[Wanderer042]

I and my friend have been trying really hard to find a good emulator for Duke Nukem Zero Hour. While scouring the internet has not bore fruit. I am starting to lose hope if I can actually find a good emulation of the game. Of course there is Project64. People have told me Mupen64. But people tell me that there are other emulators that can work with better results. Both Frame-rate, and hopefully graphics, but then again this is Nintendo 64 graphics we are talking about. In my opinion it is the definitive Duke Nukem experience. While the controls can be more desired. It has a menagerie of levels and weapons, a sense of adventure as well. The .45 Peacekeeper revolver was an awesome weapon, heck I got a replica of it on my wall, and was one of my favorite weapon in the Duke Nukem series. Not to mention the eras you get to time travel—in my opinion the Wild West set the standard. After I saw the new game coming out, I was disappointed. The 20th anniversary was nothing more than a cash in, and Duke has seen better days. Call me sentimental but this was the one Duke Nukem game that sold me on the series. I mean I have played since Duke 3D to DNF. But I keep going back to Zero Hour, which was until the old console broke down. Thank goodness we live in an age of the internet and numerous people whom emulate the game. Please, if anyone knows where to emulate this awesome game, decently, I will be in you debt. Thank you.

[deuxsonic]

Project64 I consider to be the best N64 emulator. The graphics plug-in you can swap out and I actually use one that was designed for Glide for UltraHLE ages ago because I feel it produces the most accurate results, which then also requires a wrapper to translate API calls. You can get controller adapters for practically nothing on eBay and then use the emulator with your controller.

[necroslut]

deuxsonic, on 07 September 2016 - 12:00 PM, said:

Project64 I consider to be the best N64 emulator. The graphics plug-in you can swap out and I actually use one that was designed for Glide for UltraHLE ages ago because I feel it produces the most accurate results, which then also requires a wrapper to translate API calls. You can get controller adapters for practically nothing on eBay and then use the emulator with your controller.

With Project64 you can also use keyboard+mouse controls, making it play like a traditional FPS. That works much better than the original controller IMO, even though it does make the game a bit easier.

[deuxsonic]

Emulator Zone is saying that the newer releases of it come bundled with malware so you might want to grab the version they have here.

http://www.emulator-.../project64.html

[ashura252]

deuxsonic, on 07 September 2016 - 10:35 PM, said:

Emulator Zone is saying that the newer releases of it come bundled with malware so you might want to grab the version they have here.

http://www.emulator-.../project64.html

Uhh, iirc, the official installer has ads in it, and you just need to make sure you're reading every step of the way to not install something you didn't want.
I guess that's how they get their release supported, but yeah it's a pain.

[Tea Monster]

I tried to use an emulator and found it to be a huge pain in the ass trying to get the controls sorted out.

I was going to say that you should just grab a second hand console and just play like God and Nintendo intended. Having a check through indicates that the price of N64s is still pretty high.

[Wanderer042]

deuxsonic, on 07 September 2016 - 12:00 PM, said:

Project64 I consider to be the best N64 emulator. The graphics plug-in you can swap out and I actually use one that was designed for Glide for UltraHLE ages ago because I feel it produces the most accurate results, which then also requires a wrapper to translate API calls. You can get controller adapters for practically nothing on eBay and then use the emulator with your controller.

Thank you for the advice. I tried out Mupen and other Emulators you suggested and I found out that Project64 had the best results. As for the controller though this is where I need to pull up my sleeves and mess with the controller menu.

[Wanderer042]

Tea Monster, on 08 September 2016 - 02:01 AM, said:

I tried to use an emulator and found it to be a huge pain in the ass trying to get the controls sorted out.

I was going to say that you should just grab a second hand console and just play like God and Nintendo intended. Having a check through indicates that the price of N64s is still pretty high.

After many hours of research I found that the best results is a Logitech controller. While there are other Nintendo emulation controllers on sale out there. After five minutes of fiddling, luckily my friend and I have tweaked project64's controller menu and the game-pads layout to simulate the old school controller bore fruit. It was a pain, but was a success. Mapping out the C buttons to the joystick made the game way easier in moving after calibrating it to the right stick—and the looking controls as well to the left. The rest was easy to map out. Zero Hour needs a lot of TLC to make it work like it used to but it was good when me and my friend finally got the controls just right.

[deuxsonic]

You can do it keyboard and mouse but I've found it's tough to find a layout that works consistently well with games of that console because the controls were originally designed around the controller so there can be a large amount of trial-and-error to get something that feels good for one game, and then you end up having to do it for every game so you're always swapping out layouts, but I guess this wouldn't be an issue if Zero Hour is the only game you plan on doing this with. I think I did do this with DOOM 64 originally so I could play it like any other PC FPS, but after Kaiser did the EX port now it literally is a PC game.

I got an adapter to use a DualShock 2 and you can make that approximately platform-agnostic since most controllers share a lot of their layout, and consoles that use fewer buttons are even easier to set up using it. I had put some thought into which controller I wanted to use for this purpose and that's what won out for me as the C buttons can be set up as the right stick which is exactly how Nintendo did it with the GameCube controller, A and B, start, L and R, and the D-pad are already there basically, and that leaves you with Z which was designed as a left-hand trigger and once again looking at how the GameCube controller handled this, it made it another shoulder button, so you could bind this to L2 since it was a left-hand button originally. I went with the DualShock 2 over the original DualShock as the sticks are stiffer which allows for finer movement as the N64's analog stick was pretty stiff as well -- the only thing missing is the star shape around it so when pushed all the way in a certain direction it is easily kept in that direction. I did this many years ago and just kind of stuck with it. You could do the same thing with the DualShock 3 or 4 or the 360 or XB1 controller or the Wii's Pro controller or anything with that general shape.

[Wanderer042]

deuxsonic, on 08 September 2016 - 10:35 AM, said:

You can do it keyboard and mouse but I've found it's tough to find a layout that works consistently well with games of that console because the controls were originally designed around the controller so there can be a large amount of trial-and-error to get something that feels good for one game, and then you end up having to do it for every game so you're always swapping out layouts, but I guess this wouldn't be an issue if Zero Hour is the only game you plan on doing this with. I think I did do this with DOOM 64 originally so I could play it like any other PC FPS, but after Kaiser did the EX port now it literally is a PC game.

I got an adapter to use a DualShock 2 and you can make that approximately platform-agnostic since most controllers share a lot of their layout, and consoles that use fewer buttons are even easier to set up using it. I had put some thought into which controller I wanted to use for this purpose and that's what won out for me as the C buttons can be set up as the right stick which is exactly how Nintendo did it with the GameCube controller, A and B, start, L and R, and the D-pad are already there basically, and that leaves you with Z which was designed as a left-hand trigger and once again looking at how the GameCube controller handled this, it made it another shoulder button, so you could bind this to L2 since it was a left-hand button originally. I went with the DualShock 2 over the original DualShock as the sticks are stiffer which allows for finer movement as the N64's analog stick was pretty stiff as well -- the only thing missing is the star shape around it so when pushed all the way in a certain direction it is easily kept in that direction. I did this many years ago and just kind of stuck with it. You could do the same thing with the DualShock 3 or 4 or the 360 or XB1 controller or the Wii's Pro controller or anything with that general shape.

Oh man, I wholeheartedly agree with this. But let me tell you when I finally got the dang thing working on my computer, oh the Terok control scheme was like trying to man-handle a cow up the back staircase. Man it did take me a good ten minutes to get the rust off. When I look at your control layout it makes me think how much I had to really teak it and make it genuine, while trying to improve it and basically turn poo into gold. Putting the controller at direct input solved this problem immediately, and not X input.