k and r9 290. I'm also using Ishiiraku's build too. The new textures unfortunately result in a bit of hitching while exploring around, and I've seen it even in some Youtube clips too. It just seems that some people are so used to shitty console hardware performance, they don't notice and just blow their loads over framerates. Either that or I'm anal about it. Not a big deal and it's obviously still playable.

 

[Duraframe300]

Those old Core2Duo 2,66 CPUs are fucking beasts. They've got hyperthreading and can be easily overclocked to 3,2. Dolphin run smoothly as fuck in my old rig with Xenoblade in HD. As for PCSX2 I even got MGS3 to play fine in HD (minus some cutscene slowdowns, but you can switch to software for those). Of course Kudos to the emulators because some years back MGS3 needed NASA computers to be emulated.

I've actually been playing Xenoblade for the first time using the HD texture pack, pretty decent game so far. It's not exactly what I'd call "smooth" with this pack installed though, even on an OCed 4.2GHz 4670k and r9 290. I'm also using Ishiiraku's build too. The new textures unfortunately result in a bit of hitching while exploring around, and I've seen it even in some Youtube clips too. It just seems that some people are so used to shitty console hardware performance, they don't notice and just blow their loads over framerates. Either that or I'm anal about it. Not a big deal and it's obviously still playable.

Don't know if its the same thing, but

Shader Compilation Stuttering
Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the most susceptible titles to shader compilation stuttering. The GC and Wii have no concept of shaders - everything is executed directly by the hardware without an intermediate programming language (API). Modern computers and mobile systems do not work in this way, requiring the use of shaders as an intermediary so your system's GPU can perform the tasks that the GC and Wii GPU performed directly. Shaders have to be generated though, and since GC/Wii games are not designed to create shaders ahead of time as a PC game would, when a new effect appears Dolphin has to delay the CPU thread while the GPU thread performs the compilation; a pause that does not exist on the consoles. For most games shader generation takes only a few milliseconds, but for a few demanding titles, the shaders that they generate are so large that they can result in noticeable stuttering, in severe cases pauses of over a second may occur.

Eventually stuttering will reduce as a shader cache is built up, but there is no solution to this problem at this time. Changing your GPU, updating your GPU drivers or updating Dolphin may invalidate the shader cache, requiring it to be rebuilt from scratch.