NES Emulation - slowdown and flickering solution!

[Knowcontrol]

With the recent tutorial by ETA Prime on the Unbroken YouTube channel regarding importing MS-DOS games, I got interested in adding a few DOS games to my library. In my search for the best DOS emulator I found a YouTube video by Pixelmusement who compares DOSBox vs DosBox-X. The video was fantastic and the content was very interesting.

I then went to his recent video uploads and saw a video titled "No More NES Slowdown/Flickering!", well needless to say he had me at NES!

What an amazing video with the explanation about sprites and the drawing limitation per scanline. I highly suggest you watch it as it's incredibly informative as to how the NES works. What I took away from that video is that the Mesen emulator is incredibly accurate as it actually emulates the visual glitches and slow-downs that the actual hardware produces. So that's the cool part. The next awesome part is that you can change the sprite limit to keep the gameplay smooth, reduce flickering, and prevent slow-down. To do so you'd go to Options>Video>Advanced>Remove Sprite Limit (checkmark it) - this will reduce or eliminate the flickering of objects, uncheck the "Automatically re-enable sprite limit" option. To reduce slow-down go to Options>Emulation>Overclocking>set Additional Scanlines before NMI to 400. This is in Pixelmusement's video so I highly suggest watching it all the way through, it's totally worth it.

Enjoy!

Edited May 7, 2022 by Knowcontrol

[neil9000]

8 hours ago, Knowcontrol said:

With the recent tutorial by ETA Prime on the Unbroken YouTube channel regarding importing MS-DOS games, I got interested in adding a few DOS games to my library. In my search for the best DOS emulator I found a YouTube video by Pixelmusement who compares DOSBox vs DosBox-X. The video was fantastic and the content was very interesting.

I then went to his recent video uploads and saw a video titled "No More NES Slowdown/Flickering!", well needless to say he had me at NES!

What an amazing video with the explanation about sprites and the drawing limitation per scanline. I highly suggest you watch it as it's incredibly informative as to how the NES works. What I took away from that video is that the Mesen emulator is incredibly accurate as it actually emulates the visual glitches and slow-downs that the actual hardware produces. So that's the cool part. The next awesome part is that you can change the sprite limit to keep the gameplay smooth, reduce flickering, and prevent slow-down. To do so you'd go to Options>Video>Advanced>Remove Sprite Limit (checkmark it) - this will reduce or eliminate the flickering of objects, uncheck the "Automatically re-enable sprite limit" option. To reduce slow-down go to Options>Emulation>Overclocking>set Additional Scanlines before NMI to 400. This is in Pixelmusement's video so I highly suggest watching it all the way through, it's totally worth it.

Enjoy!

MESEN has been the best and recommended go to NES emulator for some years now, i have used it for probably 3-4 years myself. Personally i use the Retroarch core though. All 2D systems had sprite limits, SNES Megadrive/Genesis included, its just how the hardware worked, and most emulators for those systems have options to turn off sprite limits.