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Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

spekkio

Arcane
Joined
Sep 16, 2009
Messages
8,278
Oh. Those are two bonuses you can get in DDS2. There's a bonus skill DDS2 if you selected the "we will help them without betrayal" dilaog option early on in DDS1. Thought you would know that.
Of course I know that. I simply didn't bother with it (wanted to make my own choices).

Anyway, if I knew that by asking for a "fully completed Digital Devil Saga 1 save" you meant one with perfect dialogue choices, etc., I wouldn't bother with wasting 2 minutes of my life on uploading my own memecard. :roll:

So again:

spekkio said:
Maybe try describing what you really want in more detail next time? :roll:
:rpgcodex:
 

deuxhero

Arcane
Joined
Jul 30, 2007
Messages
11,328
Location
Flowery Land
I would have preferred one with the perfect dialog choices, but with the surprising lack of such a save on the internet I'm using yours. (Thought the brofist was enough to indicate thanks)
 

spekkio

Arcane
Joined
Sep 16, 2009
Messages
8,278
I looked for some site with ps2 saves other than gamfags, but couldn't find anything. Weird, since there's a shit-ton of sites with cheats (mostly the same ones, but still). :(
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,945


The sega emulation thing seems to be using unity for something and the games seem not even in accuracy.
Only sonic seems to be good everything else seems to be underwhelming especially with the music part.
 

Bigg Boss

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2012
Messages
7,528
So Nintendo is taking down old games so they can resell old games on new/old systems like the SNES CLASSIC.
So a corporation is taking down illegal uses of their copyright so they can sell them legally on their own system.
And why is this a problem exactly?

Suddenly out of nowhere after all these years. Nothing wrong with it. I have all the roms.

I'm just saying they are doing it for a reason.
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,474
Location
California
makes sense, thanks for the info. I was shopping for those since my 5yr old nephew is itching for more platformers.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Men, let me tell you a story of how both emulator coders and dump database maintainers fail at what they do.

Fail 1: emulator devs and redump dumpers. RA universally 'recommend' using redump cd images, to the point that it used to be a crapshot if their scanner would even recognize cd images not from redump. The problem with this was the dreamcast redump set, and i quote a hardware hacker:
IMPORTANT: Recently some new dumping groups have been releasing GDIs dumped with PC CD-ROM drive using so-called “swap method”. Technically there is nothing wrong with it except for slightly different “offset” on audio tracks compared to what Dreamcast drive would produce, nothing you’d even notice. But they’ve changed the way track starting address is calculated and as a result all games that have digital audio, or data split beyond track #3, will not work properly. This is not a GDEMU issuse and there is no fix planned for this – avoid such dumps.

Fail 2. TOSEC dumpers: Naturally, i go for the other options. TOSEC-iso and trurip are the only other game in town, but as i read that trurip just picked up the TOSEC dat, i go TOSEC. TOSEC has a terrible name scheme but i don't care... however, their name scheme has consequences...

It so happens that RA uses the crc of the smallest file on a set as the main ID to lot of things, including game info, images and netplay. I don't know if they scan the others to 'actually make sure' the first time, but lots of metadata wiring uses the .cue or .gdi for dreamcast.

However, TOSEC had the brilliant idea to 'standardize' names of the tracks. After all, if you want a name, the one on the .gdi is enough right? They went to all that trouble to create that complete naming scheme, and .gdi standard has no 'official' way to make comments to change the crc with metadata (even though they number the number of lines on the file and put one file per line, so the rest of the file could be used for comments if parsers are sane and/or it was specified).

Result: there are 113 .gdi crc duplicates of 'crc="468c1495"' for different games on the TOSEC dats. There are more, ofc. So everything is broken good job.

Fail 3. trurip dumpers: Ok, this is not a problem right? Trurip copied the dumps so they surely fixed this by just renaming the tracks. Yeah, no. Too much work, prefer to wank around a exclusive registration only club of 'elite' dumpers (took a while to find the DAT and be disappointed).

Fail 4 and 5: Retroarch devs. Just for fun, retroarch devs deal with this by telling people to use redump (see fail 1), and funny enough i found another major bug on their scanner while testing this. If you happen to have a dir containing a rom with a dot '.' on the name, such as can happen with rom rebuilders that create a dir with the name of the ROM to contain them if you don't compress, their scanner will skip the dir (a work around is to enter the rom directory on their file browser before scanning).


This concludes my monthly adventures in 'why Retroarch still sucks and computer illiterate persons should seek advice before making technical decisions on file format standards'.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Aug 10, 2012
Messages
5,871
sf8e01-2okucj.jpg


Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii) on Dolphin. This is one of the best modern platformers I've played, if not the very best. It's considerably hard, too.

Runs great and the newest experimental Dolphin builds have something they're calling "Ubershaders", which results in pretty much stutter-free gameplay (no more shader caching). I was previously using the Ishiiruka build that does shader compiling on a separate thread.

Here's a link to the official Dolphin build with Ubershaders:

https://dl.dolphin-emu.org/prs/pr-5702-dolphin-latest-x64.7z

And here's a link to the latest Ishiiruka build (it has other great options that might still justify using it over the official build)

https://drive.google.com/drive/fold...FXV0ZwZHlKdmdMUFNtVkM5Wk1lX1o1SmhjeHUwSHVDcjQ

I'm using version 954.

Overall, Dolphin is great. I most often use it to emulate Gamecube games, I think the GC is one of the most underrated consoles of all time - plenty of great games for that system and they all benefit from a high resolution. There hasn't been a better arcade racing game than F-Zero GX.
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2012
Messages
5,871
dkctfx0kz3.jpg


Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze running on Cemu. I've tried to get this to run properly all night, unfortunately latest versions of Cemu break this game pretty bad (I guess all of their efforts have been towards getting Zelda to work as well as possible). On 1.8.x it glitches a lot and you have to run it at high GPU buffer accuracy, which makes it run at 30-40fps even on a beast rig.

Older builds work much better. I'm playing on 1.7.2c and it runs at 60fps without any dips. There are some minor graphical artifacts (fur on Cranky and some bosses) but it's not a big deal.

It looks a lot better than Returns and it's more of the same great gameplay. These games are really amazing.
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,945
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze running on Cemu. I've tried to get this to run properly all night, unfortunately latest versions of Cemu break this game pretty bad (I guess all of their efforts have been towards getting Zelda to work as well as possible). .
And it is working so well for them that their patreon went from 40k to 20k in about 2 months.
Unfortunately that means that even more fixes will be gong toward zelda to bring back that sweet zelda fan money.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Folks i have a question that will determine if i will mark a rom collection read only: does the pc-engine/turbografx16 roms '.pce' (not the isos for the cds some models had) write to the cartridge like harddrive images or are they really read only memory?

The wikipedia article is unclear. It implies they're writable, but is it only for factories and not the console? I ask because every later console i remember had saves in a memory card apart, in a console inbuilt persistent memory or were not writable. Obviously, the NEC x6800 and PC-98 are writable, using diskettes and hard drives, but what of pc-engine?

I'm not very excited about having md5sums of 'ROMS' changing under me just for using them (i avoid that with a copy-on-write drive).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuCard

Note that emulators usually cheat and turn a cartridge format with a 'user writable area' read only by copying the 'user area' to disk and saving persistence there instead of in the rom file itself, but in some cases like floppies that distinction is not possible.

edit: turns out pc-engine emus use .pce as a real ROM and cheat as above (like genesis, snes etc emulators).
 
Last edited:

Hirato

Purse-Owner
Patron
Joined
Oct 16, 2010
Messages
3,935
Location
Australia
Codex 2012 Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Not sure how applicable it is, but 3DS games on carts all seem to include a bonus user writable area that doesn't get included in any cartridge rips.

Every single one of my 3DS games I have ripped and then installed on the device generated their own sav.dat (not sure of the filename right now) to hold save information on the SD card.
I had to use a separate tool called JKSM to transfer my saves from cart to SD card.

Of course, many 3DS games also use the SD card for some additional data, or let you keep extra saves on the SD card with only the first one or two on the cart (on a side note, it's ridiculous how much faster the games save to SD card!).
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Not sure how applicable it is, but 3DS games on carts all seem to include a bonus user writable area that doesn't get included in any cartridge rips.
See, i don't understand how that area isn't abused by game makers so that 'throwing it out' when you dump isn't unsafe. They could stick a file they need there out of laziness in creating it and the dump would suddenly need the user area. Unless the user is supposed to be able to manually delete completely and totally, no game intervention tricks, so then yeah it makes sense then.

Though considering the literally dozens of decades and tens of thousands of games that used cartridges i simply can't believe that there aren't dumps that need the user area because the game-maker was a smartass and put a file there.
 

tuluse

Arcane
Joined
Jul 20, 2008
Messages
11,400
Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
SCO

I'm pretty sure the PC Engine/Supergrafx saved to the game cartriges like SNES, Genesis etc. However, Retroarch feeds those into srm files or the like if I understand correctly.

Edit: I should have read your edit carefully
 

Comte

Guest
Anybody have a working copy of the Punisher Mame Rom? I cant get my to run on the latest version of Mame 64bit.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Can i rant about MAME here? I'm going to rant.

Why isn't mame consistent about marking zips with all of its roms missing or in parents as missing. It's annoying to have this stupid 'mushikings' game appearing as incorrect just because i have the naomi bios. I suspect this only happens if you bother to have unmerged sets but it's fucking annoying to see a game i don't even want marked as broken.
 

Walden

Savant
Joined
Mar 23, 2016
Messages
289
What do I need to do or buy to play isos on a 3ds(don't have the console yet)?
 

Zandig Slaytanic

Educated
Joined
Oct 8, 2015
Messages
58
DOSBox ECE (Enhanced Community Edition)
http://blog.yesterplay80.net/dosbox-ece-en/

In my opinion, easily the best and updated version of DOSBox with extra features:

Currently, DOSBox ECE differs from normal DOSBox in these features:

Emulation of a 3Dfx Vooodoo card through OpenGL (No external Glide wrapper needed!)
4x, 5x and 6x scaling in windowed mode is possible
Pixel-perfect output mode for undistorted scaling of the picture
Improved emulation of OPL3 (a FM sound synthesis chip from Yamaha)
Improved sound of PC speaker emulation
Emulation of Roland MT-32-Midisynthesizers
Integration of Fluidsynth (a software MIDI synthesizer with Soundfont support)
Selection of the MIDI device by name or just a part of the name
 

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