Sony and Nintendo Make the Emulators of the Year ?

The Homebrew and Emulation Scene has seen some great Emulators over the years, Snes9X, Zsnes, Mame (in all its versions), Bleem, Ultrahle, Project64, Chankast.

Those Emulators have brought many thousands to the Homebrew and Emulation Arena, since those emulators have come and gone we havent had the buzz of a killer emulator since then.

That is until the last few months, the might of Sony and Nintendo have jumped into the Emulation Scene with their own emulators for the PSP and Nintendo Wii.

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Sonys PS1 Emulator
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Sony who using bullyboy tactics killed of Bleem and VGS have released what is the best emulator easily of the last year. The Playstation Emulator works at full speed with sound and decent controls in a widescreen on the Playstation Portable. The Emulator is being released in a single game format with PSX Games on the PS Network Shop. Luckily for the Homebrew Scene, Dark Alex released a custom firmware that opened up the emulator and now thousands of PSP Homebrew fans are enjoying all their favourite PSOne games in both NTSC and PAL format. Just about every game is perfect.

So well done Sony, for a company who hates emulators you have made the best one so far.

Nintendo`s Emulators for Wii
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The Nintendo Wii is an amazing console, not as powerful as the PS3 and Xbox360 but so unique it is gathering fans from all over the globe.

The Virtual Console is an awesome way to buy your favourite classic games and relive the best years of gaming.

For this Nintendo has written some excellent emulators for the Wii, So far we have Snes, Nes, PC Engine, Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64 and within the next few months NeoGeo and MSX.

Nintendo have done what most homebrew coders take years to do and thats get fullspeed emulators for the consoles mentioned above and with that in mind have dealt the homebrew community a major blow. Most Homebrewers love Emulators and with Nintendo covering most of the best systems already the need to write emulators for the Wii lessens.

Conclusion
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It feels strange as a fan of Homebrew and Emulators for over 12 years to be thanking Sony and Nintendo. But this year they deserve all the thanks from all corners of the emulation scene for the best emulators released in the last year.

Thanks Again Sony and Nintendo :)

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Do you agree or disagree with this article, answer via comments.

Nintendo`s Emulators for Wii was a better idea than the PS1 Emulator for the PSP.

The PS1 emulator is only good because of the custom firmware that lets anyone play any PS1 game on the PSP without having to pay for them, though Sony had intended to sell limited amounts of overpriced games that could only be bought via PS3.
When I say overpriced, I mean more than zero dollars.
You have to pay for every last emulated game on the Wii, but I'm not sure of how much they cost or what games they're selling so far.

Well, for the Wii, the games range i think from like 4-10$. The older consoles like nintendo and crap are like 4. SNES and genesis are like 5/6$. This goes all the way up to N64 at a whopping 10$.
Now, compare that to around 5-7$ for a playstation game.

Bluh...bull****. PSP owns! PSP can play all of that. SNES at full speed,NES at full speed,NG4 almost full speed and even more consoles at full speed. PSP is the bomb. And the best of all is that it's a handheld and we can play all emulators for free.

So true, the psp is a great portable device for emulation.
I´m curious how the Wii emu´s work though. Can you play your own roms or will it only work though download?

wait wait wait.. wii plays genesis elso?????
omg......... im really gonne buy it

PSP can play all the listed emu that the wii can play except for the N64(full), besides the PS1 games are classic

SNES Emu + PS1 Emu + PSP= PRICELESS

i completly agree they have done amazing things with each of there respective hardware, however the pricing is an issue to me and the fact you cant get a discount (or freebie) if you own the actual game cart/disk/whatever is a big let down, and in fact is the only one.

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Originally Posted by kcajblue

Nintendo`s Emulators for Wii was a better idea than the PS1 Emulator for the PSP.

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Looking at your statement from a homebrew perspective I'd say you were insane.

While the quantity and future potential of even more emulators on the Wii is impressive, it could hardly be considered a replacement for PSP homebrew. Hell, with gpSP you can even play 85-90% of GBA games on the PSP. I don't even think the Wii has a GBA Emulator.

And I don't know how anyone could not be excited about PS1 capabilities with Dark_AleX's 3.xx OE firmware.

But this article is not about homebrew necessarily, its about SONY & Nintendo's efforts in emulation. I'm not sure its really fair to compare a handheld to a console, but SONY did seem to poorly plan how they rolled out PS1 gaming on the PSP. For people who have no clue about homebrew it is indeed far more convenient to use the Wii's virtual console.

So for regular Joe consumers who are not technically inclined or are in the dark about PSP homebrew, the Nintendo Wii would be more attractive if one is looking for a way to relive the classics.

i just said it was a better idea.
i didnt say it completely beat the psp.

i said that because the psp only has one official emulator. while the wii has support for all of the old nintendo systems.

you guys have to realize that sony did not intend for people to pirate roms to play on their psp's, it is homebrew that makes the psp decent to own, not sony

great read, the most impressive emulator has to be the ps1 emulator on the psp. I don't think that a full speed ps1 emulator could have come from a homebrew coder. I commend Sony for there efforts.

If were talking legal emulation, the Wii is best. There are more fun classic games on Wii VC (Zelda/Mario) than classic games on the ps one. Is there even anything worth playing on ps one anyways?

I do think Wii and Sony have made the emulators of the year, but is it fair to even consider them? They both have nearly limitless resources and staff available to them. Considering the state of emulation in the homebrew community, I think the emulators of the year should go to ZX-81, Exophase and Strmnnrmn (Sorry Dax, though you unlocked the PSX emu, you didn't really make it, but I'm super grateful anyway).

my vote(if it mattered) would go to Exophase(sorry if I spelled that wrong) becuasesony and nintendo had the recources to make those emulators but Epophase really tried hard to make his emulator the best it could be. I am trully a fan of gpSP, and Exophase as a coder. And also the Sony ps1 emulator kicks ass of course, but the fact that gpSP is coded by an individual person kind of blows my mind
Thats why i think gpSP deserves to be called the best emulator.

i would just like to add that in reagrds to wii emulated games yes they play fine and look great but there is none of the custom options that i usually find so handy in an emulator. Mainly the inability to save anywhere on older and many times frustratingly hard games, this is a serious omission on nintendo's behalf i feel and i dont want to hear about how u can leave a game and come back to it another time because if u screw up later in the game then u still gotta start again. i admit this only mainly covers 8 bit games but some 16bits never had a save option either. Also nintendo refusal to emulate rumble packs and save packs on n64 games is just a joke to me. But that still hasnt stopped me buying what i think are overpriced VC games :-)

for emulation let's not forget gamecube and ps2 on the wii and ps3, respectively. though it's mostly hardware not software (sorry EU), it's still an added bonus that we've missed on other consoles (still pissed for almost a decade now that my dc couldn't emu saturn). it's also a shame you can't play psx downloads on ps3 (only on psp). are we expected to buy every game again like nintendo or hunt down discs on ebay? sony now has the ability just as nintendo to offer lost treasures of gaming history to its customers.

are not even half as good as what the emu scene has developed, they lock the screens into their native resolutions and aspect ratios with disastrous results on many newer lcd tvs once bein run in component cable mode.
And Nintendos answer to the problem so far, live with it (not quite in the same words, they said, the games are run as they are on the original hence problems can occur)
the easy fix for nintendo would be to add scalers which can deliver progressive signals (the code is open and has been tested for years)
but no fix...

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Originally Posted by Gene

my vote(if it mattered) would go to Exophase(sorry if I spelled that wrong) becuasesony and nintendo had the recources to make those emulators but Epophase really tried hard to make his emulator the best it could be. I am trully a fan of gpSP, and Exophase as a coder. And also the Sony ps1 emulator kicks ass of course, but the fact that gpSP is coded by an individual person kind of blows my mind
Thats why i think gpSP deserves to be called the best emulator.

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I totally agree with you there mate.

Exophase did a remarkable job on Gpsp and for it to run at full speed on almost every game is truly awesome.
I must admit though the PSone emu is my favourite. I've finished FF7 and i'm now on disc 2 on FF9, it's great to have a portable Resident evil too.

One little word which really confuses me.
on 3.10 OE-A Sony updated the PS1 emulator but one of the strangest things that they could do was adding the auto pal-ntsc fix.

why??

i'm sure we have all had problems converting our pal games to ntsc on 3,03 OE-A and below just so we don't get half of our screen missing but for Sony to help us in this way makes things much easier. :)

Another thing that seems odd is 99% of games are available in the US anyway including many games which did not get a release over here, Sony didn't need to do this pal-ntsc auto converter so why did they do it.

In some odd way it seems like Sony actually want us to rip our own PS1 games and stick them on memory stick

Because emulating the N64 on a 700mhz processor with 96 megs of ram is SO hard... I mean, it must be WAY easier to emulate the PS1 on a 333mhz processor with 32 megs of ram... Nintendo really had their work cut out for them, apparantly.

Yep, $10 for an N64 game is a much better deal than a $5 PS1 game that you can take anywhere. Or if you want, you can pay $30 to get your N64 games on the go with the DS! And NES/SNES games are only $20 for GBA! Isn't Nintendo just the best company ever?
[/sarcasm]

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Originally Posted by WRAGGSTER

Do you agree or disagree with this article

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Wholeheartedly disagree, for the following reasons:

1) This article gives sole credit to Nintendo/Sony, when it's a well-known fact that major corporations have been incorporating open-source emulator code into their commercial releases for some time. I obviously can't say with total certainty, but I would be willing to bet that both companies picked up code from other sources and then finished them off. This is usually known as porting or optimizing and you usually don't give props to the porting/optimizing party.

2) Most of the non-commercial emulators that we enjoy are developed as a hobby, in the coders' free time. A lot of emulators could be polished up and perfected in just a few months if you got a team of coders working on them full time (especially if they had free and unrestricted access to all of the original hardware documentation that they needed, as Sony and Nintendo certainly did).

Taking that into consideration, neither company has done anything notably special, especially if they didn't start from scratch. ...And looking at the sheer scope of consoles that the big N is attempting to provide games for, you'd have a very hard time convincing me that the emulation work was done entirely without help from open-source projects.

It's great that they're willing to provide us with these emulations, but it's nothing impressive. It's just business.

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Originally Posted by darthpaul

PSP is the bomb.

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I don't think anyone is allowed to use that expression anymore.....as in, the last time i said "the bomb" was around the time the N64 first came out:rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by b8a

This article gives sole credit to Nintendo/Sony, when it's a well-known fact that major corporations have been incorporating open-source emulator code into their commercial releases for some time. I obviously can't say with total certainty, but I would be willing to bet that both companies picked up code from other sources

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Sony and nintendo would not need to port any homebrew emulator because they have the original documentation of the hardware. Intern it would be simple to emulate.

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Originally Posted by b8a

Wholeheartedly disagree, for the following reasons:

1) This article gives sole credit to Nintendo/Sony, when it's a well-known fact that major corporations have been incorporating open-source emulator code into their commercial releases for some time. I obviously can't say with total certainty, but I would be willing to bet that both companies picked up code from other sources and then finished them off. This is usually known as porting or optimizing and you usually don't give props to the porting/optimizing party.

2) Most of the non-commercial emulators that we enjoy are developed as a hobby, in the coders' free time. A lot of emulators could be polished up and perfected in just a few months if you got a team of coders working on them full time (especially if they had free and unrestricted access to all of the original hardware documentation that they needed, as Sony and Nintendo certainly did).

Taking that into consideration, neither company has done anything notably special, especially if they didn't start from scratch. ...And looking at the sheer scope of consoles that the big N is attempting to provide games for, you'd have a very hard time convincing me that the emulation work was done entirely without help from open-source projects.

It's great that they're willing to provide us with these emulations, but it's nothing impressive. It's just business.

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Yea i totally agree w/ u on that. Since both Sony and Nintendo had the codes for their own systems, it would be much easier for them to create their own emulators compared to homebrew coders who had to crack the systems first to get the codes and try to make a perfect emulator on wat they can get. Homebrew coders dont do it for a profit either while those 2 companies do. Exophase has done a great job on gpPSP.

yeah after considering what i posted i have to say something.
that something is, as already mentioned, the companies have limitless resources so of course there work is going to be better. i dont mean to take the shine off the guys who spent all there hard time making software for us all from there own home and for no gain other than recognition (which they are getting at least from me) so i really think its not fair to compare corporate software against homebrew as they cant really compete. all the emulators are phenominally good work no matter how they came about but the edge goes to the homebrew devs simply because there not doing it for money or a big company - there doing it for us.

Yeah, i cant give sony or nintendo much credit on these emulators. Good idea to make them, but i wouldnt light a candle to them cause they have money out the ass and the documentation on the system's workings. so from now on, i think any emulator nominations should go to homebrew coders, not companies. bt i do have to give some cred to sony though, for making such an exploitable system. :D

Damn Anger, beat me to it.

i agree with other comments the ps1 emulator would be rubbish without the crack by DA.

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Originally Posted by gunntims0103

Sony and nintendo would not need to port any homebrew emulator because they have the original documentation of the hardware. Intern it would be simple to emulate.

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I think we may be misunderstanding each other... I already addressed the fact that they would have access to the documentation and thus have an easier time making the emulators.

Sure they don't NEED to port emulators, but if someone else has already done 80-90% of the work, why would they work from scratch? Being a "coder" yourself, I'm sure you're well aware of the concept of not reinventing the wheel. Hobbyists may be "pure" enough to work from scratch, but these are companies that just need software that works. From that standpoint, they'd be utterly nuts not to use code that's already been tested by thousands accross the globe.

Besides, being a "coder" yourself you DO stay current on what your emulator producing bretheren have to say, don't you? Because I've read plenty of reports from emulator coders who have been able to pick their work out of commercial projects from companies rereleasing software that they had all of the original source code and hardware documentation for.

And, if that's not enough, maybe thinking about it from this perspective will help: Sony didn't NEED to incorporate open-source code that subjected the PSP to a security vulnerability. But they did.

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Originally Posted by woods05

If were talking legal emulation, the Wii is best. There are more fun classic games on Wii VC (Zelda/Mario) than classic games on the ps one. Is there even anything worth playing on ps one anyways?

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:D lol...hum u may have eared about Metalgearsolid, Finalfantasy7 or Gran turismo....?!?!?:confused:

my personnal favorite: Einhender, tobal2, jumping flash

ok daft question but where can i get my hands on the sony psx emulator? do i have to buy it or download it on a ps3? As i wont be gettin a ps3 until it comes down to a resonable price, is thier anyway of gettin the emu from here or is that naughty.....................