Discussion and News forum for all things video game emulation related, or tangentially. Platform agnostic. Mobile is welcome too. We'll keep it loose, but more focused on emulation. Piracy discussion is allowed, that's one reason we're on this domain.
A General Discussion will be stickied for the community to chat in about whatever. Staying on topic isn't important in any GD stickies.
Rules
#1: Obey our domain rules first and foremost.
#2: Mundane Tech Support/ROM Sourcing Questions should to be kept to the sticky posts, unless it's something novel/interesting others might want to see.
#3: Unless it's at least tangentially relevant to emulation, no politics. Don't get your toque in a knot.
#4: Be nice, and consider reporting an offending hoser of #4 instead of responding to mean people to begin with.
Inspired by negative impressions of /r/ROMS:
#5a: Strive to be polite & patient with noobs asking questions.
#5b: Doesn't mean be a doormat.
Helpful Links
Good shaders for stuff like retroarch: https://github.com/RetroCrisis/Retro-Crisis-GDV-NTSC
https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt_royale/
https://r-roms.github.io/ Get all your games here, retro and up. r/ROMs reddit community's game link aggregator.
A Download Manager is recommended. JDownloader2, for example, download the clean installer here: https://board.jdownloader.org/showthread.php?t=54725
Play ROMS online within your web browser emulators here, no setup required: https://vimm.net/vault
Myrient is shutting down unfortunately :( You can read about it here and about the rescue mission fan torrents:
More aggregators: https://shakil-shahadat.github.io/awesome-piracy/#roms
https://wiki.dbzer0.com/piracy/megathread/emulators/
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Main_Page The wiki dedicated to all things emulation.
https://www.readonlymemo.com/emulation-101/
Fiddly Switch Shit
Current prime Yuzu continuation:
https://git.eden-emu.dev/eden-emu/eden/releases
Ryubing probably the main Ryujinx fork for now:
https://git.ryujinx.app/Ryubing/Canary/releases
Switch games (Use adblock for the love of gods):
Speaking of which...
For more fiddly emulators, their wiki sites provide tweaks/fixes/hacks, and explain any bugs that are still known issues.
https://wiki.pcsx2.net/Category:Games
https://wiki.rpcs3.net/index.php?title=Category%3AGames
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Nintendo_GameCube
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Wii
Hax
Account Required Pre-Patched ROM/ISO hacks and fan translations here: https://retrogametalk.com/repo/
DIY ROM/ISO patches: https://romhackplaza.org/
Browser based ROM patchers: https://www.marcrobledo.com/RomPatcher.js/
https://www.hack64.net/tools/patcher.php
https://www.ff6hacking.com/patcher/
Good Programs
The good (standalone) N64 emulator: https://github.com/Rosalie241/RMG
Quick and Dirty shaders in a window you can overlay on other windowed emulators: https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass
Can confirm, RPCS3 works great on my M2 Pro Mac mini, should work nearly as well on my M2 MacBook Air, though, because that doesn't have active cooling... I wouldn't chance it. It's a nice netbook for what it is.
All I played on it was Rockband 3 with the Rockband Deluxe mod, but it ran near flawlessly. I'm not sure how a 3D action game would run. I should try to see if I can get something like Fallout 3 running on it.
Been enjoying yarg and ghwt on PC, but RB3 was really my baby and I'd love to see what Deluxe is about. Is emulation really that good, latency/timing wise? I got a roll limitless for my 360 but I cba setting it back up
You got a what for your 360? I assume you mean some kind of exploit like JTAG. If not, you should look into ABadAvatar. It's an Xbox profile that exploits the system via the avatar system, so, as soon as the Xbox tries to load that avatar, it exploits itself. You should absolutely take the Xbox offline before doing this, for obvious reasons. It runs with, what they call 95% efficiency, so there's a 5% chance it won't work, in which case it just tries again.
You ever been to a convention where they were playing Rockband in the game room? Ever notice it had some "different" features, like showing the time elapsed/remaining above the score? That's not some obscure setting you missed. They're running a modded 360 and they're running Rockband 3 Deluxe on it. There are some videos on YouTube showing what it's all about... here's the 1.0 trailer. I'm sure they've added stuff since then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA6gn1TbmyE
Emulation is always going to be a bit behind in latency, so I'm not too sure about that. I think I was able to hook a mic up to my Mac and sing a song, but the instruments were always gonna be a problem because RPCS3 is a PS3 emulator and I only have Xbox instruments. I didn't try any. All I could ever do was sing anyway.
I'm aware of Deluxe. Roll limitless is a fan made controller + midi drums adapter based on raspberry pi pico, that works with Xbox 360, and was made in part because of limitations of the official midi pro adapter. Notably, it couldn't handle fast drum rolls, among other things. I was just wondering if console emulation was good enough that I can leave the 360 in the closet
Ah, okay. I'm not that big on hardware, especially when it comes to drumming. For example, would you agree that We Will Rock You is the easiest drum track (that has a drum track)? I can't get through that on any difficulty, because of endurance, and it isn't a long song, either.
My wife can do drums, but not on a level where we've ever thought about additional hardware beyond the cymbals (which she does use and plays Pro Drums on Expert and typically gets 5/Gold stars, but isn't topping any leaderboards).
Wow. Have SSD prices gotten so crazy that people are buying BluRay drives?
No, PS3 games are on BluRay discs.
They've always been though. Why this development now?
Because you can now just insert a disc into a blue BluRay drive (which you'll have needed to rip them to disk anyway) on your PC to play them: just like on a real PS3.
just insert a disc into a blue BluRay drive (which you’ll have needed to rip them to disk anyway)
Cool, cool. So we're pretending any significant amount of emulator users are doing this now?
It's cool that it's an option now, but I'm betting this has no use for majority of users.
Why did it take 20 years to happen? is the question
Edit: Previling philsophy of history: things just kind of happen.
If I had to guess, randomly accessing the storage on the disc takes a lot more overhead time compared to reading from an internal drive. Now the emulator is so fast that it can handle the seek time on top of emulating the console.
Fat PS3 was only capable of 1X - 2X Bluray read ~9MB/s while Slim and Super Slim were capable of 6X ~27MB/s (changes over the surface of the disc of course) so I don't think that's it. PS3 used a rather shitty BSD FAT32 driver for their 5400rpm laptop drives and SSD upgrades were better but still heavily bottlenecked by said driver.
I can load a decrypted ISO directly in RPSC3 over 1 Gigabit ethernet from a NAS with that inherent horrendous latency (compared to local storage drives, especially random access) and it'll still load faster than a game would on an actual PS3 on either or even combined storage mediums like many games partial installed to HDD and also used Bluray.