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MAME on DS


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I run NES, SNES, GB, GBA, Megadrive, Master System and Genesis emu's fine on my DS using a cyclods and a 3in1 ezflash, surely mame isn't that far off?

 

"MAME" is more or less a collection of emulators. There's no such thing as a good example of a "typical" MAME driver - they're all very different. You might get Pacman and Space Invaders running at full speed, but everything else is going to suck.

 

As for those other things you list - I've gotten GB and Master System running smoothly on my DS (I'm assuming NES falls in that boat too). Everything else sucks. Megadrive and SNES have excessively bad frameskip, and the sound quality on all of them suck horribly.

 

I love my DS and play it almost every day. But it's no good as an emulation platform. That's why I'm also buying a Pandora. Horses for courses. It's a 600MHz to 1GHz scalable ARM CPU - 10 to 15 times faster than the DS, as well as full OpenGL 2.0 hardware support via a separate dedicated GPU.

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Ive got marca ds on my ds. The page that has been linked to has very ld info, marca has a bout 10-15 games 100% if i remeber correctly(might be a few less) including pacman. And it has more games that are missing sound but still work in other regards. Only problem with it is the way it splits the games over the 2 screens. It sets em up horizontally so it splits em in half and puts em over the 2 screens but doesnt even make them fit the full height of the screens. That can be annoying in games like Donkey Kong but it still works fine
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Well everyones entitled to thier opinion, but it runs emus great on mine-maybe try a new slot 2 device.

The slot has nothing to do with it. I run all mine on an R4. Once loaded up, the limitation falls back on the DS.

 

The CPU is the limiting factor. The DS main CPU is quite slow (66MHz) and the secondary processor used for 3D is also slow (33MHz) and doesn't have a full 3D instruction set available to it to do any sort of graphical offloading that most PC emulators use.

 

There's not a SNES emulator available for DS that can run 100% with full sound emulation without going into frame skip. If you're OK with that, then that's cool. I personally find frameskip annoying, especially on fast paced games where it means the difference between life and death.

 

Older 8-bit consoles are emulated OK. The sound on most is goddamn awful, and it has nothing to do with the DS's small speakers either (load it up through the headphone jack and it's still shithouse). Speed wise it's fast enough for Master System, NES and GameBoy/GameBoy Colour, again as long as you're OK with the crap sound. But for more modern 16-bit consoles, it can't handle it.

 

Shoving a picture out at 30FPS is not "great" emulation in my books.

 

60FPS or go home.

 

MAME or other arcade emulators will go the same way. You'll get 100% emulation out of older stuff (Pacman, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, maybe Asteroids depending on how it handles vector). Don't expect 100% speed out of CPS1 or anything newer.

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first @Astro

I have pac man and DK running, couldnt be stuffed getting any more had, had a flight to catch

Now, @elvis and sort of everyone

You can emulate more modern stuff at a good speed. I get around 60fps on my genesis emulator when im playing bubsy, so it emulates fine. I also get good speed on sonic 3.

On my neo geo emulator i get an average of 55fps on fatal fury 2, with my lowest being 50 and highest being 60(i think it limits at 60). KOF2000 i get highest of 60 fps lowest of 50 fps.

Metal Slug 2 i dont get as good a speed. THe speed is in the low 40 fps normally.

 

Now i havnt tried any other emulators but im sure they would work very well. Now the sound, the sound is fine with the emulation. I dont knwo where elvis got his info but the sound on all of the emulation i have tried is perfect, not troubles at all.

 

Ports also seem to work very well. Doom works perfectly, and from what I have heard so does quake, and it even allows for some mods to be added if they are small enough.

 

While it doesnt seem powerful(I believe its actually the 66mhz processor that is used for 3d and the 33 is used for 2d), it can still do alot of stuff.

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Now, @elvis and sort of everyone

You can emulate more modern stuff at a good speed. I get around 60fps on my genesis emulator when im playing bubsy, so it emulates fine. I also get good speed on sonic 3.

What does "around 60FPS" mean? Can you get 60FPS solid 100% of the time with good quality audio?

 

Look, I'm not bagging the DS. I have two of them because my missus and I kept fighting over the first so we got a second. The DS gets more play in our household than any other console or arcade system because it's easy and convenient, and has a lot of very cool games. My missus is currently working through all of the old 8-bit GameBoy Zelda games using the LameBoy DS emulator, and loving having it on a handheld with backlit screen and access to save states.

 

But it's not powerful enough for 16bit console or arcade emulation. 40FPS, or "around 60FPS" isn't 60FPS, and IMHO destroys the gameplay of fast moving games (I play mainly high-speed shooters like Giaries, Gynoug and the Thunderforce games where 40FPS means death because you can't see bullets coming for you). For that reason, I'm buying a Pandora and will be playing MAME, MegaDrive, SNES and Playstation games on that. That doesn't mean the DS sucks. It means it just isn't beefy enough for proper emulation of newer consoles. There's no way I'm getting rid of either of my DSes because of that. I'm just not willing to sacrifice game quality by trying to cram things on a slower machine for the "because I can" factor.

Edited by elvis
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Can anyone recommend the best emulators to use on the DS?

 

Brad

 

Not sure if these are the best I get good results running:

 

jEnesisDS for Mega Drive roms;

Apprentice Minus DS for Master System roms;

lameboy for gameboy roms;

nesDS for the nes roms; and

SNEmulDS for SNES roms.

 

Plus the newer Cyclods firmware can run GBA games without an emu.

 

Anyone recommend others?

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I love my DS and play it almost every day. But it's no good as an emulation platform. That's why I'm also buying a Pandora. Horses for courses. It's a 600MHz to 1GHz scalable ARM CPU - 10 to 15 times faster than the DS, as well as full OpenGL 2.0 hardware support via a separate dedicated GPU.

 

That pandora's the balls, I want one! Looks like it may be capable of running playstation games.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console)

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I started another thread on it with more details there, including videos of current emulation:

http://www.aussiearcade.com/showthread.php?t=16415

 

According to the GP32 forums there are devs working on a Dreamcast Emulator for Pandora too. So far nobody's expecting it to run full speed, but they thought they would give it a go and see how close they could get.

 

PSX runs full speed without any OpenGL support yet - full 60FPS with just software rendering. When they get their OpenGL support up and running properly it will mean faster speeds and extra effects (higher resolution than native PSX, extra filtering/lighting/transparency effects, etc).

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Not sure if these are the best I get good results running:

 

jEnesisDS for Mega Drive roms;

Apprentice Minus DS for Master System roms;

lameboy for gameboy roms;

nesDS for the nes roms; and

SNEmulDS for SNES roms.

 

Plus the newer Cyclods firmware can run GBA games without an emu.

 

Anyone recommend others?

 

Thanks for that! Going to check them out although I do have to ask why GBA when the DS runs them anyway?

 

Brad

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around 60fps i was meaning 60fps constant for bubsy and in certain parts of sonic it drops below because of water effects combined with what i can figure out as being a bad rom file

Remember Sonic required the faster Megadrive systems that came later on. I had one of the earliest Mega Drives and it could never play Sonic cartridges (I must have tried a few dozen different ones over the years). You'd boot it up and get distorted sound, or a complete game crash. Every single other game for MegaDrive (and I've tried close to 100) worked fine on that console, so it wasn't a faulty console.

 

Conversely there are versions of Populous for MegaDrive (one of the earliest games for MD) that state on the game's casing that they won't work on the later generation MegaDrive consoles (the ones that came bundled with Sonic, as well as the MegaDrive II consoles) due to the slight hardware change.

 

So it still sounds like it's not a bad ROM file, and just a limitation of the emulator and the DS's low speed. Perhaps there's room for some improvement in the emulation software for gameplay speed (unlikely, considering most MD emulators all use the same M68K core emulator code). But that still doesn't change the fact that all 16-bit emulators on DS sound like complete arse.

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