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Comment by corysama | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

Mhm. That's been the general solution to make emulators of the time fast. ZSNES was mostly assembly too.

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.

>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.

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).

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.

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?

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 :).

It wasn't ZSNES, it was your keyboard not accepting input from three keys at once !!! I know because I remember this exact thing.

It was actually neither ZSNES or my keyboard, but SNES9X :)

from:

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).

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_inp...

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.

Yup!

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...

Evem today some emulators have trouble with this :)

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.e...

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