It Might Be NES

[HJRodrigo]

I was curious if anybody else was disappointed that development of imbNES never continued even though it became open source. It was the closet to experience to playing the NES on another system. I could play both systems side by side and it was hard to see the difference.

imbNES is now open source! That's the good news. The bad news is that due to time constraints, I personally won't be able to work on it anymore. I hope that someone out there has the desire to take this project and do something interesting with it. Especially if you're a programmer who is interested in working in the video game industry some day, the knowledge that you'll pick up working on an NES emulator that runs on the PSX will be extremely useful even today in terms of understanding how this stuff all works.

If anyone is looking for ideas on where to get started, I could suggest a couple. First, the CD reading code could use a bit of error checking and retry logic. It's pretty dumb right now and it causes imbNES to freeze at the intro screen on some people's consoles with old lasers or poor quality CDR media. Also, the CPU and the GPU on the PSX could be made to run a little more asynchronously than they currently are. That should do a lot to get those games that just barely miss a solid 60fps up to speed. Of course, there's always more mappers to add, bugs to fix, and code to refactor.

Thank you to everyone who has used imbNES over the years. It was a lot of fun developing it and I can't wait to see version 1.4!

Sadly seven years later and 1.4 never became reality . I wonder if the source code was put on google code or source forge if that might bring some life back into the project

[Zepper]

- I believe there are two major issues:

a) You need a modded PSOne.
b) The compiler tools are not available, like MAME does.

- Another thing is to burn it into a CD; a "waste".

[Dwedit]

What about FCEU GX for the Wii? It works much better than the NES emulator for the Xbox.

[Bregalad]

It was the closet to experience to playing the NES on another system. I could play both systems side by side and it was hard to see the difference.

It has been a while since I used it, but if I remember well, the triangle channel didn't quite sounded right, but aside of that yeah it looked and sounded kind good and had decent compatibly (altough I used it even BEFORE I bought my used NES). Yet I remember it didn't run Castlevania III because it was MMC5.

a) You need a modded PSOne.
b) The compiler tools are not available, like MAME does.

- Another thing is to burn it into a CD; a "waste".

Nowdays a blank CD is less than $1 so that isn't really an issue. You just have to put all your roms on it and that's okay.
It's right you did need a modded PS1 or PSOne (I don't think it had to be the PSOne, altough it's the one I have), or to have an early PS1 and do the disk swap trick.

[peppers]

You don't really need real modifications to the PSone/ps1, all you really need is a game shark and a toothpick, although I find it easier to program a PIC and install it in there, or buy one from eurasia for cheap.

Back in the day I used IMBNES all the time but I'm not all that interested in it anymore personally. Really these days PSone is more of one of ther consoles being emulated rather than running emulators.

[Zepper]

What about FCEU GX for the Wii? It works much better than the NES emulator for the Xbox.

- Lawsuit!

[BootGod]

It was the closet to experience to playing the NES on another system. I could play both systems side by side and it was hard to see the difference.

...

Sadly seven years later and 1.4 never became reality .

Yeah, I always impressed with imbnes. The image quality in particular was very good, I think mostly because the PSX supported the low resolution mode used by the NES (or close to it). Whereas all the next-gen console emulators had to scale up to a higher resolution.

The sound was a bit muffled, IIRC, the emulator saved time by not using its own mixer and instead utilized the sound DSP and uploaded the samples individually (which automatically interpolated them).

It was a bit of a pain for me to use though. I didn't have a modded PS and had to use the GameShark + spring technique to boot.

I can't believe that was seven years ago already!

[HJRodrigo]

- I believe there are two major issues:

a) You need a modded PSOne.
b) The compiler tools are not available, like MAME does.

- Another thing is to burn it into a CD; a "waste".

I would think a PS2 with Free McBoot installed would work just fine. This would means no modchips or Boot discs are required . I have not tested imbNES on my PS2, so I will probably try it later today or tomorrow

@BootGod: I was surprised too when I realized 7 years had passed. The image quality was amazing and I could not believe a Play Station was capable of emulating the NES to such a degree

@Dwedit: Never really like using the Wii for emulating, as I have yet to buy joypads for it.

[pikmini]

hey guys, google alerts just told me there was a thread on nesdev about imbnes and i thought i'd just say that i can't believe how long it's been either! i wrote imbNES back when i first started college and it was one of the most challenging and most interesting things that i've ever worked on. i was also kind of disappointed that no one picked up the project after i released the source code but it wasn't too surprising given how old the ps1 was by that time and how much of a process it was to get it set up and working.

i was also pleasantly surprised to see bootgod in the thread who i assume is the same bootgod who wrote the rombank frontend for creating the imbNES iso images? thanks for all your help back then. your rombank program made the impossibly complicated task of assembling an iso with the emulator and roms into something much more manageable. cheers!

[BootGod]

i was also pleasantly surprised to see bootgod in the thread who i assume is the same bootgod who wrote the rombank frontend for creating the imbNES iso images? thanks for all your help back then. your rombank program made the impossibly complicated task of assembling an iso with the emulator and roms into something much more manageable. cheers!

No problem (Alan, was it?) It pales in comparison to the work you did! I liked it so much I was happy to lend a hand While googling just now to try and find your site again, I stumbled across this entertaining tutorial video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8FcACKm9Fg featuring that old rombank program. I was just waiting for it to crash or something

Ah it's making me all nostalgic now, I might have to bust out the PSX this weekend and fire it up!

[BMF54123]

Whereas all the next-gen console emulators had to scale up to a higher resolution.

The Wii actually handles low resolutions really well, probably because its vertical resolution is 480px and a lot of old consoles are 240px (or close enough that adding/subtracting a few lines doesn't matter). Makes for nice, clear scanlines and no flicker, provided you configure the emulator properly.

[pikmini]

The Wii actually handles low resolutions really well, probably because its vertical resolution is 480px and a lot of old consoles are 240px (or close enough that adding/subtracting a few lines doesn't matter).

i would imagine that any of the current gen consoles should be able to output an image that's pretty much exactly the same (to a casual observer) as the NES. they all support 480i which is in a sense what the NES is putting out, and they all have software configurable DACs so you can control the timing of the video signal for horizontal alignment and size.

when i was developing imbNES, i also happened to have a part time job in the control room of my school's distance learning center. they had a bunch of video equipment there that i used after hours to calibrate the output from imbNES to match an actual NES as closely as i could. i remember there were all these displays with oscilloscopes (i have no idea what they were called or actually used for) that i was able to use to line up the display in terms of X and Y position and size on screen. for the color palette, i brought in my nes, psx, super mario bros and a game genie and worked out some codes that would let me set the BG color to a specific palette entry on the NES and then freeze the game. then i used a custom color picker program i made for the psx and more oscilloscopes in the control room to manually match up each color, one at a time on the two devices. it took a long time (mostly spent entering in the 192 game genie codes i needed) to finish matching everything up, but once i was finished the result looked really nice.

[tepples]

i would imagine that any of the current gen consoles should be able to output an image that's pretty much exactly the same (to a casual observer) as the NES. they all support 480i which is in a sense what the NES is putting out, and they all have software configurable DACs so you can control the timing of the video signal for horizontal alignment and size.

If that's true, then why can't the Wii switch its component output from 480p to 540p, and from there to 540p with an extra scanline in every other frame (making 1080i)?

[ReaperSMS]

Software Configurable != Unlimited

Most VGA cards had software configurable DACs too, but at some point you run into the limits of the dot clock range or memory bandwidth avaliable

[Memblers]

It is a really good emulator, I thought the compatibility seemed better than most other emulators at the time. We had it on the same TV as the NES and they looked the same (a little better actually, because the NES was an NES2 with bars on the video). Now I know why.

Pretty much it did everything I wanted it to do in the last version, so I don't think I had any feature requests but I do remember emailing you because I was working on my old NES sound emulator for SNES and was curious if the SPU was anything like the SPC. It probably was just that there's no easy way around the interpolation for both of them, heh.

Myself, I haven't had a working PSX in years. I have 6 non-working systems now, all different revisions so I can't even make a frankenstein. It's cool when it works, but it's literally a pile of junk. Also likely that I just have all the abused ones, because they were free, heheh.