Here's the thing - I made an NESPC (stuck a PC inside of a busted Nintendo for those who don't know) for my girlfriend for Christmas. To do it cheaply and keep it cool, I used a $10 embedded PC with a 233mhz Cyrix MediaGX processor that I got off of EBay. I figured this should be good for anything up to a Sega or so. The last time I played a lot of emulated NES games, after all, was back when I had a 486 and used Nesticle95. Nesticle95, of course, runs fine on the thing. The problem is that I wired up the original controller ports to the parallel port using PPJoy and one of the controller buttons won't seem to work in Nesticle. Most Windows emulators nowadays (as I recently found out) are written in C or C++, so they're all too slow. The only one I could get to work at a decent speed is the original Nester, but at full screen mode it shrinks a into a square and loosing 30% of the screen to this really sucks. Does anyone have a solution to this? I can't find a setting that will change it. What other Windows assembler-based NES emulators do you think I should try?

My other issue is that I love to play Genesis games. With most of the Windows XP services disabled to keep the CPU free, Gens will emulate most Sega games. Sonic, however, always gives it some problems. Is there a faster Windows Genesis emulator out there? I can't believe I'd be having so many problems emulating a console with a clock speed of under 10hz.

If I replace the video card, will that help with any emulators? Will faster RAM help? It'd also be nice if there was a way to automatically shut down explorer.exe when I'm emulating a console and then turn it back on afterwards, because that does free up a decent amount of CPU power for me.

> Here's the thing - I made an NESPC (stuck a PC inside of a busted Nintendo for
> those who don't know) for my girlfriend for Christmas. To do it cheaply and keep
> it cool, I used a $10 embedded PC with a 233mhz Cyrix MediaGX processor that I
> got off of EBay. I figured this should be good for anything up to a Sega or so.
> The last time I played a lot of emulated NES games, after all, was back when I
> had a 486 and used Nesticle95. Nesticle95, of course, runs fine on the thing.
> The problem is that I wired up the original controller ports to the parallel
> port using PPJoy and one of the controller buttons won't seem to work in
> Nesticle. Most Windows emulators nowadays (as I recently found out) are written
> in C or C++, so they're all too slow. The only one I could get to work at a
> decent speed is the original Nester, but at full screen mode it shrinks a into a
> square and loosing 30% of the screen to this really sucks. Does anyone have a
> solution to this? I can't find a setting that will change it. What other Windows
> assembler-based NES emulators do you think I should try?
>
> My other issue is that I love to play Genesis games. With most of the Windows XP
> services disabled to keep the CPU free, Gens will emulate most Sega games.
> Sonic, however, always gives it some problems. Is there a faster Windows Genesis
> emulator out there? I can't believe I'd be having so many problems emulating a
> console with a clock speed of under 10hz.
>
> If I replace the video card, will that help with any emulators? Will faster RAM
> help? It'd also be nice if there was a way to automatically shut down
> explorer.exe when I'm emulating a console and then turn it back on afterwards,
> because that does free up a decent amount of CPU power for me.
>

Windows XP has got to be taking up a hell of a lot of resources. If you can find emulators and controller drivers for (e.g.) Windows 98 (or even DOS), the freed-up memory and CPU power may help. It may even be worth looking into Linux-based emulators...
I used to have a Cyrix 300Mhz processor (onboard graphics ... can't remember how much memory - 16, maybe 32Mb), and was able to run Finalburn (with a bit of frame-skipping). I had at least one Genesis emulator working (can't remember which). Never tried any NES emus though. This was all under Windows 98.

You should be able to find an old dos based emulator that will run fast. However it might not be pretty. Generally the reason why newer emulators are slower is because they work better. Have you tried fwNES? It's from 1998 and runs in DOS.

For genesis I would probably go for kgen. kega fusion is better but probably slower. genecyst is also worth a go.

Back when I ran Windows NT/2000 I used to boot dos off a floppy and run stuff off a zip disk. You could probably do something similar with a CD.

smf