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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

#71

Post by filmgirlcw »

Kaze404 wrote: post #53
FillardMillmore wrote: post #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 pe…

If this is interesting to you, I recommend this (1) documentary on XBAND, a peripheral used to access an Xbox Live-like service for the Super Nintendo. It's a fascinating piece of engineering for the time. (1) - https://youtu.be/k_5M-z_RUKA

I rented an XBAND from Blockbuster video in 1995 and it was one of my first “online” experiences outside of using USENET in elementary school. We got a new family computer (a Pentium 90!) with a 14.4 modem and Windows 95 about 6 months later — and that’s what started me on the life I know now. But the XBAND and the article in Nintendo Power about it were an early party of my lifelong love affair with the web.

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

#72

Post by dehrmann »

userbinator wrote: post #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

Would using die scans start to run into copyright issues?

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

#73

Post by rhinoceraptor »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #62
overcast wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's truly shameful is the fact these 30+ year old games are still protected by copyright. Nintendo and all the third party developers have already made their money many times over. It's time for these works to enter the public domain.

Also, none of these companies would even be able to sell old games if it weren't for amazing developers writing the emulators (and people playing pirated games on them). All these games would be lost forever.

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

#74

Post by dehrmann »

zerocrates wrote: post #66
fox8091 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"16 bytes of data" is also the size of an AES-256 key, which is apparently able to be copyrighted.

What's your source on that? Doesn't seem likely to me.

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

I wish people would point that out more often when there's discussion around backdooring systems to allow for government surveillance. With how quickly keys got out for HDDVD and Blu-ray, there's no reason to thing something similar wouldn't happen with a government backdoor, and that's if it's not for sale on the dark web before it goes public.

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

#76

Post by smprather »

smprather wrote: post #75

Has Nintendo released officially, or leaked, the RTL for any of the processors in the SNES? If someone could get their hands on that, then the emulation authors should be able to achieve perfection.

Looks like some people are trying to re-create it at least. https://github.com/srg320/FpgaSnes

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

#77

Post by NobodyNada »

greggh wrote: post #52
byuu wrote: post #47

Hi all, thank you for sharing this article here! It is technically a "laymen's" version of https://byuu.org/articles/edge-of-emulation (submitted here earlier), meant for a wider audience, but it does elaborate on some new discoveries such as the digital video output testing mode. In the off chance anyone is able to help with this, I've set up a Discord channel (#ars) for coordination here: https://discord.gg/Fx7TfKh…

I'm sure the answer is no, but I emailed a few people at NERD (Nintendo European Research & Development). Asked the obvious question about the documentation even existing anymore, and if there were any possibilities of it ever being made public. You've probably done that already, but I figured it was worth a shot. I'll update if I actually get a response.

Nintendo's official development manual is available at archive.org [0]. However, AFAICT it is rather low-quality and incomplete, and it pales in comparison to the wealth of documentation created by years of reverse-engineering effort from hobbyists like byuu.

I imagine that the official documentation was leaked rather than publicly released. Nintendo wants to make money selling re-releases of classic games, so they are extremely unfriendly towards emulator developers. Just look at the all the propaganda on their corporate website: "The introduction of emulators created to play illegally copied Nintendo software represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers [...] Such emulators have the potential to significantly damage a worldwide entertainment software industry which generates over $15 billion annually, and tens of thousands of jobs." [1]

[0]: https://archive.org/details/SNESDevManual/mode/2up [1]: https://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp

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

#78

Post by malux85 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #58
FillardMillmore wrote: post #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 pe…

A brazilian bank released software for the Mega Drive. Looks like it could display the accounts as well as manage investments and credit cards. Wonder how many people actually used this... https://segaretro.org/Telebradesco_Residência https://www.sega-brasil.com.br/Tectoy/Telebradesco_Residenci... https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1995/3/22/dinheiro/26.html

What the heck?!? This is awesome!!!

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

#79

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

NobodyNada wrote: post #77
greggh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the answer is no, but I emailed a few people at NERD (Nintendo European Research & Development). Asked the obvious question about the documentation even existing anymore, and if there were any possibilities of it ever being made public. You've probably done that already, but I figured it was worth a shot. I'll update if I actually get a response.

Nintendo's official development manual is available at archive.org [0]. However, AFAICT it is rather low-quality and incomplete, and it pales in comparison to the wealth of documentation created by years of reverse-engineering effort from hobbyists like byuu. I imagine that the official documentation was leaked rather than publicly released. Nintendo wants to make money selling re-releases of classic games, so they a…

I would assume that from a practical standpoint, the SNES emulation 'war' is lost for all practical definitions of it - pirates can run everything they want in more than sufficient quality using any of multiple options.

So Nintendo doesn't have much to lose by letting the few geeks that want perfection for perfection's sake have it.

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

#80

Post by byuu »

GuiA wrote: post #61
FillardMillmore wrote: post #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 pe…

I imagine that these could still be emulatable in software, right? I.e. you could simulate whatever data the golf club was generating and pipe it into the emulator, such that you could play that golf game with a Wiimote or some other peripheral. Similarly you could have some shim code for the online games like the horse race one that talks to some community run server, re-enabling a new kind of net experience.

You can to varying degrees, yes. There's a barcode scanner, an exercise bike, a baseball bat, and more. I designed higan around a modular tree structure so that you can just create a new derived node for any peripheral, and define whatever API you like, so that we can emulate the protocol. Then it's up to the GUI to figure out how to do something when it sees Node::ExerciseBike, and how to do I/O with its API interface.

One could imagine, for instance, connecting an actual USB barcode reader to emulate the Barcode Battler, or providing a text box to hand-type a barcode number.

I don't see anyone actually bothering to simulate the entire horse betting network complete with virtual bank accounts, but if you're really interested, Raphael Assenat reverse engineered quite a bit of the JRA-PAT system for fun here:

https://www.raphnet.net/divers/retro_challenge_2018_09/index...

It's a pretty good read as well!

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