PuNES (NES Emulator)

[Lordmonkus]

For most people emulating the NES through Retroarch using either the Nestopia or FCEUX cores is plenty good and is by no means a terrible way to emulate the NES. But for anyone looking for better emulation I would like to recommend the emulator PuNES. This emulation has a 96.2% accuracy according to TASVideos testing http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/NESAccuracyTests.html

This emulator is pretty freaking awesome. After playing around with it for a while I like it a lot. It supports Retroarchs CG shaders, though not every single shader preset will work but crt-hyllian does and that is a very good shader. It also supports the Famicom Disk System and you can bind controller buttons to eject and flip disks like in Retroarch. You will need the DISKSYS.ROM file in the emulator directory for FDS support of course.

Anyways, just wanted to make this emulator known for people who maybe do not know about this fine piece of work.

Link for the emulator:

http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6928

Edit:

And before anyone jumps in with Nestopia and FCEUX being perfect. No NES emulator is perfect at the moment and it is not due to lack of cpu power or effort. It is because there are literally hundreds of custom mapper chips that came inside the cartridges and they all need to emulated individually. No emulator right now emulates 100% of them but PuNES and Mesen are the two closest.

[Jason Carr]

Hi @lordmonkus, have you gotten puNES to work with LaunchBox? It looks like it would be my favorite NES emulator but I can't seem to get it to start up fullscreen. I see the command line parameters but for some reason they're not working for me when launching games.

[Lordmonkus]

Just full screen it (alt + enter) with a game loaded and exit out with either alt + f4 or using your Launchbox key press combo. It should load up full screen the next time around, it does for me anyways.

[Jason Carr]

Ah, gotcha. Thanks @lordmonkus.

[Lordmonkus]

No problem.

[Jason Carr]

Yeah, there's no question. This is murdering pretty much all other emulators. It's 100% perfect for me with no audio glitches or anything, which is saying something because nothing else is playing without any glitches for me. Not to mention I can use Retroarch shaders. It's a huge win.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah it's a pretty sweet emulator and the shader support is nice even if it doesn't let you use every shader (Royale-Kurozumi and some others don't work). One game I found that doesn't work is Crisis Force but also doesn't work with Retroarchs Nestopia core, the FCEUMM core does work though and another person in another thread that the game works with Mednafens NES core. No Mednafen NES core in Retroarch though.

[DOS76]

What about the bnes core for RA

 

Edited August 27, 2016 by DOS76

[kmoney]

Very interesting...even though I do not really have any issues with the nestopia retroarch core I am intrigued to try this out. I did not even know this emulator existed. Thanks for pointing it out!

[Jason Carr]

Sadly Retroarch has been failing me for a long time now. All NES and SNES cores in Retroarch refuse to play without minor audio and video hiccups. It's the kind of thing that wouldn't bother most people but I find it incredibly jarring and annoying. I have this problem on three different systems with different video cards and sound cards and it's happening on all of them. I'd really like to find a fix but I feel like I've tried everything and I got so annoyed with it that I'm giving up on it for a while lol. All I can figure is that either people just aren't as picky as me, or there's something unique that I have in the three of my test systems that is causing it.

[kmoney]

@Jason Carr Very interesting as I have not had any issues with any of those cores. I wonder if you are using one of there nightly cores that have glitches as sometimes there nightly builds do have issues. I know a while ago I did have some issues with one of there nightly builds with audio pops and crackling.  Actually I use the Nestopia and the BSNES Accuracy cores with shaders applied. I also have vsync turned on and Hard GPU sync on along with hard gpu sync frames set at 0. So all of those settings are pretty much maxed out and I have not had any issues with audio and video. The only issue I ran into one time is because BSNES Accuracy is so gpu and cpu intensive, I was gettings slowdowns with audio glitches and I had to go into my Nvidia settings and set a profile up for retroarch and set the power managemnt mode from adaptive to prefer maximum performance and that fixed that issue. 

I hope you get your retroarch issues resolved soon.

[Lordmonkus]

@DOS76As far as I know the bNes core isn't that well developed. I could be wrong but for Retroarch NES Nestopia and Fceumm are the best.

@Jason CarrHave you messed with some oft he sound settings like lowering the audio latency at all ? If you set it too low it can cause sound issues or maybe you are using a shader that it just a bit too heavy on the resources. You could also try turning on Threaded Video to squeeze out a bit of extra performance.

There really shouldn't be any sound issues unless a) your system isn't fast enough (i doubt yours is too slow) b) audio latency set too low, 16 causes issues for me on most systems, 24 or 32 is usually good. or c) using a shader that just causes enough of a hit in performance.

Turn on your framerate counter to make sure you are getting 60 fps constantly. My guess is you got a setting that is causing the issue, try deleting your config file for those problem cores and see if it makes it run better.

[kmoney]

@lordmonkus I can get Crt Royale Kurozumi shader to work with punes. It doesnt work with the win64dx9 version but it does work with the win64sdl version of Punes which is for opengl.

[Lordmonkus]

Ahh cool, good to know.

Hmm it crashes for me when I load it. I downloaded the win64sdl version and set it to opengl rendering.

Edit:

Nevermind, I was loading the glsl version of Royale-Kurozumi, loaded the cg version even though the emulator is running opengl mode and it's fine.

[Sithel]

This is a great emulator! I would have never found this so thanks for that. I'm concerned that in my cabinet that the keys Ctrl, alt and shift will cause some issues because i'm noticing some on my test pc when I hit those keys. I don't however see a way to either disable those or change them in the input settings. Any ideas how I could do that maybe through an ahk setting for the emulator within launchbox?

[Sithel]

I seem to have answered my own question by doing some research. For anyone else, I edited the Emulator setting for punes in launchbox at the AutoHotKey Script tab. I added these lines to close the emulator and disable those keys i referred to.

; This section closes NESpunes when pressing Escape



$Esc::

{

Process, Close, {{{StartupEXE}}}

}



LShift::return



LAlt::return



LCtrl::return

 

Edited August 28, 2016 by Sithel

[Lordmonkus]

Cool, glad you figured out a way cause it looks like you can only rebind the hotkeys and not just null them out unfortunately.

[Moosetracks]

Has anyone figured out a way to make Punes start full screen?  

 

Thanks Sithel for the AHK script.  It solved another problem I was having!

 

 

[Lordmonkus]

Easy, when you load a game just hit  Alt + Enter to go into full screen then exit the game using Alt + F4 or Launchboxs exit key. The next time you load up using puNES it should load in full screen mode. It does for me anyways.

[marcobelloneon]

Since we're talking about nes accurate emulators, do you know the command to launch Mesen in fullscreen?