GBA hardware plays all of these formats.
very good point,had not even thought of that i was just combining the gb and gbc
Android sounds like an awful platform for emulation. Wouldnāt you want your emulator running tight, native code, as fast as possible? Isnāt everything on Android run through the VM?
How accurate is the emulation, for that matter?
And Iām worried about this ādump cartridge into memoryā operation. How does that work with exotic NES mappers? And what about SNES games with in-cart enhancement chips? A cartridge interface sounds like a lovely opportunity to take advantage of that hardware, but I get the distinct impression thatās not whatās being done here.
No, but itās a common misconception.
Plus, the āadvantageā of going native is largely negated by the Dalvik JIT.
This will be further negated by the next release of Android, because the new āVMā, ART, does Ahead-of-Time compilation.
Finally:
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BEHOLD! the analog hole!
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Not that you can directly compare clock speeds, but the fastest CPU in the systems listed is the Gameboy Advanceās running at 16.78 Mhz. Iām pretty sure I was able to emulate the SNES on my 486. Iām not sure what CPU theyāre running this system on, but itās probably ridiculously overpowered compared to the original systems.
Well, for /good enough/ emulation purposes, sure. I remember those early days - PasoFami and whatnot.
But if you want capital-A accurate emulation, system demands start piling up fast: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/
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Oh wow, I remember that gameā¦
Best thing about Episode One, IIRCā¦
So. Freakinā. Fast.
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Sure, and thatās interesting stuff from a technical standpoint, but for people who just want to play games*, āgood enoughā has been good enough for every 8- and 16-bit home console for the past ten years at least. Iām fairly confident that even the shittiest modern Android machine can outperform the hand-me-down bodge-up of a computer I had in 2003 that could play any SNES or Genesis game I ever threw at it. As long as it works, Iām not too fussed whether, under the hood, itās a flawless electron-level emulation or a hot mess of game-specific hacks.
*Iām continually bemused by how many gaming-emulation enthusiasts arenāt actually interested in playing games at all. They seem to be responsible for most of the progress that lets the rest of us play games, though, so Iām not complaining.
I donāt really think that a goal of authenticity means youāre not interested in playing games, even if I donāt particularly share that goal as much. That article is really interesting in that a lot of the little things he cites are actually fairly big deals (one game in particular straight up doesnāt work on other emulators), and the overall effect of having to kludge around them was creating weird romhack stuff going on in the market.
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The designers of the game had CRTs in mind, not LCDs. If a certain graphic relies on a CRT quirk thatās not present in the LCD, it can look rather worse.
See this page for a description of how the early Kingās Quest games were tweaked for the IBM PCās composite graphics but looked rather ghastly in RGB mode.
Of course, those games also came in 16 color versions, but that was because they were explicitly programmed that way. I donāt imagine that some of these game companies envisioned that their games would be played on emulators with RGB graphics, and LCDs.
Yep. My Nexus 7 (v1) can emulate N64 beautifully. The biggest problem with emulation on android is lack of accurate controller support. There is Sixaxis Controller which allows you to hook a PS3 (maybe even PS4?) controller to your android device but my experience was that the controller wasnāt nearly as accurate as it needed to be, and it was far less accurate than the original N64 controller.
Very few android specific games incorporate controller support either.
Look at your old game console. Now look at the back of your fancy flat
screen TV. How do you connect the composite connector to a modern HDMI
input?
With your fancy flat screen TVās composite input? Even brand new 4K smart TVs have a full set of SD analogue inputs.
Itās cool to have all those consoles in a single device, but itās not like the originals are unusable on new TVs.
Or this for $45. Use it myself to switch between a HDMI connected PC & N64 / WII
Edit: I should note that it has an annoying green line across the top of the screen (YGWYPF), but I tune it out pretty quickly.
Indeed you should.
but I tune it out pretty quickly.
Others might not be so lucky.
It takes about 3 minutes to start an Ouya, download an emulator. I would say that the biggest āproā of the Retron 5 is being able to use the original controllers.
I actually use Bsnes (current version is called Higan) for my research on game design.
There are games that are downright unplayable, or look like ass on other emulators.
And
It does have a āperformanceā profile, for people still using a pentium 4 with windows xp.
By the way, using Higan (ex-Bsnes) you can emulate BS-X Satellaview and Sufami Turbo. I donāt think that is even posible on Znes and other lower end emulators.
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