2000's era console/arcade emulation on PC's

[eightbit]

In the past week I have been digging back into my software archives to revisit emulation of consoles and arcades from the late 90's to around 2008 specifically to see if my memory serves me correctly. As I recalled back them emulation of many systems and arcade machines was excellent. Then, many years later with Raspberry Pi Retropie setups experiencing something quite different. Lag. 

 

So the general consensus today is that emulation introduces lag and the only way to really enjoy said console or arcade game is to either play on real hardware or on an FPGA.

 

But I remember it was so good? Was it just that good because I was experiencing it for the first time and didn't pay attention?

 

Well, I have no real evidence to say that lag did not exist then, but playing around with some old emulators (Kega, MagicEngine) these play excellently on the P4 donation I have been messing around with. I paid for MagicEngine (www.magicengine.com) back in 2000. Remember the days of paid emulators? This...Bleem...

 

It plays TG16/PCE games at least to my eyes and my hand at the controller perfectly. I cannot detect any lag at all. Same goes for Kega Fusion which handles Genesis/32X/SegaCD. I can't detect any lag or delay. But I will say that I could absolutely detect lag when using Retroarch (via RetroPie) on the Raspberry Pi.

 

So, I guess emulation via stand alone emulators was quite a bit better back then. 

 

I'll have to dig out the "Dega" emulator. It is the only one I have ever found that actually converts the SMS 3D to allow use of old fashioned red/blue 3D movie glasses! And, next up to try is ZSNES. I loved that emulator as well.

 

 

What were your old stand alone emulator favorites? Remember the Bloodlust stuff (Nesticle, Genecyst, Callus)? Remember Retrogames.com? Zophar's Domain? Daves Classics? Man, time really does fly.

 

 

Edited April 22, 2022 by eightbit

[wierd_w]

Part of that comes from using both USB inputs, and the I2S sound chip in the Pi.

 

USB has to 'poll' the connected devices for changes in state. It is not an immediate signal, like from a PS/2 keyboard or oldschool gameport joystick. This introduces input lag.

 

Likewise, the I2S sound generator in the Pi is driven by the CPU. This means the CPU is less available to service events. Meaning potentially more lag.

 

 

[zzip]

Emulators became bloated too.   Remember all the emulators that ran great on a 486?    Well if you took the modern versions of these emulators or similar emulators I doubt a 486 could still handle them.   Certainly not Mame which used to run on 486 in the early days.

 

They've added all kinds of features.   Retroarch has rewind capability,  real-time shader capabilities all of which I'm sure adds a bit of lag.

 

Also if the screen is being scaled up for modern displays in software that will add overhead.   Take advantage of hardware scaling when you can.

 

And Pi's are weak devices, turn off any unnecessary emulator features and you may need to play around with other emulator settings to get optimal performance.

 

9 hours ago, eightbit said:

What were your old stand alone emulator favorites?

I remember a bunch of popular emulators that fell by the wayside.

 

Xl-It!  Was probably the best and most popular Atari 8-bit emulator,  not sure if it did 5200 as well.

Atari ST had a number of popular emulators before STeem and hatari became the default choices:  PacifiST, SainT, WinSTone

There were a number of standalone arcade game emulators before they all got merged into Mame

Also remember that the UAE Amiga emulator was a very early one, but almost no PC back then could run it with decent performance.

[The Usotsuki]

ApplePC, BRSMS, BRMSX, NO$GMB (alternate DBoy), NESticle (alternate LoopyNES), Genecyst, ZSNES...

[wierd_w]

Fusion is an old 68k mac emulator for DOS.  

 

Between it and ARDI Executor, I did a lot of "must be in claris works" homework back in the day. Not the speediest mac emulation, or the most complete, but sufficient for my needs back then. (Course, I was the only kid geeky enough to go that route in my school system back then...)

 

Basilisk II is more feature complete, and would be better on a pentium 3 or better system. But for old pentiums and 486s, fusion works acceptably.

Edited April 22, 2022 by wierd_w

[Keatah]

17 hours ago, eightbit said:

So the general consensus today is that emulation introduces lag and the only way to really enjoy said console or arcade game is to either play on real hardware or on an FPGA.

Modern emulators do have some lag, but that has been minimized by the ridiculous clock speeds to today's microprocessors. 5GHz is now entry level. And USB polling speeds can be 1,000Hz or more - like for gaming mice and such. Shit.. I can have 1,000Hz on a decrepit Pentium M lappy.

 

Thing with FPGA is that many folks believe it to be a 1:1 exact recreation. Couldn't be farther from the truth.

 

17 hours ago, eightbit said:

But I remember it was so good? Was it just that good because I was experiencing it for the first time and didn't pay attention?

Very much that.

[eightbit]

I tested Snes9x v1.60 (IIRC) on this machine today and noticed a "reduce lag" option in the video settings. I then played an hour or so of DKC which as most know has some control that needs really accurate button pushing (like that mine cart level) and it was spot on...even with the crappy controller I am using. Impressive on the ol' hated Pentium 4

 

Also impressive that the video card in here is a crappy AGP Radeon 9600SE. 

 

 

 

[+Gemintronic]

I don't remember things being super great.  Nesticle worked.  SNES emus were super sketchy except for a simple Pac Man like homebrew.  UltraHLE was impressive on Windows NT with a Voodoo2 openGL patch.. but, not many games were playable. 

 

My experience.

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, Gemintronic said:

I don't remember things being super great.

True enough. The novelty factor was pretty high. Running consoles and arcades on PC was "T H E  S H I T!" But it took many more years till they evolved into being capable of replacing a real console. And more after that till they became desirable over real hardware (in some use cases).

 

In time it became apparent I could build a collection that was bigger, better, and faster than any childhood attempt at accumulating piles of systems and boxes of cartridges.

Edited April 23, 2022 by Keatah

[youxia]

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

5GHz is now entry level. And USB polling speeds can be 1,000Hz or more - like for gaming mice and such. Shit.. I can have 1,000Hz on a decrepit Pentium M lappy.

 

Thing with FPGA is that many folks believe it to be a 1:1 exact recreation.

5Ghz is not "entry level", there are other factors in emulation (such as OS) which might contribute to lag and are immune to high-end specs, and FPGAs don't need to be 1:1 to offer 0 lag experience.

 

Just sayin :)

Edited April 23, 2022 by youxia

[bluejay]

Connectix Virtual Game Station runs on my 500MHz Powermac G4 well enough to replace my PS1. Pretty impressive stuff for '99. I think I tried Sixtyforce for N64 emulation but it didn't work all that well.

[The Usotsuki]

ZSNES and SNES9X were both good enough by the time I graduated high school in 2000.

[mr_me]

14 hours ago, Keatah said:

Modern emulators do have some lag, but that has been minimized by the ridiculous clock speeds to today's microprocessors. 5GHz is now entry level. And USB polling speeds can be 1,000Hz or more - like for gaming mice and such. Shit.. I can have 1,000Hz on a decrepit Pentium M lappy.

 

Thing with FPGA is that many folks believe it to be a 1:1 exact recreation. Couldn't be farther from the truth.

Further to what Youxia said, FPGA has the advantage of emulating system components running in parallel like the original hardware.  Software emulation has to run very fast and get the timing right. 

 

Yes, even Mister fpga hardware emulation uses usb for input.  Some usb devices have more latency than others, it's more the usb device and the emulation than the usb interface itself that makes the difference.

 

22 hours ago, zzip said:

Emulators became bloated too.   Remember all the emulators that ran great on a 486?    Well if you took the modern versions of these emulators or similar emulators I doubt a 486 could still handle them.   Certainly not Mame which used to run on 486 in the early days.

 

They've added all kinds of features.   Retroarch has rewind capability,  real-time shader capabilities all of which I'm sure adds a bit of lag.

 

Also if the screen is being scaled up for modern displays in software that will add overhead.   Take advantage of hardware scaling when you can.

 

And Pi's are weak devices, turn off any unnecessary emulator features and you may need to play around with other emulator settings to get optimal performance.

Early emulation had to cut corners with accuracy to get acceptable performance.  As host computers became faster, developers improved emulation accuracy.  Higher accuracy requires more processing so the most accurate emulators won't run well on old hardware.  Some emulation features might add lag others might not, video effects can be turned off and resolution lowered.  MAME being packed with more emulators won't affect the performance of each individual emulator. 

 

RPis are relatively weak compared to a common PC and the latest emulators are developed for PC.  Retropie doesn't run with a desktop or any window manager as far as I know, I think that helps with efficiency.

Edited April 23, 2022 by mr_me

[+OLD CS1]

Modern Vintage Gamer on YouTube has some good videos on the histories of various emulations and emulators from which you can glean some ideas of what from the era should work best.  Worth checking out, IMNSHO.

[MrMaddog]

I agree, back in the day emulators were experimental and was more concern with just running the game at full speed on existing PC's.  After I had to sell off my Playstation I used MAME to still play my favorite arcade games from the compliations like Namco Museum, plus around 2000 I was re-buying NES carts at $5 a piece (Not a typo!) and play the "backups" on my gaming PC.

 

Yeah nowadays there are more features, and bloat, but PC's are relatively much faster so it's all moot anyways.  Plus I never notice any lag using USB gamepads...

 

 

[eightbit]

I was very heavily into the emulator scene in the late 90's - early 2000's. So much so that at the time when I was a regular at Joe's (Digital Press) website there once was an Emulation forum created for me to moderate. It lasted a while until emulation was deemed a "dangerous area" and shitcanned. A real shame.

 

That said however I have lots of emulators archived. Some really great efforts came out of those years!

 

[wierd_w]

Have you looked at Zophar's Domain?  they have lots of emulators, recent and antique, cataloged/mirrored there.

 

(It's like a slice of early 2000s in a time capsule.)

[eightbit]

11 hours ago, wierd_w said:

Have you looked at Zophar's Domain?  they have lots of emulators, recent and antique, cataloged/mirrored there.

 

(It's like a slice of early 2000s in a time capsule.)

 

I've been a visitor of this fine website for decades. Amazing that it still exists!

 

Digging around I completely forgot about the Gens emulator. Another fantastic Genesis/32X/SegaCD emulator.

[Keatah]

As time moves forward I find myself becoming less nostalgic for what came right after the early emulators. The first ones are nice to have as remembrance of when the scene first started. It's the interim versions I don't care about. The long journey and accumulation of x.x.xx revisions. Many tiny improvements. Sometimes regressions. Lots of tedium. Then we arrive at today with lots of polish and refinement. So I keep the early 1st versions, and then a rolling list of the latest ones.

 

An example would be the first 2 or 3 versions of MAME. (0.68 & 0.147 for technical reasons.) And now only the latest monthly release to stay current. Someday I'll archive them all when I get around to it.

 

So the early first versions remain important to me. For the initial discovery and coolness that emulation could exist. That I could play Tempest and Zaxxon and Liberator again, for first time in many years. Games we honestly thought were gone forever as the arcades closed down one by one.

 

Today I more or less consider individual emulators as utilities, as virtual machines, as modular OS plug-ins even. Required tools to be installed on a new build. They are a means to immerse oneself in the software ecosphere of each respective emulatee. They extend and blend eras of computing together. After all, it's the software that's the memorable take-away. Hardware becomes personally important and memorable when it's something you actually anticipated, saved-up for, read about, and owned, back in your early days. But only that specific hardware that you strolled into a computer store to purchase.

 

Hopefully that all makes sense.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Keatah

[eightbit]

I have two full sets of MAME. v0.113 (archived in the mid-late 2000's on a whopping 18 DVD-R's) and v0.234 full set which is obsurdly large (3TB I think) due to not only the CHD's but the software list CHD's as Mame & MESS as you are aware merged at some point in the past.

 

Today I had the idea to rebuild a Mame v0.61 set for fun. Why 0.61? Well it was (at least to my knowledge) the last version of Mame before the inclusion of games that required compressed hunks of data (CHD) images. IIRC Mame v0.62 started with CHD images with the game "Area 51". And, as far as I remember it was when Mame started demanding better hardware. I could be wrong there, but it just felt like after the 2002 4th of July release of Mame v0.61 things just didn't run as well....at least on the hardware I was using back then.

 

It also wasn't swamped with dozens upon dozens of Mahjong games

 

The entire complete romset for v0.61 is 4.5GB round about (split sets that is...merged will obviously be smaller). I ran it on a Windows 10 machine for fun too and the binary actually still works fine. 

 

Anyway, this will be the perfect set to keep on the Pentium 4 2.4GHz machine as the Mame build falls right inside of the timeline and a full set doesn't consume a ton of hard drive space.

 

Yeah, I know, kind of a stupid thing to mess around with or even be concerned with as any older version will do (even v.113 works find on the P4) but I was pretty bored today...lol!

 

 

 

 

Edited April 28, 2022 by eightbit

[eightbit]

Also, while digging around the past, old emulators like "Meka" and the like (and my own past) I found the page where I donated "Rambo - First Blood Part II" for the Sega Master System for dumping back in October of 1999 to Zoop (or Bock, etc):

 

https://www.smspower.org/db/rambofb2.shtml

 

One of my earliest PC handles was "Nintendont". I used that name for quite some time until some chick on AOL kept hassling me thinking for some reason I was her ex-boyfriend so I changed my name to "zektor" at that time....lol. Then sometime in the mid-2000's to "eightbit"...and here I am  Still "zektor" in some places (like Digital Press which I rarely visit nowadays)

 

Wow, thinking back on this. It was a time when there were big cart dumping projects going on to get everything archived....and there was a way to go back then. My mom was still alive at that time too...she died two months after I sent this cart off for dumping. God rest her soul.

 

I was still a year and a half away from legally being able to drink...that didn't stop me however. I was enjoying the Dreamcast at that point too. Around a year or two years later I was playing this dumped ROM on that Dreamcast using Heliophobe's excellent SMEG emulator on the Dreamcast. God rest his soul too:

 

https://www.smspower.org/forums/10896-NickHeliophobeWarren

 

 

What a long time ago it all seems... I guess it really IS a long time ago.

 

So now if you ever play this ROM you know where it originated from!

 

 

Edited April 28, 2022 by eightbit

[JFD62780]

On 4/27/2022 at 12:51 AM, wierd_w said:

Have you looked at Zophar's Domain?  they have lots of emulators, recent and antique, cataloged/mirrored there.

 

(It's like a slice of early 2000s in a time capsule.)

Better yet, did you know Zophar himself has a Twitch?

 

He even went out of his way to bring back memories of the site one night, writing a new article in the process!

Edited April 28, 2022 by JFD62780
Perfecting a few links...

[eightbit]

Zophar's domain has always been an excellent resource. I went there today actually to look for a decent frontend that will work nicely in Windows XP with an older version of Mame. I found "fastmame v0.98b" which is a heavily optimized version of Mame v0.98 from Katharis (Geoshock) when that website existed. When I tested the emulator on this P4 it was the first time both Killer Instincts (1 & 2) ran at full speed on this box, so I was impressed. Needing a good frontend I went to Zophar's site as usual and found "EasyMame" which is an old frontend from around 2005. And it is excellent and pairs perfectly with this Mame build. 

 

I have visited the site in order to download many old emulators and such.... many of which are long gone from the internet and are ONLY available there. Its great it's still around!

 

On a side note, looking at old Mame release notes I see that there was a major video code re-write in v0.106u1. That explains entirely why any Mame version from there forward runs like a DOG on this P4 machine. 

 

The machine I am using for Mame is not extremely powerful. A P4 2.4ghz, 128MB ATI video card and 1GB of system RAM. However, versions of Mame pre-v106u1 run excellent. Perfect speed in nearly every game I have tested (hundreds). But after that version it is terrible. Something to keep in mind if anyone is looking to turn an old Pentium III or 4 box into an affordable arcade machine. This P4 was free so it became a REALLY affordable arcade machine

 

 

Edited April 29, 2022 by eightbit

[Keatah]

My daily driver remains a Gateway/e-Machines Pentium-m 735 w/XP Home. And it is able to run most MAME 0.147 stuff. At least my handpicked favs, like Primal Rage¹. This great showing attributable to the 735's large ultra-low latency L2 cache. To make it even more impressive it's got Intel Extreme Graphics² - which is to say very pedestrian early integrated graphics. But. It. Works. Clearly demonstrating how much MAME relies on the processor.

 

Back in the day we used to make fun of and condemn e-Machines. But their low power consumption and conservative design put on a good showing. Just not for overclockers and die-hard enthusiasts needing the latest and greatest every 6-months.

 

1) Yes I hate fighting games. Yes I like this one.?

[Chris+++]

This is one of the reasons my home PCs are all running XP. The emulators I use are all from the first decade of the 2000s, as far as I'm aware, and there's very little to no lag: Older versions of MAME, VICE64 (Commodore 64), Bliss (Intellivision), BlueMSX (ColecoVision), O2EM (Odyssey²), Classic TI (TI-99/4A), Altirra (Atari eight-bits), NES and Genesis emulators whose names I can't recall at the moment, and of course Stella (duh).

 

I don't believe any of the versions I use were released more recently than 2010, and they all work great, with no noticeable delay between control movements and screen results. There are certain things that I go without, such as overlays and other ephemera, but I'm happy with the game-play accuracy itself, i.e. what counts. It seems that the comments above are correct, regarding the slow-down resulting from the extra fluff in later versions of the same emulators.

 

A couple of years ago, a buddy of mine bought a much more recent PC than my old Dell boxes, running Windows 10, and there's perceptible lag in pretty much all of his emulators. It made me feel like less of a freak for running such an old OS as XP. What the emulators actually do is run OSs from the '70s and '80s, of course, so maybe it's not so weird after all that a classic-game player would be so non-modern.

 

 

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by Chris+++