| paleface [sys=PC; cat=Emulation; reg=NA] |
| | | Open source GB/GBC/GBA/NES/SNES/PC Engine emulator by Sour. Official site https://www.mesen.ca/, repository https://github.com/SourMesen/Mesen2/ .
Has run everything on GB/NES/SNES I've thrown at it so far, haven't noticed compatibility issues. Can remove borders from Super Game Boy (see entry 1532) and Super Game Boy 2 (see entry 1534), which is great! : ) Input mapping is quick and clean.
Haven't been able to get any flavor of the one PC Engine game I tried, Double Dragon II (see entry 505) to work though; PC Engine emulation is relatively new in Mesen, I think.
Lots of room for more comfy features--would love easier palette editing--and saving!--for GB, for instance. : ) But you can already change 4-color GB sprite palettes separately from the 4-color backgrounds, whereas SGB/2 only allows you four colors for the whole screen. |
|
|
| | | Other settings to make:
- Unchecking "Enable LCD frame blending" under Game Boy/Video
- Checking "Enable integer FPS mode (e.g: run at 60 fps instead of 60.1)" under Video/General to fix frame drops in recorded video of NES/SNES |
|
|
| | | | Mesen isn't even mentioned in Google result lists for "best SNES emulator"... But the top ones always mentioned seem less fully featured, so I dunno. Higan for instance appears to have limited display resolutions--although I didn't quite get that far in trying to set it up, which was rather baffling--and Snes9x doesn't have specific NTSC and PAL aspect ratios (and doesn't seem to have a way to load GB games in Super Game Boy?). |
|
|
| | | | Snes9x does handle the transition from menu to wrestling in Funaki Masakatsu smoothly, though, whereas that flips Mesen out a bit (it has to be resized manually). But I can't shake the feeling that Snes9x isn't running it at quite the right aspect. |
|
|
| | | Recent hourly builds of Mesen have had audio glitches when running Tetris through Super Game Boy 2. Most recent is better--just an extra static burst ~50% of the time when landing a block--but not great.
A build of Mesen is just the Mesen.exe, which creates all the other dlls and stuff when run--kind of slick.
Can't build it myself in MSYS2; requires .NET 6 SDK for Linux and that appears to require going through MS themselves, which I am not going to do to my MSYS2 install. : PP |
|
|
| | | | According to https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Super_Nintendo_emulators#Super_Game_Boy , other than higan/bsnes/ares, "As of April 2023, Mesen2 is the only other multi-system emulator that can properly replicate a SGB." |
|
|
| | | Overscan, which can cut for instance the blinking border tiles when scrolling the screen in NES games (8 top and bottom in Final Fantasy, for instance), or just dead black border areas (16 top and bottom in Castlevania, for instance), doesn't seem to work that way in PAL, where it just replaces the area with black bars?
Mesen--at default settings--will auto-apply an .IPS patch to an NES game if the .IPS file is in the same directory--might also have to have the same base filename? DOESN'T work in a .zip though. So it's less messy, file-wise, to use an IPS patcher like Floating IPS (see entry 1581) to apply the .ips to the ROM permanently. |
|
|
| | | | The ROM can be in a .zip, but the .ips has to be loose, in that directory, and have the same base name as the ROM/zip. |
|
|
| | | Sample Windows shortcut Target line:
C:\downloaded\mesen\Mesen.exe "C:\downloaded\mesen\roms\Mr. Do! (USA).sfc.zip" --preferences.gameSelectionScreenMode=Disabled --doNotSaveSettings |
|
|
| | | | Mesen doesn't work with a wireless DS4 natively--DS4Windows got it working, though: https://github.com/Ryochan7/DS4Windows |
|
|
| | | Mesen doesn't do per-game settings, so I gotta leave its settings for stuff like Aspect Ratio, Overscan, and Volume at like Auto/0/100 or something, and set them per-game in shortcut "doNotSaveSettings" command line parameters, for instance
C:\downloaded\mesen\Mesen.exe "roms\Final Fight 2 (Japan).zip" --preferences.gameSelectionScreenMode=Disabled --snes.Overscan.top=23 --snes.Overscan.bottom=16 --fullscreen --video.aspectRatio=Auto --audio.masterVolume=50 --doNotSaveSettings |
|
|
| | | | For PC Engine CD games, it seems that Mesen needs the games unzipped. CHD isn't supported. It requires the Super CD-ROM System 3.0 BIOS. |
|
|
| | | | ares can load PCE CD games from compressed .chd, so I'll just use that emulator instead. |
|
|
| | | I'm going to use ares for SNES emulation--it's better than Mesen at cropping border areas, at least in Mr. Do, the game I compared in ares and Mesen.
It doesn't have Mesen's per-color palette control for GB and border control for NES (which is a huge but NESessary pain as NES games vary wildly in their bordering, and flashing border areas), so Mesen's still the one for those. |
|
|
| | |