6 ms·

For context: prior to Nesticle you needed a very beefy machine (for the time) to emulate NES games at a half-decent frame rate. All of the existing emulators

For context: prior to Nesticle you needed a very beefy machine (for the time) to emulate NES games at a half-decent frame rate. All of the existing emulators were basically unplayable on my Pentium60. Nesticle came out of nowhere and was a huge improvement. Totally playable. I think it was the first jitting nes emulator.

tomc1985 10y ago
Heh. Yeah the crap one had to go through just to get emulated games running on old hardware... Somehow Chrono Trigger was playable on a 486, but only if you disabled transparency (which made a couple of levels really tough to navigate) and had sound disabled. This was with ZSNES on Win95 I think?
- Kurtz79 10y ago
  I remember that in Chrono Trigger there is a part in the future where you need to input a specific button sequence, and in one of the early version of ZNES it wasn't working, it was maddening at the time :).
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    It wasn't ZSNES, it was your keyboard not accepting input from three keys at once !!! I know because I remember this exact thing.
    - Kurtz79 10y ago
      It was actually neither ZSNES or my keyboard, but SNES9X :) from: https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/changes.txt https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/changes... 0.72 released ... - This time really fixed Allegro library keyboard handling (DOS port); it was missing key some presses/releases (was stopping Chrono Trigger Left + Right + A button combo from working).
      - mmebane 10y ago
        ZSNES certainly had the L+R+A problem, too. [1] I assume the default key mapping hit a failure case with some common limited-rollover keyboard design, but I've never bothered researching it. It's possible it was caused by Allegro, as well. [1]: http://zsnes-docs.sourceforge.net/html/faq.htm#universal_input_threekeys http://zsnes-docs.sourceforge.net/html/faq.htm#universal_inp...
  - Spoom 10y ago
    I remember playing Chrono Trigger on an early SNES emulator that didn't support alpha layers (possibly ESNES), and when you got to the future, you had to know to disable layer 3 so that the fog wouldn't just completely block out the world map.
    - tomc1985 10y ago
      Yup!
    - mmebane 10y ago
      The transparency problem was common enough with ZSNES to make it into the FAQ: https://github.com/bazzinotti/mac-zsnes-1.36/blob/master/dos/zsnesfaq.txt#L237 https://github.com/bazzinotti/mac-zsnes-1.36/blob/master/dos...
  - smaili 10y ago
    Evem today some emulators have trouble with this :)
pikzen 10y ago
I very much doubt that Nesticle used dynarec. With games of the era requiring precise timings, a JIT would have been more trouble than it's worth. I can't find any source for Nesticle having a JIT compiler either. It was however very inaccurate, which may have contributed to it running faster than most of the emulators of the time. Dynarec has mostly been used from the N64/PS1/Dreamcast generation and onwards.
- jeffrom 10y ago
  Vague memory hanging out with these folks while they were working on this that a lot of speedup was due to well placed inline assembly
  - pikzen 10y ago
    Mhm. That's been the general solution to make emulators of the time fast. ZSNES was mostly assembly too.
- amyjess 10y ago
  It was in fact so inaccurate that many ROMs had to be modified to run under Nesticle. There's actually a tag in the goodtools filenames that indicates a ROM has been modified to run under specific emulators (I think it's [f], but I don't remember 100%, and I'm not going to look this kind of stuff up at work). Later emulators that made use of game-specific hacks (e.g. ZSNES) would store the hacks in the emulator instead of the ROM, patching the hacks into memory at load time, so people could use the same accurate ROM dumps in both accurate and inaccurate emulators.
gribbly 10y ago
>I think it was the first jitting nes emulator. I'm certain it did not use JIT or any kind of recompilation, I believe it's speed came from not being very accurate and also written in hand optimised assembly.
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
IIRC it wasn't the first fast NES emulator (there was Paul Robson's NESA), but I think it was the first one to be fast and have decent compatibility/mapper support. Having a halfway decent GUI and being freeware didn't hurt its adoption either (iNES DOS/Windows was shareware at the time).
mrpippy 10y ago
iNES is the NES emulator I remember from my childhood, for Mac in particular (although it also ran on Windows, DOS, and every UNIX platform). With a core written in PPC assembly, it was able to run at full speed on any PPC Mac (60 MHz being the slowest). This was around 1998 though. https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19981205215037/http://www.emulation.net:80/nintendo/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19981205215037/http://www.e...
jandrese 10y ago
IIRC NESTicle was written by one guy over a weekend or something crazy like that. It was fast because he understood PC architecture and build the whole thing by hand to be fast. It didn't use fancy tricks so much as it avoided things that were unnecessarily slow on PC hardware of the time.

tomc1985 10y ago

Heh. Yeah the crap one had to go through just to get emulated games running on old hardware... Somehow Chrono Trigger was playable on a 486, but only if you disabled transparency (which made a couple of levels really tough to navigate) and had sound disabled. This was with ZSNES on Win95 I think?

Kurtz79 10y ago
I remember that in Chrono Trigger there is a part in the future where you need to input a specific button sequence, and in one of the early version of ZNES it wasn't working, it was maddening at the time :).
- rangibaby 10y ago
  It wasn't ZSNES, it was your keyboard not accepting input from three keys at once !!! I know because I remember this exact thing.
  - Kurtz79 10y ago
    It was actually neither ZSNES or my keyboard, but SNES9X :) from: https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/changes.txt https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/changes... 0.72 released ... - This time really fixed Allegro library keyboard handling (DOS port); it was missing key some presses/releases (was stopping Chrono Trigger Left + Right + A button combo from working).
    - mmebane 10y ago
      ZSNES certainly had the L+R+A problem, too. [1] I assume the default key mapping hit a failure case with some common limited-rollover keyboard design, but I've never bothered researching it. It's possible it was caused by Allegro, as well. [1]: http://zsnes-docs.sourceforge.net/html/faq.htm#universal_input_threekeys http://zsnes-docs.sourceforge.net/html/faq.htm#universal_inp...
- Spoom 10y ago
  I remember playing Chrono Trigger on an early SNES emulator that didn't support alpha layers (possibly ESNES), and when you got to the future, you had to know to disable layer 3 so that the fog wouldn't just completely block out the world map.
  - tomc1985 10y ago
    Yup!
  - mmebane 10y ago
    The transparency problem was common enough with ZSNES to make it into the FAQ: https://github.com/bazzinotti/mac-zsnes-1.36/blob/master/dos/zsnesfaq.txt#L237 https://github.com/bazzinotti/mac-zsnes-1.36/blob/master/dos...
- smaili 10y ago
  Evem today some emulators have trouble with this :)

pikzen 10y ago

I very much doubt that Nesticle used dynarec. With games of the era requiring precise timings, a JIT would have been more trouble than it's worth. I can't find any source for Nesticle having a JIT compiler either. It was however very inaccurate, which may have contributed to it running faster than most of the emulators of the time. Dynarec has mostly been used from the N64/PS1/Dreamcast generation and onwards.

jeffrom 10y ago
Vague memory hanging out with these folks while they were working on this that a lot of speedup was due to well placed inline assembly
- pikzen 10y ago
  Mhm. That's been the general solution to make emulators of the time fast. ZSNES was mostly assembly too.
amyjess 10y ago
It was in fact so inaccurate that many ROMs had to be modified to run under Nesticle. There's actually a tag in the goodtools filenames that indicates a ROM has been modified to run under specific emulators (I think it's [f], but I don't remember 100%, and I'm not going to look this kind of stuff up at work). Later emulators that made use of game-specific hacks (e.g. ZSNES) would store the hacks in the emulator instead of the ROM, patching the hacks into memory at load time, so people could use the same accurate ROM dumps in both accurate and inaccurate emulators.

gribbly 10y ago

>I think it was the first jitting nes emulator. I'm certain it did not use JIT or any kind of recompilation, I believe it's speed came from not being very accurate and also written in hand optimised assembly.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago

IIRC it wasn't the first fast NES emulator (there was Paul Robson's NESA), but I think it was the first one to be fast and have decent compatibility/mapper support. Having a halfway decent GUI and being freeware didn't hurt its adoption either (iNES DOS/Windows was shareware at the time).

mrpippy 10y ago

iNES is the NES emulator I remember from my childhood, for Mac in particular (although it also ran on Windows, DOS, and every UNIX platform). With a core written in PPC assembly, it was able to run at full speed on any PPC Mac (60 MHz being the slowest). This was around 1998 though. https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19981205215037/http://www.emulation.net:80/nintendo/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19981205215037/http://www.e...

jandrese 10y ago

IIRC NESTicle was written by one guy over a weekend or something crazy like that. It was fast because he understood PC architecture and build the whole thing by hand to be fast. It didn't use fancy tricks so much as it avoided things that were unnecessarily slow on PC hardware of the time.