The heartbreak of emulator impasse.

[Pantechnicon]

I’ve been revisiting Final Fantasy Legend II (Game Boy) for the last couple of weeks. Rather than using my original cart for this game I opted to play a backup copy using a DS-based emulator called Lameboy.

All was going well up until I got about 40% through the game. I reached a level (Guardian’s World) where you have to play a particular song on the jukebox of the tavern in order to open a secret door. When I deposited the 1GP required to play the song, instead of opening the door (which I know is there, having beat this game three times before already), the game program resets to the title screen. There’s no other way around it. Two weeks of playing this game are all for naught due to this little nuance of emulator incompatibility :frustrated:.

I’m too demoralized at this point to start over again, at least not right away, so I’ve switched to a different game. But to salve the wounds I thought I’d throw the topic out there and ask if anyone else has ever had to abandon significant progress in an emulated game owing to some hitherto unforeseen glitch in the emu program? If so, what was the game and/or emu involved?

[Clownzilla]

The wife and I got to the last stage on the Simpsons Arcade game (MAME) and it just reset on us without warning. We didn't use save states so we were screwed.

[skaar]

Lots of emulators allow you to port your save file back and forth between the card and the PC. You can probably play through that bit on your PC and transfer the save back to the DS...

[Pantechnicon]

Lots of emulators allow you to port your save file back and forth between the card and the PC. You can probably play through that bit on your PC and transfer the save back to the DS...

I'll have to give that a shot. It'll be nice if it works.

Keep the sad stories coming guys.

[darkweb]

Not an emulator story but I've had a similar heartache. A few years ago I picked up Blue Dragon for the XBOX 360. I fired it up and immediately got into the game. I can't remember where I was but it was some dungeon like area that I had been playing for about an hour and decided that I needed to find a save point. A half hour later I still hadn't found a save point but got into a monster fight and the game locked up loading it. I was devastated! All that hard work down the drain and I haven't touched the game since.

[bombman]

I was playing Final Fantasy Legend II on an emulator about 12 or 13 years ago, it was shareware so it wouldn't save my game so I had to leave the emulator and computer on. I made it to the Odin battle (I think that's his name, he appears when your party dies) and then the power went out. I don't think I've ever been more pissed off in my entire life.

I did end up beating it about 6 years later, but still just thinking about it gets my blood to a boil.

[otoko]

I can never keep myself playing an emulator that long to ever find these things out.

I'm too scatterbrained and bored...

[BetaWolf47]

I've lost progress simply due to the convenience and simplicity of emulators before. Also bad controller mapping too.

Let me put this in perspective: I had a 6-button, 4-trigger gamepad. The buttons were arranged like a Sega Saturn controller. On ZSNES, I had it mapped like an SNES controller. Where C and Z are on the Saturn controller, I had it mapped to "Save" and "Load". With such vital functions mapped so closely to the action buttons, you can see an accident waiting to happen here. And it did.

I was playing Super Mario RPG, just past Booster's castle. I was into the wedding scene when I accidentally hit "Load". My last state was about an hour before. Whoops. This was when I was naive though... I map my controllers wisely now :P

[Kid Ice]

I can never keep myself playing an emulator that long to ever find these things out.

I'm too scatterbrained and bored...

Yeah....an evening of emulation for me means playing at least 10 different games.

[Gameguy]

The wife and I got to the last stage on the Simpsons Arcade game (MAME) and it just reset on us without warning. We didn't use save states so we were screwed.
I actually got to the last boss fight on an actual coin-op unit, died and ran out of tokens to continue. I ran to the change machine for more tokens and I put in a token right as the timer got to zero, and the game just started again from the beginning instead of continuing. I was very mad about that, I didn't want to play it again as it wasn't cheap to get that far.

That wasn't emulator related but I don't really play with emulators that much so I haven't had any major problems with them. I've had problems with actual games but that doesn't really count with this thread.

[Baloo]

Yeah....an evening of emulation for me means playing at least 10 different games.

Yeah, if I want to play a game on an emulator it's a game I don't have and I'll only try it out for about 5-10 minutes or so before I get bored and play something else.

[ryborg]

I wasted a few weeks and many hours of playing the difficult yet very entertaining SMW ROM-hack Super Demo World two years ago because of some glitch. I was using an old version of ZSNES and the game kept locking up in a specific stage towards the end (not quite to the Star Road but close).

There was no way around it and I couldn't transfer the save file to another emulator or computer. I'm thinking something went wrong during the patching process, but who knows. I'll eventually get back to playing it, but that's about as frustrating as gaming gets.

[bombman]

I actually got to the last boss fight on an actual coin-op unit, died and ran out of tokens to continue. I ran to the change machine for more tokens and I put in a token right as the timer got to zero, and the game just started again from the beginning instead of continuing. I was very mad about that, I didn't want to play it again as it wasn't cheap to get that far.

That wasn't emulator related but I don't really play with emulators that much so I haven't had any major problems with them. I've had problems with actual games but that doesn't really count with this thread.

Oh I hate that. That's definitely happened to me on more than a few occasions.

[badinsults]

Lesson: use in game saving!

Assuming that SRAM should created correctly by the emulator, you should be able to try a different emulator and see if it is just a problem with emulator you have been using. If it happens in other emulators, chances are you have encountered a very real glitch. Never rely on "save states"!

[fishsandwich]

I was playing Shining Force CD on my PSP. I like to play the SF games over and over with new characters. I've played the Sega CD version once and I was looking forward to some portable SFCD.

I made it into the game a good 3 hours and then it just froze. I had a save point from about a half hour earlier so I loaded it and fired it up again. Froze at the exact same place. Tried one more time. Same thing. Got disgusted and moved to the second game on the CD (it has two upgraded ports of Game Gear Shining Forces games plus 2 hidden bonus battles). THAT game froze up about 40 minutes in, same crap.

Anyone know of a Sega CD for the PSP that will run SFCD without freezing up???



!

[NayusDante]

I remember Chrono Trigger being a pain to emulate, due to the required button combination to get to the food storage area. Before I got a gamepad with enough buttons, I had to deal with keyboard simultaneous-input limitations. Then, when I finally got a decent pad (Gravis GamePad Pro, the white one, non-USB), I played the crap out of it until it broke in the middle of FF6. Replaced it with the black USB version, which I still have.

I also remember trying to emulate Harvest Moon back on my 386. It ran alright for a while, but after a few weeks, it slowed to a crawl. The game still ran fine until I loaded my savestate, so I couldn't continue and didn't want to start over.

I really fell out of the emulation scene back when it was still impossible to run games with special enhancements. Back then, stuff like Mario RPG wouldn't run at all, and Mega Man X2-3 were glitched beyond playability.

I've had similar "impasse" moments on real hardware too. I know that some gameshark codes for FF6 PSX made the tower in Zozo impossible, as NPCs would block a hallway. Turned the codes off, and they kept moving. Recently, I was playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but I kept dying during a particular segment. One of the non-interactive pipes in the water zone took a sharp turn down, but the game didn't load the area below. Thus, every time I went down that pipe, the screen stopped scrolling and it killed me. It was a necessary section, too, so I had to reset and clean the cart.

Come to think of it, real hardware seems more prone to this sort of thing. I let my sister borrow Mega Man Xtreme, and she asked for help on Chill Penguin. I looked at the screen, and his health bar is still there, but he's nowhere to be seen. I was playing A Boy and His Blob (Wii) the other day, and the jack transformation pushed Boy through the wall, and he fell endlessly without dying. I could still scroll horizontally, but I couldn't complete the stage. All I could do was exit.

[BetaWolf47]

Oh yeah, you guys know how Battletoads for NES has that problem on the rope climbing level on some Famiclone systems? That used to be a problem with emulators too. That happened to me a few years back when I was new to the emulation scene. I thought Jnes was perfect until then. It's probably fixed by now, but back then it confused me.

[LaughingMAN.S9]

snatcher for the sega cd, shit locks up when getting in the turbo cycle :(

[Kiddo]

When you deal with Satellaview research, "Emulator impasse" is impossible to avoid. I have to use 3 different emulators, with around 5 different configurations, to boot up every ROM. Not all of them boot up and play past a certain point. And this is before I bring up missing Soundlink audio/game data/etc.,

The worst part is that many people who only play the "Popular", mainstream games never truly realize how incomplete their emulators may actually be, and will tell me to "Just play the ROMs" to this date.

[JSoup]

I remember all the game breaking glitches that were in the Mario & Luigi: Super Star Saga back when the ROM was new. You could always tell who was playing the ROM over the actual game based on the questions they asked.

Ogre Battle Tactics glitched out on me at one point. I ended up having to load an earlier savestate, only to have the first game suddenly boot up on it's own an hour later, effectively deleting all kinds of progress. I never went back to the game after that. Now that I think about it, I think I had the same problem with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.

[BetaWolf47]

When you deal with Satellaview research, "Emulator impasse" is impossible to avoid. I have to use 3 different emulators, with around 5 different configurations, to boot up every ROM. Not all of them boot up and play past a certain point. And this is before I bring up missing Soundlink audio/game data/etc.,

The worst part is that many people who only play the "Popular", mainstream games never truly realize how incomplete their emulators may actually be, and will tell me to "Just play the ROMs" to this date.

"Just play the ROMs" is one of the most annoying things you have to deal with these days. A lot of modern gamers are elitists who wouldn't know any better.

But as for your problem... even SnesGT doesn't work well enough for you?

[mobiusclimber]

I remember back when the SNES emulator for the PSP was incredibly wonky. Save states wouldn't load properly, ruining an entire game if you hadn't saved anywhere else. It happened once and I started using in-game saves as well as save states. But it really took away a lot of the portable aspect of playing the games on the PSP. It was basically a crapshoot whether the save state would work or screw up, and some of the games wouldn't allow you to save in-game for an hour or longer.

[Kiddo]

But as for your problem... even SnesGT doesn't work well enough for you?

SNESGT does not boot Konae-chan and has a notable emulation issue with BS F-Zero Grand Prix. BS Fuurai no Shiren also only loads on SNES9Xpp XE;

http://superfamicom.org/blog/2009/10/satellaview-emulation-snes9xpp-xe-is-sweet/

- This same emu can't run some ROMs only BSNES does. Get the picture here? Satellaview emulation is almost literally all over the place, and I have to pop one ROM in every emulator to check the compatibility of it.

[PentiumMMX]

I've run into plenty of problems with emulators in the past. Seeing as there's a topic on it, I might as well share a few here.

- One of the worst examples was when I was trying to play Super Mario RPG on my laptop (Which my username came from), but instead of using ZSNES like usual, I decided to try SNES9x. I don't remember which version it was (It was a DOS-based version), but it was terrible; very few things worked because of so many hardware incompatibilities, while ZSNES worked wonders with the same hardware.

- I also remember the struggle to find an emulator for the same laptop that could run Final Fantasy VII (Because it was cheaper to buy the PSX version than the PC version). The only one that would run the game at a playable speed was Bleem, and sadly, it was a demo version; no save feature avaliable. I eventually settled for buying an original PlayStation with a memory card for next-to-nothing, which (Obviously) worked a lot better.

[kaedesdisciple]

This is kinda related, but still gets my goat when it happens. There is a very strange input problem on the NesDS emulator that is especially prominent when it comes to save states. Sometimes, when I press the 'save state', it actually hits 'load state' instead. If I've been working for the last hour or gotten past a particularly hard part that I don't want to repeat, having that little issue pop up makes me want to throw the thing across the room and not want to do it again.

[badinsults]

SNESGT does not boot Konae-chan and has a notable emulation issue with BS F-Zero Grand Prix. BS Fuurai no Shiren also only loads on SNES9Xpp XE;

http://superfamicom.org/blog/2009/10/satellaview-emulation-snes9xpp-xe-is-sweet/

- This same emu can't run some ROMs only BSNES does. Get the picture here? Satellaview emulation is almost literally all over the place, and I have to pop one ROM in every emulator to check the compatibility of it.

If you look up the readmes of any SNES emulator, they all say that the Satellaview is not properly emulated. To complain about it is pointless, as it is well known by the emulator authors.

[Kiddo]

If you look up the readmes of any SNES emulator, they all say that the Satellaview is not properly emulated. To complain about it is pointless, as it is well known by the emulator authors.

That's kinda like saying this thread as a whole should not exist, because usually emulator authors know the bugs/incompatibilities of their emulators. Kinda silly to say to me. Can we not have people who wish to see improved emulation?