Teknoparrot Review

[Toney Talbot]

Sowhat I learned this week is that there's a type of emulation that isn't really emulation in the traditional sense. For a particular era of arcade games (2005 up to the present day), the games ran on PC hardware and were written in regular PC code. This means that the process of getting them on your home PC isn't the traditional emulation route (where your computer is emulating a different machine entirely) but an arcade loader (where a loader program sorts out what you need to run the original PC based code on your own PC at home). You're effectively running PC games on your PC, so it's far less demanding than emulation.

The results of my experimentation (and thanks so much to @StoooTube for answering my questions when I got stuck) have blown me away. I have a 2007 PC with a second hand Nvidia 560Ti graphics card in it. It wouldn't run stand a chance of running, say, a PS3 or Xbox emulator. But it plays PC games from 2007 very well, so I'm using the Teknoparrot emulator and playing Afterburner Climax, Sega Racing Classic, Daytona 3, Outrun 2 and Sega Race TV and they are all running superbly. It's also strange how, for example, Outrun 2 plays really well on a joypad (the controls feel exactly the same as the home PC conversion) which is amazing when you think the arcade code is designed for a steering wheel.

The downside to all this is that it's the most tweaky system I've come across in emulation. There doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason as to which game file is the executable, and there are some issues that make no sense to me at all. For example, Chase HQ 2 ran extremely slowly, but as soon as you press start the game itself plays at full speed. Unfortunately this meant that calibrating the controller took ages and you have to do that (just the once) before you can play it. Some games do not allow you to insert a coin and you need to find the arcade settings screen and put the game on free play , after which it works fine. Some games need a patch for AMD graphics, others need a patch for Nvidia. The executable for Outrun2 happens to be hidden in a folder called Jennifer. Sometimes there's no obvious way of knowing what exe file to pick. A number of the games get files quarantined by your virus protection. It's not very intuitive!

But this is all a one time faff. Once you have the game set up, it's one click to start and it's proper arcade games in the home, good, recent stuff, working amazingly well. The best bit for me was being able to play and spend time on Sega Race TV, which I played once in Blackpool and never saw again. A very silly game (and not Sega's best by a long way) it's a racer I've always wanted to play again and I can't believe how perfectly it runs on my old PC.

This is an area of emulation I'd not seen before and it's pretty exciting! If you have the patience to tweak, it's quite extraordinary to have these brilliant arcade games running perfectly on a fairly basic PC. And if you can run Outrun 2 in 4K, well.... Glorious!

There are a few different 'emulators' like this (arcadeloader was one of the first I think). They aren't emulators in the strictest sense, they just allow arcade games that run on standard PC hardware to be run on your own pc, presumably taking care of security and I/O in some cases, although i've never delved into it.

You will struggle to find these freely available (i.e. through archive.org) as a lot of the games are recent-ish and will still be out in the wild. There is a french forum called Emuline that have a good subforum for arcade pc loaders, but you will find yourself trawling through various download link sites and the restrictions you get without paying for them.

These loaders cover a wide variety of machines though so there is no one spec that is good enough. I'd suggest cross referencing that hardware it supports with their wikipedia pages to see how your pc stacks up against them.

I found it to be very hit and miss, but there's some really good stuff on there when it does work. I had it integrated with CoinOPS next but it just wasn't configured correctly. For every game that did work, 2 wouldn't.

I am absolutely blown away by this. Running on a PC that is fairly old, I'm playing Afterburner Climax, Sega Racing Classic and Outrun 2 absolutely perfectly, not a glitch in sight. Thanks to @StoooTube for the assistance. This is incredible!

When I wrote that previous post I'd been setting the games up and making sure that they work and was just blown away by how perfect the games are emulated, even on my old PC. Now I've tried to play the games I've had varying results with different controllers. I don't have a wheel for the PC and I've got various control pads here to try out. The best results have been with the Xbox one controller. You get a small amount of drift which you can fix by changing the dead zone in the teknoparrot settings. Sega racing classic suffers due to the small amount of movement of the stick. You find yourself steering to the extremes all the time. Sega race TV and Outrun 2 seem to handle absolutely perfectly and plays as if it was written for your computer.

I think what impressed me the most about this is that I had expected it to be an emulator in the traditional sense but it seems that these games are PC-based anyway and I can only assume that it's not doing anywhere near the amount of dynamic recompiling that you get with traditional emulators. My PC was last upgraded in about 2008 and is by no means a gaming PC. I'd have no chance of emulating, say, Afterburner Climax on a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 emulator but the original arcade game came out in 2006 and runs perfectly on it .

I think I'm on my four or fifth try to get most things working. I've downloaded a few packs for Coinops and Core, and they're incredibly hit and miss. You really do need to go into this directly from the emulator I've found. Another kicker is having your anti-virus quarantine half the files before you know it, leaving you wondering why so many files are suddenly missing.

I'm surprised there's not a proper set up pack or guide, but this really feels like experimental emulation. But when it works, it's incredible. I absolutely agree with dumpster that it takes some tweaking but it's worth it.

You guys have persuaded me to have a play around with this. So far I've only gotten hold of Sega Rally 3, but it crashes out with an 'Out of memory for tex' issue. Any ideas what I need to do to fix this?

How can I calibrate for Chase HQ2? I've tried not touching keys or joypad, I've tried holding left and right when it tells you not to (which seems to be the fix) but still tells me calibration failed.

Rambo was the same for me - I swapped the game exe to a different one - Here are my settings - I think I had it set to RamboR.elf to start with. It works now. I'll grab my Luigi settings as well. And wow, Outrun 2 is glorious!

I somehow managed to get hold of a copy of Outrun 2 where all the music had been replaced with just the worst "music" known to humanity. Absolute total barbarity, some horrific sub-Vengaboys audio puke. Who does things like that? Frankly it's a much bigger crime than downloading the game in the first place.

I think the Daytona 3 crash *may* be down to forced resolution. I remember having loads of trouble before I got it running. From memory it has to be set at a specific resolution, but you can use a fix to make it fit your monitor screen. The fix will be buried somewhere in the emuline Teknoparrot thread.

Outrun 2 is based on Chihiro (which in itself is an original Xbox with a bit more RAM) and the emulation of this is still not great but Outrun 2 SP was released on Lindbergh technology, which is basically PC architecture (an Intel P4 HT 3.0Ghz and NVidia 6800) and then running on Linux.

1. The sun can be over bright in some sections, and this can be fixed by a hack to adjust the sun position/strength. (it's to do with hacking the game to run in higher resolutions than originally intended, and this then causes the sun's position and strength to be adjusted incorrectly)

Note: I have provided a .zip archive for TP (TeknoParrot) here: !TzZFSKZZ!D07r8o9Lz7coe_4cmpgpTFB0qSRKrAHJmaNcPAGKPCI which I have updated to all the latest modules as of today. If you prefer you can download this version which will allow you to skip most of the steps below and just extract to a permanent location as per step 4.

6. The first time it runs it will detect it being run for the first time, it will ask about adding games, click NO for now. Also, 4 update windows may appear. TeknoParrot has multiple modules, and each one needs updating. Find the window that wants to update the component TeknoParrotUi first and click the Update button. This should download and install, and you may get an error "Object Reference Not Set..." just press OK, then it will ask if you want to restart TP, click YES.

1. A number of graphic shaders need to be fixed to work with NVidia GPUs on Windows. These fixes have already been applied to the download of OR2 above, so you don't need to do them. If you have obtained OR2 elsewhere then it would be worth doing this fix. Download the file outurn2_nv_shaderfix_jennifer.7z from this post and extract the files into the location you have extracted OR2 to. You would need to extract into the /disk0 folder as this contains the Jennifer folder.outrun2_nv_shaderfix_Jennifer.7z

2. The executable file for OR2 is known as an elf file, and it's location is /disk0/Jennifer/Jennifer (no it doesn't have an .exe extension). This file is hardcoded for a resolution of something like 800x480 and has problems with shadows if run on PC. I have included 4 fix files here, which can be used to extract a new Jennifer file, which will have a different name. You need to select and use the file based on your full screen resolution. I have included fix files for 1920x1080, 2560x1440 and 2 for 4k resolution 3840x2160 resolutions. I am unsure what, if any, difference there is in these two 4k files but I have included both. You need to extract the file to the /disk0/Jennifer folder. Don't worry it will not overwrite the original Jennifer file as these all have different names for the Jennifer file. 1920x1080.rar 2560x1440.rar 3840x2160.rar 3840x2160 alt.rar

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