Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Project 64 - N64 emulator

PJ64 is my favourite choice for a N64 emulator. It gets everything to work normally and there's not really much I can say that shouldn't be in the features section. There may be another emulator that's better that this, but if you just want an emulator that will work, choose Project 64

Features
  • Change in the plugins you want for your emulator
  • Change the menu language
  • Pause, reset, save and restore menu options.
  • Save states
  • Cheats (Easy to activate)
  • Full screen 
  • Help maual
Homepage
http://www.pj64-emu.com/
 

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Change in theme

I'm changing the main theme of this site to a blog which talks about emulation and GBA (Gameboy Advanced) games. Just a quick entry, just so this blog will be able to be written in for a bit longer.

No$GBA - DS/GBA emulator

No$GBA (Now going to be referred as No$) is the best DS emulator, even though it wasn't supposed to be. As you can probably guess from the name, No$ was meant to be a GBA emulator, but soon became a DS emulator. It's GBA emulation may not be that great, it's DS emulation beats DeSmuME with its speed.
It's graphics for GBA isn't as good as VBA and it's DS emulation's graphics may be too geographical (easier to see the shapes. Is it even the right word?)
It's sound can be bad depending on the rom. It can be slow if the rom is slow/fast. You can't really hear it properly and the songs are hard to follow, but this is only with a few roms. All of the GBA roms should work and most of the DS roms shouldn't have too many problems.
You can easily change the buttons to how you want them and you can easily change the settings to your liking, including the speed of the game.

Homepage:
http://nocash.emubase.de/gba.htm

Features
Advanced options
DS/GBA rom compatibility
Active emulator forum for emulation help

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

How to use an emulator - The basics

For people actually reading this blog, but not knowing what an emulator is, this will tell you about the basics of emulation. OK, to explain what an emulator and rom is, keep reading.

Let's just say an emulator is a T.V with an inbuilt DVD player and the rom is a DVD.If you just have the T.V, then you can't play the DVD because you don't have any and if you only have the DVD, you can't watch it because you don't have anything to play it on.
So if you only have the emulator, but no rom, then you can't play any game, because you don't have one and if you only have the rom, then you can't play it because you don't have anything to play it with.

Ok, now that's done, now on how to play a rom, which is usually the same for each type of emulator.
To play a rom, open up the emulator and press ctrl+l to load a rom, but if that doesn't work, go into file, then open/load rom. You might have to select execute emulation/rom, but that can be in different places, but may be in the emulation menu option. Other types of emulators, like No$GBA, automatically go to a load screen, where you choose your rom and it loads it automatically. There are a few ways to open a rom, but if you're smart enough to find an emulator and rom, you're probably smart enough to figure out how to load up a rom.

Next is the little bit more advanced settings. Just so you know now,  these are not really the 'advanced settings'. More just the basics of the advanced settings.

With most emulators, you will be able to save states. What this means is that can save wherever you are in the game exactly like it was when you saved it. So lets say you saved while your sprite was walking and then your sprite stopped walking. If you then loaded your state, you would see your sprite exactly where he was before, walking. Another example is that you're facing a boss. You save state when you are about to beat him, and you are about to strike, when he kills you. If you just load the state, then you can dodge the bosses attack, then kill him. On VBA, the way to save states is to hold shift and press one of the F(no.) slots. To load it, you just press the F(no.) slot you saved it to. So let's say you wanted to save a state in pokemon, so yous aved in F1 (shift+F1). You lost the battle, so you want to load states. You press F2, but nothing happens. It doesn't work because you didn't save it to F2. You press F1 and it works. There are others, like No$GBA, when you have to press ctrl+S or F6?, to get a save screen. You then name it and press save. To load, you press ctrl+l or F7? and you get a load screen. You choose which save state to load and it loads. This is a much slower way, but it still works. There are also other ones like espxe where you change slots with F2, save with F1, and load with F3. This also works, but it's annoying when you ahve to keep pressing F2 to get to the save state that you want. That's all about save states.

Cheats. Cheats can be used in some emulators and are usually used with Action Replay codes and Gameshark codes. These can be found on the internet and most of the time on found on google. They can also be found on GBAtemp. They are usually able to be added on the cheats menu option.

Well that's pretty much all you need to know about emulation. If you want to find out more, then just play around with your emulator, but keep a copy, just in case.

If you need anymore advice, just comment and I'll see what I can do.

Monday, March 1, 2010

VBA - Gameboy (Advance) emulator

The VBA emulator is the best emulator for the Gameboy advance and Gameboy consoles. It makes the graphics pretty good, considering the GBA's small screen. It's still being updated now, so you know that it's going to get better. Tell me if I'm wrong, but they're up to VBAGX. I'm not sure what this exactly is (which I know is pretty bad for me), but if you havee more info, could you tell me in some shape or form so I can edit this post. Anyway, whenever I play any GBA games, I always use this.

Features
Realtime save/load
Turbo with the presss of a button
Cheats
Loads of options and add-ons for looking at the actual games code?

Homepage:
http://vba.ngemu.com/