The games that use the MMC5 and 4-screen mirroring,
Bandit Kings of Ancient China
Castlevania III - Dracula's Curse
Gauntlet (Licensed or Unlicensed)
Gemfire
L'Empereur
Laser Invasion
Nobunaga's Ambition II
Rad Racer II
Romance of the Three Kingdoms II
Uncharted Waters
don't work well with the Game Genie at all. For the MMC5 games, the background is entirely grayed out, only the sprites are visible. For the 4-screen games, all the graphics are extremely corrputed and barely noticeable. For After Burner, the graphics are only slightly corrupted. These are the only licensed NES games that have any trouble with a Game Genie. Could anyone tell me why?
Also, recently I bought a NES Clone based off the Neo Fami. Instead of the 60-pin cartridge and 9-pin gamepad connectors, it uses 72-pin cartridge and 7-pin gamepad connectors for NES cartridges and peripherals. Unfortunately, all the above games fail to with it. The MMC5 games suffer from severe graphics glitches or stall very early in the game, the 4-screen mirroring games suffer from wrong tile placement, and After Burner suffers from missing tiles. I believe this has something to do with the unusual ways these games manipulate Nametables.
Interestingly, the Neo Fami, the clone upon which this device, (FC Game Console USA Version by Yabo) claims on its compatibility page that it can run After Burner and MMC5 games without a hitch. (I don't know of any Famicom games that used 4-screen mirroring.) Also, with the Game Genie and any one of the above games inserted into the clone, the Game Genie will display normally, while it would not on the real NES.
Now, if the Neo-Fami can run these games and the FC Game Console USA Version cannot, I would guess two reasons why. First is that the FC Game Console USA Version is using an older version of the Nes-on-a-Chip which didn't get this behavior right, or that there is a wiring error from the 72-pin connector to the NES-on-a-Chip in the FC Game Console USA Version, which could potentially be fixed.
People need to stick to one simple name for the Yobo FC Game Console USA Version, to make it easier to talk about and search for. I also wish they sold an all dull-black version, like they did for the Neo Fami. It looks allot nicer. Too bad they didn't keep the controller ports standard, even on the USA Version, as the individual port shape is just as important as how both ports are placed next to eachother.
So apparently these NES-clones are less accurate than emulators? That is a pretty sad state of affairs. Even worse yet is that the Kevtendo clone, which is supposedly super accurate, might not ever see the light of day.
Jagasian wrote:
Even worse yet is that the Kevtendo clone, which is supposedly super accurate, might not ever see the light of day.
What makes you say that?
If Kevin never becomes willing to make and sell Kevtendo units, then it won't see the public light of day.
Quietust wrote:
Jagasian wrote:
Even worse yet is that the Kevtendo clone, which is supposedly super accurate, might not ever see the light of day.
What makes you say that?
It just seems like he isn't willing to make Kevtendos himself by hand, find an investor to mass produce Kevtendos, or sell the intellectual property to somebody else who is willing to mass produce systems based on the IP. I seriously pray for the day that I am proven wrong, but as each day goes by, I become more and more discouraged. I would pay $300 for a fully functional Kevtendo, no questions asked... I would Paypal the money immediately.
The Kevtendo is something that I almost wish I never heard of because now I know exactly what I won't be able to own. Before, such a thing was a pipe dream. Now, it is like the ultimate Nintendo Entertainment System cock-tease. I also figure that if he does make a few by hand, that I would probably be pretty low on the priority list to be given a chance to buy one
Anyway, I realize that you know Kevin personally, so if you know something that I don't know, drop a hint or two... make my day a little brighter. Or maybe you could steal the prototype that he currently has and sell it to me
You know, if he totally wanted to be a tease, he could demo the Kevtendo at the Classic Gaming Expo and other gaming conventions... get everybody drooling... then tell everybody that they won't be mass produced
I guess that could be a health hazard.
Or he could be waiting several years for the mapper patents to run out.
Or, just do what I did and get an EPROM programmer, all the different types (including Famicom carts) of mapper carts that I wanted to play, and hack up the carts to accept eproms. It really doesn't cost much, but it takes some time to modify the carts, and round up the rare ones (that no one wants to play so they are cheap, for now).
I also bought a FDS RAM adapter (a HUGE thanks to Brad Taylor for his FDS Loader), constructed the cable so I could play all the FDS games.
VirtuaNES can be set up, so its almost 100% authentic, and you can even find adapters these days for the controllers.
I also built a MAME cabinet that uses a TV (hacked it for RGB), and it looks just like the arcade units, you can't tell the difference.
I was thinking it would be super cool, if someone could adapt a current NES emulator to use the mame video drivers in DOS, so you could have 15khz output, and use an arcade monitor, it would look totally authentic.
In fact you could even get real dot crawl, by using a RGB -> NTSC encode. (google AD724).
drk421 wrote:
VirtuaNES can be set up, so its almost 100% authentic
But are there programs that will run on a real NES but not on VirtuaNES or vice versa? Another user sticks to the opinion that if you use only emulators for testing a newly developed program, you might as well just write your game as a native program in the same language in which the emulator was written.
tepples wrote:
drk421 wrote:
VirtuaNES can be set up, so its almost 100% authentic
But are there programs that will run on a real NES but not on VirtuaNES or vice versa? Another user sticks to the opinion that if you use only emulators for testing a newly developed program, you might as well just write your game as a native program in the same language in which the emulator was written.
Does VirtuaNES run Micromachines correctly?
VirtuaNES is excellent for running Famicom games, Famicom Disk System games and ports of Famicom games to the NES (i.e. NES games from Japanese companies.) It is not so good at running PAL NES games or games programmed by European companies like Rare and Codemasters (Micro Machines, Dizzy). I don't think it supports the Game Genie (I'm not sure about VS System games.) It has scanline glitches in games like Crystalis and Bad Dudes.
Only Nintendulator can claim mastery over Micro Machines. I don't know if there is a (cartridge) game I can throw at it to break its reputation as 100% compatibile with licensed and unlicensed games alike.
Great Hierophant wrote:
Only Nintendulator can claim mastery over Micro Machines. I don't know if there is a (cartridge) game I can throw at it to break its reputation as 100% compatibile with licensed and unlicensed games alike.
Somebody needs to port Nintendulator to the Xbox. The old FCE Ultra port is looking a little shabby these days. I need more accuracy.
Considering that Nintendulator crawls on my PIII 800MHz, especially with the more advanced games, what likelihood is there it will run any faster on the Xbox's 733MHz PIII?
FCE Ultra has one feature few other emulators can match, its ability to display at a variety of resolutions, including user defined ones. I appreciate the ability to get a full-screen stretch without ugly interpolation artifacts by manipulating pixels while keeping integral ratios.
Great Hierophant wrote:
I appreciate the ability to get a full-screen stretch without ugly interpolation artifacts by manipulating pixels while keeping integral ratios.
I agree with this vertically, but horizontally, the linear interpolation artifacts make it look more like a TV. I tend to play in 3.636x by 3x scaled window on a 1024x768 LCD panel.
Great Hierophant wrote:
Considering that Nintendulator crawls on my PIII 800MHz, especially with the more advanced games, what likelihood is there it will run any faster on the Xbox's 733MHz PIII?
FCE Ultra has one feature few other emulators can match, its ability to display at a variety of resolutions, including user defined ones. I appreciate the ability to get a full-screen stretch without ugly interpolation artifacts by manipulating pixels while keeping integral ratios.
Dunno. Doom 3 crawls on an 800mhz PIII system, but it runs quite well on the Xbox. There are too many variables for the comparison to work. I guess it would at least be nice to have the latest FCE Ultra source ported to the Xbox, as that would drastically improve the current status of NES emulation on the Xbox.
Quote:
Doom 3 crawls on an 800mhz PIII system, but it runs quite well on the Xbox.
Apples to oranges. Most of the levels required significant rework, and some features needed to be disabled or removed (notice the flashlight doesn't generate shadow volumes) to make Doom run at a decent clip on the Xbox.
I would also note that Nintendulator was not written with portability in mind. I know the xbox is somewhat Windows like, but this still seems a bit of a stretch. I did attempt a Linux port of it a while back. I only spent a few days on it, but it would have required a complete re-write of more than half of the code. In addition the reusable part - the guts of the logic, are (out of necessity) somewhat confusing. On top of that when I was doing this about a year ago, the code was not very well documented.
In the end I think porting Nintendulator would be at least as difficult as writing a new one from scratch.
On a side note, Nintendulator works well under Linux using Wine. Nintendulator is THE tool for NES development, nothing else compares, so having it accessible on a more robust development platform is fantastic. Thanks Q for all your work.
Quote:
I agree with this vertically, but horizontally, the linear interpolation artifacts make it look more like a TV. I tend to play in 3.636x by 3x scaled window on a 1024x768 LCD panel.
The NES outputs a picture on a television that takes up the whole screen, and a little more if you factor overscan into the mix. On my CRT monitor, if you use a 648x480 full-screen resolution with 2x sized pixels, you will have NES video in a squarish picture. While 256x240 is very square like, the huge horizontal borders would not have been tolerated on a television screen. So Nintendo made or allowed the video to stretch out to cover the screen. However, each stretched pixel is the same size as every other stretched pixel. (More or less) When emulators use a full-screen option, they interpolate the image with different sized pixels. Todays emulators don't try to manipulate the CRT to provide for custom non Direct-X based full-screen screen ratios.
The picture looks ugly with anything less than using integral horizontal to vertical pixel ratios. In FCE Ultra I use 5x Horizontal to 4x Vertical pixel ratio at 1280x960 to get a beautiful full-screen picture. It looks
very close to what the NES would display on a TV and can be tweaked by the monitor controls to allow for overscan. You may wish to try it if you have an LCD that supports that resolution natively (few do.) If only Nintendulator could do this I would be very happy.
Anonymous wrote:
The picture looks ugly with anything less than using integral horizontal to vertical pixel ratios.
This is true of nearest-neighbor modes, but it's not true of linear interpolated modes.