Beginners Guide to Emulation

[Lordmonkus]

This guide is aimed at people that are just getting started out with emulation but hopefully there are some tips in here to help some of the more advanced users as well. I won't be going into any super advanced subjects or emulator specific details at all. This is also just a guide to the basics, you should always refer to the emulators website and documentation on how to use them. I will however try and provide my opinion on what I feel is the best overall emulator in terms of both quality and ease of use. This means that while in some cases there may very well be better emulators in terms of emulation quality but their "new user friendliness" really isn't there. This means there are some great high quality emulators I won't be talking about but I may mention them by name but nothing beyond that.

Section 1:
What emulators to use ?

This really is a tough one because there are a ton of different emulators and different people will have different requirements. For the purposes of this guide though I will stick with the basic and popular consoles. Also I will only talk about stand alone emulators and not Retroarch but I will take a moment right now to talk about it. Retroarch really is amazing and I really suggest using it once you get your feet wet with the basics and want more from your emulation experience but it really is not for the total beginners. I did write up a startup guide though for anyone wanting to get started using and can be found here: 

 

Now that Retroarch is out of the way lets talk about some of the popular and common systems that people want to emulate:

Nintendo Entertainment System

If you start out Googling NES Emulator you will most likely find Nestopia or Fceux as the more popular and older options and while they are good emulators and not bad choices I feel there is one much better choice and is very easy to get up and running, Mesen. This emulator is quite simply the best stand alone NES emulator out there today, it is very easy to use and is extremely accurate. Two other very good options are puNES and Bizhawk.

Links:
Mesen: https://www.mesen.ca/
Bizhawk: http://tasvideos.org/BizHawk.html
puNES: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=6928

Super Nintendo

Probably the next most common system to emulate and there really is only one option here for the beginner and that is Snes9x. No other emulator has the simplicity and quality packaged together in one. Zsnes is the old school emulator that many people still use but is horribly outdated and buggy with many games, it really is only worth using if your computer is ancient and you only want to play the top 50 games. Higan and BSnes are both extremely high quality emulators but they require the use of special chip dumps to make certain games work, games such as the MegaMan X series and Mario Kart. Those special chip dumps can be a bit tricky to find but with a little Googling you can find them, it is because of this extra step though I am not recommending these emulators to beginners.

Links:
Snes9x: http://www.snes9x.com/ 
Snes9x Download (get the 1.55 or latest version at the time of reading): http://www.s9x-w32.de/dl/
Bsnes: https://bsnes.dev
Higan (If you want to look at it): https://byuu.org/

Nintendo 64

The best choice currently is Simple64.

Links:
Simple64 : https://simple64.github.io/

Nintendo Gamecube and Wii

There is only one option here, Dolphin. This emulator is fairly simple to setup though the controller setup may be a bit confusing for new users it isn't too bad. The emulator overall though is very user friendly, does not require any bios files and its emulation quality is quite high given how relatively new the hardware is.

Links:
Dolphin: http://www.dolphin-emulator.com/

Sega Master System, Game Gear, Genesis, CD, 32X

This is going to cover Segas 8 and 16 bit consoles, the Master System, Game Gear, Genesis, Sega CD and 32X. The Kega Fusion emulator is probably the best choice here though Gens is not a bad choice at all. Both are very simple to set up and get working. Both will require bios files for the CD functionality to work though, more on bios later on in the guide. Both Fusion and Gens are old and outdated now but they are pretty much the only choices when it comes to 32X. For the other Sega consoles mentioned here Retroarchs GenesisGX Plus core is the superior emulator but because of reasons mentioned above I am recommending Fusion or Gens. Honorable mention however go to Blastem which is an up and coming high quality Genesis emulator but its UI and setup is not very user friendly at the time of writing this.

Links:
Fusion: http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/genesis/fusion.html Unfortunately no homepage for the emulator.
Gens: http://gens.me/
Blastem: https://www.retrodev.com/blastem/

Sega Saturn

As much as I would like to recommend something I cannot recommend anything to people totally new to emulation. All of the choices for it have issues in one form or another but I will say that if you are seriously interested in emulating the Saturn take the time to learn how to use Mednafen or Retroarchs Beetle Saturn core which is built off of Mednafens code. Both of these do require a fairly good CPU to drive it and are very picky about the quality of the disk image dumps, there are a lot of bad Saturn dumps out there and you are required to have proper bios files. Two other options for Saturn emulation are SSF and Yabause but both have their own issues. SSF requires you to either mount disk images using a virtual CD program such as Virtual CloneDrive or DaemonTools. Yabause is more user friendly but is a very buggy emulator.

Sega Dreamcast

Redream is the easiest to use Dreamcast emulator but does have major issues with all of the Windows CE games right now but overall this is a fantastic emulator. It is free but does have a premium option for 5$ you can unlock the resolution scaling.

Demul is the better emulator in terms of compatibility and accuracy but does have higher system requirements and is a bit of a pain to setup.

Links:
Redream: https://redream.io

Sony Playstation

Duckstation is the best stand alone choice now though you do need to have a bios for it to function. It is extremely easy to setup and use and the quality of this emulator is outstanding. Use ePSXe only if you are incapable of obtaining a bios file.

This one is pretty simple, much like the SNES there is only one emulator that packages both quality and ease of use into a single emulator and that is ePSXe, just make sure to use version 2.0.0 or newer. It has a fairly simple to use UI and gives you the option to use it's own built in high level emulated bios so you don't have to go looking for a bios file, though having the bios could make a difference in certain games. Like in the previous sections there are other options that technically offer better accuracy but their UI is not friendly and they are a pain to use. Mednafen and Xebra are both high quality but suck to use.

Links:
Duckstation: https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation
ePSXe: http://www.epsxe.com/
Xebra: http://www.emutopia.com/index.php/emulators/item/299-sony-playstation/1221-zebra

Sony Playstation Portable

Much like the Dolphin emulator for Gamecube / Wii this system only has one emulator, is super simple to setup and is very high quality, also no bios requirements.

Links:
PPSSPP: http://ppsspp.org/

Sony Playstation 2

At first I wasn't even going to talk about this system but I figured I may as well because it is a well known and popular system. I was hesitant to talk about this emulator because while it plays a giant percentage of the games it is fairly glitchy and when using a hardware renderer it essentially requires settings on a per game basis to get as much out of the emulator as possible. I really don't consider this a new user friendly emulator but it's not exactly awful either, it certainly lacks the polish that Dolphin or PPSSPP has. Get the latest nightly builds if you intend on using this, the stable builds are quite old in comparison and there have been big improvements overall.

Links:
PCSX2: https://pcsx2.net/

TurboGrafx 16 / PC Engine

This is only going to be covering the basic system and not the CD or the SuperGrafx. For the totally new to emulation person Ootake is a great little emulator which is very simple to use. While it does emulate the CD it does require you to mount the disk image. Another good emulator choice is MagicEngine but it is not free so you would have to buy a copy of it.

Links:
Ootake: http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/pcengine/ootake.html
MagicEngine: http://www.magicengine.com/uk_index.php?sessid=PtxobxixD-vjQWg00krsGAw6LGBA

Arcade

There is only one real option here and that is the grand daddy of arcade emulators, Mame. While not super user friendly it is the best and most reliable way of emulating the arcade stuff. More information further below in Section 4. There is the emulator Final Burn Alpha (FBA) but I really do not recommend using this as a new user at all, finding good rom sets for this can be quite troublesome. This is not to say that FBA is a bad emulator because it isn't at all, it's quite good but it is not better than Mame and more troublesome when starting out.

Links:
Mame: http://mamedev.org/

Honorable Mention Emulators

I wanted to mention 2 multi system emulators that are quite good, Mednafen and Bizhawk. Both of these do a very excellent job but do have some minor drawbacks that hold them back just a bit. Mednafen is amazing and easily does the best job at emulating the TurboGrafx16/CD, Playstation and Saturn but the lack of a built in UI really hinders it for new people. There are 3rd party UIs you can get for it I have found them to be lacking in the user friendliness department as well, something to look into though if you want to look into it.

Bizhawk is also a great multi system emulator and has a nice user friendly UI, very easy to set and a nice built in bios checker so you know if your bios files are good or not. A lot of the "cores" it uses to emulate specific systems are based on other emulators code much like Retroarch does and their NES core is 100% accurate (their claims). Some of Bizhawks emulator cores are based off of Mednafens code.

Links:
Mednafen: https://mednafen.github.io/
Bizhawk: http://tasvideos.org/BizHawk/ReleaseHistory.html

Section 2:
Where to get roms and what to watch out for ?

I certainly cannot and won't be providing any links to rom sites I will give some site names that you can use Google to find. The internet archive has quite a lot of stuff and they have a copyright exemption which means they are legally allowed to have their downloads. They should be the first place you look for stuff and you do need to register an account. Emuparadise has a lot of roms for most every system but you should only use it for cart based consoles. Their CD based disk images can be hit or miss in terms of quality and some emulators may or may not work with them. Their forums are actually a much better source for stuff than their main site and you will need to register a free forum account to get access to the downloads. Another site that is decent for some stuff is theisozone but I only use that site if I can't find what I am looking for elsewhere. If by some chance neither of these 3 sites has what you are looking for in terms of console based systems then you may have to dig deeper into Googles search but what you find could be hit or miss, there are a lot of old and bad roms and disk images out there and shady sites looking to make you jump through ad loops to get what you want. To get romsets for Mame I highly suggest using the pleasuredome. The old pleasuredome has shutdown but it is not gone, you can get the latest Mame sets on their github.io site, doing a Google search for "pleasuredome github.io" should give you the site with the first result.

When looking for cart based console games you will want to look for sets that are known as the "No-Intro" sets. These are clean perfectly dumped rom images and generally you need these as a base when patching a rom for a rom hack. For CD based systems you will want to look for disk image dumps from the groups "ReDump" and "DarkWater" if you see these names in the name of a download the chances are very high that these are perfect disk images and they should be in the format of 2 files, a .cue and .bin (sometimes multiple .bin files), if what you are downloading is not from one of these two groups you may very well end up with a bad disk image that won't work with the better quality emulators.

Emuparadise and The Iso Zone have both removed all their download links which does make like a little more difficult to get games. However the EmuParadise forums (as of me writing this) are still functional and have all sorts of goodies including full sets. The Iso Zone  staff have made a new site called RetroZone and they in the process of moving everything over to there.

 

For arcade roms this gets a little bit tricky and I will talk about this further down below in the guide in Section 4.

 

Section 3:
Bios and other files.

Bios are simply put the firmware or operating system of a console, that is an over simplification but you get the idea and some emulators require them to work properly. Just like with normal game roms I cannot and won't provide any links to them, they are covered by the same copyright laws and protections. Generally speaking it is most commonly required to emulate CD based systems but occasionally you will need them for a non CD based systems such as the Famicom Disk System for example. This is something you will have to check the emulators documentation to find out whether a bios file/s is required or not and where they should be located on your system in relation to the emulator. Some emulators require you to place them in a specific folder while others will just ask you where you have them located. Also the emulator may give you more details such as a correct MD5 checksum to make sure you have the right file (more on MD5 checksums below). If you plan on playing games from multiple regions you will need the bios for each region or else they will not work.

Special Chips: I mentioned earlier in the Super Nintendo section about special chip dumps being required for BSnes and Higan to get full functionality and compatibility. These special chips were chips used in certain specific games to give the Super Nintendo more processing power. The more accurate emulators like BSnes and Higan requires these chips while the Snes9x emulator does not because that emulator emulates those chips within the emulator.

I mentioned before about MD5 checksums and you will need to check them to make sure they are correct. Sometimes you can just do a simple Google search, download and rename them to what the emulator is looking for specifically but this is not always they case. You will want to check the emulators documentation for information and hopefully they have the MD5 checksum listed and that way you can check yourself when you download a file if it is the correct one or not. If it has the correct MD5 you can simply rename it to what the emulator requires and it will work.

Here are a couple of tools you can use to check your files for the proper MD5 checksum. The first is just a simple shell extension you install and in the properties window of a file there is a new tab called File Hashes, this has the info you need right there to look at and compare. Get it here link: http://implbits.com/products/hashtab/ download the Personal Free version, you don't need the paid for commercial version at all. Just to show you what it looks like here is the properties of my Sega CD bios file:A second option is WinMD5 which is also free but instead of a shell extension which integrates itself into Windows it's a stand alone executable file you simply load up and you can drag the bios file on to it and it will display the information.  Here is a screenshot of my same Sega CD bios file. Link: http://winmd5.com/

Rom Patching

This is something that is a little beyond the basics but it really is not that complicated and I felt it was worth covering. One really cool aspect of emulation is the ability to patch roms with hacks and translations so you can play those Japanese RPGS that never got an English port with full English translations. http://www.romhacking.net is a great site with nearly every hack you could ever want and you will want a good patching tool to apply those patches, Floating IPS (link: http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1040/) is very easy to use and the patches come with instructions on how to apply the patch. Remember I mentioned the No-Intro rom sets earlier ? Those are generally what is required to patch, if you get roms that are not from a No-Intro set and the patch requires a good clean non headered rom you run a good chance of the patched rom having unintended glitches or not even work at all. Of course like anything else there are exceptions to this rule, sometimes a patch doesn't care or even requires some odd ball version of a rom. Always read the readme.txt file that comes with a rom patch for details.

Section 4:
Arcade Emulation

While this is a little beyond the scope of this guide I did want to talk a bit about it because it's certainly one of the more popular things to emulate, for most people having a full arcade cabinet is not a feasible option let alone having multiple cabinets. Arcade boards are dumped into files for use with emulators differently than cart or CD based consoles. Also because of the nature of Mame development when you are just starting out you should obtain a Mame rom set that matches up with the version of Mame. Every month a new version of Mame gets released and with that the rom set gets updated, the impact this has can range from very minimal and inconsequential to most people all the way up to having a huge impact causing many games from a previous version to not work with the newer build of Mame. Over the years the really old rom dumps are almost certain to not work with newer versions of Mame.

To get up to date Mame roms I highly recommend the pleasuredome website. The old pleasuredome has shutdown but it is not gone, you can get the latest Mame sets on their github.io site, doing a Google search for "pleasuredome github.io" should give you the site with the first result.

For more information to get you started with Mame I have a written guide which should hopefully get you going with it:

 

Section 5:
Controllers

This is going to come down to personal preference and what you like but generally speaking the Xbox 360 and Xbox One controllers for Windows are going to give you the most compatibility with little to no extra work to setup. If you are looking into other controllers, especially the cheaper retro style controllers do some research on them and see what other people have to say about them. Their quality and compatibility can vary greatly. My personal recommendation for a controller for the consoles that don't use an analog stick is the Hori Fight Commander which is reasonably priced and very high build quality. It has 6 face buttons and 4 shoulder buttons along with "select" and "start" making it very versatile and suit any console you are using. Of course this is just my opinion on the controller and people have their own personal preferences and tastes.

 

Final thoughts

There is a whole lot more that could be covered but I really wanted to keep this more oriented towards people that are completely new to emulation and just getting things up a running in a way that makes sense while avoiding certain pitfalls. I purposely avoided talking about old computer systems or the newer more modern emulators such as Cemu and RPCS3 those systems are much more complex to setup and / or are funky in terms of their emulation. There are of a lot of other systems and emulators I could have talked about but this guide already got pretty long and is meant to be a beginners guide for people, once you get started with these basics applying the same principles.

If you feel like something is missing and really needed feel free to post a response and I will take it under consideration and adding it.

[mylkman]

Great write up.  Youtube(mostly walk through from launchbox) , Google and this site helped me to understand a lot about retro gaming and helped me tremendously getting everything going.  I mostly stayed with retroarch because once the joystick was set it was fairly easy to get everything else working.

   I highly suggest those that are starting out to take it one game console at a time.  Follow the most current walk throughs. Get everything to work in retroarch.  And then start to go out and download individual .exe mentioned above.  Retroarch is not that difficult to learn if you follow the walkthroughs closely. They are very informative and easy to follow. They do have a lot of other functions and the save configuration is a little weird getting used to.  But for the most part this isn't needed.  This is how I proceeded.  

   I first went through and started with the consoles that i thought I really wanted and then started from easiest. Atari 2600, 7800.  These were the first system consoles I ever owned so they were near and dear.   I kind of knew which games I wanted but it was much easier to download the pack from the sites mentioned. I may or may have used torrents to get them at first.  I highly suggest using the websites first though.   Then I moved on to sega genesis.  Another console I owned.  Then I moved on to play tation and then Nintendo. It is crazy watching how good the graphics got.  Then I got all the other consoles up and running including PS2 which paved the way for what happened ed below bease the graphics were so much better than those 80 classics. I then Paid for bigbox lifetime. Played with some cool settings. Played a few games and then......this happened 

 

   Then I went to download and install the PC games I love to play; boy that was a mistake.  This is where Ive been since last 2 months. I can't seem to want to put these games down.   Im hoping that these eventually wear me down and I get back to what I set out to do. And that is to relive some of my earlier years when gaming was part of my daily routine. Hoping this adds to the above write up and doesn't detract. Happy gaming

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah Retroarch is awesome and normally I do recommend people use it but this guide is for total beginners when it comes to emulation. As much as I love and tell people to use Retroarch I cannot recommend it to someone just starting out fresh with no idea on what to do.

[spycat]

Excellent stuff @Lordmonkus
I wasn't even aware that snes9x had been updated.

I agree on leaving Retroarch until you've found your feet with some of the dedicated emulators which is what I did for quite a long time.
I eventually tried Retroarch and found it to be not as daunting as expected once I had experience of emulation in general.
I recently got bezels (overlays) working for all my cores thanks to @Zombeaver and I'm fair pleased with that. I love bezels and outside of MAME/MESS I really couldn't use them (no interest in RL).

[Lordmonkus]

Thanks, yeah Snes9x is still getting updates on a fairly regular basis and right now is the easiest to use with the MSU-1 hacks being made.

[Zombeaver]

Happy to help!

[bundangdon]

Not a beginner here and been around the emulation scene for way too many years but thank you for sharing this! Very useful and helpful information, and it should be posted somewhere on the front page, or perhaps with the LaunchBox startup page

Edited February 4, 2018 by bundangdon

[Mir000Z]

Hello everyone, I am soooo new to this.

I cannot manage to add/install/play old windows games in to LaunchBox.

I need help to find an emulator for old windows games like commandos behind enemy lines and so .. also it will be great to mention what else I need to know

I have those old games on CDs and when I run the installer on windows it says what is in the attached capture.

Thanks a lot

[mylkman]

Probably doesn't belong in this thread.  Try starting a new one. 

[DOS76]

I don't know much about playing old PC games but if they are 16 bit games or from dos dos3.1 or windows 95 you will probably need to use DOSBox. Hopefully someone who knows more than I on the subject will be able to come along and help you out with it.

[DOS76]

18 minutes ago, mylkman said:

Probably doesn't belong in this thread.  Try starting a new one. 

If a mod thinks it is inappropriate to post here they will either tell the people or move the thread no need to play internet police man.

[mylkman]

 It is a hijack of someone else's thread.  That is just plain ole good Etiquette not to hijack. It takes away from the OP. Something I'm interested in.  What I'm not interested in is getting replies from the thread I joined when it has nothing to do with OP.

    It shouldn't have to be moved by moderators. Now with that said, I've been new before and the extra question on here that clearly does not belong may not know any better.  By not letting him know, does him a disservice because it may not be seen by other people since there is no tags or a clear subject and the whole community in general since other people will keep getting notifications of something they never planned on listening or helping with.  Therefore they shut off notifications. Also it creates utter chaos when it comes to the community sorting out info.  Hence why there is not one thread dealing with all issues.  Imagine that?  Maybe you don' care but the site does since there isn' one thread dealing with individual issues. 

It wasn't made out to be disrespectful I clearly made an appropriate comment that fits. 

 

Edited February 13, 2018 by mylkman

[DOS76]

except we don't really worry about petty stuff like that around here

[mylkman]

Well if it were me as the OP I would care. And that in itself should warrant having respect for other people.  It is the reason why you can't just walk up to someone and punch them. Extreme I know, but maybe you'll see the point.  I am glad I am not the originator of this topic above. You may not get mad or upset over it but some people do.  You don't speak for the community do you? Well neither do I.    And although hijacking threads is not a set rule, it is most likely unspoken. 

  I will no longer add comments to this thread except for follow up with the original poster.

Good day

[damageinc86]

It's sort of related in that the subject matter is tied to beginner emulation. So at least they have that going for them.  But it is a rather specific request, so I do think it might be better served as its own thread, given that the OP wrote this post as a general overview.  With it's  own thread it could really be delved into, the nuances of running old dos/win games.  

Unless the OP wants to synthesize all replies to that issue into an old dos/win section for their original guide. 

[DOS76]

My main point is since I've been here in 2015 that isn't how we generally deal with any ones posts and when people who are users tell people who are just other users it can be taken in the wrong way and cause conflicts which we are always trying to avoid around here. I'm going to leave it at that to not clog up the thread anymore and of course @Lordmonkuscan feel free to remove any post that he doesn't want on the thread since he is the OP.

[Mir000Z]

hold your horses guys!!! I simply asked a question I felt related to the topic.

I am sorry if I made a mistake. just tell me where to post it and I will. no need to argue about it.

btw, what is OP?

[Lordmonkus]

OP is me, the Original Poster

As for your question, to play old DOS games you will want to use DOSbox, there are guides on that. For older Windows games there are no emulators but you may have to do some extra work to get a game to work and what that entails will vary from game to game, there is no easy one answer for it.

[Mir000Z]

not good news sir, but thanks

[Zombeaver]

As Monkus said, DOS is covered under DOSBox, but for native Windows games it's going to be entirely dependent on the specific game as to how to get it working - in some cases you might need a graphics wrapper like dgvoodoo 2 or nglide (there are quite a few different wrappers out there) that allow the games to be run on modern video hardware; and in some cases you might need to look into alternate ways to install a game that bypass the original installer which isn't 64-bit compatible (that appears to be the case for you based on your screenshot).

If you don't want to dive into that stuff, that's basically what GOG is for. If you're not familiar with it, it's a digital storefront similar to Steam (but DRM-free) but with a higher focus on older games. They have Commandos, among many others.