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?
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How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
11–20 of 167 posts
Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
#12It's sad that Nintendo doesn't seem to see this as an opportunity to earn free press and goodwill by simply releasing all the design documents, mask images, etc.
The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there.
Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.
Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
#13Nintendo 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.
While all of Nintendo's official emulators are afaik made internally, it's interesting to note that Sony used an existing open source emulator (PCSX ReARMed) for their Playstation Classic.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-sourc...
Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
#14It's sad that Nintendo doesn't seem to see this as an opportunity to earn free press and goodwill by simply releasing all the design documents, mask images, etc. The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there. Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.
Nintendo is still actively selling SNES games via Nintendo Switch Online, and as far as I know rolls their own emulator(s) for this rather than using existing open source ones as Sony did for the PS Classic, so I doubt this will happen any time soon.
Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
#15The linked story about Higan's NEC uPD772x emulation being used by Stephen Hawking is pretty amazing, both as a story in its own right and as a parable about the value of open source and code getting used in wildly different contexts from what it was originally designed for: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Vall...
Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
#16It's sad that Nintendo doesn't seem to see this as an opportunity to earn free press and goodwill by simply releasing all the design documents, mask images, etc. The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there. Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.
Nintendo is still actively selling SNES games via Nintendo Switch Online, and as far as I know rolls their own emulator(s) for this rather than using existing open source ones as Sony did for the PS Classic, so I doubt this will happen any time soon.
> using existing open source ones as Sony did for the PS Classic
That’s interesting, I wonder if that is the case the for the PS1 emulator on the PS3/Vita used for the PlayStation Classics titles
Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
#17It's sad that Nintendo doesn't seem to see this as an opportunity to earn free press and goodwill by simply releasing all the design documents, mask images, etc. The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there. Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.
Nintendo is still actively selling SNES games via Nintendo Switch Online, and as far as I know rolls their own emulator(s) for this rather than using existing open source ones as Sony did for the PS Classic, so I doubt this will happen any time soon.
Tangentially related, there's some evidence the ROMs Nintendo was selling a couple years ago were ones they downloaded. Not bulletproof, but more likely than not.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-d...
Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nintendo is still actively selling SNES games via Nintendo Switch Online, and as far as I know rolls their own emulator(s) for this rather than using existing open source ones as Sony did for the PS Classic, so I doubt this will happen any time soon.
> using existing open source ones as Sony did for the PS Classic That’s interesting, I wonder if that is the case the for the PS1 emulator on the PS3/Vita used for the PlayStation Classics titles
I think that's a proprietary in-house emulator known as POPS. The fact that Sony already had an in-house PlayStation emulator for the ARM-based Vita makes their decision to use something else for the PS Classic a bit strange.
Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
#19It's sad that Nintendo doesn't seem to see this as an opportunity to earn free press and goodwill by simply releasing all the design documents, mask images, etc. The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there. Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.
What's sad is they don't just release the entire SNES/NES library for people who buy into their Nintendo online service. It's shameful how they've treated people who have bought and rebought into previous iterations only to have their libraries wiped out with new hardware generations. I'm looking at you virtual console.
Re: How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nintendo is still actively selling SNES games via Nintendo Switch Online, and as far as I know rolls their own emulator(s) for this rather than using existing open source ones as Sony did for the PS Classic, so I doubt this will happen any time soon.
Tangentially related, there's some evidence the ROMs Nintendo was selling a couple years ago were ones they downloaded. Not bulletproof, but more likely than not. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-d...
I can almost guarantee Nintendo did not use a downloaded ROM. I don’t have direct experience with how the ROMs are sourced, so it’s not 100%, but I worked on a team handling emulation at Nintendo and can say the processes are incredibly careful and strict.
The company is extremely micromanaged and pedantic, and this is not the kind of thing that could possibly be overlooked at Nintendo.