Systems with stalled emulation projects

[Tanooki]

I got a NGPC again in the last week, amazing little thing, and I recalled in the day there were like 3 emulators for Windows. I did some digging, seems all three are dead. The one oddball I was able to back track annoying through a chinese forum of all things was that NeoPop did get a 0.72 update (popular history claims 0.71 is the last) and google (false hit?) also says 0.73 which I can't locate.

 

Are there any active NGPC projects going anymore that aren't just neopop source ports to Android or whatever, but actually trying to get it right?

 

And that said, what other emulators have taken a hard stop? I don't recall any emulator ever getting it right for the Virtual Boy either. N64 still isn't right, but at least it still creeps along and I think it's mainly due to the bad way it got a start and the fractured development over time more than anything too bizarre with the system.

[Jess Ragan]

Jaguar emulation has been pretty sorry for the longest time. I don't know if any work has been done on it recently, but I suspect the answer is "no." As for Neo-Geo Pocket, there was a stealth build of RACE! 2.16 for the PSP and maybe a core for RetroArch but that's pretty much it. Crush Roller/Make Trax runs like crap on pretty much any emulator you use (and I haven't figured out why), but RACE! runs most other games at a decent clip.

[Jagosaurus]

Luckily SainT will have the Neo Geo Pocket SD cart done soon

 

I've had good luck with N64. Most of the games I have memories with or those I wanted to try, run fine.

 

I don't want to say Jaguar emu is dead as Shamus is still working on Virtual Jaguar, but Project Tempest does seem dead. Compatibility runs around 70% between the two with a few caveats.

 

Do all the disc based emulators now allow booting directly from .iso or .bin/.cue?

 

I always thought having to virtually mount a disc drive via Dameon Tools (Saturn) or burning a disc (Neo Geo CD & PCE-CD) was a step or two short from a finished product. Been some time since I've tried these. Those methods always seemed doable, but overall a bit of an unfinished IMO. I'm obviously not writing these emulators, but there must be a barrier preventing booting a digital file and or emulating a CD drive data stream. I like it as an option. For example, K Fusion will play real Sega CD games or a digital file. Now that's slick.

[Keatah]

CD has always been a tedious affair on the PC.

[Trebor]

Are there any active NGPC projects going anymore that aren't just neopop source ports to Android or whatever, but actually trying to get it right?

 

Mednafen and MAME both contain Neo-Geo Pocket (Color) emulation. Mednafen, in fact, has the NeoPop sources as its base, per the documentation.

 

I utilize Mednafen for its well-handled Atari Lynx emulation.

 

For the record, the same Mednafen documentation states regarding its emulation of the Neo-Geo Pocket:

 

"It's sufficient to play most of the commercially released games fairly well, but if you want to do NGP[C] homebrew development, you're better off at looking at something like [MAME]."

[Jagosaurus]

Speaking of MAME, what Jaguar emulator is used within it? I can't seem to get a firm answer on that.

 

I use MEDNAFEN on my oxbox, need to try it out on PC. I'll be testing some NGPC & Wonderswan now

[zzip]

Jaguar is the obvious one.

 

Apple IIgs seems a little weak, it has emulators, but none that I could ever get working.

[Jagosaurus]

To answer my own question, looks like Jaguar games running in MAME are running on the Co Jag builds. Via Virtual Jaguar site:

 

The original source was based upon Aaron Giles CoJag driver from M.A.M.E. and used the Starscream 68000 emulator core. Since then Starscream has been replaced by the more portable Musashi 68000 core and lots of improvements and changes have obscured the underlying codes CoJag origins (to be fair, Mr. Raingeard had made quite a few changes from the CoJag driver before we got our hands on it)! The Musashi 68000 core has since been replaced with a heavily customized version of UAEs 68000 core.

[Stewart_Pidd]

CoCo and Dreamcast come to mind. While there are emulators out there for both, they aren't very good or haven't been worked on for years.

[Tanooki]

 

Mednafen and MAME both contain Neo-Geo Pocket (Color) emulation. Mednafen, in fact, has the NeoPop sources as its base, per the documentation.

 

True enough but NeoPop even if they used the rarely discussed v0.72 isn't exactly perfect and it seems no one has seriously tried to go that added mile in all the years since which is sad (and why I led off with it.)

 

Dreamcast is pretty sorry too which is regrettable as demul can only do so much and having to go between 3 emulators to get most things to work is just dumb and time wasteful. It's not like the system was disliked or obscure, just short lived.

[Trebor]

True enough but NeoPop even if they used the rarely discussed v0.72 isn't exactly perfect and it seems no one has seriously tried to go that added mile in all the years since which is sad (and why I led off with it.)

 

MAME utilized 0.72 as a base, which is a release back in Sept 2008; nonetheless, not sure where you are getting your information from, as since then some improvements to the system under MAME include:

 

-Support for loading 32K Homebrew images

-Driver cleanups

-Implemented disabling the t6w28 output

-Save state support

-IRQ improvements

 

 

Speaking of MAME, what Jaguar emulator is used within it?

 

Curious, if the above type questioning is a misunderstanding regarding just Jaguar emulation in MAME and perhaps in the aforementioned Neo Geo Pocket (Color) by Tanooki, or also how MAME manages emulation of systems overall.

 

MAME is not like an "emulator" such as RetroArch, where the latter is a front-end/wrapper interface to other emulator's cores. The quality of the emulated systems under an "emulator" like RetroArch is truly the quality of the cores its frontend/wrapper is utilizing.

 

Although many drivers are built from the ground-up under MAME, in the instances when it is stated that MAME absorbed or utilized a certain emulator's core or base, it is often (If not always) improved upon. It is truly its own emulator of that particular system and not a front-end/wrapper actually representing another emulator.

 

For instance, MAME's core/base Atari 7800 emulator is an implementation of V7800. The last release of V7800 was back in 1999 and was brought over to MAME by the original author in the early 2000's. The driver has matured and vastly improved due to several other contributors, reaching the point where it is near hardware exact in its emulation of the system for the last few years now.

 

Along similar lines with the Neo-Geo Pocket (Color), it may have started with a base NeoPop 0.72 release from back in 2008, but it most certainly has not remained stagnant since then.

 

Respecting the Jaguar, the CPU received a massive pointer update back in 2008. Since then, video updates took place, later on specific to blitter updates, along with fixed PIT functionality have been some of the improvements. Granted, it still has a ways to go.

 

MAME is open source, so anyone is free to pick up and improve upon the Jaguar driver more...

 

Dreamcast is pretty sorry too which is regrettable as demul can only do so much and having to go between 3 emulators to get most things to work is just dumb and time wasteful. It's not like the system was disliked or obscure, just short lived.

 

...ditto for the Dreamcast.

 

Popularity, feeling towards a system, or/and how long it "lived", does not necessarily correlate to desire, drive, talent/ability, time and other items to write an emulator for the system. A very accurate emulator requires the attributes and resources mentioned even more so.

 

It's a pretty safe bet emulation authors, in general, would love for their respective emulator to run all associated games without issue(s).

[Jagosaurus]

@ Trebor, Nice comparison to Retro Arc. Yeah, I was actually referring to the opposite direction. Vritual Jaguar seems to have come out this original code from MAME (based on the quote above from VJ sote). Over time, they added features (DSP, USB controller, working on Jag CD, etc) which in turn rendered some games once compatible, now incompatible.

 

By testing multiple older builds of Virtual Jag and also MAME, I expect to find games running that don't currently work in VJ or Project Tempest. For example, Cybermorph did work in VJ at one point. Now it doesn't. Ultra Vortek doesn't run in VJ, but does work in MAME (based on screenshots I've seen).

 

That is the goal of my compatibility chart. I want to play Jaguar game "x", check chart, use emulator "y"

 

At roughly 70 to 75% compatibily with Jag games, I'd say it more accessible than most think.

[Tanooki]

TREBOR: Ok then how about this? Can I get a custom build of MAME that runs just NGPC stuff only? I've avoided that program since the later 90s like the plague fed up with the perpetual re-downloading of ROM sets since those sadists would keep renaming and moving garbage around per release (or every other) which I grew few up with. I had a friend back then make me a custom MAMEWin release which just had only Super Dodgeball on there just for my personal enjoyment (which it wasn't lost in a failure ages ago.)

 

I can't compile stuff or with this info you give me I'd make a MAME-NGPC Windows executable and be one very happy camper.

[Jagosaurus]

Mednafen isn't near as bad as folks say it is.

 

Sure you have to drag and drop the rom, there's no GUI, you have press F3 to config a controller, you have to Glook up .cfg file edits... but it isn't horrible. If you are at all computer savvy (which I know you are) and don't mind using google/youtube tutorials, it's a nice all in one option. I honestly forgot it handled NGPC & now I want to try it

 

Dont get me wrong, Fusion has me spoiled with how well it handles everything Sega I a slick GUI, but mednafen is a viable option.

[Tanooki]

I've never been a fan of that one much but I've used it a little before. Unless I read something old googling but I thought they didn't update the neopop core and just converted it to work with their tool.

[ClassicGMR]

Mednafen isn't near as bad as folks say it is.

 

Sure you have to drag and drop the rom, there's no GUI, you have press F3 to config a controller, you have to Glook up .cfg file edits... but it isn't horrible. If you are at all computer savvy (which I know you are) and don't mind using google/youtube tutorials, it's a nice all in one option. I honestly forgot it handled NGPC & now I want to try it

 

Dont get me wrong, Fusion has me spoiled with how well it handles everything Sega I a slick GUI, but mednafen is a viable option.

 

Mednafen is a major emulator on my Arcade Cabinet setup. It handles so many systems well. Since I also use GameEx as my front end loading games with it is no problem. It's the only emulator I have successfully gotten VBoy games running with.

[Tanooki]

Nice, Virtual Boy. I used to years (decade+?) ago use some emulator that was out around that time, dumb thing was stuck on the keyboard if I recall right but it ran anything I threw at it and had a 3D glasses mode for it too which was slick. Seems still to me a very lost opportunity NOT throwing those titles on the 3DS.

 

I didn't know there was a good frontend for mednafen, ended up just going as they designed it when I had tested it out years ago.