The NES experience

I dare to say that NES-emulation today is very close to perfection in terms of accuracy. Emulators come with tons of features which of course are very nice, still there's something I miss.
Perhaps I'm getting too nostalgic, but I miss the experience itself by playing the NES in front of my old tv when I was a kid. I know atleast some people know what I am talking about since some emulators have built-in filters to "emulate" old tv's to make the experience more authentic.
My question is, do you think the experience/feeling can be improved even more, without actually sitting in front of an old TV playing the real thing?
I am not sure what I am talking about, I just want to improve the experience!

I've been playing with the idea of another NES-fileformat, which mainfocus isn't about adding missing bits from the iNES-header, but instead focus on the "NES experience". Perhaps being able to add boxart-scans, into the file itself. In theory you could probably code some pretty nice-looking "Select a ROM"-file requesters with graphical interface instead of filenames.

What do you guys think in general? Are there more ways of improving the "feeling" on todays emulators, that is not really related to emulation of the games itself?

Having the box art and game manuals integrated into the emulator certainly would improve the overall experience for a gamer. For many old games the manuals are absolutely required, so it's no wonder some people think old games are overly hard because they expect they can just pick it up and play like modern games.

However, some people (like developers) will probably consider that type of stuff to be useless cruft.

I think having an actual NES gamepad connected to a computer will improve the experience.

Regarding importance of manuals, not everyone in the world ever seen them, you know.

When you're a kid your carts are very personal, the labels are damaged in certain ways, as are the boxes and manuals. Maybe an option to progressively deteriorate manuals, carts and boxes as you use them would be interesting. The possibility of writing on them would be cool too. This way you could have your own virtual game collection, where commonly used items look worse.

How big were typical CRT SDTVs in the NES era? This matters especially for games with a 2- or 4-player mode. A widescreen TV would have to be 18% larger in diagonal measure to have the same height.

How would the experience of plugging in and using a Zapper be simulated?

As an alternative to trying to get a new ROM format adopted, consider the parallel directories approach used by MAME, i.e. have your roms folder full of your .NES files, and then have a boxart folder next to it with images named correspondingly to their roms, etc.

Perhaps you might like some of the ideas here? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH8GXy-YxhA
That emulator front-end can also search and setup game genie codes or view manual scans.
Sorry, hard to find a good quality video.

This. Don't make a useless ROM format when you can solve the issue so simply like this. For games that don't have the artwork you can just use a placeholder with the filename on it. But it'll never be quite the same as the real thing.

Sound filtering to recreate a TV speaker would be good, e.g. lowpass and highpass, as TV speakers were small and somewhat muffled.

Go ahead and approximate the filtering done in the NES, but be careful not to double filter. Don't do any filtering that the user's equipment is already going to be doing. A set of powered speakers like those that come with many store-bought PCs is comparable to TV speakers. As far as I can tell, all you need are the DC killer high-pass and the low-pass at the RF unit.

Assuming you have boxart-scans in a separate folder, how would you assign those to the right ROMs? Filename looks simple, but how could this work when there's alot of alternate versions of the same ROM (there's a few horrible examples in the GoodNESs database if I am not mistaken).

Maybe you could filter the filename so that if it matches until a ( or [ type of character you assume it matches the same one for the boxart/manual. You'd need to display the filename somewhere on the screen then to tell apart different versions.

I was referring to the TV speaker, not the filtering inside the NES. I think that current PC speakers are probably better than TV speakers from way back. The TVs I played on had a mono speaker without any bass ports or good treble response as even cheap PC speakers these days have.

Game Boy is a clear candidate for this kind of filtering (I include a profile for it in Game_Music_Emu's GBS player).

A lound 15kHz buzz simulating what a CRT's power supply sounds would be a great addition...
(I'm ironical).

More seriously, I think the noise that the FDS drive does when it loads data off the disk should be emulated. It really adds to the experience. Same goes with any system that uses disks, not only NES.

Wouldn't the vent in the back of the TV be a bass port? I get at least as much bass out of this Magnavox TV when I use an NES + PowerPak + composite cable as I do out of this pair of Acer 9M-20A200-000 speakers when I use FCEUX.


Especially since I measured my GBA's speaker as having equivalent bass response to a third-order Butterworth high-pass filter with a corner frequency of 800 Hz.


The problem is that the FDS drive noise isn't part of the signal path, meaning the TV's volume control has no effect on it. There isn't really a way to reference the PC's output level to an absolute sound output power. See my last comment about FDS drive noise emulation.

Yes! I was using WinUAE recently, and I just *had* to turn the disk drive noise on, it just didn't feel the same otherwise.

Like!

I wonder whether that plays some subconscious role in the experience, even if one doesn't readily hear it. I guess we also need to have the emulators use 100% CPU on a few cores to simulate the ~90 watts a TV used.

And as you get older you won't hear it at all. Instead the authentic part of the experience will be annoying your kids when you leave it on.

For me the trouble with emulators and even flash carts is that it's too easy to load a different rom when you get the slightest bit bored. With the actual console you're naturally lazy and when you start to get slightly bored it's the hassle of getting up to swap out carts and get the actual game to boot and everything. That little bit of effort is what keeps me glued to a single game for much longer than I should be, just because I want to give it one more try before giving up and looking for another game.

Not sure there is really a good way to implement that into an emulator without upsetting the user, but that's the big ticket for me.

The other issue that often frustrates me is timing delays between the controller and the emulator. I thought Shiru's Lawn-mower was super challenging to get the timing exactly right until I played in on an actual NES and realized the delay is what was killing me. Perhaps some time trickery on behalf of the emulator would help with that. Time travel is challenging though...

Concerning the FDS-sound, this is something I actually emulated (well, sort of) in my old emulator A/NES for AmigaOS.
If the user inserted a 3.5" floppy into the Amigadrive when booting an FDS-game, the reading sound was emulated by instead
reading the 3.5" disk. I translated the byteoffset read into a sectoroffset and made the diskdrive make a "dummyread" just to get
a sound of the drive..

For emulation that's true, but the power pak is bitch annoying when you have to change your ROM. You have to press the reset button for an incredibly long time (else it will just reset the game) and then you'll have to navigate trough the awkward menu interface to load a different ROM. It's definitely more effort than switching to another cart. This isn't true any longer for the SNES power pak thanks to the guy with the lion avatar who I forgot his name, but unfortunately this is how it goes with the NES power pak.


Actually, it's a good thing it would get mixed with the volume of the PC, because if you ever want to play emulation while being totally silent you should be able to.
Ideally the emulator could optionally enable or disable the noise, and if enabled he could chose the volume relative to the other channels. By default the noise would be enabled and be quieter than the actual sound channel.

Ha ha, I always hated when emulators for Amiga or Atari ST play a recording of the drive sound. I fondly remember the noise, but I don't find the recording really pushes the nostalgia button for me. It just sounds like a recording. Maybe if there was some sort of USB buzzing box I could attach... but this is not something I'd spend money on.

Also I don't miss long load times and disk swapping at all. I usually fast forward the load bits anyway.

Along these lines, if one doesn't stick to downloading/dumping only the cartridges one owns, one is faced with hundreds of games one has never played, and an urge to try them all, never settling long with any one game, or starting multiple games rather than finishing one first. A similar thing occurs when one's financial situation for the first time gives plenty of extra money to spend on games and one buys several games at a time.