QuickNES 1.1b3 review
DownloadQuickNES is a Nintendo emulator, very promising ! The emulation is fluid.
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QuickNES is a Nintendo emulator, very promising !
The emulation is fluid. However, display problems can appear on some nintendo games and you actually can't choose the type of video display.
It runs decently in thousands of colors under Mac OS X on a 700 MHz G4 flat-panel iMac when graphics are set to thousands of colors, and under Mac OS 9 on a 400 MHz PowerMac. Once I learn CoreGraphics or OpenGL, I should be able to double performance on Mac OS X, so for now the requirements are a bit higher than I'm intending in the future.
The main highlight is its flexible movie handling, which I've spent a lot of time developing. I intend on extending this further, particularly for tool-assisted speedrun type uses. Other notable features are numerous adjustments for image and sound parameters with live feedback, mild CPU usage, and the ability to let a movie play in the background while you do other things.
The main limitations are keyboard-only control and no full-screen mode. Both of these are beyond my abilities at the moment, and aren't really critical features. I don't even have any USB gamepads nor know what all is required to support them (and remember reading that they aren't straight-forward to support, either).
QuickNES lacks some polish and refinement, and I'm still working on the emulator core, so don't expect industrial-strength support like Nestopia or similar. Experimentation and research are my main goals, not perfect emulation accuracy or maximum compatibility, though it does pass almost all the rigorous test ROMs I've released so far. Once I clean the source up a bit more I'll be releasing it under the LGPL, and will happily assist others in adding similar features to their emulators.
Here are some key features of "QuickNES":
Supports games and demos in the iNES (.nes) file format, including those compressed with zip or GNU zip (.gz).
Game play is always recorded into a movie which can be freely played and re-recorded from any point.
Named time markers can be added to allow easy return to specific points of interest.
Instant rewind is always available, allowing you to literally run things backwards to undo a mistake.
Emulation speed can be reduced for slow-motion playback and recording.
Television video artifacts are emulated, with several adjustments.
Sound emulation is crystal-clear and includes adjustable stereo enhancement for headphone listening.
Per-game customizations like adjustable turbo and screen options are remembered.
What's New:
I found another embarrassing bug: if you have "Keep backup when saving movie" turned off in the preferences, when you save it'll delete the movie file from disk, and additionally not even allow you to Save As... elsewhere. Argh! Yet another fix.
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