Now that it’s almost Christmas, some emulators come bearing gifts and one of these is that Pokemon X/Y are now playable at full speed on Citra! Other than that, SNES9x also received a pretty important fix and now, you can ramble to your emulated games with melonDS 0.7.2 as it brings microphone support.

Pokemon X/Y playable at full speed on Citra

A short while ago, the folks behind Citra managed to add LLE (Low Level) Audio Emulation to their emulator and while this is accurate, it slows most games down to about 5FPS even on modern hardware.

If you wanted to emulate Pokemon X/Y on your PC, then Christmas has come a bit early for you! 🙂

As a result, LLE Audio Emulation can’t be used by regular end-users when emulating games until it gets heavily optimised for better performance BUT it has the potential to improve HLE audio emulation (which implements audio outputting code on a per-game basis).

Now, thanks to the aforementioned use of the LLE Audio Emulation code, developers were able to understand better how games talk to the DSP and this greatly helped in implementing some missing features to the existing HLE Audio Emulation code. While doing this, it was noted that Pokemon X/Y use the AAC code for music so developer B3N30 implemented an HLE AAC decoder using FFMPEG which managed to fix the crashing issues with Pokemon X/Y and made them run at full speed!

To use the HLE AAC decoder on Windows, you need to follow some additional instructions which can be found here.

SNES9x 1.58 – Movies (input recordings) now work again

Movies are used to assist with speed-runs in SNES emulation lingo. (No, the SNES can’t do FMV video!)

If you thought that development on SNES emulators stopped a few years ago, think again because SNES9x is still being updated to this day.

The most recent update, version 1.58, brings about a couple of fixes which include:

• A fix for movie playback
  • No, the SNES can’t magically play movies now! Movies, in emulation lingo apparently, are a sequence of input controls that are played back by an emulator. These are usually used with assisted speed-runs.
• The timing hack for Chou Aniki was adjusted
• Disabled controller ports are hidden while displaying pressed keys
• Audio device selection with XAudio2 is now possible on Windows
• Some bug fixes relating to GTK+ builds and the RetroArch core

Siemens step 7 5.6 download. To grab the latest version of SNES9x and make speed-running Super Mario World (and other games) easier, simply follow this link!

melonDS 0.7.2 released with Microphone support

Recently, melonDS has been seeing a whole lot of progress and now, version 0.7.2 has been released with a pretty fun feature which is microphone support from a real microphone or from a recording.

You can now feed noise, recorded audio or your own voice to your favourite DS games with melonDS!

As a result, you can now play games like “Zelda Phantom Hourglass” which want you to use the microphone at all costs in order to do things that can be done without it.

Other than microphone support, melonDS 0.7.2 also brings about:

• Timing fixes for New Super Mario Bros, Pokemon games and Etrian Odyssey.
• An Audio Settings panel that lets you modify audio output volume and microphone settings.
• A hotkey system which lets you send two commands namely to close/open the DS’ lid and to trigger the microphone
• The input dialog on Windows no longer lags
• Other stuff such as things to make it easier to debug homebrew, an FPS limiter toggle and numerous bug fixes

To get this updated version of melonDS 0.7.2 and be able to shout at your emulated games, follow this link and choose the version for the platform of your choice (Windows/Linux only). Movie download torrent.

Conclusion

Now that the Christmas season is almost with us, many emulator developers may get some free time on their hands so perhaps, some interesting things may come out of the upcoming to weeks 😉