beneficii wrote:
I do like the readouts on Nintendulator's tracer and I like the fact that it prides itself on being accurate (and has been shown to be so), but it's very slow, so that is a big downside to it. I have a 386mHz processor, but FCEU, Nesticle, LoopyNES, etc., all run at normal speed on it. Is there something you can do about this slowness Quietust?
Nintendulator is the most accurate software NES emulator. Only Kevtris's hardware NES emulator tops Nintendulator in accuracy because it uses circuit-level emulation.
The lower-level you emulate a console, in software, the more CPU power it is going to take to run at full speed. FCEU with the accurate sound emulation feature enabled only runs at full speed on a 500+ mhz system. Nesticle, meanwhile, the least accurate emulator, runs at full speed on a 100mhz system.
My guess is that while it is possible to speed up NIntendulator, it would require too much effort and make future accuracy and compatibility improvements more difficult. Microcenter was selling a 2Ghz PC for $99 the other day. Hence the bottom of the line PC that sells these days can run Nintendulator at full speed.
In my opinion speed is not the biggest disadvantage to Nintendulator: source-level portability is. I have only seen a Windows release, while other emulators have ports to other operating systems (Linux, Mac, etc) and consoles (Dreamcast, Xbox, PSP, etc). Though to be fair, console ports have less to do with the portability of the code and more to do with the high system requirements of Nintendulator. Personally, I am still keeping my fingers crossed on an Xbox 360 port
The FCEU port to the current Xbox is quite nice, until you run into compatibility or accuracy issues.