Wii Virtual Console's NES Emulation (any comments?)

Jagasian · Post by **Jagasian** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 11:29 am

I have yet to hear somebody well versed in NES emulation comment on the quality of the Wii's NES emulation. How does it compared to the better free NES emulators?

85cocoa · Post by **85cocoa** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 6:26 pm

I'm not sure that people will be able to discuss this topic properly. As was mentioned earlier, Nintendo can simply "pull a Nesticle" and hack the ROMs as needed to make them work properly with an inaccurate emulator rather than spending time to improve the accuracy of the emulator itself. The only halfway-decent way to determine the accuracy of the Wii's NES emulator would be to have a hacker figure out how to shoehorn in blargg's test ROMs or something similar, and we all know that will probably "never" happen.

Jagasian · Post by **Jagasian** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 7:51 pm

Ok, but for the games that it does support, do they run correctly? I don't care if they are hacked to run correctly or if they run on a general purpose NES emulator. Are the colors accurate, the audio, the timing, the aspect ratio, etc?

blargg · Post by **blargg** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 10:21 pm

Right, the Wii virtual console is really a game emulator. It's emulating specific games, individually made to work through on a NES-like virtual console, with likely modification of the original game code to work with it. So it can't be evaluated as NES emulator, but it can be evaulated as an <insert game here> emulator. I wouldn't be surprised if they took the opportunity to remove slight graphical glitches in games during the porting process, for example the flickery left side of the line above the status area in Super Mario Bros. 3 (or rather, their virtual console has a more robust split-screen system that naturally eliminates things like this). Obviously they'd prefer to make the virtual console as compatible as possible with the main structure of games, since it pays off several times as compared to having to modify each game (and possibly break it).

I haven't seen it in action. Hopefully I can see it somewhere and scrutinize the basic appearance and sound quality.

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Mon Dec 25, 2006 10:46 pm

Metroid had no programming changes made to it on the GBA nes emulator. The only differences are font-deep.

I highly doubt Nintendo would hack games to fit an emulator.

Post by **tepples** » Tue Dec 26, 2006 12:18 am

Dwedit wrote:Metroid had no programming changes made to it on the GBA nes emulator.

But does the emulator use JMP/BEQ hacks or any other HLE? If acNES has time to run the NES CPU and a software sound core, and PocketNES doesn't, then I wonder where PocketNES's inefficiency lies. And I wonder how Blargg's tests would fail when injected into acNES.

(Aside: Today, for the first time, I experienced the "ac" in "acNES".)

I highly doubt Nintendo would hack games to fit an emulator.

Nintendo wouldn't, but other Japanese companies such as Konami did the equivalent. Castlevania III and a lot of other games brought over from Japan are mapper hacks from the publisher's original mapper (e.g. a VRC) to one of Nintendo's mappers (e.g. MMC5).

dXtr · Post by **dXtr** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 6:26 pm

Just discoverd that they had released SMB now so I gave it a try. I can confirm that the emulator atleast deals with 8 sprites on a line and I managed to come to the -1 world too ^^
thought I still feel like something isn't sounding right and the colors feels wrong.. I guess I have to play some SMB on my NES too to compare the games.

Post by **tepples** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 7:59 pm

dXtr wrote:Just discoverd that they had released SMB now so I gave it a try. I can confirm that the emulator atleast deals with 8 sprites on a line and I managed to come to the -1 world too ^^
thought I still feel like something isn't sounding right and the colors feels wrong.. I guess I have to play some SMB on my NES too to compare the games.

Is Balloon Fight out? If this is anything like the emulator in Animal Crossing, then go on a Balloon Trip and hit a spark. Listen as the buzzing sounds completely different from the NES.

The colors feel wrong because the artifacts aren't emulated, or at least they aren't in AC. It's like playing on a PlayChoice.

lynxsolaris · Post by **lynxsolaris** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 8:15 pm

tepples wrote: Is Balloon Fight out?

Not yet.

oRBIT2002 · Post by **oRBIT2002** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 11:11 am

I bet that the Wii's NES emulation isn't cycle exact. There's a point at world 1-2 (founding the 1-up mushroom) that slows down the gameplay for a few secs on my PAL NES, the slowdown is NOT on the Wii SMB I just purchased.
However, the sprite-flickering seems to be there (as someone already noticed) but I don't think it's entirely correct either, flickering on some NES emulators on the PC looks alot more like the "original flickering"

AWal · Post by **AWal** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 6:52 pm

United States, purchased (as of now):
Super Mario Bros.
The Legend of Zelda
Gradius

Also F-Zero,Comix Zone(still bugs mid right corner second stage thx to lack of cpu time),Sonic 1(it's ver 2 of 3 i think), Mario 64, and Mario Kart 64.

SMB Plays quite well. The advanced, superior composite video encoder they use really shows (the poles are horizontal green, not dot crawling even dithered). 1 thing I did notice was the sound is not absolutely perfect (as it never has been), when getting a mushroom the noise doesn't grind, and marios jump (regardless of size) noise pitch bends a little too high.

Zelda. Since this is the 2003 re-release I'm not sure what to expect, they could've fixed anything...but they did get the DMC samples+the friggin' popping even...that suprised me.

Gradius. No comment.

What suprised me about the VC is that Mario Kart was in the line-up...I though they were using that same GC emu engine for Zelda:OOT (some special edition disc) that was hacked to play Mario64 at one point and time...not to mention framebuffer effects...

BTW, I threw the VC data's for them onto an SD card and looked at them with a hex editor...they're encrypted...damn. That would've been too easy to inject whatever I want (seeing as I have MMC1, UNROM, and NROM-256 at my fingertips lol)

Also, prolly a nogo on the uber h4x to focus the emu on one game, since the difference between gradius and smb is about that of a few banks and some tack-in code.

Mani I can't wait for Mario3 on VC...

AWal · Post by **AWal** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 10:32 am

+Kirby's Adventure

Never got to try an actual cartridge. But it looks like their IRQ timings are in order...then again, that will really shine with Mario3's "inconsistencies."

Is it just me, or does the game really slow down in some parts;The music still gets all the cpu time it needs, but it just seems oddly slow in some parts with heavy sprites.

never-obsolete · Post by **never-obsolete** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:34 pm

Is it just me, or does the game really slow down in some parts;The music still gets all the cpu time it needs, but it just seems oddly slow in some parts with heavy sprites.

I've got the cartridge and I've noticed it gets really bad when you use the spark or fire power and a lot of action is going on. I read a site not to long ago about a guy who overclocked his nes and the frame rate drop was gone.

Bregalad · Post by **Bregalad** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:51 pm

I read a site not to long ago about a guy who overclocked his nes and the frame rate drop was gone.

This is almost impossible, because the clock is divided internally to the CPU, and increase the freqency of the main clock will cause the PPU to totally screw up and not be in synch with the TV.

Post by **tepples** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:53 pm

Bregalad wrote:
I read a site not to long ago about a guy who overclocked his nes and the frame rate drop was gone.
This is almost impossible, because the clock is divided internally to the CPU, and increase the freqency of the main clock will cause the PPU to totally screw up and not be in synch with the TV.

Easy to solve: Put the CPU and PPU on separate crystals.