puNES Emulator

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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Sky25es
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Sky25es »

Hmm. I can't switch the FDS disks sides. I tried with the hotkey and through the toolbar but the disk stays always on side a.. :?

Edit: Ok. Just found out that I have to eject the disk first. It would however be nice if we could switch and autoinsert a diskside by just pressing a button
Wii_Biiz
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Wii_Biiz »

Hello, I used to follow and post to this thread under the name "weebeez" but I lost my password (it was a long long time ago).

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I like how PuNes is turning out with the new features. This is also one of the only emulators I have found that can play Back to The Future 2 & 3 for NES without a constant red flashing every time you walk. I hope more work continues to go into making PuNES a better emulator. ^_^

If I may make some suggestions - it would be great to be able to set what the Save State and Load State keys are yourself (like in NNNester-J and J-Nes) as not being able to do that breaks continuity / consistency with my Joy2Key profiles for my Mayflash Wireless Wii Classic Controller to USB adapter (also, being able to use keyboard inputs even >if< you also have a gamepad set up - since I need to be able to have those to still have the analog stick double as the D-Pad).

Other than that, I think PuNES is a fantastic NES emulator. I love the CRT TV mode, I use it with the RealityC palette file from AspiringSquire, as it makes the blacks a sort of dark charcoal grey, which helps to distinguish the "tube" from the rest of my 37 inch LG LCD television. I hope more features of this nature will be added, perhaps even a "blocks" mode that makes each pixel look like blocks.
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Balthier
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Balthier »

Hello. I really like this emulator but there are some things preventing me from loving it. I was taking it for a test spin with Tecmo Super Bowl and I noticed that the crowd noise was much louder than in other emulators (fceux and higan) indicating to me that maybe whatever sound channel the crowd noise is on is tuned too high, and I left all the sound settings at default so something is not quite right. Also is it possible to add an option for a 4:3 aspect ratio? I thought that the 8:7 aspect was more of a square pixel aspect as opposed to a real TV aspect. It just doesn't look right, even with the NTSC filter turned on, which by the way looks much better than the fceux NTSC filter. It's too close to a perfect square. And is there a way to turn off that save state recording thing on the bottom of the window? I notice the slider and timer move as a game progresses, and I have no need for such a feature and would rather have it off so it's not eating up resources. There's a typo for one of the border settings in the config file too, reads "bordes" instead of "borders". The only other complaint I have is with the way the video settings are set up. Turning on or off certain things will disable other things, and then one is left scratching their head as to how to get that greyed out feature to turn back on. It should be a little more user friendly and perhaps have a tooltip popup indicating what certain things do and how they affect other things (i.e. turning this on turns that off, turning this off turns that off, etc.).
tepples
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by tepples »

"8:7" is probably the pixel aspect ratio: each pixel is 14% wider than it is tall. When multiplied by the number of pixels in the conventionally visible portion of the NES picture (256x224), this produces 64:49, or close to 4:3 display aspect ratio.
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Balthier
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Balthier »

tepples wrote:"8:7" is probably the pixel aspect ratio: each pixel is 14% wider than it is tall. When multiplied by the number of pixels in the conventionally visible portion of the NES picture (256x224), this produces 64:49, or close to 4:3 display aspect ratio.
Hmmm. It still looks too narrow or square. Every other emulator I've ever used that has a 4:3 setting either comes close or gets it right. Snes9x for example. Set it to 8:7 and it's a really square picture, which is nice if that's what you want, sharp and jaggy pixels, set it to 4:3 with blarg's filter and it looks right. I'm old school so I need the 4:3 aspect with filtering, which also hides that obnoxious thing that AMD drivers do where the top left half of the screen's pixels are a different size than the bottom right half so it looks like the picture is made of 2 different triangles. Or maybe it's just a d3d and direct draw problem. Mame and epsxe both do that if I don't have some kind of filtering turned on.
tepples
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by tepples »

It may be the case that one emulator interprets "8:7" as pixel aspect ratio (correct) and another emulator interprets "8:7" as display aspect ratio (incorrect). Are the circles in the "Linearity" test of 240p test suite the same width in all directions? If the pixel aspect ratio is correct, they should be.
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Zepper
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Zepper »

tepples wrote:It may be the case that one emulator interprets "8:7" as pixel aspect ratio (correct) and another emulator interprets "8:7" as display aspect ratio (incorrect). Are the circles in the "Linearity" test of 240p test suite the same width in all directions? If the pixel aspect ratio is correct, they should be.
I was just opening a topic for my question. ^_^;; Well, considerating a PC screen ratio of 16:9, should I use the PPU output image as 8:7 for the correct NES screen ratio? Currently, I use 4:3, or 640x480 as example.
lidnariq
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by lidnariq »

These terms are strictly defined.

The Display Aspect Ratio for the NES should "always" be 4:3. But...
• For the NTSC NES, that happens because you started with 256x240 pixels, cropped out the middle 224 scanlines, and scaled that until it was the right width (~300 pixels)
• For the PAL NES, that happens because you started with something almost 256x240 pixels, padded it at top and bottom to a total of 260 scanlines, and scaled that until it was the right width (~350 pixels)

The Pixel Aspect Ratio for the NES depends on the TV.
• For the NTSC NES, it's 8:7.
• For the PAL NES it's approximately 7:5.

The confusion comes from 256÷240224 = 8÷7 , so a naïve reading makes it unclear whether "8:7" is DAR (implying square pixels) or PAR.
Last edited by lidnariq on Sun Aug 21, 2016 4:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Zepper
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Zepper »

I mean the generated/buffered/whatever NES PPU image aspect ratio. Well, 256:240 is 16:15, not counting any kind of clipping.
tepples
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by tepples »

The whole picture (at least by Rec. 601 definition of active picture period) is 280x240, including 24 pixels of side border (12 on each side). Multiply 280/240 by 8/7 (pixel aspect ratio) to get 4/3 (display aspect ratio).
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Zepper
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Zepper »

Are these 24 pixels rendered by the PPU? They're solid color, the $3F00 to be specific.
tepples
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by tepples »

Yes, these 24 pixels are what the PPU outputs during what Rec. 601 considers the active picture period. Most are indeed the color in $3F00, but I seem to remember reading that the first is actually gray in order to give some TVs a better idea of where the picture begins even if $3F00 is black.
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Zepper
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by Zepper »

tepples wrote:Yes, these 24 pixels are what the PPU outputs during what Rec. 601 considers the active picture period. Most are indeed the color in $3F00, but I seem to remember reading that the first is actually gray in order to give some TVs a better idea of where the picture begins even if $3F00 is black.
One second. It doesn't change the aspect ratio subject. The visible area rendered by every emulator is 256x240, no clipping.
Direct to the point (again): what's the image aspect ratio for matching a TV ratio display? I'm sure it's not the 640x480, but something smaller in length.
tepples
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by tepples »

You are correct that most popular NES emulators do not render a border.

If you don't want to process the border, scaling 256x240 to 584x480 approximates the NTSC pixel aspect ratio. (The actual figure is 256 * 2 * 8/7 = 585.143.) For cleanest results, you'll want to stretch the image to 512x240 with a "sharp" algorithm (nearest neighbor, Scale2x, hq2x, etc.) and then stretch the result again to 584x480 with linear interpolation.

(Noticed profile country: Brazil)
Because PAL-M uses very similar timings, this scaling should also approximate what you see on a PAL-M TV. Is there a counterpart to Rec. 601 for PAL-M that defines how wide (in microseconds) and how tall (in scanlines) its 4:3 frame is?
lidnariq
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Re: puNES Emulator

Post by lidnariq »

PAL-M should use the same System M timings that NTSC does...
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