In regards to emulating Pokemon titles.

[huckleberrypie]

Well, since I'm seeing numerous Poke-related threads here, I was wondering as to how much of a pain in the rear it is to emulate those games. Did Game Freak/Nintendo sprinkle it with numerous fail-safes, or was it just too complex enough?

[Exophase]

Plenty of people have beaten the games, I've found testers for them and have even given a bounty for the most problematic one. Most of the issues are probably due to cheats, and a lack of understanding that cheats don't usually go away when you turn them off. At any rate, you should always keep in-game saves around just in case.

[huckleberrypie]

Plenty of people have beaten the games, I've found testers for them and have even given a bounty for the most problematic one. Most of the issues are probably due to cheats, and a lack of understanding that cheats don't usually go away when you turn them off. At any rate, you should always keep in-game saves around just in case.

Figures. In my case, while I care relatively little about Pokemon, the most I could do would be outright hacking the game for my amusement.

[Jay Haru]

Plenty of people have beaten the games, I've found testers for them and have even given a bounty for the most problematic one. Most of the issues are probably due to cheats, and a lack of understanding that cheats don't usually go away when you turn them off. At any rate, you should always keep in-game saves around just in case.

Figures. In my case, while I care relatively little about Pokemon, the most I could do would be outright hacking the game for my amusement.

Let me guess... you want a mlp pokemon (closest will be keldeo I think) with a strawberry shortcake avatar

But personally, I really find it irritating to answer pokemon related concerns almost exclusively. It really bugs me that baconbaconbacon can't be a bit more... well, you know...

[huckleberrypie]

Plenty of people have beaten the games, I've found testers for them and have even given a bounty for the most problematic one. Most of the issues are probably due to cheats, and a lack of understanding that cheats don't usually go away when you turn them off. At any rate, you should always keep in-game saves around just in case.

Figures. In my case, while I care relatively little about Pokemon, the most I could do would be outright hacking the game for my amusement.

Let me guess... you want a mlp pokemon (closest will be keldeo I think) with a strawberry shortcake avatar

But personally, I really find it irritating to answer pokemon related concerns almost exclusively. It really bugs me that baconbaconbacon can't be a bit more... well, you know...

Maybe, but I mostly hack the dialogues into random, humorous ones for teh lulz.

And yeah, I couldn't help but cringe at the influx of Pokemon questions either. There's more to the DS than just pitting mudkips in cock-fights or something.

[Exophase]

Pokemon is ridiculously popular.. for some reason, emulator users are even more obsessed with it than people using the original console. Lots of people get the emulator only to play it. Back when we did have severe issues with Heart Gold/Soul Silver/Platinum a ton of people wanted refunds (oddly, there were some who only wanted to play one of those and not any of the other Pokemon games). There were also tons of people who only wanted to play Pokemon back when I was doing gpSP. Someone who was mad at me once chided me saying that 85% of people only cared about Pokemon anyway, and without it no one would care about the emulator. It's kind of demoralizing, but then again I can't complain about why people pay for something Never really cared about the games myself, I only played Blue in highschool and it was just alright.

I should actually say that yeah, the games have edge cases that are hard to get right.. the worst is the timing race conditions in HG/SS/Platinum that causes the sprites to glitch out then crash. It happens if some things are emulated too quickly - in our case it got better when we started emulating gamecard access latency. Sadly there are a fair number of other games that have these timing related crashes. They're probably not intentional though, just sloppy coding that happened to work on the real thing. DS is in a frustrating position where the hardware was fairly complex but the games still had low level access to a lot of it and could manage it how it pleased. Other modernish consoles are probably better at having libraries or the OS enforce more reliable coding practices.

The games are also loaded with anti-piracy checks to trip up old flash carts but they don't really cause a problem with emulators that handle certain things appropriately.

[Jay Haru]

Pokemon is ridiculously popular.. for some reason, emulator users are even more obsessed with it than people using the original console. Lots of people get the emulator only to play it. Back when we did have severe issues with Heart Gold/Soul Silver/Platinum a ton of people wanted refunds (oddly, there were some who only wanted to play one of those and not any of the other Pokemon games). There were also tons of people who only wanted to play Pokemon back when I was doing gpSP. Someone who was mad at me once chided me saying that 85% of people only cared about Pokemon anyway, and without it no one would care about the emulator. It's kind of demoralizing, but then again I can't complain about why people pay for something Never really cared about the games myself, I only played Blue in highschool and it was just alright.

I should actually say that yeah, the games have edge cases that are hard to get right.. the worst is the timing race conditions in HG/SS/Platinum that causes the sprites to glitch out then crash. It happens if some things are emulated too quickly - in our case it got better when we started emulating gamecard access latency. Sadly there are a fair number of other games that have these timing related crashes. They're probably not intentional though, just sloppy coding that happened to work on the real thing. DS is in a frustrating position where the hardware was fairly complex but the games still had low level access to a lot of it and could manage it how it pleased. Other modernish consoles are probably better at having libraries or the OS enforce more reliable coding practices.

The games are also loaded with anti-piracy checks to trip up old flash carts but they don't really cause a problem with emulators that handle certain things appropriately.

And its not helping that people who do play it via emulator use cheats and only use one save state and no ingame at all and then blame the app if their game crashes on them without a second thot on polishing up on good emulator practices like backing up saves and using the default saves. From what lordus informed me, android uses a weird way of recovering after a crash that really causes the data wipe since its not on its private folder or something.

[Exophase]

Yeah, and cheats are just not necessarily reliable 100% of the time.. you can find people getting Pokemon game hangs on desmume and even flash carts because of a cheat or combination of cheats they enabled. That doesn't mean these problems would always happen on real hardware, but it's really hard to test for all combinations of cheats.

[huckleberrypie]

Rockstar didn't put out warnings on using cheats when playing GTA games for nothing, right? Regardless of whether you used cheats on real hardware or not there's always the risk of messing things up.

[zeroobligation]

Rockstar didn't put out warnings on using cheats when playing GTA games for nothing, right? Regardless of whether you used cheats on real hardware or not there's always the risk of messing things up.

But GTA has cheats built-in for players to use, like unlimited ammo, vehicles, and etc. Those can't possibly mess things up since they don't alter the game code unlike AR, right?