I have been married to the concept of creating an ultimate emulation station for some time now, but without the knowledge to properly forge ahead with this project, personal aspirations have been stifled. So then, I come to the diehards here hoping to glean some creative inspiration on how to best approach achieving my following goals:
1.) I would like to have all of my console emulators running on a PC best suited for such errands. ie I want something that is ideal for gaming (PC recommendations go here)
2.) I would next like to pipe all the video signal from said PC to a professional level CRT display in true low resolution RGB. Also known as monitors that can handle 15 kHz video signals, these displays have been around for awhile in production studios and allegedly produce a picture sharper than a knife and more colorful than a rainbow. (For those curious I also intend to have a nice sound receiver handling auditory duties)
3.) I'd finally like to have this assembly fully realized by being able to use my controller interface (like a Wii Classic Controller) to remotely boot my selected emulator and game file (so I wouldn't have to access these commands via a mouse and keyboard) and thus allowing me to game on my comfy couch.
While typing this I am realizing that it sounds like I want a system closer to what the Wii's Virtual Console service already allows. Would installing stable emulation software on the Wii yield the results I am looking for? Please share your ideas and experiences!
ZSNES Fantasies
Moderator: ZSNES Mods
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Gil_Hamilton
- Buzzkill Gil
- Posts: 4294
- Joined: Wed Jan 12, 2005 7:14 pm
Re: ZSNES Fantasies
Wii is going to be somewhat limited.
It may work great for the 16-bit era, but if you want to do Playstation or, Althena forbid, Saturn emulation, it's a dead end.
I've not kept up with Wii development enough to know what all is and isn't available, but I'd wager that some of the less-mainstream systems are better represented on the PC.
I'd go with a dedicated PC. It's far more flexible.
Especially since you can interface a wider variety of controllers. I swap gamepads depending on what I'm doing.
Notably, a 3/3 pad layout is much better for Genesis emulation than the 2/2 of the Classic Controller.
And that's without getting into the time-honored tradition of building your own controllers. Not really relevant unless you're going to get serious about arcade emulation, but whatever.
Now, if you're ONLY doing SNES, this is mostly a moot point.
Also, 15KHz RGB has been around forever, and not just in the pro space. Consumer computing abandoned it eventually, but that doesn't mean it was NEVER available at that level.
In fact, VGA's 31.ETC KHz horizontal refresh was chosen specifically because it was exactly double the 15.WTF KHz horizontal refresh used in IBM'S EGA and CGA graphics adapters(and NTSC, not-so-coincidentally), so a simple line-doubling process was all that was needed for back-compatibility.
The primary selling point of NEC's MultiSync monitors(and others, who did not have a trademark on the term MultiSync) was that they worked properly with both 15- and 31-KHz HSyncs. This was, admittedly, a bigger deal on non-IBM platforms, since most IBM analog RGB was at the 31-KHz VGA rates.
And yes, a functional 15-KHz monitor will generate a much cleaner picture than a television will, as well as being more easily adjusted and calibrated.
That said, persuading emulators to output the same image scan a real system would produce can be difficult. If you're not planning to also use real hardware, I'd test with a standard 31-KHz VGA CRT first and see how that goes before moving on.
It may work great for the 16-bit era, but if you want to do Playstation or, Althena forbid, Saturn emulation, it's a dead end.
I've not kept up with Wii development enough to know what all is and isn't available, but I'd wager that some of the less-mainstream systems are better represented on the PC.
I'd go with a dedicated PC. It's far more flexible.
Especially since you can interface a wider variety of controllers. I swap gamepads depending on what I'm doing.
Notably, a 3/3 pad layout is much better for Genesis emulation than the 2/2 of the Classic Controller.
And that's without getting into the time-honored tradition of building your own controllers. Not really relevant unless you're going to get serious about arcade emulation, but whatever.
Now, if you're ONLY doing SNES, this is mostly a moot point.
Also, 15KHz RGB has been around forever, and not just in the pro space. Consumer computing abandoned it eventually, but that doesn't mean it was NEVER available at that level.
In fact, VGA's 31.ETC KHz horizontal refresh was chosen specifically because it was exactly double the 15.WTF KHz horizontal refresh used in IBM'S EGA and CGA graphics adapters(and NTSC, not-so-coincidentally), so a simple line-doubling process was all that was needed for back-compatibility.
The primary selling point of NEC's MultiSync monitors(and others, who did not have a trademark on the term MultiSync) was that they worked properly with both 15- and 31-KHz HSyncs. This was, admittedly, a bigger deal on non-IBM platforms, since most IBM analog RGB was at the 31-KHz VGA rates.
And yes, a functional 15-KHz monitor will generate a much cleaner picture than a television will, as well as being more easily adjusted and calibrated.
That said, persuading emulators to output the same image scan a real system would produce can be difficult. If you're not planning to also use real hardware, I'd test with a standard 31-KHz VGA CRT first and see how that goes before moving on.
KHDownloadsSquall_Leonhart wrote:DirectInput represents all bits, not just powers of 2 in an axis.You have your 2s, 4s, 8s, 16s, 32s, 64s, and 128s(crash course in binary counting!). But no 1s.
Re: ZSNES Fantasies
I honestly can't recall really any emulators that can output to those modes. I think it generally required specific video cards and DOS-based emulators. Probably hard-to-find stuff today, and probably no real modern emulators, unless they can work in windows, I guess (Does modern windows allow such low resolution modes, anymore?).
Maybe these people were born without that part of their brain that lets you try different things to see if they work better. --Retsupurae
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Gil_Hamilton
- Buzzkill Gil
- Posts: 4294
- Joined: Wed Jan 12, 2005 7:14 pm
Re: ZSNES Fantasies
I seem to recall SNES9x being low-res friendly, once you bully the system into believing, with powerstrip or whatever the cool kids use these days.
I've got no proof it works under Win7, but no real reason to doubt it would either..
Once you've convinced the OS that said resolution exists, ZSNES should be able to do it too, with the modern custom resolution feature.
But yeah, low-level MS-DOS stuff is the easy way, except that getting the hardware to play that way anymore is hard.
I've got no proof it works under Win7, but no real reason to doubt it would either..
Once you've convinced the OS that said resolution exists, ZSNES should be able to do it too, with the modern custom resolution feature.
But yeah, low-level MS-DOS stuff is the easy way, except that getting the hardware to play that way anymore is hard.
KHDownloadsSquall_Leonhart wrote:DirectInput represents all bits, not just powers of 2 in an axis.You have your 2s, 4s, 8s, 16s, 32s, 64s, and 128s(crash course in binary counting!). But no 1s.