Emulation and Frequency Differences: Good/Bad Emulators and Settings

[kedawa]

I always enable vsync when I have the option, but I never really knew what perfect sync did.
The biggest issue I seem to have with emulators is that anything that uses a strobe effect to simulate transparency ends up looking really messed up and inconsistent. Shadows in NeoGeo games are the prime example. They just flicker randomly.
For GGPO, should I have autoframeskip enabled or disabled in FBA?

[OmegaFlareX]

For Saturn I use SSF, but I honestly haven't been able to confirm how the emulator's VSync option behaves. On one hand, it seems good to me, on the other, I've heard mentions of lag. Can anyone confirm how it behaves?

Lag-tastic. I run all emulators in windowed mode for two reasons - 1) there's no input lag and 2) it's much easier to get a 2x or 3x scaled original resolution that way. Needless to say, emus with vsync in windowed mode are what I stick with. Unfortunately SSF is not one of them, I have to choose between weird res+input lag or screen tearing. Usually I prefer the latter. Interestingly, if I record 60fps footage from Fraps in windowed mode, there's absolutely no screen tearing on playback. Why is that?

A couple more remarks that I didn't see here yet:
VisualBoyAdvance. Great for GBA stuff, but I've tried for years and cannot get GBC/GB games to run smoothly on it. With vsync turned on, I get really horrible audio issues every 30 seconds or so (I assume it's due to the program "catching up" or something). Both fullscreen and windowed. This has been the case for all 3 computers I've had since '05.

I couldn't pass up the 9.99 for all the Sega Collections on Steam. At first I thought the emulation was flawless, but it seems they fucked up the vertical resolution. For a comparison, boot up a vert shmup in Fusion, watch the scrolling background for a few seconds, then check the "Use NTSC aspect" option. Wavytown go. That's basically what vert scrolling looks like on Steam. At least the horizontal res is okay.

[Tain]

Lag-tastic. I run all emulators in windowed mode for two reasons - 1) there's no input lag and 2) it's much easier to get a 2x or 3x scaled original resolution that way. Needless to say, emus with vsync in windowed mode are what I stick with. Unfortunately SSF is not one of them, I have to choose between weird res+input lag or screen tearing. Usually I prefer the latter. Interestingly, if I record 60fps footage from Fraps in windowed mode, there's absolutely no screen tearing on playback. Why is that?

Actually, I always thought that windowed mode in Windows often forces the delayed type of VSync, which certainly would cause lag. Regardless, simply running in windowed mode is certainly no guarantee that you'll get no lag. No clue about the Fraps.

A couple more remarks that I didn't see here yet:
VisualBoyAdvance. Great for GBA stuff, but I've tried for years and cannot get GBC/GB games to run smoothly on it. With vsync turned on, I get really horrible audio issues every 30 seconds or so (I assume it's due to the program "catching up" or something). Both fullscreen and windowed. This has been the case for all 3 computers I've had since '05.

I've seen this, too, but I haven't looked into GBC/GB stuff enough. I'd try out MESS; I think it does GB/GBC perfectly.

I couldn't pass up the 9.99 for all the Sega Collections on Steam. At first I thought the emulation was flawless, but it seems they fucked up the vertical resolution. For a comparison, boot up a vert shmup in Fusion, watch the scrolling background for a few seconds, then check the "Use NTSC aspect" option. Wavytown go. That's basically what vert scrolling looks like on Steam. At least the horizontal res is okay.

Speaking of, I grabbed Alien Soldier on Steam. I wasn't really thinking ahead, so I should have expected it, but it's the PAL version. So it isn't a real videogame. Sucks.

[Cheebs]

If you run in windowed mode, you're frackin' up the aspect ratio on most games. CPS used pixels that were taller than they were wide. Ever notice how screen shots of Street Fighter Alpha look widescreen and the fighters look short n' fat...until they fall on their backs where they look crazy thin? Those images were never meant to be made with square pixels, and that is what you get in windowed mode. Most Nes, Snes, and TG16 games are the opposite with pixels that are supposed to be short and wide.

[Tain]

Some emulators let you force 4:3 in windowed mode, though.

[Frogacuda]

You know I want to tag this with a similarly finicky rant about filtering and scaling. Very few emulators really do this correctly. Generally there are one of two ways to resize to a bigger resolution: You can use a bilinear filter which gives everything on screen that soft, blurry, glaucoma kind of look, but eliminates any warping and generally looks smooth. Then you have unfiltered scaling, which preserves the hard edges and sharpness of an image, but if you aren't scaling in increments of the original res, you're going to get ugly warping, and if the pixel aspect doesn't match the screen aspect, you're fucked either way. This is why CPS ports on DC always looked blurry or ugly and didn't support the VGA box.

But there are a few emulators that fix this by offering an option for prescaling. What this does is scale the image up proportionally several times, and THEN filter it to fit the screen. The end result is the appearance of a perfectly crisp image that is smooth and even and can be fitted to the correct aspect ration. Only a very small number of emus do this right now, including MAME and MESS, but all of them should.

[Cheebs]

If you hit 1600 x 1200 and use some of the better crt simulators you can also get 3:4 without the glaucoma. Also: arcade vga card out to a real CRT.

I guess by the time they got to the DC there was no longer enough money to totally re draw brand new sprites for every frame like they did for SNES and Saturn ports.

[Tain]

Agreed 100% that everything should support prescaling. It makes too much sense.

[kedawa]

I try to stick with whole-number scaling and no filtering of any sort. I like them blocks sharp.

[Frogacuda]

I try to stick with whole-number scaling and no filtering of any sort. I like them blocks sharp.

Unless you're on a CRT, you're putting up with filtering anyway, because that's how your monitor does non-native resolutions.

Also, like I said, not great for stuff that has pixel aspect ratios that don't match the real world aspect ratios, like NES, TG-16, CPS2/3, etc.