NES Emulator issues

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I as a video game fan love to play old-school emulators such as NES and SNES emulators. However in Ubuntu I'm getting crappy sound and frame rate on both. Anything you suggest.

Also would setting a virtual box and running NES and SNES Games under WIndows be a good idea.

Is this just within the emulators, or do you notice it system-wide? I know that my speakers don't have properly working audio drivers under Linux, so I have crappy sound. And many graphics cards, especially Nvidea, are not yet fully working with Linux-native drivers. Or, if you have Intel graphics, the Ubuntu devs broke those in Jaunty.


Emulation inside virtualiztion? Yes, that is a very good idea, if only for the geek points.

Learn to compile your own Linux kernel for optimal performance.

Recompiling the kernel won't change the fact that my speakers don't have a fully-functioning audio driver. Apple likes to keep everything nice and secretive, and it takes a while for the reverse-engineering to happen. Same goes for anyplace you are stuck using binary-only drivers (like for Nvidia, if I'm not mistaken). You aren't going to recompile that driver, so it won't make any difference.

Yeah, it looks like a driver problem. Have you used VirtualBox under your current setup? I doubt that Windows run well if even NES emulation is slow.

To Orwell,
I haven't used Mac before, but did Apple actually used a strange sound chip? I thought most just use some off the shelf HDA codec.

Hell no. Nvidia works great. Its ATI that sucks the big one. I swapped from twin ati x1650 pros to a single nvidia 9800-gt and I can run eve online at full settings with no errors on my 1920x1200 monitor.

It's a hardware issue- the Macbook has three speakers, but currently the Linux driver misses the one in the middle. As a result sound quality sucks.

@Fuzzy: OK, I had thought it was Nvidia that was still causing problems with binary-only drivers. My ATI works fine, but then it's an old one. And I haven't tested it for gaming yet- don't have enough RAM to even start up an FPS.

Hm, y'know what just occurred to me? My iMac is wifi-capable, but I haven't ever tested to see if the card is recognized under Debian... be back soon. EDIT: Nope, my wifi isn't recognized out of the box. As it's a desktop system, I'm not even going to bother getting wifi. It'll always be next to a wall and an Ethernet port.

Back to Gamefreak's question: I really doubt you would get better performance by running the emulator inside a virtual machine, unless it's the emulator itself that's sucking. Try running some native Linux games like OpenArena or Nexuiz. If those don't have performance issues, it's likely the emulator's fault rather than a broken driver, so you might get better performance by putting it in a Windows virtualbox.

Even if you don't get better performance though, serious geek cred if you do emulation inside virtualization. Bonus points for VNC'ing to the whole mess from somewhere else.

If u don't post your specs not even Orwell or fuzy will be able to help,

Step 1: Stop using emulation for your emulation
Step 2: Download fceu for your operating system
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit

Thanks Orwell, I have used your advice and have downloaded the latest tar.gz from Intels website. Now my SNES emulator works better than in Windows. I still have to tackle the NES emulator though.

You can use Nesticle together with Wine to get NES emulation.

For myself I use this startup line when I'm playing NES games:
fceux Zelda.nes --opengl 0 --sound 1 --bpp 8 --soundq 0 --pal 1 --frameskip 1

Makes me able to play NES games over here on my old Powerbook. No problems. It's a bit cpu intensive, though.

Here's something that may be interesting to you, gamefreak, and those of you looking to play NES games: the VirtualNES at virtualnes.com, an NES emulator that runs as an applet, so you can play games in your browser. From my experience using it in Firefox on my acer aspire running Mint (a Linux distro based on Ubuntu), it runs great, although it sometimes lags.

They make a big deal on the site about how, unlike most emulators, this one is perfectly legal because you are running ROMs for games which they have paid for and are hosting on their servers, although that means you are limited to the ROMs that they make available, which is a fairly extensive, though not complete selection from the NES library. You can download the applet as a .jar file as well, so you could play using your own ROMs, provided that they use one of the NES memory mappings that has been implemented for the vNES.

I've been taking a look at the source, and its interesting to see the details of how the NES works, and how the author handles things like the rendering procedure for displaying graphics on an analog TV screen, emulated on a digital display.

If your computer can take it, you could always try bsnes.

Nestacle used to be good simulator, however, it's not updated any more.