Hardest games to emulate today?

[Sora de Eclaune]

I've been wondering lately... Disregarding unusual peripherals that can't currently be emulated in some way (i.e. Mouse Controller for Slide Adventure Mag Kid), what would be the hardest games to emulate today?

I'm going to be using these games to test out various emulators. I know you're really supposed to use a game you know very well, so that you can tell when there's even a slight problem, but having some kind of a baseline for knowing an emulator's or system's limits would be nice.

 

[FAST6191]

Peripherals which would be said to include cartridges and expansion packs with additional processing hardware, anti piracy and games that lean into tight timings or possibly undocumented aspects of hardware to do things that simpler emulators might not do. These are your emulator breakers (and sometimes flash cart breakers as well).

To an extent the expansion pack concept died with the SNES (the megadrive/genesis having maybe one example in an obscure racing game, plus things like in cart multitap for certain games. N64 only being stuff like real time clock for Japan only animal crossing) and gameboy/gameboy color -- I can point at technicalities for the GBA (Shrek whole films being otherwise unknown in the commercial world bankswitching) and DS (indeed the enhanced flash cart aka mostly DSTwo homebrew, or indeed flash cart firmwares themselves, being examples of extra processing onboard) but most things there are minimal.

If getting into this aspect of things my usual set of links is probably going to be
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011...-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/

https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
https://mgba.io/tag/debugging/

Many will maintain system specific lists as well but I have fewer of those to hand. Some of the FPGA (Mister, analogue pocket and the like) circles will also maintain them as self tests.
https://github.com/nba-emu/NanoBoyAdvance has a few for the GBA getting a bit more into the deliberate tests rather than games. Just because the commercial games might not go there does not mean homebrew and ROM hacks won't or can't one day benefit from pushing the limits.

You also get to broach the sometimes more subjective world of audio emulation (the game will play, the sound will play, if you whistled what you heard then nobody would know otherwise, and that is also not counting some of the DAC replacements and original composer replacement*).
https://www.hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php and wherever is doing the plugins for foobar usually being where the golden ear types hang out. Lack of musical talent, genetics and years of concerts, engines and power tools mean I am not one of those and don't hear many of the things they do (even if my oscilloscope can see it).

Getting super into the weeds you also have batch level testing. The original xbox initially using RAM that might not pass quality control seeing some models have visibly slower load times/load pauses vs later models using ostensibly the same hardware (no Amiga 500 vs 1000, DS vs DSi, 3DS vs N3DS type scenario) being an interesting one. Smash brothers contest debates on certain controllers being more frame accurate than other batches being an other, as is some of the stuff on N64 goldeneye speedrunning (technically is a real controller but a deliberately broken one).

*Donkey Kong as the original composer would have had it being one of the more noted examples https://gonintendo.com/stories/350643

 

[Jayro]

On the software side:
Booting up Goldeneye or Perfect Dark on N64 emulators is a great test, as some won't even boot due to the microcode issues that plague these ROMs, and if they DO manage to boot, they usually run like hot garbage with a black sky and very choppy framerate. Explosions going off can even freeze the games into single digit FPS slideshows.

ExciteBike 64 on the N64 is another "heavy" game for the system, but is a bit easier to get into the gameplay.


And on the Hardware side:
Apparently nobody wants to clone the original NES CPU and PPU, essentially making them open-source for the various open-hardware NES mainboard projects... And I'm not entirely sure why. Are they just afraid of "Big N" coming after them? Is there parts of the CPU and PPU that have gone undocumented, and still remain a mystery?

The Commodore 64 suffers a similar fate, but I believe it's CPU chips have successfully been cloned (finally!) so you can build a 100% open C64 at least... I'm hoping the NES chips will be next. (And no, I'm not suggesting using FPGA, but actually replicating and fabbing new hardware of the old chips, even if they're smaller and adapted to fit the original sockets.)

 

[captain_obvious]

Just a guess but the Saturn and PS3 are probably very hard to emulate because the hardware is rather complicated.

 

[KelSolaar]

Just a guess but the Saturn and PS3 are probably very hard to emulate because the hardware is rather complicated.

True. There is probably a reason to why we yet dont have any Saturn core for MiSTer or that Sega havent released a Saturn mini console.

 

[BlazeMasterBM]

WarioWare Twisted can be a bit of a pain to emulate. Of course, you'll likely want to play the game with real motion controls and none of that joystick crap. I got the game working on GBA emulators on my phone, but of course they make you pay for gyro controls. I don't recall if there's a 3DS inject of this game yet with working gyro.........

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

I always thought the DS would be nearly impossible to emulate well, but a nice phone and DraStic does it wonderfully well.

I thought the Wii would be pretty hard but I think as long as you have a Wii sensor bar thing for you PC and some actual Wiimotes Dolphin can do it well? (haven't tried it in spite of literally having everything to do it...) Probably because I have a Wii and HDMI adapter? I bought the USB sensor bar just because it was on sale for like 3 dollars or something. I thought it would be a fun one day project if I ever get enough time lol

Things I always thought would never get emulated... Where there is a will there is a way.

These days the biggest road blocks to any efforts to emulation would be encryption. That is the single largest problem in my opinion.

 

[M7L7NK7]

On the software side:
Booting up Goldeneye or Perfect Dark on N64 emulators is a great test, as some won't even boot due to the microcode issues that plague these ROMs, and if they DO manage to boot, they usually run like hot garbage with a black sky and very choppy framerate. Explosions going off can even freeze the games into single digit FPS slideshows.

Maybe a decade ago, even Goldeneye has worked fine in Retoarch on Switch for years

 

[windwakr]

I've been wondering lately... Disregarding unusual peripherals that can't currently be emulated in some way (i.e. Mouse Controller for Slide Adventure Mag Kid), what would be the hardest games to emulate today?

I'm going to be using these games to test out various emulators. I know you're really supposed to use a game you know very well, so that you can tell when there's even a slight problem, but having some kind of a baseline for knowing an emulator's or system's limits would be nice.

I know you said it's not the topic of the thread, but just FYI Slide Adventure is emulatable using this PR for DeSmuME.
https://github.com/TASEmulators/desmume/pull/737
Only the Windows frontend has been hooked up to the add-on, BTW.

Spoiler

The game isn't very good.

 

[SeventhSon7]

 

[Jayro]

For whatever reason, the God of War games from the PS2 and PSP era bring even the best emulators to their knees.

 

[Jayinem]

Just a guess but the Saturn and PS3 are probably very hard to emulate because the hardware is rather complicated.

I would say Xbox 360 over PS3. RPCS3 currently has 68% compatiiblity, and that includes most exclusives which is what matters because if you can play the game on another emulator or PC who cares right. However the Ratchet & Clank games for PS3 aren't working great yet. Xenia (X360 emulator) doesn't have near that amount of playable games at this stage. I've played a little of Lost Odyssey for Xenia it's said to be playable all the way through.

For Saturn again personally I only look at exclusives like why would I need to play X-Men vs Street Fighter on a Saturn emulator when I can just play the arcade on MAME? I was able to play most of the exclusive Saturn games I wanted on SSF emulator although it's not the most user friendly emulator.

 

[Jayro]

The original NESticle Emulator ran on Windows 95 and DOS, and was amazing. It got me into graphical NES ROM hacking too.

 

[pojes]

On the software side:
Booting up Goldeneye or Perfect Dark on N64 emulators is a great test, as some won't even boot due to the microcode issues that plague these ROMs, and if they DO manage to boot, they usually run like hot garbage with a black sky and very choppy framerate. Explosions going off can even freeze the games into single digit FPS slideshows.

ExciteBike 64 on the N64 is another "heavy" game for the system, but is a bit easier to get into the gameplay.


And on the Hardware side:
Apparently nobody wants to clone the original NES CPU and PPU, essentially making them open-source for the various open-hardware NES mainboard projects... And I'm not entirely sure why. Are they just afraid of "Big N" coming after them? Is there parts of the CPU and PPU that have gone undocumented, and still remain a mystery?

The Commodore 64 suffers a similar fate, but I believe it's CPU chips have successfully been cloned (finally!) so you can build a 100% open C64 at least... I'm hoping the NES chips will be next Eduk8u. (And no, I'm not suggesting using FPGA, but actually replicating and fabbing new hardware of the old chips, even if they're smaller and adapted to fit the original sockets.)

i would rather say its emulators instead of games that need certain hardware specs! the emulator that runs a lot of games properly but needs really powerful hardware is pcsx2. You'll need at least dual core and a powerful gfx! gamecube is also emulated very well with dolphin. but for that it also needs a powerful gfx card and processor. dolphin runs ok though on my 2,6 Ghz Dual Core AMD, with a 2005 mobo and 2gb of ram. Gfx card is a 7600GT. With this setup I can emulate almost everything except psx2!

 

[Kwyjor]

https://unmamed.mameworld.info/ is fine reading for this sort of thing. Or at least it used to be. I think a lot of stuff in there now is unemulated just because it's completely obscure.

(I was waiting for the longest time for Lupin III: The Typing to be emulated, but I think it is now? It's just another Sega NAOMI game, but I think the keyboard was a sticking point. The weird thing is that nobody seems to have recorded any videos of it in emulation.)

 

[Xdqwerty]

mario tennis 64 i think