A small handful of games may look better (?), since they assumed that the TV was never able to display the leftmost and rightmost 8 pixels. From, example, Energy Breaker did something crazy by clipping the left and right 8-pixels of all its backgrounds, but yet the backdrop color shows through, making it look like this (without the cropping).
A number of other games leave behind 'buggy' artifacts on the sides of the screens because they assumed that most TVs will cut them off anyway. And old TVs also cut out the top and bottom pixels too. Personally, I never liked cropped pixels anyway. But I figured if I added such an option, I would crop it both ways for games such as Energy Breaker. And instead of 3 other options to crop horizontally only / crop vertically only / crop both horizontally and vertically, and multiply that by 2 for fit and fullscreen, I went for crop (both horizontally and vertically) for fit, and another one for fullscreen.
Yes, an NES emulator will be easier and more manageable. Of Nestopia, and FCE, which is the better performer in terms of speed?
Thanks for the explanation, I actually wasn't aware there were games that assumed stuff on the sides would get cut off. No biggie for me anyway since all I use is the 4:3 and no stretch modes depending on games. Was just curious what the logic behind cropping sides was since it seems like an unintentional bug to me, glad to know you did it intentionally.
As for Nestopia vs FCE, I think they both run equally bad on O3DS (the RetroArch implementations at least) however based on some quick testing I did right now with those games I mentioned earlier, FCE has better performance.
Furthermore Nestopia seems to struggle with booting the first of Gokuden games while it works fine on FCE, and if that wasn't enough Nestopia doesn't seem to produce accurate colors in Castlevania.
So I'd say FCE, besides it seems to be more in line with what others have requested in the last couple of posts.
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It's kind of hard to believe there's no decent NES emulator on the old 3DS.
What's the FPS like for FCE?
It is indeed hard to believe but that is the reality. NesDS (the NES emulator for DS) literally runs better than any of the 4 on O3DS (VC, and RetroArch's Nestopia/FCE/QuickNES). Framerate wise, I tested in couple of games and on average FCE seemed to have about 13 more FPS than Nestopia (average of about 20 in Nestopia vs average of about 33 in FCE).
On a side note, it's also worth noting there isn't a good Super Game Boy/Game Boy/Color emulator on 3DS either. GameYob on DS works flawlessly, but the 3DS GameYob port has been abandoned for a good year now and the sound is completely broken in it with all kinds of crackling, static and even framerate not being up to snuff. And the VC emulator doesn't support SGB emulation so forget about color in games like Metroid 2 (unless you use a romhack) or the Generation 1 Pokemon games (Red/Green/Blue) that aren't Yellow. This also includes the famous Pokemon Brown (a prequel to Prism) romhack which also doesn't have color without SGB's palette emulation. As you might know, Super Game Boy was a SNES addon that also came with pre-programmed dynamic palettes for some Game Boy games, those included Metroid 2 and the Generation 1 Pokemon (of which Brown is also a romhack of).
So perhaps if you weren't interested in NES you could check GameYob's 3DS source and see if you could improve the performance and fix the sound.
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...Is there really a substantial difference between the current 3D slider implementation and RetroArch's? I'm not seeing it.
(New 3DS here.)
There is a very substantial difference, you probably didn't notice because you put the slider all the way to the max. Run RetroArch and then adjust the slider very, very slowly a little bit and you will notice that it actually has 3 different states of the faux 3D, with the last one being the "merged screens" technique as we currently have in SNES9x. The reason we're asking about this is because the 1st and 2nd states don't suffer from having to look dead-on at the screen to get the sharper image and don't suffer from the merged screens bleeding. First one being a softer image, while second state being the sharp pixels one which is what we're after.