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Early emulators and several clone consoles seem to mix up two of the square wave's duty cycles, making the sound sound off. However, I must be in the minority since I actually like the inaccurate, inverted sound, and I believe certain songs sound better (Over Horizon stage 1, for example). So instead of me busting out a clone console, what would be an emulator (for Windows) that doesn't accurately emulate sound? I tried Nesticle, but it doesn't work on my computer, probably cause it's so old and probably cause it was made for DOS. If NES emulators with inaccurate sound are now extinct, is there any way to make an emulator sound inaccurate, or at least swap the duty cycles around?

puNES added a setting for that.

NESticle will run in DOSbox, if you really want hear it. It's sound emulation isn't all that bad (for it's time), most noticeably the DPCM was loud and unfiltered-sounding, and I think triangle channel was an actual triangle, not made of steps.

I'm aware this might be a bit off subject, but concerning NES emulators with inaccurate sound...

Does anyone ever have any problems with FCEUX? It's my emulator of choice, but sadly it faces a lot of crackling in it's audio while changing the focus of the window. Is anyone aware of how to fix these issues? I've tried altering everything from buffering to the output quality, but nothing seems to work. Oftentimes I'll mute the emulator entirely because of it's crackling.

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NSFPlay has an option for swapped duty, which I put in because there are many European clones of the NES that did this. It's a good option if you just want to listen to the music.

I thought I didn't have those problems with FCEUX, but now that I tested it, I can get it to crackle pretty easily for a little while after moving the window. Or minimizing the window. Or maximizing the window. It could easily be a bug, since Windows exhibits some funky behavior when the window is moved (the window message loop is blocked), maybe they didn't take that into account.

I've had much more severe problems with audio in Nestopia. It's very easy to get the audio to hiccup severely. NSF playback in particular seems to be broken.

Of course none of this really is about inaccuracies in sound emulation.

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Download STREEMERZ for NES from fauxgame.com! — Some other stuff I've done: kkfos.aspekt.fi

Alright, thanks for the responses folks! Granted I don't have much to say, but I figure I should show my gratitude.

For what it's worth, I find that using vsync with FCEUX creates a crackle, but if I turn off vsync it plays okay.

Yeah, the "static" in FCEUX during play is a result of odd synchronisation/timing issues pertaining to audio/video drivers and/or latency (regardless of what audio card I used (onboard Realtek or an Audigy SE)). So it makes sense Vsync enable/disable would affect it. Some of it has been fixed using FCEUX 2.2.3 SVN (I get binaries from emucr.com) and setting Vsync to "Lazy Wait for Vblank" and setting DirectDraw to "No hardware acceleration". I have similar synchronisation oddities in other emulators, which is mainly why I use Nestopia when actually wanting to play a NES/FC game, and FCEUX +other emulators solely for debugging/development. That's just me though.

Yeah, same. I use FCEUX for debugging. Nestopia for playing (or, more often, NES + PowerPak).