This isn’t for anything too big for changes for what I post to the site. I was able to do some testing for the Xemu emulator on the laptop and things are quite promising for it’s use for the future. While I have talked about playing Conflict: Vietnam from the 2.0 site, I was having issues with it running on all of the current systems that I had at the time. It wasn’t supported for backward compatibility for both the Xbox 360 and One. When I tried to play it on the A/V station I was getting 15 FPS or lower.
With it running on the new laptop that I got, I’m getting solid 25 FPS with slight dips. Which understand, this is a game that’s to be played on the Original Xbox. There weren’t too many games that could hold a solid 30 FPS or games that could go up to 45 FPS that was optimized for that hardware at the time. The issue that happen off and on and are more infrequent is when the games soft locks.
When I was playing it on the A/V station, it did that well over 30 times with the first two levels of that game and, where there were a high number of movements and actions is when the FPS would dip into the single digits. During the same playthrough of then, it only soft locked 5 times with the frames holding solid during the two repeat missions from before. I feel really confident that I can enjoy playing on this emulator with this game. It was also noted on their website that Conflict: Vietnam was listed as “Playable”; That means that you will encounter issues here and there while playing that title.
I’m sure that there will be issues during game captures and such. The saving grace is that Xemu can do save states of the game at any time. So, I plan on trying to use that function often but, I wouldn’t doubt that there will be times that I will have to replay sections to get back to a point. I’m sure that there will be edits made to Game Captures and Lets Plays when I use it. I plan on recording the whole session(s) and making edits like I did in the past before I started using O.B.S with its pause function; I can see it becoming more difficult to follow along if it’s like a smash cut back to where I left off before a soft lock.
So, the obvious change will be that we should be seeing more of these types of games getting Game Captures and Lets Plays down the road. The bigger change is that since I have to use the Xbox 360 controller to play these games (I’m not going to be using a keyboard and mouse for an emulator), I have decided that I’m going to “retire” playing Perfect Dark on the 360. This is mostly for the fact that resyncing the controller every time would become a pain. The other reason is that I have played Perfect Dark thousands of times from both the N64 and 360 over the years. I think that I have gotten my fill for the most part of my life.
Keep in mind that if I can play any of these older games on the 360 or One, I plan on doing that. The emulator really is a last resort for this dying generation of console. As a reminder Lazz.Network is hosting the emulator and games for download (It’s all under the ISO section). While I’m respecting how Xemu wants to prevent piracy (So the project won’t be taken down by Microsoft), I still want to make it someone easy for you to get this running yourself. While providing preservation efforts to the games itself; Well, the games that I own mind you.
The thing is that the Xemu download has everything needed to make it run but, it’s not setup. The games hosted are in the raw formats of the disks that it was ripped from; So, it’s not going to play until it’s converted to the format for Xemu. If you want to use what’s hosted here for Xemu, check out their website to see how to convert these ISOs into the file format needed.
I hope that you will like this change as I’m really excited to get my paws wet again with playing some of these old games from my childhood again.