kamefu

Huzzah! We have yet another non-working, out-of-date, emulation utility, m'lord! It goeth by the name of kamefu. Only it doesn't, because apparently switched its name to gamefu some time in 2006, meaning this broken thing that I got from the repositories isn't just completely useless to me, it shouldn't even be in the repositories as there has been a new version (with a different name) out for years.

Opening it up launches a wizard that asks me where my roms are. I put one in a directory called 'roms' and pointed it there. Ehn, it didn't recognize it and locked up at 'updating collection'. Re-starting the program, I was told I had zero roms. Dammit, I have one rom: the SNES version of Shadowrun I downloaded to review the last broken emulator.

I suggest not bothering with this. If you are going to bother with it, pick up the most recent version from SourceForge as it probably works. Or at least comes closer to working. As near as I can tell, this is just a multi-purpose front-end, meaning that configuring it is probably a bitch, and you'll have to download a bunch of actual emulators and learn to use them from the command-line anyway.

Purpose-built front-ends for specific emulators tend to involve little to no mucking about with command-line switches, and also to actually work, so I'd instead recommend that you find one of those.

GSnes9x

Yay, GSnes9x is not a sudoku game! It's a broken SNES emulator frontend, instead! Snes9x is a cross-platform SNES emulator; GSnes9x is a graphical front-end for Gnome so you don't have to muck about with that whole command-line thing.

On the plus side, it includes Snes9x, so you don't have to download that as well. It just works right out of the box. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well.

Joystick support is broken and sound didn't work for me either. No idea why, as far as the sound goes, though it appears that others had the same problem. The joystick thing is due to an error with the path it looks for the joystick at; it appears to be an Snes9x problem, rather than a GSnes9x problem, but the fix is to edit a configuration file of some sort somewhere, and I can't be bothered.

It also refused to go to full-screen despite the fact that I told it to in the configuration for the rom, and in the global preferences. The graphics look nice in their little window, but everything looks decent when it's really small. Downside? Everything's really hard to read when it's that small.

I decided to test the emulator with a rom from Shadowrun for the SNES; I loved the Genesis cart of the same name (completely different game; same franchise), and never had gotten around to playing the SNES version. It's essentially an adventure game, so the unreadable text was a bit of a hassle.

All in all, I'm sure you could get GSnes9x working with a bit of effort, but I have to wonder why you'd bother. The version of Snes9x it comes with has to be out of date, as GSnes9x has been listed as a dead project on SourceForge since 2004. You'd be much better off finding an SNES emulator that is still being updated, or at least works out of the box - I hear good things about ZSNES. I'll let you know if it works when I get to it.

FCE Ultra

Another emulator, here. FCE Ultra emulates NES games. It works, and works well. There's really not much to say. The only thing I noticed that was a bit annoying was the input-configuration. I was using the GUI frontend for GNOME, and it wanted 3-4 different buttons for each NES button being mapped to my joypad. It was different for each button; the directions got two, the A button got 3, the B button got 4, and so on. Just a bit weird. More annoying was the fact that it didn't save the config, so after closing the GUI, when I restarted it, it had forgotten the controller info. If you were to be un-lazy and play it from the command line, you'd have to edit the config files, and that wouldn't be an issue. So while the emulator is dandy, the GUI has issues.

DosBox

I've been fighting the urge to give up on this crazy quest to review Linux games, and just re-install my battleworn copy of Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant for the 1,000th time, in the hopes that this time I will beat it. I was strong, firm in my resolve to consistently review Linux games according to my master plan. But I had to test DosBox today, and so...

... yeah, I tested it with Wizardry VII. I managed to pull myself away, though. Eventually. After defeating the Horror of Ra-Sep-Re-Tep. I was very tempted to go after the Map Kit before quitting, but I knew that I would be lost, if I went that far, and I wouldn't get back to doing this review-blog for a week or two, minimum.

Which is to say, DosBox works. Oh yeah. DosBox is a multi-platform DOS-emulator; it exists so you can play old-school games on your new-school fancy computer with a minimum of hassle and hardware incompatibility. You mount a directory on your hard drive (where you have all your old DOS games) as a drive in DosBox and you're good to go.

I actually had fewer problems with it under Linux than I did the last time I set it up under XP. I had a sound-flake out (I lost digital sound but kept MIDI) for a little while, but it never happened again, after the first time, and everything was perfect. Incidentally, I first played Wizardry VII on a 14-inch monitor. Playing it on my current 21-inch for the first time today was a little bit like drinking one of those mega-sized cans of Foster's Lager (Australian for Beer, though I'm told actual Australians drink more Victoria Bitter).

DosBox gets a huge thumbs-up for me. If you can figure out Linux, you'll have no problem getting around in the command shell, and there are so many good games from back in the day that there's really no reason to ever buy software again, outside of graphics and larger real-time sandboxes. The downside, of course, is that installing DosBox doesn't get you anywhere. You have to have some old DOS games laying around too.

The whole 'abandonware' issue will probably never really be resolved, because most of the companies with a stake in the issue don't actually exist anymore. All I have to say on the matter is that purchasing software, when it's available, is definitely the moral high-ground. For everything else, there's Home of the Underdogs. Enter at your own risk.

DeSmuME

DeSmuME isn't a game, it's a Nintendo DS emulator. So analysis of plot and storyline and what-have-you is kinda irrelevant. It's also kinda problematic from a use standpoint - while the emulator is free, it's useless without games to play, and the vast majority of games available for play are ripped roms of DS cartridges. Which are illegal, n' all*.

Doesn't really matter, though, as it's useless even with the roms, mostly. To try it out, I obtained a copy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. It seems like every time I look at Game|Life, some sort of Phoenix Wright related news pops up, and I was curious as to how close the actual game was to that Flash-demo that they released for the newest one.

Admittedly, my machine is not the fastest on the market. It wasn't even the fastest on the market when I built it a few yews ago. It's an Athlon 2000+ XP with uhmm... 1.5 GB of RAM, and a 512MB nVidia AGP card. But it crawled on my machine. With nothing else open, it was playable, jumping between 14 and 20 FPS, and usually around the 14 mark. At first.

By the time I was halfway through the first chapter of the game, I couldn't get a framerate higher than 12 fps, was often as low as 8, and had to click the mouse a couple of times to make sure it registered with the simulated touch-screen. With a browser window open - not active, just open - I'm currently averaging 7 fps.

This game is already kinda slow - I'm a fast reader, and any kind of wait-time annoys me - but pauses that are probably dramatic on the original hardware are turned into excruciatingly long lulls in DeSmuME. Your mileage may vary; maybe it's a better experience on a dual-core processor. But as far as I'm concerned, this emulator is just not ready for regular use. I can't imagine how frustratingly lame any sort of action game would be.

Sound and graphics were mostly 100% - there was one spot where the graphics got glitchy, and occasionally the sound got slow - but the whole thing just trickled like molasses. DeSmuME is not yet ripe.

*Yes, I know they are legal in certain circumstances, but those circumstances almost never exist in reality, and have never (as far as I know) been tested in an actual court room anyways.