Emulation in General

[dgdgagdae]

I think I'm gravitating more and more toward emulation, as opposed to using actual older consoles. I was dicking around with my Gamecube Gameboy player. At first, I was experiencing horrible lag with the stock disc. So I purchased the Action Replay Disc, so I could load the Gamecube Gameboy Interface. Even that wasn't quite perfect; there was still a bit of lag.

 

I had to ask myself why I was going through all that trouble, when I can just hook up my Nvidia Shield Portable to HDMI, connect my wireless controller, and run MyBoy. The picture is clearer, and there is no lag. Because it runs Android, I have access to all kinds of emulators, all of which have less lag over HDMI than the actual consoles over composite. Anything I run via emulation has much better quality than RF, too.

 

I already know how Keetah is going to respond, if he sees this thread. I think I might be firmly in his corner on this one. It doesn't seem worth the trouble to mess with orignal hardware anymore. Never mind the problems associated with keeping some of this old stuff running. With video lag, emulation is in some ways actually superior.

 

Your thoughts?

[keepdreamin]

Are you plugging up to composite on a HDTV? Yeah, you probably want to knock that off. Think of HDTVs dealing with analog video as speaking a foreign language. They know just enough to ask where the bathroom is, and how to hail a taxi. To really enjoy the culture, it needs a well versed interpreter like the Framemeister or OSSC.

[dgdgagdae]

Good point, keepdreamin. Yes, I'm connecting to an HDTV (4k, actually). There's no room in my home currently for a CRT setup, and no room in the budget for a Framemeister.

[keepdreamin]

There are a few consoles where I'd stick with original hardware. Jaguar, saturn , n64. but they're more the exception, rather than the rule. Otherwise, emulate away.

[NinjaWarrior]

How big is your room?

 

I just have a 19' CRT TV in my room, That's my limit

[spacecadet]

Every single emulator I've ever used has been inaccurate in some way. I don't always care and you may not either; I use plenty of emulators. But I don't consider them a substitute for the real thing; they're more of an added convenience to let me play in different situations than I otherwise could. It's like playing an mp3 on a set of earbuds on your phone vs. playing a song off CD (or vinyl) on a good home stereo.

 

I usually don't really understand when people make it an either/or thing. I suppose I get that you're having lag issues with the Game Boy Player. I don't really get the lag issues with other consoles over composite or RF, though. That sounds like a TV problem. It's physically impossible for an emulator to have less lag than the console it's emulating, whatever the output. An emulator's added lag may be so slight as to be imperceptible, but it's always adding a layer of interpolation that the original console didn't have to deal with. It can't have *less* lag than the original and still claim to be emulating.

[the_wizard_666]

Generally speaking, I don't emulate much. I have in the past, and I probably will in the future at some point, as emulation has it's place, but I much prefer the real thing. That said, not everyone has the desire to have thousands of games on the shelves, so I totally get it. It's just not for me. Other than MAME and DOSBOX of course, but even those are used sparingly.

[mr_me]

The quality of emulation accuracy is quite good (depending on the machine). Many people find emulation too much technical trouble to deal with. The real issue is input/output lag compared to original hardware/crt. Is the lag a problem?

 

If emulation accuracy, besides lag, is an issue I'd be interested to hear about it.

 

Depending on the display it could be possible that output lag on original hardware is worse than emulation lag. Some modern displays are horrible at processing SD video and I could see 4K displays being even more problematic. [Often improved with display settings on the TV]

Edited April 2, 2017 by mr_me

[keepdreamin]

How big is your room?

 

I just have a 19' CRT TV in my room, That's my limit

 

Dude, a 19 foot CRT is insane! Where in the world did you find that?!

 

19"

 

He said home, not room. Seeing how this isn't 1987, most homes are going to have a much larger, modern television. He should be able to enjoy gaming on his 4K set.

 

Let's see:

emulation over HDMI on main tv in comfy well outfitted space with plenty of light.

 

VS

 

real hardware on small goodwill CRT, relegated to a "kiddy table" TV stand stashed away in a nondescript location of your own house

 

It sounds like the latter doesn't appeal to OP (not sure why it would to anyone ). since an upscaler isn't in the budget at the moment, the first sounds like the better option.

Edited April 2, 2017 by keepdreamin

[toptenmaterial]

I just picked up a small CTR, 12" I'm guessing. I want to start doing a lot more emulation from the Wii and perhaps an android box and my earlier HD set doesn't have a game mode. I don't care about having a large set anyhow so it doesn't matter to me.

[dgdgagdae]

Someday I'd like to have a game room with a CRT, but that's out of the question for now. We just don't have the space. So I'm relegated to playing on the big TV in the living room. I was careful when selecting the TV, paying close attention to input lag in reviews. Here's what I have, by the way: http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/ju7100.

 

I don't think an upscaler would help me, though. Won't it output in 1080p, then have to be upscaled to 4k by my TV anyway? I'm not aware of anyone making an upscaler that outputs at 4k, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Of course, that's also what's happening with anything I connect via HDMI for emulation. The NES Mini and Nvidia Shield Portable are both pushing out 1080p (maybe even 720p for the Shield, I'm not sure), so there's still upscaling happening in the TV.

 

I suppose it could be perception, but it really does seem to me that I see less lag over HDMI than I do over a real system connected via composite. Mostly, I can live with it. One system that I have hooked up at all times is a Gamecube. Other than the Game Boy Player, that I mentioned, the lag isn't enough for me to really notice. But if I connect an NES, I'm not quite getting Mario's jumps right.

 

There's also a matter of convenience. I'm not going to connect up a bunch of switches, so my consoles are on a shelving unit beside the TV. If I want to use one, I need to hook it up, run an extension cord for power, get out a table to rest it on with wires strung across the living room. It's so much easier to plug the Shield into an HDMI cable that I keep behind the TV at all times, pull out its wireless controller, and go.

 

Don't get me wrong, I still have original hardware. On the rare occasion that someone is over who wants to play, I hook it up so we can do so. But if it's just me playing a single player game, I'm more likely to emulate.

[Jimjans]

Its less input lag with a scaler and original hardware even if it output 1080p than a emulator.

 

The problem in your case is that you are feeding the tv analog signals and it does a poor job converting it .

[keepdreamin]

TV's scaling 1080P up to 4k isn't the problem. It's the analog to digital conversion.

 

How many consoles are you plugging up? All mine are in the TV stand (Besta unit from ikea), behind doors so it doesn't look like I'm living in the stock room of Funcoland. No shelving next to TV. Have controller extension cables that reach across the room. Don't need to drag out a side table.

[dgdgagdae]

How many consoles are you plugging up? All mine are in the TV stand (Besta unit from ikea), behind doors so it doesn't look like I'm living in the stock room of Funcoland. No shelving next to TV. Have controller extension cables that reach across the room. Don't need to drag out a side table.

 

I permanently have a PS2 hooked up to component and an Xbox 360 hooked up to HDMI. I've been on a GameCube kick lately, so that has stayed hooked up for months via composite. On the stand I have an Intellivision, Atari 2600 Jr., NES, SNES, Genesis, Nintendo 64, and Atari 7800. I know I could eliminate the 2600, but it seems to be more reliable than the 7800.

[Schizophretard]

Your thoughts?

 

It is kind of hard for me to relate to because I have always chose TV's based on what I want to hook up to them instead of choosing the TV's and then working backwards from there.

[zzip]

I think I'm gravitating more and more toward emulation, as opposed to using actual older consoles. I was dicking around with my Gamecube Gameboy player. At first, I was experiencing horrible lag with the stock disc. So I purchased the Action Replay Disc, so I could load the Gamecube Gameboy Interface. Even that wasn't quite perfect; there was still a bit of lag.

 

I had to ask myself why I was going through all that trouble, when I can just hook up my Nvidia Shield Portable to HDMI, connect my wireless controller, and run MyBoy. The picture is clearer, and there is no lag. Because it runs Android, I have access to all kinds of emulators, all of which have less lag over HDMI than the actual consoles over composite. Anything I run via emulation has much better quality than RF, too.

 

I already know how Keetah is going to respond, if he sees this thread. I think I might be firmly in his corner on this one. It doesn't seem worth the trouble to mess with orignal hardware anymore. Never mind the problems associated with keeping some of this old stuff running. With video lag, emulation is in some ways actually superior.

 

Your thoughts?

 

I've preferred emulation to actual hardware for awhile now. Physical space for the old stuff is always a problem. Dealing with aging hardware/disks is a problem. The often low build quality of those systems is blatantly apparent more than ever now too. Hooking it all up when I want to use it is time that could be better spent elsewhere.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

It is kind of hard for me to relate to because I have always chose TV's based on what I want to hook up to them instead of choosing the TV's and then working backwards from there.

Agreed. I use my GameCube's Game Boy Player on a 20" CRT TV all the time and I have never experienced any lag at all with it. The way I look at it is that you could spend a small fortune on upscalers or system modifications to try and get older systems working properly and providing a good picture on the newest televisions, or you could just pick up the kind of TV that they were made to work with for free on Craigslist and get the same experience with way less headache involved. Plus you get to play light gun games.

 

As far as emulation goes though (and it should be noted that the GameCube's Game Boy Player is not emulation, there is real honest to goodness Game Boy Advance hardware inside it) I really like it as a supplement to collecting and playing games on original hardware. I have a few systems that I love collecting games for, but for the rest that aren't quite as special to me I'm just fine with experiencing them via emulation. Emulation is also great for participating in High Score Clubs, since chances are you're not going to own every game being played any given season and you might not want to shell out the cash for a quality flash cart for the system being played. Or as in the case of the Atari 7800 there might just not be any flash cart option available at all.

[toptenmaterial]

Agreed. I use my GameCube's Game Boy Player on a 20" CRT TV all the time and I have never experienced any lag at all with it. The way I look at it is that you could spend a small fortune on upscalers or system modifications to try and get older systems working properly and providing a good picture on the newest televisions, or you could just pick up the kind of TV that they were made to work with for free on Craigslist and get the same experience with way less headache involved. Plus you get to play light gun games.

 

As far as emulation goes though (and it should be noted that the GameCube's Game Boy Player is not emulation, there is real honest to goodness Game Boy Advance hardware inside it) I really like it as a supplement to collecting and playing games on original hardware. I have a few systems that I love collecting games for, but for the rest that aren't quite as special to me I'm just fine with experiencing them via emulation. Emulation is also great for participating in High Score Clubs, since chances are you're not going to own every game being played any given season and you might not want to shell out the cash for a quality flash cart for the system being played. Or as in the case of the Atari 7800 there might just not be any flash cart option available at all.

Side note: GBP looks great on any size TV, whereas GBA games emulated on my Wii look awful. Can emulation for the GBA be pulled off on a television?

[Gentlegamer]

Emulation is awesome!

 

Behold! Emuception!

 

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Side note: GBP looks great on any size TV, whereas GBA games emulated on my Wii look awful. Can emulation for the GBA be pulled off on a television?

I had the same problem when I tried emulating GBA games on the Wii with Visual Boy Advance GX. The picture was always a bit grainy and the slowdown was pretty horrendous. It handled original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games fairly well, but Game Boy Advance games were a "no go". If you really want to emulate GBA games on a television I've heard that a Raspberry Pi 3 setup with RetroPie is a good option, but I've never looked into it since I already have a pretty extensive collection of GBA cartridges and a Game Boy Player for my GameCube.

[keepdreamin]

Look at it this way. New 4K sets are dropping analog connections, with the exception of the old coaxial. So if you want to be using component consoles, like the Wii, Xbox, ps2 etc.. you're going to need a converter. At that point you might as well just get an upscaler that will handle everything.

 

With the Framemeister all I need to worry about when TV shopping next is reliability and low input lag.

[Flojomojo]

Emulation is awesome!

 

Behold! Emuception!

 

I love emuception tricks.

 

Here's my iPhone running Provenance running a GameBoy emulator running Intellivision games.

 

[Tanooki]

I for one have a converted 1 car garage room here so space isn't as big of a concern, but given what I've put in here the walls are kind of tight. I've got a 32 or so inch LED TV for all my general gaming needs, got it specifically due to a very low ms rating of display lag so it can handle picky timing sensitive games. I could throw a CRT in here, but I don't like them, don't want anything to do with them anymore -- other than my neo geo cabinet with the 25" monitor, also have a pinball machine too, my work office desk, some shelving and other things so it's a fill in here. So with that I have resorted to a little bit of emulation, but on the whole I don't like I did in the 90s and 00s. Back then I'd emulate all the old Nintendo, Sega systems, Coleco too, earlier MAME before rom sets got renamed each update which was(is) asinine, Neo Geo, TG16/CD, etc. I'd play with hard to find or overseas stuff, also use it to try before a buy, and being that those were the true development era years of the systems emulation I enjoyed comparing, contrasting to originals, and I helped with testing and things on a couple projects as I knew the authors. These days, it's the Retron5 for NES/SNES stuff primarily, sometimes GB on TV too though I prefer the GB Player(Gamecube) device. Also I did toss my Neo Geo cartridges onto my android tablet with Neo.EMU for on the go.

[juansolo]

The lag you're getting is likely coming from poor analogue-digital and upscaling circuitry in the TV. Modern sets are spending less and less on analogue and low res signal handling and it's showing when you try and get them to display a 240p image on a 1080p panel.

 

I have a Panasonic plasma circa 2012 and it's analogue signal handling is woeful. I plugged a C64 in there via RF and I thought the C64 was broken the image was so bad. Putting it into an older set soon proved the computer to be just fine and actually having one of the best RF pictures I've ever seen out of anything. My panel just won't deal with it. It doesn't have S-Video on it either, or VGA, they've long gone.

That said you should really try and avoid RF, it really is the poorest signal you can use. You should really be using a minimum of composite and that's an option on most things with a little bit of modding. Ideally you should be running RGB with most things... But that brings it's own problems (again, my plasma is a little bit special when it comes to analogue signal handling).

The path of least resistance with modern displays has to be emulation. It's just a fact of life. Those that like to use original hardware have to jump through a few more hoops.

[keepdreamin]

What I don't get is those who complain that hooking up a bunch of systems to a HDTV is somehow way more complicated. Really? Your 15+ systems to a CRT is simple? You're already running the same amount of wires, composite/svideo switchers, component switchers etc.. The only extra device to a HDTV is an upscaler, that extra connection is the deal breaker? RGB scart will take the place of composite where applicable, but otherwise it's the same exact rats nest of cabling. cry me a river.

Edited April 3, 2017 by keepdreamin