Nintendo Entertainment System (NES for short) (also known as
Family Computer or “
Famicom” in Japan or “
Dendy” in the former Soviet Union) was a very famous
third generation (8-bit) in the second half of the eighties with several notable games.
Being a 8-bit, comparatively simple (even when taking into the different
Multi Memory Controllers I’ll later elaborate on) game console, not very powerful hardware like current Windows Mobile devices can easily run NES games at their original speed, including music. In this roundup and tutorial, I elaborate on how this can be done. In addition, I publish a reliable, dependable (I've made all the tests MYSELF and don't rely on any other, in most cases, unreliable source) compatibility list with many-many famous titles.
As with my previous emulation-related articles (see the
reader feedback (also at
AximSite) I’ve received to my, say, SNES emulation article), it was because of many reasons that made me publish this roundup:
- There are absolutely no comparative, let alone up-to-date roundups on emulating this platform.
- There are a LOT of apps to choose from (see Michu's related, excellent link / archive repository HERE), which really makes a newbie cry, given that there has been almost no comparative information on these titles on the Internet.
- Users’ reports you can run into in different Windows Mobile forums are really unreliable. So are the advertisements of some software developers ;-) (never EVER believe any advertisement without reading an unbiased expert’s report / evaluation!)
- While, technically, NES is pretty much inferior to fourth generation (16-bit) and fifth generation (32/64-bit) consoles released later (fourth-generation consoles - and even some of the fifth-generation ones; namely, PlayStation - are very easy to emulate on Windows Mobile), the platform still has a lot of titles worth playing. For example, it was on the NES that the Final Fantasy, the Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest) and the Zelda series debuted. These titles (the first three Final Fantasy and first four Dragon Warrior titles) are not necessarily available on later, technically more advanced and/or, under Windows Mobile, easily / efficiently emulated platforms (except for the Sony PSX re-releases of the Final Fantasy titles, which are perfectly playable even under the current version of the Windows Mobile PlayStation emulator).
As they’re very good RPG’s, if you are into the genre, you may definitely want to check them out. The same stands for some other titles like Elite (which doesn’t have a really non-beta WM version, as is also explained in the Bible of Windows Mobile Games – Part I) and Prince of Persia, which has a pretty good NES version (Windows Mobile still lacks a decent port of this title; it’s only recently that a port has been announced and an early alpha released by Mobirate but it’s still far from being perfect).
- Finally, the generic games (which I and Allen Gall have cleaned up last year - after that, we haven't received any criticism) and, particularly, the Emulators category received so much negative criticism (see for example THIS) before my starting to completely update & rework the annual Best Software Awards at Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine that I found it absolutely necessary, now that I’ve been appointed the Awards Nomination Manager, to, finally, show the whole world the right person (someone that REALLY knows what he’s doing and REALLY knows everything about the available software titles for Windows Mobile) was chosen for this task
.
Bird's-eye view on NES emulation: what makes NES emulation easy / hard?
While the built-in circuitry itself in the basic NES console is pretty easy to emulate, the custom chips / electronics (for example, enhanced sound generators for the Japanese Famicom – Famicom supports external sound generator circuitries, as opposed to the NES sold in Europe / the States) present in many game cartridges requires require a lot of additional work. You can read a bit more
HERE on what chips there are. Implementing emulation for all of these technologies takes a LOT of time and effort; this is one of the reasons why “from-scratch” one-man projects like
SmartGear have so low a compatibility rate.
Getting game ROM files
As usual, I may not tell you were to download games from. Believe me: it's far easier than you think if you know what Google is. Fortunately, there isn't a plethora of available ROM formats: everything you run into (most probably .nes files, in most cases, in a compressed form) will run under the emulators.
The available emulators I – the three (+1) most recommended ones
First and foremost, there are three (and an additional one) major, up-to-date, recommended emulators for Windows Mobile. Note that, in the following section, I also give you some advice on how these titles should be used. Note that, as always, I also give the current version of these titles.
1. Jetech.org’s PocketNester 0.7
This is the first emulator you should check out. It is the most compatible, free and reasonably fast emulator. Some of the other, current emulators (for example,
NesterJ4u) are based on this one and, therefore, have exactly the same capabilities, except for the additional support for WM5 softkeys and, with the VGA version, Landscape support.
Its main problem is the lack of WM5 softkey (and, therefore, Smartphone / Windows Mobile Standard) and Landscape screen orientation support.
These issues, as has been already mentioned, have been fixed by for example the NesterJ4u applications. There is another PocketNester derivative implementing WM5 softkey support (and, therefore, sporting support for the Smartphone / Windows Mobile Standard platform) and offering Landscape support:
Masterall’s
PocketNesterPlus (see the next subsection). Unfortunately, it’s only at these two areas that it excels at; it doesn’t have anything else worth mentioning.
Using the emulator is very simple: download the archive from Sourceforge, unzip it, install and click the PocketNester icon in the
Programs / Games folder. Go to
File / Open ROM and select the ROM you’d like to play. The ROM can be both compressed and uncompressed and, if you use
Mad Programmer’s
File Dialog Changer (please read my previous emulation-related articles on how it can be installed; most importantly, the related section in
my guide to running Magnetic Scrolls games), it can be anywhere in your file system. If you don’t use File Dialog Changer, it must be under either \My Documents or in either the root or a direct subdirectory under it on your storage cards.
While the emulator has on-screen controls (
screenshot), you may also want to (re)assign these functionalities to hardware buttons in Options / Controllers. In there, click a
… button and,
as instructed, press the key you’d like to be assigned to the given functionality. Also, it’s in here (see the lowermost checkbox) that you can enable a different method for scanning hardware buttons, should you encounter problems with some (rare) Windows Mobile models.
In
Graphics, you may also want to enable displaying the top- and bottommost 8 scanlines. It’s disabled by default, you will want to enable it with games supporting them (for example,
1942) so that you can see more of the screen (some games use this). To see what the difference is,
this screenshot (of the game 1942) shows the scanlines enabled and
this when disabled. See the difference on the top and bottom? Yes, 16 pixel rows are missing from the second screenshot. Note that, however, there are also a lot of games that don’t use these rows and even games that just display some static in there. An example is
King’s Quest 5, which has some static at the bottom there as can be seen in
here (see the colored line under “
Game paused”. During the game, it can become pretty annoying.). If you disable the 2*8 scanline display, this won’t distract your attention (see screenshot
here).
Note many emulators don’t let for enabling displaying these rows at all. Also note that I’ve also elaborated on how the individual emulators behave in this respect (see the “
2*8 scanlines displayed?” row in the
Comparison and Compatibility Chart).
1.1 Masterall’s PocketNesterPlus 0.9
This self-standing emulator is an enhanced version of PocketNester. Download it from the first post of
the linked MoDaCo thread, unzip it and transfer
PocketNesterPlus.exe to your handheld. Execute it there.
As has already been mentioned, it adds Landscape support to PocketNester (but nothing else). You can switch the orientation in
Options / Display as can be seen in
here. Unfortunately, currently, it’s in no way compatible with VGA devices.
2. MorphGear 2.4.0.9
A not very fast (but, on current, fast Windows Mobile devices, speed-wise, still perfectly sufficient), commercial emulator with somewhat limited compatibility (and some other emulators; most importantly for the GameBoy). I recommend it mostly because of the
NAMCO106 compatibility and the native support for landscape / stretching / on-screen buttons.
Getting and installing MorphGear is easy: download
THIS (main program) and
THIS (Morat’s module) CAB files; unzip them, transfer them to your PDA and click them for installing. Then, click the new MorphGear icon in the
Programs / Games group. Click the
icon in order to select a ROM to load. After this, the game will start (if it’s compatible).
As, by default, MG uses the Portrait orientation and the 100% (one source pixel equals one target pixel) rendering mode, the active screen area is really tiny, particularly on VGA devices, you will want to make sure you override this setting so that the rendering uses the full screen estate. To do this, first, click the
icon and
select iNES (NES) in the list. Now, click
Screen Size on the upper left; a drop-down list will be displayed
on the right.
Select Window Size in the drop-down list.
You can also fine-tune other parameters here: for example, the sound and the frame dropping ones. On current, fast devices, you can safely leave the sound settings at their default, high-quality settings; on slower ones, you will want to either disable sound completely or
select “Low (11 kHz)” in the Quality drop-down list. Also, at the bottom of this settings dialog, you can reassign the buttons of your mobile device. As with all the other apps in this roundup, you can utilize any button on your mobile device, even WM5 hardware softkeys and the red/green phone buttons.
Finally, if you want to play games in Landscape orientation, click the
icon again and, now, select “
Global Settings” in the menu. Click
Orientation and,
from the drop-down menu, select either
West or
East, depending on whether you’re right- or left-handed.
3. HanaHo Games / Bitbank Software’s SmartGear
(Note that the official homepage of the developer doesn’t even mention
SmartGear. Use
the MoDaCo link to download the emulator from.)
A blazingly fast and efficient, commercial emulator: it runs flawlessly even on Windows Mobile devices underclocked to 104 MHz. It, however, has severe compatibility problems and is only compatible with about 60-70% of the current NES games, as opposed to
PocketNester(Plus) and even
MorphGear, which have a compatibility ratio of around 96-99%. It's not compatible with VGA devices either.
Download the file from the above-linked MoDaCo thread (you’ll need to register yourself as a forum member). Decompress the archive and transfer
SmartGear_PPC.exe to anywhere on your Windows Mobile device. Execute it.
In the
Options / Settings section, you may want to make sure
“Throttle framerate” remains checked in (it is enabled by default); otherwise, the games will be FAR too quick. (This will be the case with some games even with it enabled; for example,
Super Mario Bros 2. In order to get rid of this problem, you will need to use another emulator.)
Also, you will need to redefine the
A, B, Start and
Select buttons in Options because, by default, they are assigned to the numeric keys (even if they don’t exist – it’s been written for Smartphones, which do have numeric keys) 1, 2, 3 and 4
as can be seen in here. Therefore, you’ll need to click all of them in turn, click
Define and press the hardware button on your Windows Mobile handheld you’d like to assign the given functionality to. I also recommend
reassigning the Exit functionality so that you can easily stop running a game and bringing up the GUI of the emulator – with the traditional, stylus-based method, this may take some 2-3 seconds.
After this, you can load the ROM image in
File / Open and enjoy gaming.
Incidentally, in addition to the framerate throttling (and some other) checkbox, there is a "
Stereo" checkbox in the Settings. As the NES had mono sound, it doesn't change anything - it has only effect on the emulation of other consoles / handhelds (SmartGear is capable of emulating other systems too). Finally, the emulator also lets for changing the sampling frequency of the sound emulation. Unfortunately, changing this won't get rid of the most notable sound-related problem of the emulator (not present in the other, recommended emulators): the high-pitch noise. Unlike with some other emulators, there's no low-pass filters to get rid of this very annoying high-pitched noise.
Note that in order to really save battery life, you must
manually underclock your handheld to, say, 208 MHz (if it’s an XScale one). It’s only this way, if you use SmartGear, that you will save significant battery life. The sole reason for this that SmartGear, as with both MorphGear and PocketNester, uses all the CPU cycles of the handheld even when it doesn’t actually need it. (For example, when you do make sure “Throttle framerate” remains enabled.)
An example CPU usage graph, running the emulator on an 520 MHz HTC Universal, showing this fact can be seen
HERE. The first, about a minute long 100% peak shows running a Mario game in
PocketNester, the second shows
MorphGear and, finally, the third shows
SmartGear. All in all, you will need to underclock your handheld. Please see my battery life saving-related articles (there are quite a few of them; see for example
THIS; make sure you follow the backlinks) for more info on this.
The available emulators II – the less recommended emulators
Now, I also list and elaborate on the other, older and not any more recommended emulators; for example,
Jogosoft’s
PocketNES, YameCE, NesCE, InfoNES etc.
NesterJ4u
These two emulators, except for some minor issues, are almost the same as PocketNester. There isn’t much point in preferring them over PocketNester – unless you have a VGA device (it doesn't run on QVGA ones) AND you want to run your games in Landscape. Then,
the Sharp build will be your friend.
Jogosoft PocketNES 1.0
This was the first Pocket PC-specific NES emulator (in addition to the Pocket PC-compatible YameCE). Now, because of it not supporting several mappers and lacking for example Landscape support makes it a worse alternative.
InfoNES for PocketPC 0.97
Note that
the official homepage of the developer only contains the old (v0.76b) Japanese binaries; the latest, 0.97 version can be accessed either in Michu’s database (
pre-WM5 and
WM5) or
HERE.
This emulator isn't really notable: it has stuttering sound even at 624 MHz. Most of the alternative emulators are FAR better.
nesCE 2.0
(See the download at the bottom of the page). A non-recommended title. See the comparison chart for more info on why I don’t recommend it.
YameCE
This emulator used to be the first really fast NES (but NOT SNES! Its SNES emulation is
very slow - much slower than current SNES emulators) emulator to be released for WindowsCE. Now, however, with the advent of fast Windows Mobile devices and the later versions of both PocketNester and, particularly, the unbelievably fast SmartGear, the initial speed advantage has gone. This means it’s no longer worth sticking to this emulator, particularly because it is only able to work for some 3-4 minutes under WM5+. After that, it becomes unable to emulate anything and only a soft reset (!) helps the situation. (Under pre-WM5 OS’es, this problem doesn’t exist.)
(Also see
THIS PG thread)
The comparison & compatibility chart
... is available
here (click the link!). Based on the info above (and in my previous articles – read them!), you will understand what it contains.
Note that, compatibility-wise, I’ve not only tested most of the possible mappers, but also some generic, famous games.
I’ve included two versions of the most recommended NES emulator,
PocketNester, in the chart: an earlier
0.5.4 and the latest
0.7, the latter occupying in the first column in the chart. All this in order to be able to compare how it has evolved over time.
Recommended links
My other game emulator reviews in
the Games section of the
Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine's Expert Blog. I plan to cover / discuss ALL emulators available for Windows Mobile and have already published some of these articles. Do make sure you follow / read this articles - nowhere else will you find a better source of emulation-related information, I'm absolutely sure.
