[General Topics] Menneisyys:
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).