puNES Emulator

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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tepples
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by tepples »

tokumaru wrote:Emulators can cheat by providing an alternate "overclocking" method not possible on a real NES, which maintains the CPU/PPU synchronization until an entire frame goes by, and then halts the PPU for a while to give the CPU some extra time to process the game logic.
Possible (and extant) on a real PAL famiclone, which in effect halts the PPU for the equivalent of 50 lines before NMI.
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tokumaru
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by tokumaru »

tepples wrote:Possible (and extant) on a real PAL famiclone, which in effect halts the PPU for the equivalent of 50 lines before NMI.
Yes, but in this case it's only taking advantage of the fact that frames are inherently longer since the frame rate is lower... there are constraints, you can't add any arbitrary amount of time like you can on emulators. I guess you could design your own NES clone from scratch with something like this, but this is definitely not a mod you can do to any console like overclocking is.
zerowalker
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by zerowalker »

Zepper wrote:Anything that breaks the hardware rules will glitch the games. It's fun... until the time something glitches and so... "is that normal to happen"? As I said, the bad side of using an emulator for messing up the hardware defaults. A few guys fired against me regarding the lack of such features in my emulator... until now.
But does anyone ask if it's normal when they have the tweaks enabled?

Cause i asked merely cause i had Nothing enabled, so i wondered if the Emulator was lacking, or if it was like that on the NES.
If one Overclocks or similar, then any support is out of the window in terms of accurate results.


As for the PPU overclock, i assumed as much that there was some Syncing going on, as such is often the case with old consoles.
Though kinda neat that you can kinda bypass that, shouldn't there be some kind of wiki page where ppl can write the results?
A bit like Dolphin Wiki has, but not quite like that.

Like, "Overclock causes blabla to happen" etc, then it would be fairly useful in the long run for ppl to see which games work fine and what to expect more or less.
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Zepper
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Zepper »

tokumaru wrote:
tepples wrote:Possible (and extant) on a real PAL famiclone, which in effect halts the PPU for the equivalent of 50 lines before NMI.
Yes, but in this case it's only taking advantage of the fact that frames are inherently longer since the frame rate is lower... there are constraints, you can't add any arbitrary amount of time like you can on emulators. I guess you could design your own NES clone from scratch with something like this, but this is definitely not a mod you can do to any console like overclocking is.
One thing very interesting is about Rockman Complete Works (PSOne). The emulation has no flickering and absolutely no slowdown! Someone (ages ago) has replied "they overclocked the CPU". I wonder how... because the Rockman gameplay is... perfect. Let me say... an ideal NES. :D
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tokumaru
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by tokumaru »

Well, the Rockman games don't have many raster effects. 1 and 2 have none, IIRC, while 3 and up use MMC3 IRQs. While bad timing could definitely affect MMC3 splits, an emulator could easily get around this by using scanline precision instead of pixel precision. FCEUX does something like this, I suppose, since it hardly shows any glitches near scroll splits.
trebor
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by trebor »

Whether going through the GUI to select "Disk 1 Side B", or utilizing the shortcut Alt-S, puNES stays locked on "Disk 1 Side A", and screen remains the same requesting 'Insert Side B'.

Switching sides with the same disk (*.fds) images works fine in other emulators such as Nestopia (Undead).
notindeed
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by notindeed »

Does this no longer support windows xp?

I get the following errors on
d3d9 32bit:
AppName: punes32.exe AppVer: 0.100.0.0 ModName: punes32.exe
ModVer: 0.100.0.0 Offset: 0016c283
sdl 32bit:
AppName: punes32.exe AppVer: 0.100.0.0 ModName: punes32.exe
ModVer: 0.100.0.0 Offset: 0019bda3
Version 0.90 works.



On a side note, why do people say this is the most accurate nes emulator when the FDS audio channel emulation is atrocious? (Tested the latest version, 0.100 on another pc). Mind you, this seems to be a common thing with nes / famicom emulators - the only two i've found that seem reasonable are Nestopia and VirtuaNes (edit: i just tried mesen and that seems to be decent too). Is it simply that most people don't realise because they don't play the japanese versions?



I have quite a few suggestions if people are interested but don't know if this is the place to post them?

Thanks!
tepples
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by tepples »

A good NES emulator need not be a good Famicom emulator. The unmodified NES does not play Famicom cassettes. Even one with an NES-JOINT won't play the audio without rewiring and something in the bottom expansion port.
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nothingtosay
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by nothingtosay »

The reason people call it one of the most accurate is that it passes almost all test ROMs. Test ROMs haven't been made for every behavior, though.

In what games does the FDS channel sound atrocious to you? I just compared the title screen music of Zelda no Densetsu against the recordings on the official The Legend of Zelda SOUND & DRAMA album and the recent Zelda 30th Anniversary compilation, and Link no Bouken against the official Game Sound Museum release of the soundtrack and the 30th Anniversary album and it sounds pretty right. I think all of the official releases use modded Famicoms as sources because it sounds too clean and bright for RF, but that actually makes this a closer comparison with the emulator. Obviously, my review is not exhaustive.

I'm not sure if this bug was reported earlier in the thread, but Lagrange Point's audio is higher in pitch the lower the sample rate is set, for some reason. According to the wiki, the VRC7's output rate is 49,716 Hz. I tried recording the audio with the emulator set to 48 kHz and, wondering if the pitch is off by the difference between the two sampling rates. I changed the playback rate downward by 1,716 Hz without sample rate conversion (to be clear, despite the chip's rate being higher, my recording needs to go down because the pitch is too sharp and increasing the rate to the chip's would make it even sharper) and compared it to the two official CD releases and it sounds right. Can you diagnose the problem, FHorse?
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BaconIsGood16
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by BaconIsGood16 »

Hello I just wanted to report a bug caused by the Auto Frame Skip. In the end of stage 4-4 of Ninja Gaiden you face 2 monsters that jump around and the Auto Frame Skip causes a stutter and it respawns the 2 monsters and then I was fighting 3 monsters. This has happened to me on this same boss 3 times. Is there any way I can manually turn off the Auto Frame Skip or change the Frame Skip to 0. Thanks For your help.
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Last edited by BaconIsGood16 on Mon Nov 21, 2016 7:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
notindeed
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by notindeed »

Well, the errors are less apparent in the songs, that's why.

Listen to the sound effects - getting hit, killing an enemy, boss roar, sword projectile and particularly the dying sound effect.
Nestopia, Mesen and VirtuaNES all sound reasonably accurate to me but all sound slightly different pitch to each other and i'm not sure which is most accurate. I guess for full accuracy the chip would need to be decapped or at least, tests performed.
Punes is not close though.

This has the music and sound effects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVumJ-z1F9E
(incidentally the drum clicks on the game-over theme are not very noticable here, but it could be due to distortion or clipping in the recording)
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rus7hp5Thuk


The death sound effect and the game over roar in The Adventure of Link are also good examples.
(See 8:12 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_LnzvgAKPE )

Hope that helps.


In regards to VRC7 and Legrange Point, Famitracker seems way better than any emulator i've find for that - all the emulators seem to harsh sounding in the intro theme.


Let me know what you think.

Thanks!
maseter
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by maseter »

Was a portable mode ever considered? So if you have a portable.ini in your home folder, this then creates input.cfg, puNES.cfg and all the rest in said home folder, and not in "current user\My Documents\puNES"?

My other request is to also include the NES Composite Palette, thanks!
http://www.firebrandx.com/downloads/Unsaturated-V6.zip
Cheers :beer:
notindeed
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by notindeed »

You can already manually add palettes yourself can't you? :)

But yes, having it be portable would be good.

Would also be nice to be able to manually specify a pixel aspect ratio, rather than just choose from the defaults, (and perhaps options to save these configs on a per game basis).
Also, being able to manually configure byuu's ntsc filter is a must (like in nestopia / mesen).

Is xp support officially dropped after 0.9 then?
FHorse
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by FHorse »

BaconIsGood16 wrote:Hello I just wanted to report a bug caused by the Auto Frame Skip. In the end of stage 4-4 you face 2 monsters that jump around and the Auto Frame Skip causes a stutter and it respawns the 2 monsters and then I was fighting 3 monsters. This has happened to me on this same boss 3 times. Is there any way I can manually turn off the Auto Frame Skip or change the Frame Skip to 0. Thanks For your help.
I'll add the option "Frame Skip 0".
notindeed wrote:Listen to the sound effects - getting hit, killing an enemy, boss roar, sword projectile and particularly the dying sound effect.
Nestopia, Mesen and VirtuaNES all sound reasonably accurate to me but all sound slightly different pitch to each other and i'm not sure which is most accurate. I guess for full accuracy the chip would need to be decapped or at least, tests performed.
Punes is not close though.
I'll give a look.
notindeed wrote:Does this no longer support windows xp?
I tested the emulator on 3 different windows xp and it worked on all three. You can write me in private detailing the problem better?
trebor wrote:Whether going through the GUI to select "Disk 1 Side B", or utilizing the shortcut Alt-S, puNES stays locked on "Disk 1 Side A", and screen remains the same requesting 'Insert Side B'.
Added to things to do.
maseter wrote:Was a portable mode ever considered? So if you have a portable.ini in your home folder, this then creates input.cfg, puNES.cfg and all the rest in said home folder, and not in "current user\My Documents\puNES"?
Portable mode already exist. Or use the "--portable" option from the command line or rename the exe file in this mode : "punes.exe" -> "punes_p.exe".
maseter wrote:My other request is to also include the NES Composite Palette, thanks!
http://www.firebrandx.com/downloads/Unsaturated-V6.zip
It's already done in August https://github.com/punesemu/puNES/commi ... 987cdcd612

if you want you can use the WIP 0.101:
Windows:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/215 ... p.d3d9.zip
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/215 ... p.d3d9.zip
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/215 ... ip.sdl.zip
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/215 ... ip.sdl.zip
Linux:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21595068/punes32
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21595068/punes64

It's containing all changes committed until yesterday https://github.com/punesemu/puNES/commits/master
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Eugene.S
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Eugene.S »

Unsaturated-V6 was updated to Unsaturated-V7. Then updated to Unsaturated-Final.
A couple days ago it was updated again. It's renamed to Nostalgia (FBX) now:
http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html
Last edited by Eugene.S on Tue Nov 22, 2016 10:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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