The Struggling Emulators (N64, PS1, NEO GEO, MAME)

[Quasar]

After spending almost a week trying to maximise my swiss gc and attempting all methods I could find, I've come to the conclustion there is nothing left to be done when it comes to trying to get the later generation of console emulations going. This being N64, PS1, NEOGEO and MAME. I would like to recap my thoughts for others to avoid the same hurdles.

N64- The best thing I was able to achieve for smooth running N64 games was using the injector from the zelda collectors disc nintendo nonofficial emulator, (n64inj_10 + exp-n64v2), in order to play mario kart 64! It also worked on some other games from the same era, super mario 64, star fox 64 and ocarina of time, however there is no way to save, so it is best used for mk64 and sf64. Otherwise Not64(Mupen) > Cube64, and is marked as still supported? The games I wanted to run most were the mario party games and a few other classics, Pokemon S2, Yoshi's Story, Rogue Squadron, BanjoK, but I don't expect that to ever be possible since as it stands no N64 games seem to be playable at a satisfactory level through emulation, except maybe SM64.

PS1- There aren't a ton of PS1 games I'm particularly interested in, but for any to be seen, the emulation for it is terrible, like the N64, and the fact that it is barely running even for wii is a defeating sign for the gc, but perhaps work could be done on this in the future to potentially play specific titles.

NEOGEO- With the success of the neocd-redux emulator, I was really happy to discover this awesome line of arcade titles for the NGCD. I was confused at first about what kind of roms were required and how you need to format the NEOGEO CD (not NEOGEO) roms with the mp3s in a folder labeled "MP3" and renaming them Track02, Track03, etc, then pulling the iso contents to the root folder. But then you have an array of later games that look fantastic but were not on the CD version (Metal Slug 3+, King of Fighters 2000+, Sengoku3, WakuWaku7, Blazing Star) since, from what I understand, they required the speed only found through a cartridge at the time. There is the Retroarch FBAlpha_neogeo.dol, but it seems to have little if any support and I will talk more about Retroarch consistency in the next section. There appears to be much more success for the wiis emulation of NEOGEO, even increasing the game size that can be opened through something to do with a Virtual Memory emulator version and creating dedicated Caches for each games. I attempted to use some of these tools to no results.

MAME- Alas, the real stumper. Between the different MAME versions, 2000(.37b), 2003(.78), etc, and Retroarch's lack of consistency in testing their emulator releases, this was a real headache.
I was able to get 1-2 more basic games running for both CPS1 (Knights of the Round, Ghouls & Ghosts) and MAME (Joust) which was a promising sign that at least something worked. This was of course after rolling back to a version from a few years ago. There seems to be no way to try MAME2003 games for gc, only cores/dol's for wii which do not translate over such as MAME2003PLUS. There were some attempts to create cores for certain MAME game lists across these forums, but I never found anything consistent. If only Retroarch could give this a more thorough look over or the wii guys with MAME2003+ could consider a port.

Now, I understand it might be asking a lot for the gamecube with its limited resources and I really aught to me satisfied with everything that's already possible, but at the same time, I feel like it really is capable of pushing into better performance for these emulations. My interests of which I would like to see more would differ from other's, but all should be given another look over. Unfortunately I have no qualifications for such a task. Maybe there is even another hardware mod that could push its performance for the poorly running emulators.
I hope this helps to outline where things are at with Gamecube's back console capabilities. All other emulators are mostly remarkable from what I've seen, but these are the only ones left that seem to struggle.

[Andross89]

...NEOGEO- With the success of the neocd-redux emulator, I was really happy to discover this awesome line of arcade titles for the NGCD. I was confused at first about what kind of roms were required and how you need to format the NEOGEO CD (not NEOGEO) roms with the mp3s in a folder labeled "MP3" and renaming them Track02, Track03, etc, then pulling the iso contents to the root folder. But then you have an array of later games that look fantastic but were not on the CD version (Metal Slug 3+, King of Fighters 2000+, Sengoku3, WakuWaku7, Blazing Star) since, from what I understand, they required the speed only found through a cartridge at the time. There is the Retroarch FBAlpha_neogeo.dol, but it seems to have little if any support and I will talk more about Retroarch consistency in the next section. There appears to be much more success for the wiis emulation of NEOGEO, even increasing the game size that can be opened through something to do with a Virtual Memory emulator version and creating dedicated Caches for each games. I attempted to use some of these tools to no results...

I could be wrong but the problem with the Neo Geo CD was the choice to have less memory. This prevented all MVS games from being received. One of the worst choices I've seen a company make. But thanks to this it works on GameCube.

Any system above is a problem. The GameCube already suffers from the SNES and its special chips.

[Extrems]

PS1- There aren't a ton of PS1 games I'm particularly interested in, but for any to be seen, the emulation for it is terrible, like the N64, and the fact that it is barely running even for wii is a defeating sign for the gc, but perhaps work could be done on this in the future to potentially play specific titles.

The links for CubeSX/WiiSX on the wiki weren't updated. You should have another go.
https://github.com/emukidid/pcsxgc/releases

[sakax]

Speed improvements in the soft graphics plugin thanks to tips from @extremscorner - Upwards of 15% speed increase across all titles.

he strikes again


the day you manage to boot triforce arcade games on the cube I bring you personally a bottle of champagne in Canada!

[Quasar]

Well that's one practically knocked off the list already, and another added haha.
The performance on cubesx is way better now! Thank you.

[Nuguns]

I also wanted cube64 just to play mario party and also mario 64. Whats the real state of mario party's, how unplayable is it or for better playable is it?

[emu_kidid]

Anything that wants to read ROM from SD and not memory is going to struggle, Mario Parties are all 32MB so they will have lots of constant loading, plus from what I recall there was flickering and layer ordering issues.

[Quasar]

Updating based on my other thread and recent discoveries.

PS1:
Now that I've had more time to throw games at wiisx, I'm astounded how many games run exceedingly well. There are still the handful of dynamic world games that arent very playable. Namedly Spyro, Klonoa, Crash, Gex 3, but the ps1 library is vast and the majority of other games run quite smooth so I consider this a great success.

N64:
It was just last year I was testing that almost no games at all ran on the emulator. Perhaps I wasn't using the right version? But now with not64, I can run a handful of games as I've listed in "Cursed/Blessed 64". Mario party 3, a game I was really happy to see running still struggles from flicker and audio problems. With the audio fix (scale pitch), only the flicker problem persists. With the flicker fix (fb textures), the map will lag out. Some mini games I had to use this fix in order to play, then I would swap back afterward.
Anyways, the progress is significant, and though it's still not a great way to experience a lot of these games, there's still some great games running well now. Smash, Banjo, F-Zero.

Mario kart arcade:
So I did get this running on emulator a while back. It took a heck of a lot of setting up and by the time I got it working, I'd lost my enthusiasm. I guess since it runs on dolphin, it'd make sense the gamecube could play it, but i'm not worried about this one.

Arcade:
Retroarch. A navigation nightmare between the versions, romsets and posts. It seems retroarch rolls out their updates across platforms which repeatedly invalidates the working versions for gc? There is the 1.0.0.2 version found in the "1.7.6 not working thread". It manages to play most CPS1 games fine. But Couldnt get any to work on CPS2 or Neo. Swear I had joust working on a previous version before. Unfortunate there doesn't seem to be support here to unlock this slew of arcade games.

Other:
Some gba titles I still get sound stutter. Zero mission, Rayman.
In Hugo, Cadash has flicker.

[Andross89]

...Klonoa...

Unfortunately, it is not possible to finish it. I think that in the last form of the last boss the GameCube will restart. Something quite frustrating considering the time spent playing it.

This also happens with the last three Goemon, Kaisoku Tenshi and Digimon Digital Card Battle. Probably many others.

[Papy.G]

There are a bunch of arcade games that had been emulated through "official" releases, in the form of arcade games compilations, such as Midway arcade treasures, Namco museum, and some others that I probably don't know about, you may encounter Joust in one of them.

[Quasar]

Oo, I found it on Midway arcade treasures. Thanks! Now just to clear something off the sd card.. or get a bigger one.

[Papy.G]

Retroarch Milestones for me are: 1.0.0.2, 1.9.2, and I have to test the last version to see if the core still has to be loaded twice to work as it is the case from the 1.9.3 on.

Don't forget to run RA from the desired scan frequency for the targeted emulator/game already set in SWISS, as RA on GC can't switch from 50Hz to 60Hz back and forth.

It's a big flaw as it should be able to straight output the native consoles resolutions on the GC instead of simulating and scaling twice.