General Emulation Discussion

Stenzek of Duckstation fame has contributed a fair bit to PCSX2 of late too. There's been a recent port or PCSX2 to Xbox, and performance has seen a dramatic uplift

1.6.0 is two and a half years old at this stage, it's the latest stable release. You'll want the latest nightly release, which are far more developed.

LAN streaming from my PC to an Nvidia Shield in the bedroom via GeForce Now on the PC and the Moonlight client on the Shield....wow, seriously impressed with this black magic witchcraft. There's virtually no lag when playing retro games via BigBox, and that's with initial testing using a Dual Shock 4 over bluetooth. I'll use a proper hardwired controller at a later stage, but I tested lag sensitive games like Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog, Aladdin on the Snes, and so on....seriously impressed.

With Moonlight on the Shield, you just pair it with your PC, and then on the PC, choose which apps that Moonlight can launch. I set mine to be able to launch Big Box for browsing the library with images/videos/metadata etc, choose the system choose the game, and boom, you're playing it. There's some slight artifacting that's visible, but the stream settings are tweakable so I'd be confident a nicer quality can be achieved.

I seen it demo'd here, but had previously never heard of it - https://www.reddit.com/r/launchbox/comments/yoxtsq/showing_off_my_bigbox_setup_streaming_to_my/

Obviously you can run retroarch on the Shield directly if you choose, but this opens up high powered systems that the Shield wouldn't be able for, with the addition of your PC game library to boot.

Following the release of the Atari 50 Collection, the developer of the Atari Jaguar emulator for it has been given the go ahead to release his emulator, BigPEmu. Seemingly it's got 100% compatability with the commercial Jag library too....fantastic news, it seems to have jumped to 1st place over much more seasoned Jag emulators (which were never really perfected anyway). The bad news is, he's seemingly battling cancer 😔

Edit - Just tested it there, it's really impressive. Presentation and GUI are top notch too. Doom seems to run a little fast however, so I imagine that'll be addressed quick enough. New default Jag emulator without a doubt.

It's so much better than before, plugin system gone, gui modernised, accuracy improved, per game config database set up with automatic fixes, efficiency improved, speed improved, automatic built in updater, and others.

Its still a high level emulator though, so you're going to get per game fixes....youll be a LONG time waiting on an LLE for the PS2, and you'll likely never see an fpga core for it...so high level emulation will always be the approach with consoles this technically advanced. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with that, look at Dolphin and so on.

Anyone saying it's perfect now is wrong, it's not perfect (is any piece of software ever truly considered perfect?). They'll get there though, the vast majority of (all?) PS2 games have been formally dumped, so it'll just take time to get to the level of something like Dolphin. Dev wise there's a resurgence of interest in PS2 though, so the future is looking bright for PS2 emulation/preservation....certainly a lot more so than it used to look maybe 3/4 years ago.

A strange question for you in an emulation thread, but now that you've your own pad....would you not pick up a nice 21" CRT for these use cases? I picked up my 21" Trinitron for 30 quid or something, and being that size, its footprint is really fine when parked alongside some retro machines in a little display.

That BigPEmu really is some achievement. Just bursts onto the scene out of nowhere, practically nails Jaguar emulation, and then adds Jaguar CD support just for the fun of it. Granted the system is more a curio than anything else, but the author is one of those savants that just nails it.

I just set it up there in my Launchbox installation....not a single issue, nothing, the entire library (of a whopping 19 games or so) just boot and play like it hasn't been some coding golden goose for the last ~20 years. Amazing stuff altogether.

Exactly, which gave the games a certain sense of mystique. Obviously the games are just standard Jag games just on cd (pretty sure there's no additional processing going on in the expansion unit unlike the Mega CD etc), but to see them alive again and running is a real milestone in emulation. I can only dof my hat to these wizards, and marvel at their skill.

I see PCem blowing up in popularity lately, presumably because of this video. People seem to think it's a new emulator, but has in fact been out for a good while.

Must give it a go, I've been setting up some vm's lately...i want classic installs of everything from Dos up to Windows 2000.

It's a really nice frontend. With bigbox then, there's some fantastic community themes that just give the whole thing a near professional finish.

I tend to stick to Launchbox tho, for speed and simplicity.