You could get an fpga at less cost.

>>307 Cheaper than retroarch?

>>308 Depends on if you already own a computer or not. Maybe you're posting on your friends phone or something right now.

>>307 I don't know how much FGPAs cost, but I do a lot of my emulation on a $40 smartphone.

>>311 Rough. Hold yourself to a higher standard anon.

>>314 I have a computer I emulate on too, of course, but it's not a laptop so it's a pain to lug it around on vacations etc. With the phone I just grab it and a controller and I'm good to go. For touch screen DS games, you don't even need the controller. It runs everything through PSX at full speed, and I can back up my saves to the cloud, or even transfer them from my PC to my phone and back. The best part is, if I lost it or it got stolen or broke, then oh no, my poor $40 smartphone. I just get the next one out of the drawer. If I backed up my saves responsibly, I can keep playing right where I left off the same day. Anyway, the point is that you don't need money to have a decent emulation set-up. The controller I use when I emulate on my smartphone costs more than my smartphone.

The perfect middle ground is to emulate on obsolete hardware. Best of both worlds.

>>301 Playing on real hardware has become one of those things where if you have the passion and means to do so, you absolutely should, because everything just feels right. But if you lack one or the other, emulation (whether through software or FPGA) is perfectly acceptable, and moreso if you cannot justify spending the arm and a leg it costs now to get a real hardware setup going.

>>307 That's still emulation >NOOOOO IT'S NOT it is.

>>327 >>NOOOOO IT'S NOT Who said that?

>>301 There's no right or wrong. Just do whatever the fuck you want.

>>329 all the FPGA shills on 4/vr/

>>338 4chan is over anon. You're safe now.

>>301 You can do both. I personally emulate stuff that are too expensive to get or stuff that I have little interest in. Recently, I bought 3 CIB GBA games for about 200+ dollars. I might get myself a GBA SP so I can play the game there over my DS lite.

>>301 I can understand people having gripes with the emulators within retroarch, iirc a lot of them are outdated, but I've never understood how people can't figure out the interface to this. Idk maybe it's my experience using design and programming software, but it's really not that bad

>>364 If retroarch was capable of just displaying a grid I think that would alleviate most peoples problems.

>>364 Ngl I cried the first time I tried to use Retroarch man. This shit can be unforgiving to a newcomer.

>>364 Because they're expecting the usual Win32 menu bar-driven WIMP interface most other emulators use, or at least something akin to Dolphin's Qt interface, whereas RetroArch's interface is made primarily with controllers in mind. There are some criticisms, though, in that there's a lot of menu nesting, and it's not always clear where certain options can be found. The biggest sticking point seems to be with the way inputs are handled.

>>327 yeah no matter how much the shills say otherwise, it's ultimately hardware emulation and no better than cloned hardware. it still gives off better results than normal emulation tho, tho that has more to do with coders doing a better job fine tuning timing accuracy. like in street fighter, where it was found to run something like 30% faster on mame than real hardware. which (I believe it was street fighter anyway) also seems to have a lot of variance between boards, as the attract mode differs between cabinets, but is constant on fpga. with that said, the only other real difference comes from input lag and 1000hz poling does take care of a lot of that. as does run ahead support. still waiting on those 8000hz poling controllers, why keyboard&mouse go them and not pads, idk.

>>367 I'd say that's an actually good idea >>371 >>379 I guess it's never bothered me since I used a controller. I'd say maybe it'd be worthwhile to add a mouse focused mode, where the options are more laid out in a grid or something, but I don't get why you'd be using RetroArch without a controller unless you were Brazilian or something and couldn't afford one. The whole point of RetroArch is to be as universally plug 'n play as it can be, and I appreciate that since it means everything from my gaming PCs to my Chinkhelds to my Steam Deck has a quickfix one stop shop for emulation. >>386 I think FPGA serves a good purpose for game preservation, at least. If the turbo nerds coding the hardware emulation there get it to near literal cycle accurate perfection, then that'll go a long ways towards maintaining these lesser known consoles in the future. But for the average user you really won't find any issues with emulation, even in RetroArch, anymore. We're long past the days of VBA frameskipping, sound de-syncing, shit not loading right, etc. It honestly threw me for a loop when I bought an RG280V and the vanilla image straight up softlocked me in Thunder Force IV after beating the first boss, as a reminder of where emulation used to commonly be

I prefer to use all original hardware, but I have no problem with emulation, as long as the important rules are not broken: 1) The emulator has to more or less correctly run the game. ZSNES-level accuracy is almost always good enough. 2) The display must not use a very obviously incorrect aspect ratio. I don't care about that Chrono Trigger moon or whatever, I'm talking about stretching from 4:3 to 16:9 (or worse). 3) The display must at least vaguely attempt to match what historical players would have seen. So none of those amazing but horrible smeary novelty shaders like in the "Lookin' good" image, and no drastic anachronistic increases in either display resolution or texture detail. But something like overclocking Star Fox is fine I guess, and widening a display area to modern aspect ratios (WITHOUT stretching) is also fine if it doesn't decrease difficulty or introduce too many nasty visual glitches. 4) The player must make at least a few earnest attempts at playing without cheating before resorting to heavy abuse of save states. Pretty loose rules I think. I know some people on 4chan were really into maximizing resolution and clarity of early 3D games though, so probably #3 would lose some people who cannot understand why blurring the mathematically perfect edges of a 20-sided polygon that's meant to represent a racecar's tire might actually make the shape look far better than if absolutely every blade-sharp angle were perfectly visible in glorious 4k at 120 FPS.

Emulate all you want just use something nicer and faster than RetroArch.

>>391 >widening a display area to modern aspect ratios (WITHOUT stretching) the term you're thinking of is "increasing the viewport" or "viewport'ing" and afaik that's a pretty rare thing that uses specialized either standalone software or niche settings within emulators. But I have seen Super Metroid running with a widescreen viewport, via some emulator tricks in a Nerrel video, so it's possible

Never using the dogshit that is Retroarch again. The thing always broke and crashed on me. The frame advance feature that reduces input lag or whatever is useless when its shitty cores cant even run 5th generation games and up right. For what SNES fighting game port are you gonna optimize your gameplay? Only good thing I've heard about it is the way it handles filters but I only need bilinear filtering.

Ares got an update today. https://ares-emu.net/news/ares-v144-released

Anyone know if fpga dither patterns are the same as native ps1 dither patterns?