Contents

About FCE Ultra

This tutorial is to help you with FCE Ultra. FCE Ultra is an excellent Nintendo emulator. It has near-perfect emulation quality much like Nestopia. You might be asking yourself "But, which one is better? Nestopia or FCE Ultra?" Well, FCE Ultra seems to have better compatibility with games, and its better for capturing screen shots. As for Nestopia, the emulator itself is programmed better and is more stable, hence it'll work better on your computer than FCE Ultra, which tends to get glitchy with its video features.

*If you would like to download FCE Ultra, I have it in my emulators page.

Extracting & Placement

I suggest you make a new folder called "NES" within a folder called "Emulation". You don't have to, but it makes things a little easier for you if you're not too computer literate. Extract all the contents of this emulator's zip file into the NES folder. If you don't know how to extract files from a zip file then read this. Put all of your NES ROMs into the NES folder too. FCE Ultra has zip support, so you do not have to extract ROMs from their zip files. Double-click on "fceu" to open it.

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Setting up the buttons on your keyboard or gamepad

1. Click on the Config menu then Input. As shown here.

2. You will see this window show up. Click on the Configure button in the "Port 1" box as shown.

3. You will arrive here. Here you can change the Player 1 buttons: up, down, left, right, select, start, B and A. All you need to do is click on a button then press which keyboard key you want it to be set to. If you have a gamepad, do the same thing, but be pressing the buttons on your gamepad rather than the keyboard keys.

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Loading a game

1. Click on the File menu then Open.

2. A window similar to this will show up (without the listed games though, heh).

3. See where the red arrow is pointing to? Click there.

4. Your "Emulation" folder should be listed there. Click on it.

5. You should see your "Nintendo" folder listed. Double-click it.

6. Now just double-click on a game to play it (Note: FCE Ultra can play zipped NES R0Ms). You will only have to do all these steps once because FCE Ultra will remember the folder where your games are.

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Window mode

Increasing/decreasing window size

Click and hold on the lower-right corner of the FCE Ultra window. As shown here. Once your mouse switches to a double-arrow, click and drag it diagonally toward the lower-right to increase the window size.  Do the opposite to decrease the window size.
 

Enabling screen renders

1. Click on Config then Video. You'll reach the window displayed toward the right (click to view actual size).

2. Look towards the bottom-left in the "Window settings" box. Click on where you see the red rectangle. Within this box is four options: Hq2x, Scale2x, Hq3x, and Scale3x. Look below for examples of what each special scaler (screen render) does.
- Scale2x/3x just attempts to render out the corners of the pixels to make them look a bit rounder. "2x" means two times bigger than 1x1 and "3x" means three times bigger than 1x1.
- Hq2x/3x does a much better job than scale2x/3x by smearing the pixels together with a slight blur. However, Hq2x/3x requires a faster computer for decent speed (at least 1 GHz and above). "2x" means two times bigger than 1x1 and "3x" means three times bigger than 1x1.

3. Click the screen render you want, then click Close.

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Full screen mode

Pressing Alt+Enter takes you into full screen mode. Pressing it again takes you out of full screen mode and back to window mode.
 

Enabling screen renders

1. Click on Config then Video. You'll reach the window displayed toward the right (click to view actual size).

2. Look towards the upper-left in the "Full screen settings" box. Click on where you see the red rectangle. Within this box is four options: Hq2x, Scale2x, Hq3x, and Scale3x. Look above for examples of what each special scaler (screen render) does.
- Scale2x/3x just attempts to render out the corners of the pixels to make them look a bit rounder. "2x" means two times bigger than 1x1 and "3x" means three times bigger than 1x1.
- Hq2x/3x does a much better job than scale2x/3x by smearing the pixels together with a slight blur. However, Hq2x/3x requires a faster computer for decent speed (at least 1 GHz and above). "2x" means two times bigger than 1x1 and "3x" means three times bigger than 1x1.

3. Click the screen render you want, then click Close.
 

Screen render problems

If you get a blank screen after enabling a screen render for full screen mode, that means your video card doesn't support it. In other words, you're screwed.
 

Stretch to Fill screen

If you wish for the game's screen to fill the screen during full screen mode, then put the circle in the "Stretch to Fill screen" option. However, this might make the screen might look and flow weird. It's usually best not to enable this feature.

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Allow more than 8 sprites per scanline

You know how Nintendo games get glitchy when there's a bunch of them together? FCE Ultra corrects that if you enable a certain option. Go to the Config menu then Video. Put a check next to "Allow more than 8 sprites per scanline".

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Save states

Save states is a feature that saves the exact spot you are in a game. All you need to do is press F5 to save your state, then press F7 to recall it. You could also go to the File menu then Save State As to save states, then go to Load State From to recall it.

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Screen capture

Press F9 to capture a screen shot. It will save it in *.png format and toss it in a folder called snaps (which is in the folder FCE Ultra is in).

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