Emulation

It's strange that there's never been a thread for this, aside from mentions here and there. I've played tons of games on various emulators that I otherwise never would have seen.

Current emulators can play all the way up to Playstation 2 and Wii, although those two need a decent CPU. Anything older than those at this point work almost flawlessly, with greatly improved visuals.

With a EMU you have the advantage of high res textures (aided by various scaling methods), anti-aliasing, saving anywhere, speedup/slowdown (great for trivial battles in menu-style JRPGS), cheats, internet play for nearly any multi-player game (never actually tried it though - contra anyone?), fan translations, no load times, and of course, massive piracy of games that you could never find otherwise.

For 2D consoles, you want to use hqx filtering and 'maintain aspect ratio' It looks the best of any of the other scaling options. For 3D, you want to set the internal resolution to a multiple of the game's original resolution. Most just give you the option to set it as native x2 x3 etc.

The games:

http://www.emuparadise.meIf it isn't there, google or torrent will find the rest. It's also well-updated with lists of emulators for various obscure systems.

The emulators - I'm only listing what I have experience with.

DOS:http://www.dosbox.com/If it ran in dos you can play it with this. Some older games require playing with CPU timing, but otherwise there isn't much configuration fiddling from game to game.

For changing key bindings in games, usehttp://www.autohotkey.com/Syntax is as simple as newkey:ldkey

Arcade:http://mamedev.org/Last time I used it the hardest part was just figuring out how to load the game. Sometimes I had to download multiple copies or other games to get all the pieces. Massively multi-platform = massively shit UI. (its designed with literally making a giant arcade cabinet in mind) But get over the hurdles and you can play pretty much everything that was coin-op. And quickly realize how much those games sucked. With this though you could play 4 player Turtles in Time over the internet, should you find three other people who can figure out how to get it working.

Android:BlueStackshttp://bluestacks.com/

NES:Nestopiahttp://nestopia.sourceforge.net/Finally beat those games that were too much for you as a child with the power of save states. There are tons of NES emulators with various degress of precision vs speed vs compatibility vs features. Nestopia is easily the best all-around.

SNES:SNES9xhttp://snes9x.ipherswipsite.com/If you used ZSNES in the past, it lost the war and is lightyears behind and pretty much shit. At some point S9X improved massively and leaped ahead of the more popular ZSNES. Use it. If you somehow still find a game that runs into timing bugs on Snes9x, usehttp://byuu.org/higan/Its not as pretty, runs a hell of a lot slower, and the author is pedantic as hell and insists on using file extensions that nobody uses and other such quibbles, but it is possibly useful to get past a few very specific timing-related bugs that I've never encountered yet the author insists exist. (mostly he refers to bugs in ZSNES)

N64:1964 Ultrafasthttp://www.retrocopy.com/downloads/1...trafast_v3.zipThis mod of the 1964 emu stands out for its ability to run supported games at 60 fps instead of having the same slowdown issues that the real console would have. However I have only used it briefly because N64 games suck, so you may want to use the diet coke of N64 emulatorshttp://www.pj64-emu.com/simply for the higher userbase.

Gamecube + Wii:Dolphinhttp://dolphin-emu.org/My understanding is that any game that supports "classic controller" mode does not need the nunchucks to play. You may need some CPU horsepower to play WII games and the compatibility won't be as good as Gamecube. GC runs terrific and looks great at 2x native and 4x AA. I only played enough of Xenoblade to say "neat, it works" but it didn't seem to dip below 60 fps for me.

Gameboy / GBA:VisualBoyAdvance-Mhttp://vba-m.com/Does it all.

Nintendo DS:DeSmuMehttp://desmume.org/download/Mouse works as the stylus. I've only played a few minutes of Dragon Warrior but it seems to work well enough. Set it to stack the screens sideways and use hq2xS to scale and remove jaggies. The games will still look a bit ugly because they are made for a piece of shit screen.

Sega Mega-Drive/Genesis/Game Gear/32x/whatever:Fusionhttp://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-index.php?page=Kegaplus render pluginshttp://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-dow...php?fileId=564

Dreamcast:nullDChttp://code.google.com/p/nulldc/

Playstation 1:ePSXehttp://www.epsxe.com/Requires more configuring out of the box than any other emulator, but it all works. For graphic plugins use Pete's OGL2 2.9 (included), for sound use PEOPS DSound 1.10 athttp://sourceforge.net/projects/peopsspu110.u/files/Here's one decent config guide:http://www.anandtech.com/show/1258/4You pretty much wind up tuning this for each game.

Playstation 2:PCSX2http://pcsx2.net/Has improved a lot lately. Some games will have issues with FMV or slowdowns. Playability is still on a per-game basis. FF games worked great, with some odd bugs like Jecht being turned around backwards (wtf?)

PSP:JPCSPhttp://www.jpcsp.org/Still in its infancy, but some things work. I don't have much experience with it other than loading up a couple of games out of curiosity.

For EPSXE, to make most games look their best, download the shader pack athttp://www.emucr.com/2012/10/epsxe-s...-20121019.htmland use AA Shader 2.o (just copy the files there to the base shader directory) with a plugin config that looks like this:

Pete's OGL2 Settings:

Gives results like:

Grandia:

Xenogears: (notoriously difficult to make the sprites and 3D look good at the same time)

FF7:

Of course, 3D models on the PS1 will always look bad because of the way the hardware works. So while the textures look much better in espxe, the PC FF7 won't have the weird warping effect.

I'd never heard of IZJS. Near as I can tell this is the newest versionhttp://psx-scene.com/forums/f164/ff1...version-62222/

I looked over the changes and I like the fast forward button,but I'm not sure if that's enough to make the game less boring. The job system is cool at least.

Also, currently I use a dualshock but its kind of flimsy and cheap compared to Xbox controllers. What would be a good xbox controller to get? Is there one cheaper than the "xbox for windows" controller for $40? Does it have to say "for windows" or can you plug in any xbox controller?

IZJS patched and working. FF12 looks rather nice at 4x resolution - the current verison of PSCX2 runs much better than when I first messed with it a year or more ago.

First step was to turn off the blue piss lines and reverse the right stick so the camera was no longer flipped. This isn't a fucking flight simulator.