@NESster: The PC I was using I had custom built in 1999. I had upgraded from 128Mb to 256Mb of RAM, but other than that it was 100% 1999 parts. 400Mhz Celeron and an AGP ATI All-In-Wonder with 16Mb of vedeo RAM. It may have been 2000 or 2001 or later when I ran the Emulator but the N64 was definitely in it's Twilight years at the time. The emulator still ran at full peed despite my outdated PC. I did not own an N64 at the time but remembered my buddies played it a lot in High School. Anyway the only ROMs I remembered getting to work on it were Mario64 and MarioKart. I don't remember the name of the EMU but it had an auto-configuration for the Adaptoid in it. Both games had a variety of graphical isses but they were playable using a real controller with the Adaptoid.
As for the NES sound, I don't know how close the Retron5 will be to the original. As long as the rectangles, triangles, and other channels are proportional and play at the correct pitch and volume, I'm good. The analog noise floor is something no emulator emulates correctly, but it's only noticable during silent moments with the volume turned up on the original NES. Wii's Virtual Console omits the high frequency ripples in the NES triangle waves but most other emulators I've used reproduce this effect to varying degrees. Even stock the NES sound was surprizing clean for an 8-bit console, definitely less noisy than the gut-wrenching aidio/visual from the TIA chip on the Atari 2600/7800, and NES is even clearer sound than the Sega Genesis Model 1 (Genesis model 1 gets the cleanest sound output from the 1/8" minijack set to volume 5 and outputted directly to a HiFi sound system - the DIN jack mono A/V and RF sound is somewhat distorted with the RF being the worse of the two). I actually prefer the raw chip synths of the Genesis over MIDI synths of the SNES but it depends on the musical style. SNES is far better for orchestral sound but that is another topic completely. 1st party games seemed to bring out the best out of the soundchips of both 16-bit systems. Zelda, SMRPG, Yoshi's Island, as well all the Sonics have some of the best music IMO on their respective 16-bit platforms.
Another issue I'd like to bring up regarding video is that many games had graphical artifacts native to their own hardware. I remember when SMB3 came out on Virtual Console people complained the game had buggy graphical artifacts on the edge of the screen which did not appear back in the day on their original hardware. Fact is, it did but overscan covered it up. SMB3 featured diagonal scrolling despite the fact the NES was only designed with horizontal or vertical scrolling in mind, not both. Every screen is mirrored either horizontally or vertically in the PPU RAM and a vertical offset is specified every frame while a horizontal offset can be specified every scanline. This was used in some advanced games for faux parallax scrolling effects, but in SMB3 levels where the stage was taller than one screen and permitted diagonal scrolling, a single tile of BGM graphics would wrap around between the right and left hand edges of the screen causing between 1-7 pixels of sprite tearing on the far left edge. Vintage CRTs typically hid the artifacts in their overscan regions, so the artifacts were output by the NES hardware but not displayed on most screens. Modern HDTVs display these edge artifacts in Wii VC emulator and will also display them the Retron5. Once again casual gamers and people who don't know any better are gonna gripe about these graphical glitches/artifacts in the games when played back on the Wii VC or the Retron5, despite the fact they have always been there, even on original hardware. Just like on a real N64, you can see through the walls when the cam gets stuck behind them, an emulator will do the same thing. Any game that truly pushed beyond the boundaries of any hardware platform is going to have some sort of artifacts or frame rate or other limitations. If an emulator reflects this it is not bad or glitchy emulation, but accurate emulation. Any emulators that attempt to patch up these native artifacts in a particular game are only gonna break something in a different game. And I certainly hope we are beyond the dark ages of inaccurate emulators, which rather than attempt to improve overall accuracy, would routinely release game specific patches to get problem games to work. That's so 1990s... Anyone actually still use Nesticle or UltraHLE? Didn't think so!
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