| smbhax [sys=PC; cat=Emulation; reg=NA] |
| | | Open source GB/GBC/GBA/NES/SNES/PC Engine emulator by Sour. Official site https://www.mesen.ca/, repository https://github.com/SourMesen/Mesen2/ .
Has run everything on GB/NES/SNES I've thrown at it so far, haven't noticed compatibility issues. Can remove borders from Super Game Boy (see entry 1532) and Super Game Boy 2 (see entry 1534), which is great! : ) Input mapping is quick and clean.
Haven't been able to get any flavor of the one PC Engine game I tried, Double Dragon II (see entry 505) to work though; PC Engine emulation is relatively new in Mesen, I think.
Lots of room for more comfy features--would love easier palette editing--and saving!--for GB, for instance. : ) But you can already change 4-color GB sprite palettes separately from the 4-color backgrounds, whereas SGB/2 only allows you four colors for the whole screen. |
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| | | Other settings to make:
- Unchecking "Enable LCD frame blending" under Game Boy/Video
- Checking "Enable integer FPS mode (e.g: run at 60 fps instead of 60.1)" under Video/General to fix frame drops in recorded video of NES/SNES |
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| | | | Mesen isn't even mentioned in Google result lists for "best SNES emulator"... But the top ones always mentioned seem less fully featured, so I dunno. Higan for instance appears to have limited display resolutions--although I didn't quite get that far in trying to set it up, which was rather baffling--and Snes9x doesn't have specific NTSC and PAL aspect ratios (and doesn't seem to have a way to load GB games in Super Game Boy?). |
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| | | | Snes9x does handle the transition from menu to wrestling in Funaki Masakatsu smoothly, though, whereas that flips Mesen out a bit (it has to be resized manually). But I can't shake the feeling that Snes9x isn't running it at quite the right aspect. |
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| | | Recent hourly builds of Mesen have had audio glitches when running Tetris through Super Game Boy 2. Most recent is better--just an extra static burst ~50% of the time when landing a block--but not great.
A build of Mesen is just the Mesen.exe, which creates all the other dlls and stuff when run--kind of slick.
Can't build it myself in MSYS2; requires .NET 6 SDK for Linux and that appears to require going through MS themselves, which I am not going to do to my MSYS2 install. : PP |
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| | | | According to https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Super_Nintendo_emulators#Super_Game_Boy , other than higan/bsnes/ares, "As of April 2023, Mesen2 is the only other multi-system emulator that can properly replicate a SGB." |
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| | | Overscan, which can cut for instance the blinking border tiles when scrolling the screen in NES games (8 top and bottom in Final Fantasy, for instance), or just dead black border areas (16 top and bottom in Castlevania, for instance), doesn't seem to work that way in PAL, where it just replaces the area with black bars?
Mesen--at default settings--will auto-apply an .IPS patch to an NES game if the .IPS file is in the same directory--might also have to have the same base filename? DOESN'T work in a .zip though. So it's less messy, file-wise, to use an IPS patcher like Floating IPS (see entry 1581) to apply the .ips to the ROM permanently. |
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| | | | The ROM can be in a .zip, but the .ips has to be loose, in that directory, and have the same base name as the ROM/zip. |
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| | | Sample Windows shortcut Target line:
C:\downloaded\mesen\Mesen.exe "C:\downloaded\mesen\roms\Mr. Do! (USA).sfc.zip" --preferences.gameSelectionScreenMode=Disabled --doNotSaveSettings |
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| | | | Mesen doesn't work with a wireless DS4 natively--DS4Windows got it working, though: https://github.com/Ryochan7/DS4Windows |
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| | | Mesen doesn't do per-game settings, so I gotta leave its settings for stuff like Aspect Ratio, Overscan, and Volume at like Auto/0/100 or something, and set them per-game in shortcut "doNotSaveSettings" command line parameters, for instance
C:\downloaded\mesen\Mesen.exe "roms\Final Fight 2 (Japan).zip" --preferences.gameSelectionScreenMode=Disabled --snes.Overscan.top=23 --snes.Overscan.bottom=16 --fullscreen --video.aspectRatio=Auto --audio.masterVolume=50 --doNotSaveSettings |
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| | | | For PC Engine CD games, it seems that Mesen needs the games unzipped. CHD isn't supported. It requires the Super CD-ROM System 3.0 BIOS. |
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| | | | ares can load PCE CD games from compressed .chd, so I'll just use that emulator instead. |
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| | | I'm going to use ares for SNES emulation--it's better than Mesen at cropping border areas, at least in Mr. Do, the game I compared in ares and Mesen.
It doesn't have Mesen's per-color palette control for GB and border control for NES (which is a huge but NESessary pain as NES games vary wildly in their bordering, and flashing border areas), so Mesen's still the one for those. |
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| | | | Ah! Mesen now (maybe I just missed it before?) can do per-game overscan settings with Game - Game Settings -- it's the only setting in there, in fact. |
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| | | | Have been finding DualShock not working in Mesen lately--maybe after running Steam and Steam Input? Powering DualShock down and back up seems to fix it. |
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| | | | I've had Mesen lock up with menu windows open--once on NES controller mapping and once on the Cheats browser, I think--in two recent builds; have gone back to a build from 8/13 for now. |
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| | | The freezing in menus has been acknowledged as a problem in the Windows "native builds," ie the version not requiring .NET ("improved start up times"). So I'm back on the .NET builds.
Under Settings - Emulation, there's a "Run Ahead" option. Not sure how Run Ahead works exactly in Mesen; there's a libretro (Retroarch) explanation that it uses save states saved to RAM of "additional frames"; and how to figure out how many delay frames you have:
"We need to find the shortest internal input lag a game can have, it's usually just moving the character:
Pause emulation (press "P" hotkey on keyboard).
Press and hold a direction on the controller.
Advance emulation frame by frame (press "K" hotkey on keyboard) until the character moves.
At best an action will be visible on the next frame, so the frames of lag are the amount of time you pushed "K" minus 1."
In Mesen the default hotkey for frame advance is "'" (tilde key), and I have to push twice (tested: Pac-Man CE, Mappy-Land, Ninja Gaiden) when controlling w/ both keyboard and DualSense. So, I set Run Ahead to 1, and now it advances on the first press.
Before that, testing in CE with the FPS counter showing showed pretty steady framerate until "Run Ahead" 4, where it could sometimes sit for a bit at like 64 or 59 or something I dunno. |
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| | | | That RetroArch Run Ahead page: https://docs.libretro.com/guides/runahead/ |
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| | | --emulation.runAheadFrames=[0 - 10]
NES seems to be 1
SNES seems to be 2 (Batman Returns tested)
GB seems to be 2 (Double Dragon II tested) |
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| | | Mesen will save a "Last Session" save when you exit a game with the "Power Off" menu item or shortcut key...but not when you say just close the program window with the game running--UNLESS you also enable the --preferences.gameSelectionScreenMode=PowerOn command line setting, it seems.
So for a game like Tetris, which saves high scores but only for a single session, ie the game itself has not save capability, you can keep it going in a state maintaining the scores by combining PowerOn with the --loadLastSession switch. Not very intuitive but seems to work. My Tetris command line for instance is
C:\downloaded\mesen\Mesen.exe "C:\downloaded\mesen\roms\Tetris (USA)_nostalgic.zip" --preferences.gameSelectionScreenMode=PowerOn --fullscreen --video.aspectRatio=NoStretching --audio.masterVolume=40 --loadLastSession --doNotSaveSettings |
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| | | A GB color palette (high contrast, blue-shaded sprites, high contrast blue & purple background):
Background: FFFFFF,00DBFF,AC0089,000000
Sprites #1: FFFFFF,D4FF00?,0083FF,000000
Sprites #2: FFFFFF,unused?,unused?000000
Sprites 1 color 2 I think shows briefly in certain fade-in level transitions in DDII. Haven't spotted Sprites #2 colors 2 and 3 yet. |
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| | | Updated that palette to tone down the glare a bit:
Background: DEE7F7,00CEF8,AC008C,000000
Sprites #1: EFEFEF,CCEF40?,0084FF,000000
Sprites #2: EFEFEF,00FF2D?,FF0079?,000000 |
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| | | | extrabastardformula on selectbutton pointed out that that palette is CGA colors. ^ _^ |
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| | | Tried loading Double Dragon Advance for GBA in Mesen and got a pop-up saying "This game requires a firmware file for the: Game Boy Advance Boot ROM
Filename: gba_bios.bin
Size: 16384 bytes
Would you like to select it now?"
So I guess I'll have to stick to mGBA. ^ _^
SourMesen/Mesen2's last update was July 6 2025. Developer Sour's last post in the development thread on nesdev.org https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=303111#p303111 was July 16th 2025 (Sour's account there is at 999 posts); Fiskbit, the admin there, said on August 19 2025 that "Sour's fine, but I don't know when he may be back." ( https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=303744#p303744 ) |
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| | | | The TMNT Cowabunga Collection (see entry 1886) has some GB/GBC/GBA bios files that can be extracted--unfortunately, the GBA one, the 2.25 KB "agb_boot.bin," does not enable GBA emulation in Mesen; if you try selecting it when prompted by Mesen for the 16384 byte "gba_bios.bin," Mesen says "The selected file does not match the required size (16384 bytes) and cannot be used." |
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| | | The GB Kunio beat em up actually uses those ? colors from before (its Double Dragon conversion for the West doesn't!). ; ) Updated the greenish ones a bit:
Background: DEE7F7,00CEF8,AC008C,000000
Sprites #1: EFEFEF,A0FF69,0084FF,000000
Sprites #2: EFEFEF,00E639,FF0079,000000 |
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| | | | All of the SFC/SNES games I've tried seem designed for NTSC pixel aspect ratio, whereas all but 1 of the FC/NES games have seem designed for 1:1 PAR--the exception being Tecmo Bowl. |
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