[FCEUmm][Nestopia] The evolution of FCEUmm?

Libretro Cores
#1

Hi there,

Having both FCEUmm and Nestopia running on some ARM systems that can’t cope with MESEN, I was wondering: what’s the current status of FCEUmm and Nestopia? (MESEN is of course fantastic but it’s outside most portable ARM system’s hold). This is my understanding of how things are:

-Nestopia was originally a very accurate NES emulator, specially when it comes to audio. However, it’s no longer being developed upstream.

-FCEUmm, while originally having poor audio emulation, has seen some improvements, at least the libretro core has, by looking at the commit history of the core.

So, what’s the current situation regarding FCEUmm vs Nestopia?

Thanks!

1 Like
#2

They’re effectively pretty similar, AFAIK, but the main difference is that FCEUmm supports more mappers (I think?) and plays nicer with netplay/runahead.

1 Like
#3

@hunterk Thing is, in the old days (~2013-2014) FCEUmm sound was clearly inferior. I have searched on the list of commits and haven’t found any mentions to sound improvement. In other words, is it supposed to sound like Nestopia these days? Are there any games where I can “stress” NES audio emulation to try and find differences? The games I used to play sound the same to me.

#4

Hmm, I use them interchangeably and haven’t noticed any major difference. I would guess some of the expansion carts might be a good place to start, like Akumajou Densetsu 3 or Gimmick!.

#5

@hunterk I have just been trying both, Akumajou Densetsu (Japanese CV3) and Gimmick!, in both emulators, and I can’t be sure one sounds better than the other… Strange, years ago I DID notice major differences. And my ears are pretty good: they are medically tested each year for missing frequencies, etc (because of my job).

#6

oh man, I’m jealous! I do frequency sweeps periodically just to keep an eye on my age-related hearing loss (I’m down to ~18 khz tops now D:), but nothing professionally/medically legit.

#7

Don’t be jealous, I am a forest firefighter (which is hard sometimes) and I only have 5 months of work per year. So I am poor :stuck_out_tongue: But happy, that’s also true.

2 Likes
#8

FWIW, the NES emulation in FBNeo is a bit easier than Mesen on the cpu, and should be more accurate than FCEUmm/Nestopia. It requires the usage of specific romsets though.

#9

Wow, that’s good news, really :slight_smile: FBNeo is, along with GenesisPlusGX and Gambatte, one of the best RetroArch cores. Every version gets better and better! I believe you are among it’s developers, so a deep thanks for such a wonderful work.

About these specific NES romsets, does that mean it doesn’t support NES hacks? And by specific romsets, do you mean the no-intro romsets?

#10

Please read https://github.com/libretro/FBNeo/blob/master/src/burner/libretro/README.md for informations about romsets and patched roms.

We also have a topic for NES game (including hacks/translations) support requests : https://neo-source.com/index.php?topic=3690.0

#11

@BarbuDreadMon I have been trying to get NES to load on FBNeo for hours now. However it seems to have a brutal entry level (and that’s counting that I am not exactly a weak GNU/Linux system user…).

I have read what the docs say about romsets. I did. So I went and:

  1. Downloaded this DAT: https://github.com/libretro/FBNeo/blob/master/dats/FinalBurn%20Neo%20(ClrMame%20Pro%20XML%2C%20NES%20Games%20only).dat

  2. Loaded the DAT in a new profile in crlmame (via wine since that’s a poor Windows only POS)

  3. Rebuilt the NES romset after ticking the Non-Merged sets and un-ticking the “Separated BIOS” from Advanced

  4. Tried to load the resulting zipped ROMs with the “subsystem” option that appears when the FBNeo core is loaded. FBNeo won’t load any of these zips.

  5. Tried to rename the zipped ROMs in the intended way, for example lunarpool.zip becomes nes_lunarpool. Won’t load any of these zips.

So well, here I am, defeated by a ROM-loading system I can’t get to work for me, and asking for help.

#12

Oh, made it to work by simply putting the ZIPs in a folder named “nes”, as mentioned in the docs as an alternative for subsystem support.

The emulation seems to be very precise, indeed! But it’s outside the scope of the RG351P, by FAR. I guess I will use it on the Raspberry Pi 4 anyway :slight_smile:

In case someone is curious, I would say this emulator requires about the same CPU as SameBoy or Mesen (in other words, WRT Arm systems it will run fine on A72 but not on A53).

It’s very curious indeed to see how much CPU is needed for these new-gen emulators for 8bit systems.