byuu's message board

IIRC -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- there are N64 plugins that will have separate framebuffers for displaying or for the CPU to mess with, and will even emulate CPU framebuffer effects for the display buffer. Even if I'm wrong, something like that happens, and it's crazy.

At some levels it's practical to run two simultaneously. But this gets harder and harder as the LLE and HLE will start to get out of sync.

Actually byuu all Mupen64Plus plugins can increase resolution .
Higher resolution has nothing to do with accurency of emulation because its ehnacemement.3D graphics dont have real resolution and higher resolutions dont affect accurency because its scaling done at the end of rendering process.

From what I saw in a quick Google search, the Rice video plugin is old, and it's use is discouraged. It's not very accurate, especially when compared to some new plugins, so I believe that it is difficult to say that it is "striving for accuracy."

Rice plugin is not old compared to other plugins.

Yep, looks like I'm wrong about that. N64 emulators are not my forte.


It depends on your definition of accuracy. Some people define video accuracy as, "Wow, this looks exactly like I remember Mario 64," and then some people define it as, "This is exactly what Mario 64 will look like if I play it on a real N64." My definition of video accuracy is the second definition, so I would have to say that I disagree with what you have said.

This reminds me of the Mode 7 high-quality scaling/blurring, as demonstrated here, using some footage from different Super Metroid TASes from tasvideos.org:



As you can see, there is a big difference between the two images, with one being smoother; however, despite the fact that some may think it looks nicer, it would not have been smoothed had it been a real SNES, and thus can be deemed inaccurate.

I believe that this high-quality scaling would fall under the category of enhancement, yet to me, this strays from the accurate. Can it be a nice option to have in an emulator? Yes. Does having it as an option in an emulator make it any less accurate when not using it? No. However, not rendering it as the real console would does indeed make it inaccurate.

(P.S. Sorry if the image is too big. I simply screenshotted YouTube videos and threw it together quickly in GIMP. The image may look a bit weird due to the dithering. Source video can be found here for the blurry one, and here for the accurate one.)

Features like higher internal resolution , trilinear or anisotropic filtering, antialiasing or support for shaders and texture packs has nothing to do with accurancy of emulation if original console didnt have them.Only actual emulation can be accurate. Desmume X432R isnt more or less accurate than original version. Second one is I suppose bilinear but both images in your picture look like shit.

Just because boosting the internal resolution doesn't have any apparent side-effects does not make it not accurate. Accuracy as a word does not simply refer to apparent behavior or any arbitrary set of things. You seem to subscribe to the idea that accuracy = compatibility, but no. Accuracy, in terms of emulation, is simply how correct the emulation is to the original hardware. No revision of the DS had a GPU capable of doing this. Without reading the code, it's impossible to say whether such hardware would even be plausible to build because the emulator could be doing things that would be really difficult to implement in hardware to pull this off with high compatibility.

And for all we know, there could be unforeseen side-effects. It wouldn't be unheard of - for example, Dolphin-emu has the ability to boost internal resolution also, and while it certainly SEEMS to be accurate, it still changes some behavior in some corner cases.

And while certain things seem like free enhancements, there's always a case when that might not be true. Which is why force anti-aliasing can break crap on desktops. :)

> Features like higher internal resolution , trilinear or anisotropic filtering, antialiasing or support for shaders and texture packs has nothing to do with accurancy of emulation if original console didnt have them.

Yes, they do, as if the original console didn't have them, then emulating them as such will not be accurate to the original console. The objective of an accurate emulator (such as bsnes and cen64) is to emulate the console, not to play games. If you just want to play games, then play them however you want, with texture packs, antialiasing, upscaling the internal resolution, or whatever. However, this will provide an inaccurate graphical representation when compared to playing on a television with an original console.


> Desmume X432R isnt more or less accurate than original version.
Actually, it is less accurate, because on a DS you can't change the internal resolution of the rasterizer.

> Second one is I suppose bilinear but both images in your picture look like shit.
I don't think anyone is going to argue with you there. However, one of the images is accurate to what a SNES would output and the other is not, which is the point I was going for there.

EDIT: What jchadwick said.

Like I said increasing resolution has no relation to accuracy.

Yes it does. The GPU it's emulating does not run at those resolutions, therefore the GPU emulation is inaccurate.

If you're going to reply to this post, please actually explain why you think the word 'accuracy' based on its definition does not include the resolution a GPU runs at.

No it isnt, increasing resolution is additional feature of emulators its not part of emulation only actual emulation can be accurate or not.

What's "actual emulation" entail? GPUs, like CPUs, are hardware, and we're emulating their behavior. Not all 3D hardware is the same, and resolution is often an important part of console hardware.

How is this not part of emulation? Emulation is, by definition, doing things the original console did. One of those things was rendering, at their native resolution. Are you sure you're not thinking of postprocessing effects, such as xbr? That is applied to a frame after all emulation for that frame is complete. The CPU has done its logic, the GPU has done its rendering, and then the filter or shader or whatever is applied. Raising the internal resolution, on the other hand, has to happen during emulation, and in many cases can even affect the game's internal logic. The simple fact that it can cause bugs in the game should be evidence enough that it's part of emulation.

I'd rather a version that operates at a frame rate that is most compatible with 60Hz computer displays. Currently there is slight micro hiccups periodically because it doesn't run at quite the right frame rate for typical computer displays.

For the currently discussed topic, it depends on the emulator. For example, upscaling the internal resolution in PCSX2 causes numerous problems in several (most?) games, I'm of the assumption the upscaling isn't applied to the final output unlike a certain user here who is seemingly insisting all emulators do it after (or as the final step of) rendering.