Atari Jaguar Emulation Has Arrived On iPhone

Rich Whitehouse is a legend. He had (has?) cancer and still kept trucking with the emulator - and on PC it's flawless, including Jag CD support. I was tempted to buy a Jag again, but this emu is better than the real thing, with lots of neat QOL extras. So I bought a Jag controller and an adapter.

It's also the best emulator I've seen. Portable, no installs. Lots of easy to use options. Great filters. Just and click and go. No tricky set-up. I don't know why people like or use trash such as RetroArch - you spend hours fiddling and still nothing works! BigP just works, first time, no fuss. The rest of the emulation community can learn from Rich Whitehouse. (Is PC Engine CD-ROM emulation fixed yet? Because that has been a dumpster fire for over 20 years.)

I hope Rich finds success and money with this new release.

@sdelfin
Thanks for the polite write up. Kudos also for battling through with command lines. I too took the time to learn them, and then created BAT files to make it easier (specifically with CDi emulation; I ended up making a custom BAT for for each game). Once I learned how I felt only resentment for having been made to do so. Some authors claim it improves performance not having a GUI, but they're just lazy. GUIs have not impacted performance since after the millennium. Jeez, upgrade your rig if the few megabytes of RAM needed are dragging your system down.

So, PCE CD emulation. Good question.

I've since stopped even trying, and bought a PC Engine with a TerraOnion add-on to run CD games flawlessly. So maybe they fixed it in the last few years, I dunno.

But basically all the authors seem to be raging nutjobs who INSIST on making the interface as annoying as possible.

I'm just gonna list random things I despise about PCE CD emulation.

1) Scum authors who refuse to allow ISO use, forcing the need for the CD, because "I don't want to encourage piracy." Yeah, they can GTF. That system hasn't been commercially viable since 1993. This forces you to burn CDRW or image mount. I have never found a decent image mounting program that did not BSOD my to death. Every computer I've loaded DaemonTools or whatever on to has died in about a month. Malware? Probably.

2) Eventually some emulators starting allowing ISOs. Except not in any normal or easy to use way. I don't want to have to rip it into some weird data/audio ISO/MP3 mixed format. I just want to use one file ISOs.

Why can't they code this to work right? There's always some lame excuse about mixed data/audio being more accurate or some crap. Again, they can GTF with that childish nonsense.

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@sdelfin
So I ended up in this super ****ed up situation where I'd try to download a game, and to save download space it'd be data and APE files, or WAVs, or some crap I had to convert. When I tried ripping my own discs there'd be errors, or bytes out of alignment. Or I'd download a single ready to burn ISO which the emus couldn't handle, because the authors are idiots and only allowed mixed file folders.

So I would then burn this ISO to CD-RW, then I would rip this CD-RW into the required mixed data/audio format. Every. Single. ****ing. Time. And I did it over 50 times to play the games I wanted.

So I'm ready to go, right? I've download an ISO, burned it to CD-RW, then ripped that to iso/mp3 format, and I have the correct cracked emu (because I refuse to pay for crap that won't work right), so now, at last, I can play? Right?

Nope!

Do you have a TOC? Do you know what a TOC is? Without a TOC nothing runs! So I try to make a TOC using the ripping program and CD-RW disc. "Sorry this TOC does not match the directory of files". So I try downloading a TOC. "Sorry this TOC does not match the game you are trying to load."

Eventually I swapped to MednafenX on the OG Xbox, which came with every TOC. I had to rip all my games as usual, but I could select the right TOC from a list and force it to run. No PCE CD emulator should ever ask about TOC. These should be baked in and auto-detected. Why?! WHY does it even ask for a TOC and refuse to run without one? Logically I cannot understand this. If it needs a TOC to function then it should come with TOCs. They're not like BIOS, they're a Table of Contents, so like a CUE file. But, you still needed a CUE file anyway! That's the insane thing! You needed a TOC and a CUE!

There were all sorts of sound problems. Audio mixing problems. And if I wanted a new game I'd have to go through the above 30 minute process.

I hated it! So eventually I just bought a PCE with TerraOnion.

Now?

Download game from CDRomance, enjoy.

No fuss. No problems.

I cannot fathom how in 2024 the PCE CD emu scene can be such an abhorrent trainwreck.

Look at BigP. For Jag CD games you just load and go. No fuss.

For PCE CD emulation... Let me ask you: have you got a TOC? Is it the right TOC? Does this TOC match the file length of the ISO data track? Did you name the data track and audio tracks correctly? Do those names match the CUE file? Is the TOC and the CUE file named correctly? Are you absolutely sure that god damned TOC is set-up right?

Rage inducing. Absolute rage inducing.

@sdelfin
And the worst thing? What sanctimonious ***** the authors are when you try to point out these problems.

The PCE / TG16 fan scene is populated by the most unpleasant human beings I have met on the internet.

Their responses range from "you should only be using original discs not pirating" to "you need to learn how to use command lines" or "it works for me so it must be fine".

Not one of them seems remotely interested or capable of creating a functional emulator that works as smoothly as various others.

There's a forum they all hang out on. Half the members are banned. Most of them dislike me immensely. Last I checked there was a forum topic dedicated to trash talking me. Utterly loathsome sub-humans.