Lynx
New member
emuDigest 2004
Let’s start, ok?
I’ll take a quick look into not-so-distant past - year 2003.
The year was famous for the first *cough*playable*cough* PS2 game, Sega Model 2 and decent Sega Saturn emulation (using GiriGiri, where legality is still a subject of discussion), real Atari Jaguar, Nuon and 3DO emulators and some smaller (for a public) but bigger (for developers) events, like a breakthrough in PPC emulation which brought basic support of Mac OS9 emulation into Basilisk II and helped GameCube emulation to become a reality, as well as PearPC this year. I also thought that nothing could be improved in PSX and N64 emulation.
A breath of depression came upon all of us at some early moment in 2004. We are old sceners and we don’t believe in miracles anymore. What could possibly happen that would detonate the scene and once again light up the flames in our eyes?
So, a bit of waiting really brought us miracles!
At the first point we’ve tried to make a chronological list of the biggest events, but later really thought to make some kind of a TOPXX. It’s not really a TOP since a lot of the positions are floaters. We all do respect each others work so we really can’t say ““Chankast” has prevailed “PCSX2” this year”. Basically, it’s a list of the events sorted by “explosiveness” factor of the releases. We don’t want to pretend to be accurate; we are just doing our job.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Please welcome, The TOP 3 Categories of The Year (in random order)!
1) Dreamcast Emulation
2) GameCube Emulation
3) PlayStation 2 Emulation
Well, everyone has self-defined the order of these “New Generation” (ok, it’s getting old) categories. Let’s review the events:
Dreamcast - Chankast
After years of Icarus waiting, this one came as a huge surprise. Being annoying to the newbies with the difficulties of running games using some BIOS files, OSes (SPTI vs ASPI issues), it really became a leader of the discussions for the entire year. The flawless speed and quality of the emulation (which proves that LLE doesn’t really matter) are really stunning. While Icarus was trying to become modular by importing PSX emulation style (with plugins, bells and whistles), Chankast took different road – immediate release upon reaching a specific stability level, where games could be completed.
This emulator proved to be worth playing for months.
GameCube – Dolphin, Dolwin and gcube
While Dreamcast has seen only one release of the emulator (which is able to play commercial games - not mentioning ElSemi doing Namco Museum in the distant past), GameCube has seen far more.
Dolphin is another example of High Level Emulation combined with crazy Dynamic Recompilation. It shines so hard, that brings back the memories of UltraHLE release. While not being as cool as Chankast from the gaming side (who’s going to be the first to complete Windwaker @ 2 fps? that’s a comparison to the reality of Shenmue completion under Chankast), it does really proves the TEASER concept. Go play Bust-A-Move 3000, Yoshi’s Cookies or Kururin.
The Dolphin isn’t the only star here. gcube (newcomer) and Dolwin (done by the Russian author, previously unknown for HLPSE) has both reached the state, where games do become playable.
We’ll see how it will work out next year, but for some reason gcube does remind me about mupen64…
It’s a big relief to see the system finally emulated.
PlayStation 2 - PCSX2
The amount of terrific screenshots from the homepage of this emulator was big and reminded us about early Icarus homepage. Doh, kill these memories, baby. We don’t want Nightmares anymore.
0.7 has seen the light and brought big amount of improvements. One of them is called really “Playable games” (for some of us). While kiddies don’t feel satisfaction and become even more frustrated by inability to play as Tidus or Yuna or the San Andreas guy, others are very excited and think about further optimizations to improve the compatibility, quality and speed of the complex beast. And the amount of playable (who’s going to be the first to) games is even bigger, than in Dolphin. PLUS you could save and continue.
The second batch
It’s really hard to make a list of “2nd echelon” emulators. They aren’t 2nd for some of us – they were far more useful than “gamy top 3”. I’ll just make a real emuDigest of the further emulators, not the top.
Nintendo 64 Emulation
While I was right by saying “nothing could be improved in PSX emulation” (especially after OpenGL2 plugin by Pete), I was wrong in N64 case. We’ve seen a really strong wave of the releases. Since 1964 0.9.9 does fall in-between of 2003 and 2004 and we’ve discussed the masterpiece last time, mupen64 is the present that really brings us the third emulator to use (besides Project64 and 1964). It’s already strong and mature, but it has more potential for improvements! We can’t have N64 emulators without GFX plug-ins and this year was REALLY important. Rice did a great job and his “Video” plug-in is now as mature as Glide64 is. Both of them are really important and now they take the absolute lead in N64 GFX emulation. Another surprise was the Azimer’s AudioHLE plugin featuring fast speed and high sound quality.
Newcomers
2004 had few surprises – handheld Watara SuperVision emulator called “Potator” (from the famous Virtual Jaguar dev team) and breakthrough in Nuance (Nuon emulator), allowing to PLAY commercial games. Pokemon Mini became a reality due to the inclusion of PM emulator into the GameCube game. Three more conquered platforms are a real progress.
Sega Saturn Emulation
The tricky part here is the visibility of the total absence of the progress. All the current emulators are taking their time to reach the point, where they will be able to run most of the 2D games. We have SSF 0.07 being resurrected, Yabause progressing really well (and it’s open source nature gives really nice prospects to it’s future) and Saturnin, which is quite near this year goal. It’s really a starting point which has couple of hyperjump gates. We’ll have a lot more games running in 2005, but now new SSF shows the compatibility rate comparable to GiriGiri. Well, both of them were in parallel development 4 years ago so this comes as no wonder.
Sega Genesis/MegaDrive
While Stef is taking a break, Steve is doing all the homework. I think we have quite a strong and fat dot here. No more concerns (except the speed and accessibility) after Kega Fusion release. Sega CD+32x emulation is a reality. I guess it took dozens of sleepless nights to sync both (or should I say throse?) of them.
Some of you would like to see gens++ here, but it’s really not worth it.
Arcade emulation
Nah, I wouldn’t do a review of all the platforms covered by MAME this year. Let the mamedev team cover it up for me (as well as yearly evolution graphs).
I’ll note a new release of Sega Model 2 Emulator from ElSemi, as well as his latest creation called Crystal Emulator. Another dozen of 3D arcade titles beaten!
Last year I’ve missed FinalBurn Alpha which is starting to replace deadly-ill RAINE. Thanks again, Flash. This emulator is covering more and more platforms and it REALLY has BLAZING speed!
ZiNc’s last word is quite nice, I couldn’t disagree. This is a masterpiece which deserves a break at the reached point. Arcade PlayStation emulation at it’s best.
Oh, I’ve predicted some HLE MAME-derivates in 2005 and we’ve seen EKMAME even earlier - this year. While it wasn’t warmly received by official developers, it proves the concept – some people care about quality and not the precision. They do want to see alpha blending on top of that PSX pixelated lowres stuff.
Aaron has also released single game emulator (Radikal Bikers) which is using quite forgotten approach to the emulation - static recompilation.
I’ve probably missed some parts here since I wasn’t into arcade emulation much this year, but it should sum up most of it.
Computer Emulation
PearPC
The king of new generation PPC emulation brings us MacOS X, which gets installed at the speed outblazing original Macs. Precision and quality of the emulation is unquestionable. It’s really STUNNING. PC users have suffered for half a decade. In order to develop things for the amazing platform, we had to buy shining and expensive (as hell) equipment, while Mac users were using VirtualPC. We had a lot of promises to see Mac PPC emulators over the past years. Don’t wait for Emulators Inc. & Ardi. Go use it. PearPC does bring us active alternate software reality. And it isn’t called Linux.
DOSbox
At the very same moment when we really became annoyed by the inability to play Crusader: No Regret and Remorse on our usual PCs running “NEW TECHNOLOGY” operating systems (yes, that’s NT-derivatives and I still have an extra P166MMX with SB16 Vibra just for oldskool gaming), updated DOSbox has appeared with the new i386 emulation and blazing performance. Finally, the emulator became useful for all abandonware fans.
blueMSX
In less than one year this emulator became the best MSX emulator.
I’m moving to another part – technological innovations of the year.
I’ll propose the list and everybody will be able to judge the importance of every event based on their preferences:
RascalBoy Advance and VBALink
Both of these emulators have showed us the missing link in GameBoy Advance emulation – link cable support. All the Pokemon fans celebrate by drinking non-alcoholic champagne.
SNES chips emulation
This was an awesome project to reverse engineer a lot of them one-by-one. Big respect to the dev team dedicated to the final SNES touches.
Picodrive
Do you really believe in fast emulators nowadays? If not, you should try this one. Sega MegaDrive emulated on smartphones. N-Gage owners celebrate first real game
Arcade decryptions
Starting the reverse engineering of the platforms counted as emulated (I’m referring to the Sega Systems) is a big responsibility. It’s another final touch to the old Sega arcade machines. Include your own other favorite decryptions here. And rumors regarding Chihiro games being launched on modded/upgraded Xboxes.
RealityBoy
This one is the only real emulator of Nintendo Virtual Boy and seeing the project being resurrected and almost finished makes us happy.
MagicEngine
…proving the technology could be polished and made more accessible by the years of hard work.
PSF
…trying to cover all the music on consoles.
Neat, now I demand Sega Genesis.
scale3x
Does anybody remember 99 and Parrot from BrSMS?
GoodMerge
…bringing romset sizes to the FDDs.
Tickle
For bringing the simple explanation of emulation to wannabe developers.
Another category we introduce here is…
DISAPPOINTMENTS OF THE YEAR!
We’ll be quick, somewhere sarcastic just a bit, and we don’t really want to offend anyone. These events were noted by the users.
No releases:
1) SuperModel (don’t thing the song of 40GHz, we don’t demand LLE)
2) MagicEngine PC-FX (ok, we could survive another 1 year delay since ME 1 looks so neat!)
3) Ardi. Death of the company. No more PPC Mac legends.
4) DeJap
5) Icarus/ChooDo[/font] Forget about it.
Dead ends:
1) Satourne – hey, if it couldn’t run on our computers, how could you make a core?
2) cxbx – is the team really that mature ?
3) RAINE – the team has left the building
Deaths:
1) FakeNES. We’ll miss you, ZSNES team.
2) Dolphin. Leaving so early?
3) FCE Ultra. Dead to be reborn. Again.
Others:
1) RockNES. Doesn’t work as well as a Rock for Scissors, even after being polished for years.
2) FreeDO. We’ve heard the lyrics of the song: “OpenSource”. At least partially.
3) BGB. Please, THE BEST GB/C EMULATOR, become accessible!
4) Atari Jaguar. Please, don’t stop me now!
Well, that’s it for the digests and TOPs of the year.
I would also like to note some big names of this year which I personally like:
ZSNES (half dozen of new chips, you say?), SuperSleuth
MagicEngine
WinUAE
NO$GBA
I’m sure there were more, but we are here to celebrate really new and explosive events, right?
I’d like to excuse myself for not covering up Japanese events, as well as some others.
Site Maintainers
I’m greatly disappointed by the absence of usable Archive sections on your sites. You know who you are. Monthly archives are A MUST. I was very disappointed by some sites not having a search feature in news archives, as well as static archive pages dated 2003 or… DAILY BASED ARCHIVES.
Let’s start, ok?
I’ll take a quick look into not-so-distant past - year 2003.
The year was famous for the first *cough*playable*cough* PS2 game, Sega Model 2 and decent Sega Saturn emulation (using GiriGiri, where legality is still a subject of discussion), real Atari Jaguar, Nuon and 3DO emulators and some smaller (for a public) but bigger (for developers) events, like a breakthrough in PPC emulation which brought basic support of Mac OS9 emulation into Basilisk II and helped GameCube emulation to become a reality, as well as PearPC this year. I also thought that nothing could be improved in PSX and N64 emulation.
A breath of depression came upon all of us at some early moment in 2004. We are old sceners and we don’t believe in miracles anymore. What could possibly happen that would detonate the scene and once again light up the flames in our eyes?
So, a bit of waiting really brought us miracles!
At the first point we’ve tried to make a chronological list of the biggest events, but later really thought to make some kind of a TOPXX. It’s not really a TOP since a lot of the positions are floaters. We all do respect each others work so we really can’t say ““Chankast” has prevailed “PCSX2” this year”. Basically, it’s a list of the events sorted by “explosiveness” factor of the releases. We don’t want to pretend to be accurate; we are just doing our job.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Please welcome, The TOP 3 Categories of The Year (in random order)!
1) Dreamcast Emulation
2) GameCube Emulation
3) PlayStation 2 Emulation
Well, everyone has self-defined the order of these “New Generation” (ok, it’s getting old) categories. Let’s review the events:
Dreamcast - Chankast
After years of Icarus waiting, this one came as a huge surprise. Being annoying to the newbies with the difficulties of running games using some BIOS files, OSes (SPTI vs ASPI issues), it really became a leader of the discussions for the entire year. The flawless speed and quality of the emulation (which proves that LLE doesn’t really matter) are really stunning. While Icarus was trying to become modular by importing PSX emulation style (with plugins, bells and whistles), Chankast took different road – immediate release upon reaching a specific stability level, where games could be completed.
This emulator proved to be worth playing for months.
GameCube – Dolphin, Dolwin and gcube
While Dreamcast has seen only one release of the emulator (which is able to play commercial games - not mentioning ElSemi doing Namco Museum in the distant past), GameCube has seen far more.
Dolphin is another example of High Level Emulation combined with crazy Dynamic Recompilation. It shines so hard, that brings back the memories of UltraHLE release. While not being as cool as Chankast from the gaming side (who’s going to be the first to complete Windwaker @ 2 fps? that’s a comparison to the reality of Shenmue completion under Chankast), it does really proves the TEASER concept. Go play Bust-A-Move 3000, Yoshi’s Cookies or Kururin.
The Dolphin isn’t the only star here. gcube (newcomer) and Dolwin (done by the Russian author, previously unknown for HLPSE) has both reached the state, where games do become playable.
We’ll see how it will work out next year, but for some reason gcube does remind me about mupen64…
It’s a big relief to see the system finally emulated.
PlayStation 2 - PCSX2
The amount of terrific screenshots from the homepage of this emulator was big and reminded us about early Icarus homepage. Doh, kill these memories, baby. We don’t want Nightmares anymore.
0.7 has seen the light and brought big amount of improvements. One of them is called really “Playable games” (for some of us). While kiddies don’t feel satisfaction and become even more frustrated by inability to play as Tidus or Yuna or the San Andreas guy, others are very excited and think about further optimizations to improve the compatibility, quality and speed of the complex beast. And the amount of playable (who’s going to be the first to) games is even bigger, than in Dolphin. PLUS you could save and continue.
The second batch
It’s really hard to make a list of “2nd echelon” emulators. They aren’t 2nd for some of us – they were far more useful than “gamy top 3”. I’ll just make a real emuDigest of the further emulators, not the top.
Nintendo 64 Emulation
While I was right by saying “nothing could be improved in PSX emulation” (especially after OpenGL2 plugin by Pete), I was wrong in N64 case. We’ve seen a really strong wave of the releases. Since 1964 0.9.9 does fall in-between of 2003 and 2004 and we’ve discussed the masterpiece last time, mupen64 is the present that really brings us the third emulator to use (besides Project64 and 1964). It’s already strong and mature, but it has more potential for improvements! We can’t have N64 emulators without GFX plug-ins and this year was REALLY important. Rice did a great job and his “Video” plug-in is now as mature as Glide64 is. Both of them are really important and now they take the absolute lead in N64 GFX emulation. Another surprise was the Azimer’s AudioHLE plugin featuring fast speed and high sound quality.
Newcomers
2004 had few surprises – handheld Watara SuperVision emulator called “Potator” (from the famous Virtual Jaguar dev team) and breakthrough in Nuance (Nuon emulator), allowing to PLAY commercial games. Pokemon Mini became a reality due to the inclusion of PM emulator into the GameCube game. Three more conquered platforms are a real progress.
Sega Saturn Emulation
The tricky part here is the visibility of the total absence of the progress. All the current emulators are taking their time to reach the point, where they will be able to run most of the 2D games. We have SSF 0.07 being resurrected, Yabause progressing really well (and it’s open source nature gives really nice prospects to it’s future) and Saturnin, which is quite near this year goal. It’s really a starting point which has couple of hyperjump gates. We’ll have a lot more games running in 2005, but now new SSF shows the compatibility rate comparable to GiriGiri. Well, both of them were in parallel development 4 years ago so this comes as no wonder.
Sega Genesis/MegaDrive
While Stef is taking a break, Steve is doing all the homework. I think we have quite a strong and fat dot here. No more concerns (except the speed and accessibility) after Kega Fusion release. Sega CD+32x emulation is a reality. I guess it took dozens of sleepless nights to sync both (or should I say throse?) of them.
Some of you would like to see gens++ here, but it’s really not worth it.
Arcade emulation
Nah, I wouldn’t do a review of all the platforms covered by MAME this year. Let the mamedev team cover it up for me (as well as yearly evolution graphs).
I’ll note a new release of Sega Model 2 Emulator from ElSemi, as well as his latest creation called Crystal Emulator. Another dozen of 3D arcade titles beaten!
Last year I’ve missed FinalBurn Alpha which is starting to replace deadly-ill RAINE. Thanks again, Flash. This emulator is covering more and more platforms and it REALLY has BLAZING speed!
ZiNc’s last word is quite nice, I couldn’t disagree. This is a masterpiece which deserves a break at the reached point. Arcade PlayStation emulation at it’s best.
Oh, I’ve predicted some HLE MAME-derivates in 2005 and we’ve seen EKMAME even earlier - this year. While it wasn’t warmly received by official developers, it proves the concept – some people care about quality and not the precision. They do want to see alpha blending on top of that PSX pixelated lowres stuff.
Aaron has also released single game emulator (Radikal Bikers) which is using quite forgotten approach to the emulation - static recompilation.
I’ve probably missed some parts here since I wasn’t into arcade emulation much this year, but it should sum up most of it.
Computer Emulation
PearPC
The king of new generation PPC emulation brings us MacOS X, which gets installed at the speed outblazing original Macs. Precision and quality of the emulation is unquestionable. It’s really STUNNING. PC users have suffered for half a decade. In order to develop things for the amazing platform, we had to buy shining and expensive (as hell) equipment, while Mac users were using VirtualPC. We had a lot of promises to see Mac PPC emulators over the past years. Don’t wait for Emulators Inc. & Ardi. Go use it. PearPC does bring us active alternate software reality. And it isn’t called Linux.
DOSbox
At the very same moment when we really became annoyed by the inability to play Crusader: No Regret and Remorse on our usual PCs running “NEW TECHNOLOGY” operating systems (yes, that’s NT-derivatives and I still have an extra P166MMX with SB16 Vibra just for oldskool gaming), updated DOSbox has appeared with the new i386 emulation and blazing performance. Finally, the emulator became useful for all abandonware fans.
blueMSX
In less than one year this emulator became the best MSX emulator.
I’m moving to another part – technological innovations of the year.
I’ll propose the list and everybody will be able to judge the importance of every event based on their preferences:
RascalBoy Advance and VBALink
Both of these emulators have showed us the missing link in GameBoy Advance emulation – link cable support. All the Pokemon fans celebrate by drinking non-alcoholic champagne.
SNES chips emulation
This was an awesome project to reverse engineer a lot of them one-by-one. Big respect to the dev team dedicated to the final SNES touches.
Picodrive
Do you really believe in fast emulators nowadays? If not, you should try this one. Sega MegaDrive emulated on smartphones. N-Gage owners celebrate first real game
Arcade decryptions
Starting the reverse engineering of the platforms counted as emulated (I’m referring to the Sega Systems) is a big responsibility. It’s another final touch to the old Sega arcade machines. Include your own other favorite decryptions here. And rumors regarding Chihiro games being launched on modded/upgraded Xboxes.
RealityBoy
This one is the only real emulator of Nintendo Virtual Boy and seeing the project being resurrected and almost finished makes us happy.
MagicEngine
…proving the technology could be polished and made more accessible by the years of hard work.
PSF
…trying to cover all the music on consoles.
Neat, now I demand Sega Genesis.
scale3x
Does anybody remember 99 and Parrot from BrSMS?
GoodMerge
…bringing romset sizes to the FDDs.
Tickle
For bringing the simple explanation of emulation to wannabe developers.
Another category we introduce here is…
DISAPPOINTMENTS OF THE YEAR!
We’ll be quick, somewhere sarcastic just a bit, and we don’t really want to offend anyone. These events were noted by the users.
No releases:
1) SuperModel (don’t thing the song of 40GHz, we don’t demand LLE)
2) MagicEngine PC-FX (ok, we could survive another 1 year delay since ME 1 looks so neat!)
3) Ardi. Death of the company. No more PPC Mac legends.
4) DeJap
5) Icarus/ChooDo[/font] Forget about it.
Dead ends:
1) Satourne – hey, if it couldn’t run on our computers, how could you make a core?
2) cxbx – is the team really that mature
?3) RAINE – the team has left the building
Deaths:
1) FakeNES. We’ll miss you, ZSNES team.
2) Dolphin. Leaving so early?
3) FCE Ultra. Dead to be reborn. Again.
Others:
1) RockNES. Doesn’t work as well as a Rock for Scissors, even after being polished for years.
2) FreeDO. We’ve heard the lyrics of the song: “OpenSource”. At least partially.
3) BGB. Please, THE BEST GB/C EMULATOR, become accessible!
4) Atari Jaguar. Please, don’t stop me now!
Well, that’s it for the digests and TOPs of the year.
I would also like to note some big names of this year which I personally like:
ZSNES (half dozen of new chips, you say?), SuperSleuth
MagicEngine
WinUAE
NO$GBA
I’m sure there were more, but we are here to celebrate really new and explosive events, right?
I’d like to excuse myself for not covering up Japanese events, as well as some others.
Site Maintainers
I’m greatly disappointed by the absence of usable Archive sections on your sites. You know who you are. Monthly archives are A MUST. I was very disappointed by some sites not having a search feature in news archives, as well as static archive pages dated 2003 or… DAILY BASED ARCHIVES.
Last edited by a moderator:
