by mare » Tue Sep 17, 2013 3:12 pm
Pretty much what Animal said. Emulators have come a long way compared to what they used to be and nes, snes, master system, genesis (mega drive for you euros
) and even N64 emulators are very stable and have gotten to a point where they can replicate 99.9% of what the original hardware can do. The project64 team in particular have done a lot of work over the years to make their n64 emulator pretty much flawless. On top of this, there are also great texture packs and plugins which enhance visuals making them more pleasing on HD tvs and monitors. I'd recommend Project64 with the glide64 plugin for n64 emulation.
I use ZNES for snes. I haven't used it in a while but I was playing earthbound on it months ago and had zero issues and i really liked the basic gui it utilizes. In general for nes/snes emulation, I am pretty sure you can't go wrong with any of the popular ones listed on emulator-zone.com.
I am not sure about Saturn emulators, but I assume there are some good ones out there, considering the N64 had a more powerful chipset and graphics (i think?). Also, there are some GREAT games on the Saturn, most of which never came to North America, but that's a whole different discussion
.
As far as controllers go, I don't know too much about third party usb controllers but I know there are a ton of options out there. Otherwise, if you have an xbox 360 controller, that will plug straight in and you are good to go. A playstation controller will also work but you need to install the motionjoy software and load some drivers to get it to talk, which is pretty easy. I played through the entirety of Majora's Mask with a playstation controller which made playing the ocarina a little akward, but other than that it was fine. It's funny you mention the Gamecube cable. I was actually looking at my N64 and Gamecube cables last night and realized the chord is the same. I checked both on my N64 and they both displayed the signal but I honestly couldn't tell a difference in picture quality.
Lastly, I agree that the virtual console is over priced. There are some amazing games and especially some really hard to find ones offered on the VC but to me it doesn't seem worth $10 for a digital copy of an N64 game or $8 for an snes title, sans cartridge. From what I've seen it's actually somewhat common to hack the wii and there are videos on youtube with detailed instructions. I have not done this, but there are also people who will do this for a price and I imagine with the size of those old games and a 32gb SD card, you could put quite a lot of the aforementioned system's games, if not their entire libraries onto a single SD card.
Pretty much what Animal said. Emulators have come a long way compared to what they used to be and nes, snes, master system, genesis (mega drive for you euros :roll:) and even N64 emulators are very stable and have gotten to a point where they can replicate 99.9% of what the original hardware can do. The project64 team in particular have done a lot of work over the years to make their n64 emulator pretty much flawless. On top of this, there are also great texture packs and plugins which enhance visuals making them more pleasing on HD tvs and monitors. I'd recommend Project64 with the glide64 plugin for n64 emulation.
I use ZNES for snes. I haven't used it in a while but I was playing earthbound on it months ago and had zero issues and i really liked the basic gui it utilizes. In general for nes/snes emulation, I am pretty sure you can't go wrong with any of the popular ones listed on emulator-zone.com.
I am not sure about Saturn emulators, but I assume there are some good ones out there, considering the N64 had a more powerful chipset and graphics (i think?). Also, there are some GREAT games on the Saturn, most of which never came to North America, but that's a whole different discussion ;) .
As far as controllers go, I don't know too much about third party usb controllers but I know there are a ton of options out there. Otherwise, if you have an xbox 360 controller, that will plug straight in and you are good to go. A playstation controller will also work but you need to install the motionjoy software and load some drivers to get it to talk, which is pretty easy. I played through the entirety of Majora's Mask with a playstation controller which made playing the ocarina a little akward, but other than that it was fine. It's funny you mention the Gamecube cable. I was actually looking at my N64 and Gamecube cables last night and realized the chord is the same. I checked both on my N64 and they both displayed the signal but I honestly couldn't tell a difference in picture quality.
Lastly, I agree that the virtual console is over priced. There are some amazing games and especially some really hard to find ones offered on the VC but to me it doesn't seem worth $10 for a digital copy of an N64 game or $8 for an snes title, sans cartridge. From what I've seen it's actually somewhat common to hack the wii and there are videos on youtube with detailed instructions. I have not done this, but there are also people who will do this for a price and I imagine with the size of those old games and a 32gb SD card, you could put quite a lot of the aforementioned system's games, if not their entire libraries onto a single SD card.