temper4iPhone Beta Preview

by Eric March on May 28, 2008 at 11:57 pm

Fans of the classic NEC TurboGrafX 16/PC Engine, your emulation fix is nigh, for ZodTTD’s TG16/TurboDuo emulator temper4iPhone has been released to the beta tester’s club. It emulates both standard TG16 HuCards as well as TurboDuo CD games, and installation creates all of the necessary directories you will need to get started.

Games need to be stored in /var/Mobile/Media/ROMs/TEMPER/ (on firmware version 1.1.3 and above) as you might expect. There is no BIOS file required for standard games — everything needed to emulate the TG16 is built-in to the emulator. Running CD games however will require the syscards — those you’ll have to find on your own or ask around, but if you do find them, they are stored in /var/Mobile/Media/ROMs/TEMPER/syscards/ (again, on firmware 1.1.3 and above).

As for how it runs — extremely well. In portrait mode with sound enabled, speed is pretty much a constant 58-60FPS. In landscape, it can drop as low as 45-50FPS, but you’ll never notice. There were no hitches or jerks during play — the display was fluid without any distracting pauses or jumps. Similarly, sound was perfect; no cracking or jumping, just perfect FM synthesis and digitized sounds. There is a sound delay that I suspect is buffer-related, so sound effects generally tend to show up about half a second after the on-screen action that triggered them. Compatibility is also extremely high. Every game I tried ran just fine, though some few experienced a few glitches here and there. (Ghost Manor — no relation to the Atari 2600 Xonox game — turned the background white at some random point early in the game, for example.) Overall though there wasn’t anything I wasn’t able to run, and the vast majority of games should run without a hitch.

But don’t take my word for it. Have a look at the video below and judge for yourself. temper4iphone should be unleashed upon the masses soon if all goes well in the beta process.

Posted in Emulators and Roms, In The Works