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How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection

arstechnica.com

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Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection

#3
It is interesting to me how some systems are easier to emulate than others, and the ease of emulation seems to correlate somewhat with ease of programming model. The infamous example which comes to mind even far beyond the SNES is of course the Sega Saturn, while on the other end of the spectrum, Dolphin has support for multiple consoles at once.

Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection

#6

It is interesting to me how some systems are easier to emulate than others, and the ease of emulation seems to correlate somewhat with ease of programming model. The infamous example which comes to mind even far beyond the SNES is of course the Sega Saturn, while on the other end of the spectrum, Dolphin has support for multiple consoles at once.

Counting the GameCube and the Wii as two consoles is kind of cheating, the Wii is barely more than an overclocked GameCube with an irrelevant OS running on the side exposing some I/O through a fairly well defined I/O interface. The hardest part of emulating a Wii is emulating a GameCube.

Dolphin is also nowhere close to the accuracy of emulators like bsnes. There are many games that plain don't boot, mysterious bugs that have resisted debugging for years and years (some game breaking, e.g. if you have too many characters unlocked you cannot finish Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn on Dolphin), etc.

Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection

#7

It is interesting to me how some systems are easier to emulate than others, and the ease of emulation seems to correlate somewhat with ease of programming model. The infamous example which comes to mind even far beyond the SNES is of course the Sega Saturn, while on the other end of the spectrum, Dolphin has support for multiple consoles at once.

Dolphin has support for two consoles: Gamecube and Wii. It supports both of them because the architectures are extremely similar. I don't get what you mean by "ease of programming model". Saturn/Playstation/N64 were the first to have games programmed primarily in C with libraries provided by the system developers. This generation is harder to emulate simply because the system architectures contain more chips connected with wider buses running at much higher clock speeds. All of those factors make low level analysis, like with a logic analyzer, impractical. Another factor is the popularity of the system and level of interest in emulation of the system. The original XBox is a good example of this. Gamecube and PS2 have much more polished emulators because they have more titles that interest people, while little effort is spent on emulating the original Xbox (despite being essentially a PC) arguably due to the lack of exclusive titles to make it worth it.

Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection

#8
Interesting tangent from the article:

>Today, SNES emulation is in a very good place. Barring unusual peripherals that are resistant to emulation (such as a light-sensor based golf club, an exercise bike, or a dial-up modem used to place real-money bets on live horse races in Japan), every officially licensed SNES title is fully playable

I had to look up the 'dial-up modem' reference - apparently it's a Japan-only peripheral called the "Famicom Network System" that did in fact have software available that allowed for bets to be placed on live horse races.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System

http://niwanetwork.org/wiki/JRA-PAT

Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection

#9

Nintendo Switch Online subscription includes an "official" SNES emulator. How does it compare to BSNES, and would a decompilation of the emulator help with resolving the PPU issues?

Nintendo's emulators are usually equivalent to what the state of the art was 15-20 years ago. They have plenty of bugs, usually fixed with duct tape and game specific hacks. They are designed to run the set of games they sell and nothing else -- once you get out of what the QA team has explicitly tested, it's not uncommon to find unemulated or badly emulated hardware features.

Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection

#10
And so the final, most extreme approach, would be to expand upon our decapping efforts. We have 20x die scans, but the resolution is not enough to make out and reconstruct individual logic circuits from them, such as was done with the Visual 6502 project.

That was done with the NES too:

https://github.com/SourMesen/VisualNes

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