Although the scene seems to have much less activity than it did 5 years ago, I just realized how far the emulation of some systems has come. I went back and was messing around with old 32X, n64, and jaguar emus last week, most of which were probably 3+ years old.

My old version of Gens had pretty spotty 32X support, with a lot of games having big glitches or not booting at all. I just tried out Kega and was amazed to see how robust its 32X support is! Every single game I tried worked flawlessly and I couldn't spot any differences between Kega and the actual hardware. Gens had great Sega CD support, but Kega even does the SCD/32X combo. very impressed with how far 32X emus have come.

I had a similiar experience when I downloaded the newest Project Tempest and tried some Jag games. There are still a few bugs, but the games are now very playable. I didn't know so much progress had been made on the system. I played AvP for a couple hours and the only glitches I could find were the automap doesn't work and leaves garbage on the screen and the predator's vision modes don't seem right.

I've always looked down on n64 emulators somewhat because they seem to be mostly just a hodgepodge of different plugins. However, I tried the new Rice video plugin and was again impressed that previously glitchy games like No Mercy work almost prefectly. Looking at the n64 compatibility lists though, there still seems to be a handfull of games that don't work.

I never really suspected emulation on these systems had come so far. Have any other systems made huge progress in the last few years? I think the next on my list to try will be SSF. I remember old reports of it being horribly slow and unplayable with low compatibility, but that sounds like it has changed now.

SSF works great, I'd dare say its nearly on par with how EPSXE emulates Playstation, but the big difference is that SSF requires at least a 2.8 Ghz CPU to get good results, over 3 Ghz recommended, and It pretty much needs a Pentium 4 processor (which are capable of SSE2 Instructions), I heard some people on this board got it working with an AMD chip, but for the most part, everyone else says it only works with Pentium 4 CPUs. If you have a P4 and its real fast, expect to play a vast majority of the games perfectly if not very well.

On my 3.4 Ghz P4, 2D games like SF Alpha 3, MSHVSSF, Power Instict 3, Astra Superstars, and Asuka 120% all run full speed perfect, and 3D games like Radiant Silvergun run about 55 fps or so (fluxuates slightly, with frameskip on it runs extremely well).

> SSF works great, I'd dare say its nearly on par with how EPSXE emulates
> Playstation, but the big difference is that SSF requires at least a 2.8 Ghz CPU
> to get good results, over 3 Ghz recommended, and It pretty much needs a Pentium
> 4 processor (which are capable of SSE2 Instructions), I heard some people on
> this board got it working with an AMD chip, but for the most part, everyone else
> says it only works with Pentium 4 CPUs. If you have a P4 and its real fast,
> expect to play a vast majority of the games perfectly if not very well.
>
> On my 3.4 Ghz P4, 2D games like SF Alpha 3, MSHVSSF, Power Instict 3, Astra
> Superstars, and Asuka 120% all run full speed perfect, and 3D games like Radiant
> Silvergun run about 55 fps or so (fluxuates slightly, with frameskip on it runs
> extremely well).
>

It didn't seem to work on my P4 3.0GHz computer. No matter what I tried, all I could get was an error (not message) box that said it couldn't open the message file. No amount of playing with emulator location, the default file, and whatnot got anywhere. Same thing in Alpha 13 and Beta 1. I haven't yet tried Beta 2, but I'm not holding my breath.

A brand new version of the emulator has just been released. This is not a major update but a bugfix to 007 r2. Wonder if this corrects the crashing problem so many of us have been experiencing?

Personally, I'm too tired with the emulator to try it out but if someone else with problems downloads it...let me know if it works.

I couldn't resist the temptation to download the new SSF. Great news folks, it finally works (on my machine anyway).

Just hope to god it doesn't crash on me anytime soon.