Mednafenx-nes - Nes Emulator For Xbox V15, What happened to v14? Options

[lithium210]

im building a mame cabinet or more like a xbox cabinet and after using this emu, its perfect for my setup! thanks so much!!

[Sketcz]

I did a search and this appears to be the latest topic on Mednafenx NES, so I'd like to point out some serious flaws with this version.

I write for Hardcore Gaming 101, where screen fidelity is of the utmost importance. Emulated screens must be 1x1, in perfect ratio, with no filters or other such gimmickry.

Up until now I've been using MednafenX NES V9, the only problem being when you take a screenshot, what it actually grabs has scrolled downwards by about 8 pixels. So you get a black bar at the top (or in some games, whatever was being drawn in that otherwise blank area).

MednafenX V9


Note how the bottom of the screen is cut off? It's still 224 pixels vertical, but it's scrolled down a bit.

Here's how it SHOULD look, taken on FCEU for PC:


Notice how the stats at the bottom are correctly aligned? It's 224 pixels in height, but the screen capture ended at the correct place, grabbing the entirety of the bottom of the screen.

With this stage of Vice it's OK, since the game is drawing the top in to scroll down, so you don't notice, but in another game, such Samurai Pizza Cats, you end up with a hideous balck bar at the top and the bottom cut off. Obviously I can't use screens like this.

So I decided to update to V15 of this, and I discover the palette has been screwed up:


Look at how muddy and washed out it is, with a kind of orange tone to it. What is this?!

I can't play it and I can't use the screens. It's hideous. Notice how vibrant the colours were in the first two screens. And worst of all, IT'S STILL SHIFTING THE POSITION OF THE GRAB, so I again end up with the bottom cut off.

Madmab, I appreciate the work you put into this, but I have had to revert back to V9. I don't know how anyone could play a game with the wrong colours. Both V9 and FCEU have the same colours, very vibrant and beautiful to look at.


For both MednafenX experiments I deleted the SAVE directory and defaulted the settings, and booted the ROM both times in default mode. I did not alter the palette options. Somewhere along the lines you must have changed how the emulator core or whatever renders the graphics. After taking this screen I did try altering the palette options, selecting autogenerate and other options, but this screwed it up even worse! There does not seem to be any way to get the V15 emulator to render colours like the V9 emulator.

Is there any chance that both of these problems could be fixed? I can use V9 for the correct colouring, but that means I still need to switch to PC emulation for taking article screenshots.


EDIT:
Without taking more screens and FTPing them to my PC to upload, here's another game on our server I took with the bar at the top. The background is black, so you don't notice it very much, but just LOOK at how low down the status bar is? Somehow when you click capture on Mednafen, it doesn't start at the first NTSC scanline (#8), it starts at 0 and then stops short, cutting off the last 8 lines. If you need more images to illustrate this I can take some. But right now Mednafenx is useless for actual work.



This post has been edited by Sketcz: Feb 16 2012, 06:02 PM

[law56ker]

Hmm.... Interesting read.

[madmab]

1) MednafenX_NES has four options for specifying the starting and ending scanline for NTSC and PAL games. It just so happens that the "default" for NTSC is 8 scanlines.

2) Palettes are an extremely subjective thing.

3) I did not get involved with MednafenX_NES until after version 11.

4) Comparing the palette from two different emulators (FCEU) and MednafenX_NES is hardly the way to go. Best to compare the xbox versions with the "core" versionf of MednafenX that the xbox versions are based on.

5) Mednafen does offer options for selecting alternate palettes, etc. That is probably what you want to do (as well as looking into point number 1).

That's really all I can think of atm.

This post has been edited by madmab: Feb 17 2012, 03:34 AM

[Sketcz]

Thanks for the advice.

3) I did not get involved with MednafenX_NES until after version 11.

I did not realise this! Apologies for the wrong assumption.

Regarding the points:
1) The problem doesn't appear to be regarding where the scanlines start or stop when the emulator displays it on my TV. What I am seeing on my TV appears to be in perfect alignment - I get the entire image, including the bottom of the screen. It seems to be that when I hit the "screengrab" button, it starts the grab at the wrong place. Whatever imagery it's reading from the memory buffer, or whatever, and placing it as a PNG on my HDD, it's grabbing the wrong part.

2/4/5) Well, it's not that subjective. Mednafenx_NES V9 had a perfect palette which is identical to all the other NES emulators I have.

Fair enough about comparing V9 to a different emulator (FCEU), they might have different standards. But I only mentioned it because both FCEU and V9 of Mednafen produced the exact same colour palette. They're identical. I'm curious as to how and why someone, anyone, would want to change what was already perfect, and replace it with a muddy brown filtered palette. Maybe I'll root through the older V10-V13 topics to find mention of this.


I tried playing with the palette options in V15, but couldn't find anything which allowed it to look like V9. I will have another look to see what I missed.

For comparison, note the colour of the building. V9 at the top, V15 at the bottom:



This post has been edited by Sketcz: Feb 17 2012, 05:17 PM

[madmab]

Well a quick glance at ther game screen rendering code does show that it displays the screen slightly different than how the screenshots are taken. Whether I'd be able to fix that.. it's hard to say I'd have to dig a little deeper..

As far as palette changes go that is ultimately the makers of the core that do this. You could always get Version 10 thru 13 and see if the palette looks any different.

And yes palettes are VERY subjective. Just read any topic discussing it... different people have different perceptions on how they remember their NES looking. Also there would not be ten million different palettes to choose from if this was not the case.

Use the palette selector and try loading "old_palette.pal" and see if this makes you happy..

[Sketcz]

Thank you! That’s fixed the colour problem perfectly. I know this will sound stupid, but the extension “.pal” made me think it was related to emulation of PAL games, so my brain ignored it. Yes, that’s perfect now.

As for the screengrab problem, I found a workaround.

I reinstalled my old copy of FCEUltra for Xbox (I forget which version... 17?), and that screengrabs the entire screen without cutting anything off..

Curiously it displays the screen as being 232 pixels tall now (an excess of 8 pixels for an NTSC game), with a little bit of excess at the bottom. But I can always trim the excess.

I actually switched to Mednafenx a few years back because it had an option to disable the 8-sprites on a line limitation of the NES, which FCEU didn't offer (I checked all the options and didn't notice it). But I guess I can live with flickering sprites if it means a full screengrab.

If you feel like tinkering though, by all means feel free. But don't feel obliged on my account.

And thanks for the replies.

[Movax]

it had an option to disable the 8-sprites on a line limitation of the NES,

I thought that didn't really work except in rare instances, since most games that suffered heavily from that problem were programmed to rotate sprites anyway. Are there any hacked versions of Super Dodgeball that remove the active sprite rotation code?

[madmab]

I noticed that you are over at emuxtras... but did not know if you posted anything over there. So I'm replying here.

ok... I took a closer look at the screenshot capture code for the MednafenX_NES emulator and I noticed that although x-port did compensate for the gamescreen size (which at first I didn't think he did) he did not take into account any of the image offset at the top. Hence the weird screenshot issue.

I corrected that and took a screenshot and now it is positioned and looks like it should.

Thanks for catching this little issue..

This post has been edited by madmab: Feb 20 2012, 04:09 PM

[Sketcz]

I noticed that you are over at emuxtras... but did not know if you posted anything over there. So I'm replying here.

I am? I'm pretty sure I'm not. I've got an account here, on RHDN, HG101, and a few other forums, but I don't recall signing up at Emuextras. Got a link to the forum profile? I know there's a guy with my username on some Mac forums, but I don't even own a Mac!

Otherwise no problem, I'm just really pedantic when it comes to... well everything. Thanks.

[bigby]

Well, on closer inspection of the emuxtras members we find...

Skell
skid
skietuwillie
skilla
Skurvy_Pirate
skylerinman
skyline21
SkyNIC
skywaulker
skyzyourguy

No Sketcz though

[madmab]

Hrmmmm.. I wonder what in the world I was thinking..

Musta been hallucinating!

[DarthMingus]

I write for Hardcore Gaming 101, where screen fidelity is of the utmost importance. Emulated screens must be 1x1, in perfect ratio, with no filters or other such gimmickry.

What have you written?

Also, as you know, colors are very subjective. Check out the difference between RGB and composite on a real NES system:

http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/rgb_compare.html

It looks like the newer versions of the emulator more closely resembles the actual NES (composite) output. Enjoy!

This post has been edited by DarthMingus: Feb 22 2012, 04:40 AM

[Sketcz]

The colours might resemble composite, but for that true effect you need the jagged vertical lines you get with the original hardware. My Xbox outputs at RGB and the pixels are too crisp to appreciate the more earthy colours. I might as well go the whole hog and have them crisp and colourful. I mean, if someone coded a graphics filter which replicated the jaggy vertical lines, then maybe I'd argue for the earthier tones. What can I say? I'm an all or nothing kind of guy.

What have you written?

Dozens of articles for print magazines and other websites, but here's my current portfolio on HG101. Enjoy!

This post has been edited by Sketcz: Feb 22 2012, 06:04 PM