/vr/ - Retro Games

as good as it's always been

It's only good for those curious about the emulation scene of the late 90s and early 2000s. For many millennials it was how they experienced the majority of NES games they have played for the first time. You might have played 20-30 real NES game carts but with emulation you could experience a thousand.

no
just use fceux

>>9288594
The joke is they replaced the "TE" in Testicle with "NE" forming the new word "Nesticle", referencing the NES also known as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

>>9288594
yes, it's an extremely well crafted DOS era NES emulator with wonky sound and very good speed on machines under 200mhz, outside of those circumstances there's really no point in using it

>>9288594
the best

I miss edgy 90s internet aesthetic, when the net was completely disconnected from the outside corporate world

Soulful

>>9288618
>replaced e with e
Are you retarded?

>>9288630
>You can't swap one thing with another thing that is the same thing as the last thing
Anon I...

>>9288594
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-grxQ2y71o
It's the best.

>>9288594
Hasn't aged a day

>>9288636
He's saying including the E at all is redundant, retard

>>9288637
What causes the messed up sprites? Did anyone still play the games like this?

>>9288646
It was just a silly emulation error in the very first version of Nesticle. It got fixed almost immediately.

>>9288645
I don't know the devs of Nesticle on a personal level, but for me it's the "E' in NES, rather than the "E" in Testicle.

>>9288594
Messes up for me on windows 9 when I used it

Not sure about now

>>9288657
Which is redundant and proves your room temperature IQ.

>>9288659
What the fuck is windows 9?

>>9288618
Woh, that is pretty funny!

>>9288692
Windows 9 came before Windows X.

nesticle is a retro experience in and of itself.

>>9288618
I don't get it.

>>9288664
I think this can be solved by putting his IQ back in the fridge.

>>9288618
the number of autists responding to this post without understanding the implied sarcasm goes to show you just how retarded /vr/ actually is

>>9288659
>windows 9
huh?
>>9288701
>Windows X
HUH?

>>9288618
Please explain further

Thanks, Shitman!

With nesticle I could play NES games at nearly full speed on my 66mhz 486 which was great

>>9288618
"NO SHIT"

>>9288618
Ness' Tickle and Seecle (formerly Ninten's)

>>9288657
based retard

>>9288657
well trolled

>>9288701
fun fact: they skipped windows 9 due to a lot of legacy code checking the windows version and looking for 9
>captcha: os2 wx
the irony....

>>9288719
eh? trolling as an art form predates the Internet

>>9288664
>>9289038
>>9289056
he means the pronunciations of each E you dunceciations

if this guy pronounces it en ee es tickle im gonna scream

>>9289067
>Nintendo
>Entertainment
>System
:/
>>9289075
this!

>>9288637
SOVL

It's pronounced TEE-EE-ESSticle

>>9288974
yep, did the same thing on a 486 DX4 100mhz under DOS using the faux SNES pad that came with pic related, the whole thing set up in a comfy basement room

I remember writing down passwords for the Bugs Bunny puzzle platformer game(s) because I had not yet realized the concept of savestates

>>9288618
PEAK. COMEDY.

It's like ZSNES. Obviously still works, but there's better emulators these days.
Also like ZSNES, you'd use it for the nostalgia.

>>9288594
No, use Mesen.

>>9288594
If you're rocking a Pentium 75, it and LoopyNES are about as good as it gets.

>>9289790
although, I haven't tried No$NES on a super low end rig. Curious to see how it stacks up performance/accuracy-wise.

>>9288618
i genuinely never noticed that it was a joke about penis until today, thanks friend

>>9288594
No, it was showing its age about 20 years ago.

>>9288607
True, being able to get all the free NES and Gameboy games I wanted was pretty sick. Oh, and then the SNES and Genesis games, I was in heaven!

>>9288618
WHAT THE FUCK

>>9288628
The net truly is too corporatized and sanitized now.

>>9288703
I guess it is.

>>9289839
You ain't seen nothing yet. Wait til they get rid of 4chan and the games off of archive.org

>>9288607
It cannot be overstated how shitflipping it was when you basically enabled god mode and got to play all the games in the mags for free one day in '97.

>>9289845

Honestly I have no idea how this site is still up considering /b/ has been a revenge porn board for like 7 years now. I'll miss /vr/ and the other small boards when it finally goes though.

>>9289801
Well, their Genesis emulator was more obvious with "Genecyst".

Let's come up with cool emulator names, I'll start!

DREAMCASTurd

>>9289948
They'll just axe /b/ if it becomes enough of a problem that it's a threat, it's by far the most useless board on all of 4chan by enormous margin, it was already irredeemable shit 10 years ago.

>>9290007
A poet, this one.

>>9290007
VaGenesis

>>9290024
the fanboy's face
a muddy frown
the fecal poet
strikes true and brown

>>9289948
I'm pretty sure if a board were to kill 4chan, it'd be /pol/, considering all the latent school shooters and seditious fascists that frequent it.

>>9289994
what's the joke..

>>9289948
4chan is useful as a propaganda machine for many countries. It is not going anywhere anytime soon. You probably think I am schizophrenic (yeah I am) but I'm not joking, nor do I frequent pol. There's a reason why Kiwi Farms got nuked and 4chan is still standing

>>9288594
Nesticle was cool, but for me it was Nester.

>>9289839
>The net truly is too corporatized and sanitized now.
It seems like there has been a push since ~2015 to rid the net of "hate speech" (you can't even call someone a nigger in the YouTube comments anymore). However gore and explicit sexual content are more widely available than ever. YouTube has literal softcore porn and police/military shooting videos, while narco torture videos and sexually explicit content are easily accessible on Twitter and Instagram. REALLY makes you think

>>9290319
Unabomber told us so like 50 years ago.

>>9289994
think genecyst was the first emulator I ever used

>>9290007
FamiCum

>>9288618

>>9290319
>REALLY makes you think
No it doesn't, you dunce. Just proves filtering text is easier than videos.
Your entire mindset of inventing conspiracies is what's pushing you deeper and deeper into psychosis.

>>9288594
>NESticle
>ZSNES
Why were 90s emus so comfy?

>>9290319
There's retarded.
Then there's... advance retarded.
And that still doesnt begin to describe you.

>>9290389
Not all of them were. Some were purely practical and/or were commercialized even back then, such as Marat Fayzullin's emulators. The soulful ones like Nesticle were done by l33t h4x0r types just doing cool shit on their spare time. Also helps that they started on DOS so they were forced to create an entire UI, and if you're gonna do that, may as well do something cool with it.

>>9290213
I kind of thought its more because 4chan is useful to the FBI since 4chan will very willingly disclose your IP to them if you post illegal content here.

Either way its been kicking for nearly 20 years now, impressive feat.

>>9290319
This isnt even close to true, big sites scrub gore and murder videos so fast these days and if theres a shooting itll take me like 10-15 minutes to find it. Usually if I see them its because they are reuploaded here. That shit used to be so prevalent that you would see it browsing fucking GameFAQs.

Also you used to see CP by complete accident on google image search a lot of the time, safesearch wasnt even a thing back then and it was barely functional for years. I remember seeing porn in elementary school trying to do a project on blizzards so I googled "Blizzard" and the first result was some girl group with their titties out. Youre either a zoomer or delusional.

>>9290396
>>9290379
ngmi smoothbrains
you've been programmed

>>9288620
If you're the kind of person who still uses ZSNES because it's "comfy" has "soul" and it's "good enough for me" then you've got a reason to still used Nesticle in 2022.
Hail Shitman.

>>9290579
>who still uses ZSNES because it's "comfy" has "soul" and it's "good enough for me"
There's literally no reason to not use ZSNES in 2022

>>9290692
I remember ZSNES having lots of problems with transparencies, requiring disabling layers just to make certain parts of games playable. Did they ever fix that? Either way, Mesen-S is a better and more accurate emulator.

>>9290745
Don't play shit games and you won't face the issue.

>>9290745
Oh was there actually a use to that feature? As a kid I just had fun dissecting the game layer by layer and seeing if I could still get through the levels lol.

>>9290776
>Oh was there actually a use to that feature?
Yeah, if a layer was fucked up you could disable it. Transparency overlays would usually just show up in solid opaque colors so you could disable the top layer and regain vision. You could also use it to cheese actual hidden paths in RPGs and such where you're supposed to not know where you're going.

>>9290692
zsnes has code exec exploits. You're gonna get virus'd.

>>9290816
By hashed rom files?

>>9290745
It's been a long time, but IIRC, they were, or at least layer-based ones were. Pseudo hi-res transparencies (such as those employed by Kirby's DL3) are a different matter, however. I believe they did eventually get those working, but then they switched to a so-called "new graphics engine" for the last few ZSNES versions (can't recall what it did or what it purported to fix, it's been so long), and it broke the pseudo hi-res mode altogether, including transparencies that relied on it, so you either had to switch to the old engine or go back to an older version of ZSNES to have it working. So yeah, ZSNES was all over the place with transparencies.
>>9290780
Shit, I recall trying to play FFV and getting to the ship graveyard (don't recall if it was with ZSNES or SNES9X), where certain floors were 100% underwater, and with transparencies not working, it made traversing it a complete nightmare. Then somehow I stumbled upon the hotkeys that disabled layers, fiddled with them until I found the one that disabled the water layer, and finally managed to get through.
>You could also use it to cheese actual hidden paths in RPGs and such where you're supposed to not know where you're going
Yeah, I'd never recommend it to anyone getting into the FF games, but it's a good thing I played the US FFIV, since it made me keenly aware of the possibility of hidden pathways in dungeons and they were made obvious in that version, so every FF game I played after that had me looking for them.

don't forget bloodlust software's other masterpiece

>>9290867
>not running the Win9x version of DOSBox within DOSBox and then running Nesticle inside of that
step yo game up nigga

>>9290867
How many layers of emulation can you get behind?

>>9290319
Racial slurs weren't all that appreciated on most of the internet 25 years ago, you had to go to edgier corners for that (which is fine, that's what 4chan is).
You're either a fantasizing zoomer or you don't actually remember what the web was like, I'm not talking about YouTube having a fit because you said nigger, I mean much bigger things.

>>9290931
Shit, a lot of forums didn't even allow swearing. Blew my mind when I learned you could actually say things like bitch and shit on GameFAQs now.

>>9288618
The joke is that Sneed’s Feed and Seed rhymes and is pleasant to the ear, while Chuck’s Feed and Seed isn’t.

>>9290984
Yeah if anything thats what drew me to 4chan in the first place, some mod banned me from GameFAQs for 2 months for saying "pervert" way back in like 2008.

Emulating old emulators is fun. Amazing that you could even emulate NES games on a low end 486.

>>9291204
emulator emulating an emulator?
so n64 emulator emulating dk64 emulating arcade donkey kong?
or emulating psp dracula x chronicles emulating tg16 rondo of blood?

How many layers of emulation could we realistically go?

Virtual machine
Running Dolphin
Running wii homebrew Project64
Running Neon64 (NES emulator)

Thats 4 layers, can we go deeper?

>>9291247
Nest virtual machines with multiple OSes. Linux VM running a Windows VM running Dolphin, etc.

>>9288637
I wonder how those modern NES games full of weird tricks would run on early Nesticle builds.

>>9291597
Probably depends on how well they support whatever mapper they use, if at all. The earliest Nesticle version doesn't even boot Battletoads, and it completely butchers Kirby:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTl2DXjCENk

>>9290007
Smegmadrive

>>9291608
>everything seems fine
>then they hit Start
I audibly chuckled when all those squares popped up.

>>9290874
they made a couple arcade machine emulators too I think before MAME became popular

http://metopal.com/2012/03/15/emulate-the-emulators/
This site has a pretty good overview of the evolution of Nesticle, as well as downloads to all of its versions.
>>9291645
Yes, that would be Callus. I think it only played CPS1 games, though.

>>9291648
What's fascinating here is that I never knew Shitman disappeared from the last versions, so I know whatever I was using was before NESticle v0.43...which is funny because by the time I was using it, it was already outdated lol

As a side note, the guy behind NESticle also made a gamecube-specific SNES emulator called SNESticle solely so the SNES game Super Punch Out could be played in some gamecube boxing game.
This dude wrote one of the first emulators for a console, and ended up working in the videogame industry.

>>9291662
It was probably more common than we think. IIRC the dudes who wrote UltraHLE, right after they got C&D'ed by Nintendo, also ended up with jobs in the industry soon after.

>>9291662
SNESticle was originally made for DOS but was cancelled because of some ancient e-drama. Icer actually released the source code to it months ago when he heard people were reverse engineering the version in Fight Night Round 2 for Gamecube.

And then there's this dude, who apparently has been developing emulators since 19fucking93:
https://fms.komkon.org/

>>9288618
It took me a while to realize that the name was a play on the word "testicle", and years until I realized the icon was a hairy nutsack.

To be fair, I was 11 at the time.

>>9290007
Is this a pastiche on the Shiturn poster?

>>9291685
You just know some poor kid downloaded this on the family computer, then his boomer dad sat down one day to do taxes or some shit, saw that icon just hanging out on the desktop, and proceeded to accuse his son of watching porn and downloading viruses before getting the belt.

>>9291685
I had this shit on my family desktop but none of us knew what the fuck it was.

>>9291662
>>9291676
Lotta talented people get their bearings in modding and tinkering. The modding scenes for Doom, Quake, and Half-Life fostered a lot of people who would get gigs in the industry. Some more prolific than others, mind.

>>9290396
>using "..."
You talk like a faggot. Reddit is your place. Go back there and don't come back

>>9288719
Now this is irony.

>>9289858
Exactly your words. It wasn't even a full romset, but suddenly getting a cd with 150-200 Megadrive roms and genecyst became a lifechanger. First time I got to play Sonic was in 1998.

What truly would break everything was Nintendo 64 and UltraHLE. Suddenly you could play Mario 64 and Zelda OOT, with higher image quality than the real deal, provided you had a beefy computer and a GLIDE card. Until then emulation had been associated with systems "of the past" that did not need a lot of power to run, and suddenly you could emulate current, recently released games.

>>9291685
Heck, for non native english speakers the joke was even more lost on us. I always thought it was a pun on Nestlé.

>>9292251
>It wasn't even a full romset

Yes, that guy claiming it was "suddenly a thousand NES games in 97" clearly is just pretending after loosely reading a wikipedia article. Not every game was dumped yet, and in the case of the NES, not all mappers were supported yet, very far from it actually.

>UltraHLE
Bleem! was also released in 1999 while the PSX was still current gen. And if you ask me Bleem saved emulation by winning its trial (even if they died in the process), had they lost it would have set a precedent and any console manufacturer could claim emulation is illegal and send C&D letters to emulator devs, whether or not we're talking about free emulation. Had Bleem lost their trial, emulation would probably still exist but would be a lot more marginal (even the "official" paying emulation we've been getting in the past few years is arguably only a thing because free emulation has been thriving).

>>9292273
>Bleem! was also released in 1999 while the PSX was still current gen.

The difference i see is more from an economic point of view. Well, more like a "piracy angle" now that I remember more, so it's probably even more offtopic to this thread.

- With PSX, everybody owned the console, some stores would add the modchip literally when buying the console from them, and the most generous ones advertised themselves as giving you a spindle with 4-10 copied games with the modchip install. Although emulating PSX was also a feat, it's not that mattered to people not in the emulation scene.

With N64 emulation, suddenly even "normies" who never cared about emulation were nuts about being able to run Mario 64 on a PC. N64 copying devices were not exactly common, so it was considered a "expensive console since you would have to forcefully pay for the games", that only rich kids could afford.

>>9292351
>some stores would add the modchip literally when buying the console from them, and the most generous ones advertised themselves as giving you a spindle with 4-10 copied games with the modchip install
Are you from a literal third world country? I can't imagine any form of retail store, even the smallest mom and pop, daring to install mod chips and sell copied games.

>>9292385
They installed mod chips in western europe, still did last time I went to a store in 2010 or so

Never seen sell illegal copies though

>>9292385
Can you imagine how much trouble Best Buy and company would have gotten in for selling molded PSXs over here?

>>9292392
That's crazy, the only way we could get mod chips installed was to either buy a way too expensive modded console from ebay or buy a mod chip online and learn to solder.

>>9292409
Over here mod chips are seen like emulation, it's the way you may use it that can become problematic, not the thing in itself. You can use it to play your personal copies/back ups like emulation.
With that said not every store does it, some chains stay away from it while others don't, and independant stores sure as hell don't care.

>>9292418
what country? In America a store would never risk it (and most countries in general) since it's straight up illegal whereas emulation is not.

>>9292385
From what /POL/ seems to think, Spain would classify as one. In the nineties Computer stores that also did repairs would advertise "we install playstation modchips" on the windows (this being before the legal crackdown on modchips and flashcarts that followed in the next generation of consoles). The most common brain gymnastics people do are "I already paid for the hardware" and "Piracy benefits them, so I'm making them a favor". Paying for legit software used to be seen as being an complete idiot.

Literally my parents were like "You are only getting for Xmas a console that can run pirate games because we are not paying for carts anymore" (they hated videogames with a passion). So no Saturn, No N64... pretty much I was only allowed to have a PSX because it could be modchipped. The day they caught me paying for Final Fantasy VII, they were pissed off.

My childhood experiences probably fucked me badly in the head, judging by the current size of my retro games collection.

>>9290745
>I remember ZSNES having lots of problems with transparencies, requiring disabling layers just to make certain parts of games playable.

You had to use a hi-color mode for those. If you used an 8-bit resolution, transparencies did not work. This was important because in 8-bit mode it was significantly faster and could get 60fps on a Pentium 100.

>>9290780
>You could also use it to cheese actual hidden paths in RPGs and such

I remember doing that in the FF games back with ZSNES.
Didn't need to in the Advance remakes since I already knew all the layouts and secrets by then.

>>9291684
>Marat Fayzullin

>>9292434
France, and I said I don't know about the status of things is these days because I don't care about modern consoles. But I did pay a store so they would install a modchip on my Wii when it was new (afterwards they offered to install softmods as well).

Same store also sold imports and Japanese and other Japanese figurines, soundtracks, etc (actual Japanese stuff they got from Japan, not something Japanese released over here officially)

>>9292434
During the PSX era, it was a free for all. With PS2, it became a lot harder. You would need to know someone who knew somebody that could mod a console, and it would be a lottery. which chip you would get, if it would work, and if your console would survive some mediocre soldering work.

People started getting scared about modding consoles, parents did not want their kids to have an unlimited supply of games and fail school, and the rise in popularity of second hand games at Game / Gamestop / etc made piracy a lot less enticing. That and a lot of modchip stores getting closed or raided by the cops (and the end of Lik-Sang).

>>9292480
>the end of Lik-Sang

F

weren't they shut down by Sony?

>>9291231
Some of those emus don't run anymore on W10/11, so you would need to emulate a system that could run the emulator, be it Dosbox, Vmware, VirtualBox, PCem/86box...

>>9292481
That's how the legend goes. The way I remember it, it was pretty awesome for getting imported stuff and the early generations of GBA flashcarts.

the old emu scene had a lot of soul, pic related.

>>9292481
>weren't they shut down by Sony?
I think Sony sued them, they lost the case, but Lik-sang could not afford the legal fees and went under.

I may be confusing it with some other case (Creative vs Ensoniq?). It's been so long.

speaking of Bloodlust Software, did anyone play this? I can only find videos of the first two versions, not this one.

>>9288636
>>9288630
>>9288645
>>9288657
Last name Pither, spelled like brotherhood except no hood and Pit instead of bro

>>9292485
I just tried to run Nesticle on a Windows XP VM, and weirdly enough, while it runs the Win95 executable, it refuses to load games. However, if I run the DOS executable, that works just fine. Maybe it'll work on actual Windows 95 or 98SE, will have to try later.

Also for shits, I tried it in RetroArch's DOSBox core, but it runs at 15 FPS for some reason.

>>9288594
Probably not for playing games so much anymore, but Nesticle was the first emulator I used that had a pallete editing feature so you could change the graphic tiles and color palletes in real time as you were playing it. This was mindblowing for me in 1997 and would spend countless mornings making really shitty Mario hacks before school.

>>9292995
>THANKS, BUDDY!
Sovl.

>>9292497
Where do you even find l33t translations? They are not going to be hosted in RHDN and the baddest hacks probably don't get them on archive.

>>9292440
Were you able to realize how bad the official Spanish translation was in Final Fantasy VII? They even had a typo on the fucking CD case.
>Acción inensa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riB0FQ0b3iE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYG-YUR3ShA

>>9290931
Yeah, you couldn't just throw around the N word on most gaming forums. You'd get banned quickly.

>>9291708
First thing I always did was change the icon.

>>9291608
Looks fine to me

>>9291685
>>9291714
>t. no balls

>>9293649
my balls don't look like a lumpy burlap sack of potatoes

>>9292497
holy shit this is great. I bet my 14 year old can't read that at all.

>>9292497
Did Creative and Ensoniq ever have a suit with each other? My recollection was that Creative bought Ensoniq and E-mu systems and effectively merged them around 1998/1999.

>t. synthesizer and sampler nerd

>>9293857
something like that, or maybe creative and Aureal A3D?

>>9293864
That sounds plausible, I appreciate you steering me toward video game related legal history.

https://www.eetimes.com/creative-technology-sues-aureal-semi-for-false-advertising/

>>9293868
Either way creative was an asshole company who destroyed good developing software

>>9288594
Nesticle was never a "good" emulator, but it was one that worked. Like ZSNES.

>>9292273
>Not every game was dumped yet
Most of them were already dumped due to the prevalence of game copiers in the years beforehand. But yeah there were a few years there where you'd check the rom sites every day seeing if new stuff had been dumped.

>>9293857
Creative kept suing Aureal with bogus cases they kept losing, until the legal fees made Aureal go bankrupt. Then they bought them up. They did it because A3D was significantly better than Creative's EAX (which at the time was basically just midi reverb effects applied to PCM sound channels at the time, while A3D offered actual spatial audio with better hardware offloading).

Ensoniq wasn't sued, they were just straight up bought. They also had superior sound cards, especially in the early days of PCI, where they had better compatibility with games that expected ISA slot cards. That was something Creative was VERY bad at.
In fact Creative kind of sucked completely after the AWE series (and even that one had issues with YM emulation), their low-end line was buggy and their Live/Audigy line had resampling problems that made audio quality extremely bad. Audigy 2 and later was decent, but mostly only because by then games used higher sampling rate sounds which did not suffer as much.
Also their drivers were so legendarily bad that an entire third party solution (kX) was made for their cards.

>>9293089

I'm checking that one as soon as I get home, supposing they did not fix it for the platinum re-release (the one that came with an FF VIII trailers disc). But yes, the translation gets worse / funnier every time. I would make an US PSN account to buy the NTSC version.

And as far as I can remember, other EU countries did not even got the luxury of a shitty translation and had to play it in english. Wild Arms was also distributed by Sony, and while it is noticeable that they translated directly from english, it's a better translation.

But that's the catch, the things you would miss by being a pirate. Many would have to try every frequency in Metal Gear Solid to call Meryl because it was only shown on the back of the box. I wonder if they changed it for the re-releases, or added the frecuency to the digital manual.

>>9294418
>But yeah there were a few years there where you'd check the rom sites every day seeing if new stuff had been dumped.

That wasn't stuff that got dumped, it was stuff that sites managed to find, either through each other, shady IRC channels, found on hong kong copier sites, or BBS archives. Commercial games were nearly all dumped by the time, there were only a couple of alternate revisions that weren't dumped.
This is not counting shit like BS-X Satellaview which got dumped, but people like Cowering held them back from being released.

>>9290007
Memecast
PisSeX
Shwitch

>>9295194
They pretty much sued their way into maintaining their own shitty DSP designs as an industry standard, sounds like.

>>9293868
It amuses me that the gaming world also hates Creative for being a usurping and unscrupulous company. When they bought Ensoniq and E-mu Systems, both of which manufactured incredible samplers and synthesizers but were in need of restructuring by the mid-90s, Creative quickly marginalized, then strangled, that entire element of those companies (on which they were built). By 2003 or 2004 Ensoniq and E-mu were effectively dead as musical instrument makers, an absence I personally miss.

So, yeah, fuck Creative.