What is Reddit's opinion of
Mesen?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
22 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
WARNING: Save states created with version 0.9.7 (or older) will no longer work in 0.9.8.
New Features:
- Debugger: General improvements as well as new features/tools (and bug fixes.)
- NSF: Allow rewinding during NSF file playback and fixed an initilization problem with VRC6 audio.
- History Viewer: Added a few new features and options, including allowing it to be used with NSF files.
- Video: Added support for 512-color palette files (for color bit emphasis.)
- Input: Added options to configure the deadzone size for analog sticks and to hide the mouse cursor when using a zapper.
Dip switches: Dip switches can now be configured for all cartridges that use them (instead of being limited to VS System games.) ** Bug Fixes:**
APU: Fixed frame counter bug that caused audio to sometimes be paced slightly incorrectly.
APU: Fixed DMC power on state to match hardware test results.
PPU: Prevent palette updates during horizontal blank when rendering is enabled (to match expected hardware behavior.)
Namco 163: Fixed problems with battery save data.
Bandai FCG: Added support for EEPROM save data.
MMC5: Fixed incorrect attribute data when using fill mode.
VRC7: Updated audio instrument values to match the values recently dumped from hardware.
AOROM: Fixed power on mirroring state.
Misc: Fixed minor bugs in a variety of mappers (including mappers 112, 176, 320 and UNROM512.)
While somewhat informative, I suggest taking lists like these with a grain of salt. A lot of it is preference. And despite what that site says, Nestopia is NOT the best NES emulator anymore. It seems not a lot of people are aware of Mesen (probably because it doesn't have a libretro core yet :P). Mesen came out of nowhere in early 2016, is open-source, and has already surpassed both Nestopia and puNES in terms of accuracy and mapper support. But you wouldn't know that because the site seems to have a heavy bias towards anything libretro. Mesen is basically the bsnes of NES emulation right now. I highly recommend checking it out. A libretro core is currently on the author's roadmap.
Furthermore, that site doesn't seem to take cycle-accuracy into account. MAME is not "as good, if not better than," mGBA when it comes to GBA emulation. MAME is not "as good, if not better than," BGB (which I think is better than Gambatte) when it comes to GB(C) emulation. MAME is not "as good, if not better than," blueMSX when it comes to MSX/MSX2 emulation.
I wouldn't even choose MAME over Mednafen for TurboGrafx-16 emulation. MAME is definitely your best option for Atari 7800 emulation, though.
My 2 cents.
Yea but you'll have to google/youtube around for them. The HD Packs were originally for an Emulator called hdnes, but now Mesen supports them. You can also use Mesen to dump textures as you play games to PNG files and make texture packs of your own. https://www.mesen.ca/
Thanks! Nice to know people are using some of those features, too :)
As far as overclocking, that's a good point - that warning was put there when OCing was first implemented, back when I was unsure how much games would be affected by it. Since then, /u/AxlRocks (among others) has done a lot of testing with overclocking settings (on both FCEUX & Mesen) and has found the "scanlines before NMI" option to be pretty reliable in the vast majority of games.
There's also more in-depth information about OCing in the docs: https://www.mesen.ca/docs/configuration/emulation/#overclocking But I agree it might be worth changing the UI to make it a bit less scary and more accessible to users.
Hey this is great! Just wanted to say that if you want to put it in a game but don't know how to program, it would be great to see this art style put into an HD Texture Pack for emulators! Unfortunately the only HD texture pack for smb1 that I know of is still this one and I like your art style a lot more!
Tetris version played on championships is NES/Famicom Tetris, the best option is to download an emulator it's much more responsive than online ones, im using Mesen (https://www.mesen.ca/) and it works very well, you will need also a .nes game file (https://www.emulatorgames.net/roms/nintendo/tetris/ for example)
And you will be good to go ;)
I mean you could've just linked this and your listing but then again... TASVideos only used 158 Tests not the full 273.
Also, yes my name is that of the one who's one the forums for TASVideos who has written in the Mesen thread.
There's major consistency errors between the results you've provided and TASVideos... as well as TASVideos' one being out of date... might need to do something about that.
Then again we're missing 115 of the tests on TASVideos so there's no proper verification and we have to take your word.
So, as you probably couldn't guess, it was Tetris' 34th anniversary today, June 6.
So, I decided to put together this little banner in response to that. It features everybody's favorite Doki cast too, along with some of my favorite NES characters.
From left to right, we have
- Chun Li, who uses her sprite from the unofficial Chinese NES/Famicom port of Street Fighter II, specifically this one done by Hummer Team in 1992, which was based on the original version of SFII, The World Warrior, and has the largest sprite of any of the cast in the photo.
- Simon Belmont, from Castlevania, specifically the first game
- Balloon Fighter, from Balloon Fight
- Mario, who uses his Super Mario Bros. 3 sprite
And lastly, since I couldn't bring myself to leave them out of the picture, it features u/YuriTheTeacup, u/CupcakeNatsuki, u/CoffeeCakeMonika, and u/cinnamonbunsayori.
All the sprites, including the character sprites, the Tetris pieces, and the Tetris logo, were captured through an NES emulator called [Mesen](https://www.mesen.ca/), and edited to omit the background graphics so only the character sprite remains. As for the colors of the sprites, they use the Smooth color palette, done by FirebrandX, an NES color palette meant to mimic how certain CRT televisions would display NES video.
gba: use the mgba core in retroarch
gb: use the gamebatte core in retroarch
nes: use https://www.mesen.ca/
sega megadrive: use the genesis plus gx core in retroarch
n64: use https://m64p.github.io/ instead of pj64 or at least use the latest gliden64 gpu plugin instead of pj64's outdated default.
>is the Retroarch core always going to offer better graphics?
no, some cores like mednafen psx have enchanced versions but most are the same as the standalone. retroarch does have the benefit of shader support for everything though.
>I know there is no one best emulator for everything
there are definitely certain emulators that are the best for each console but that doesn't mean everyone has the build to run them
Dette kommer til å virke som et rart forslag, men jeg ville ha vurdert Tetris. Det er et spill som passer for de fleste, og det er veldig lett å sette seg inn i. Jeg spiller NES utgaven, og den har en god community. Men det foregår på engelsk.
Det fungerer veldig godt å spille med emulator på PC. Kan for eksempel laste ned Mesen: https://www.mesen.ca/. Da bruker du en ROM med emulatoren: https://www.emulatorgames.net/roms/nintendo/tetris/
Det er ikke et flerspiller spill, men det er veldig gøy å spille samtidig med andre mens man sloss om PBer, og utveksler teorier.
Jeg ønsker veldig gjerne å få flere interresert i dette spillet, og over tid kan vi få en god norsk community. :D
For the NES games, you can make your own HD audio pack if you use Mesen. The music tracks need to be in .ogg format. Read the documentation here.
For the SNES games, MSU1 hacks can be used to change the audio. An assortment of emulators/flashcarts can use this hack. You can read about them here.
MSU1 can also be used for Game Boy games through Super Game Boy emulation.
As for Mega Drive/Genesis games, there's really nothing. There was a Mode 1 hack that could "trick" cartridge games to play music from the Sega CD, but sadly it doesn't look like anything substantial came from it.
Unfortunately, you may have to go through the process of documenting the game's hexadecimal code yourself. You can do this by finding an emulator that can trace changes in a Super Nintendo game's code (I recommend Mesen-S).
Link to the site
Using a hex program called HxD, you can edit said code. I recommend removing the header from your rom using a program called Tush (if it has one in the first place), and then using another program called Lunar Expand to expand your rom (try 32 mbit, the options on the right column of the box are risky to use). This gives you room to change and experiment with things.
If you give up on this, I don't blame you. But here's to hoping your dedication keeps up and you find a way!
Btw, learn how to repoint hex code addresses and go from there for these kinds of things.
Ultimately, there is nothing stopping you from continuing using ZSNES, as long as you're having fun and aren't misinforming other people by telling them to use ZSNES instead of the better options. I usually tell people to ditch old emulators like ePSXe and VBA and get new ones if they're genuinely misinformed, but if they have a good reason to keep using a crusty emulator, I do my best to help out when I can.
But on the subject of whether you should switch, there's no reason at all to not demand the most out of your hardware and find a more accurate emulator, especially when you lose nothing by switching since bsnes, ZSNES and Snes9x all have being free- and open-source in common. "I've been using it for a while so I don't want to download a 10mb zip file to permanently improve my emulation experience" is generally frowned upon as a reason. As the linked article mentions, there are a ton of reasons why ZSNES should be dumpstered for a better emulator, so yes - there are major upgrades to be had by switching.
So to answer your question, you should switch, yes. bsnes is rather demanding given its incredible accuracy, but it's well worth it if your hardware is up to the task. Snes9X, on the other hand, is very performance-friendly, so your laptop should have no problem at all with Snes9X if bsnes doesn't run well on it.
It also might be worth it to look into Mesen-S, which is cycle-accurate like bsnes but supposedly is a bit less resource hungry. I also love Mesen's interface so I feel right at home with Mesen-S.
That's very, very bizarre. If two entirely different emulators are both encountering the same issue with the Enter key, something is likely interfering with the keyboard input, and it's not the emulator's fault. It would be strange for VBA and mGBA to share the same incredibly specific bug, considering they're separate projects with entirely original code.
Are you sure it's just the Enter key, or are no keys being recognized at all? It's possible that none of the keys work, you just haven't realized it since you can't get past the title screen. Try rebinding Enter to a different key (one that doesn't conflict with the emulator's hotkeys) and seeing if that works.
Additionally: have you tried any other emulators in the past and verified that it is specifically those two emulators that are encountering the issue? If you'd like to test, I would grab an NES emulator and test a ROM, since those are rather small in filesize. If Enter works there, then it could entirely possible be that, for some ungodly reason, VBA and mGBA just don't agree with your keyboard. I would put this incredibly unlikely. But if Enter doesn't work, you've diagnosed the problem.
I'm off to bed, but if you can investigate those two questions and come back with your findings that'd help a lot in fixing the issue
Best of luck and thank you for two wonderful emulator projects.
Why not build/release one last version and link to www.mesen.ca with a take-it-or-leave-it type of warning...? :-)
Maybe I’m reading the documentation incorrectly but it looks like it supports iNES mappers through 256.
https://www.mesen.ca/#Compatibility
When I attempt to load these roms in Mesen, the error message says specifically on screen “Mapper not supported (534/406)”
There's a great youtube series for programming NES games from scratch. This guy will show you everything you need to do to get started and goes into a ton of detail about system architecture.
For an emulator/debugger, I'd recommend Mesen. It's very easy to get started with and gives you a lot of insight.
Try Mesen. Defenitely one of the best NES emulators. Very compatible, chock full of features and also easy to use. https://www.mesen.ca/#Downloads
Higan is good also but it isn't as user friendly IMO. Higan truly excels at SNES emulation. The same guy that made Mesen also made an SNES emulator but it isn't very old (less then a year) so Higan is the goto for now.
you're best bet is to use mesen, and use the hdnes pack method, there's plenty of examples, from the popular metroid pack to my very old (and deprecated) hdmario nes pack.
You can find more info on romhacking or nesdev
mesen doc on the subject
metroid pack
nesdev link of mesen discussion
you are so so wrong, go watch the interview with retrorgb on youtube where they not only confirm that they are using open source emulation (because people had already worked out mednafen was being heavily used) but told us what they are using. the only reason they have gone back to kega is because genesis plus gx refused them a commercial license.
nes emulation is being handled by mesen.
ps1, saturn, pc engine, pc engine cd, snes (updating faust becuase snes9x and bsnes resused a commercial license) emulation are all handled by mednafen.
neo geo cd is being handled by mame (apparently with tweaks to audio for some reason).
megadrive, mega cd and 32x are being handled by kega because they couldn't license existing and better emulators as i have already explained.
their marketing department have done a remarkable job in convincing people who know nothing about the current state of emulation on pc (the target audience) that they developing all these emulators in house when in reality it's entirely open source (excluding kega), existing and freely available already.
> Maybe a popup dialog on first launch that asks if you want settings to be at appdata/name/whatever vs. portable.
How about this: screenshot (don't mind the backslashes being ¥ signs - that's just because of my PC's configuration)
while you're at it, there are a couple of things I have an issue with. Firstly, on my Dell latitude 5175 with all the default drivers Windows provides (Dell drivers messed up brightness control making it stuck at 100% so that's not an option either) the touchpad stops working during certain types of system load. I have no idea what causes it, but a good way to diagnose it is to use the Mesen emulator ( https://www.mesen.ca/ ) since that program causes the issue as soon as it is opened. It happens frequently elsewhere, but mesen is the easiest way to reproduce the issue.
This occurs on an entirely clean installation of Windows 10 Creators Update as well as previous versions of Windows 10 including the Anniversary update as well.
Secondly, something more minor, could you add colemak as one of the keyboard layouts that comes with windows (similar to how Dvorak is there)? Mac OSX and Linux both have it, but on Windows, it has to be installed separately. Thanks :)