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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

#81

Post by zzo38computer »

monocasa wrote: post #23
aikinai wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's just weird then that they put a header originally defined by pirates, and now otherwise only used by third party emulators. Including matching the even more informal parts of the header byte for byte with the most common dump of the ROM on the high seas.

It isn't wrong for Nintendo to use the same file format as other emulators, although it is hypocritical. (But including such improper stuff as "DiskDude" (which the emulator doesn't even use, and doesn't properly belong in the header anyways) is a bit wrong, and is even more hypocritical.)

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

#82

Post by praptak »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #79
NobodyNada wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not how corporations work though. The default decision is "no" and an individual employee has no benefit from getting through all the red tape to get a "yes".

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

#83

Post by naniwaduni »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #79
NobodyNada wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Third-party SNES emulator are more accurate than Virtual Console.

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

#84

Post by tomc1985 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #65
lidHanteyk wrote: post #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.

I played SNES games emulated on a 66MHz 486/DX2 using an emulator named "esnes". No sound[1] and translucency was more miss than hit, but good enough to play through the entirety of ChronoTrigger. It was pretty cool to play a current (if aging) system emulated on a PC. 1: Sound was eventually implemented, I don't remember if it was before or after I upgraded to a Pentium though.

Did the same, with ZSNES running on Win95. Sound was disabled and I'd toggle layers on and off since transparency killed the framerate. Sometimes, when my parents weren't home, I'd copy my saves onto a floppy and boot the game up on the family Pentium 166 for sound and full FX. But I beat most of the game on my 486!

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

#85

Post by fiblye »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #79
NobodyNada wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If ever there's a law passed that allows Nintendo to get non-licensed emulators banned entirely, I have no doubts they'd do everything in their power to have them wiped from existence by the next day.

If they give up and give assistance to emulator devs, there's no going back on it.

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

#86

Post by Dylan16807 »

derefr wrote: post #44
delroth wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, when you think about it, if a game behaves differently when run in an emulator, as part of an emulator-and-ROM bundled software product released by Nintendo... then that behavior is just how that particular release of the game has been canonically chosen to behave . Any bugs in the emulation of a Virtual Console title, or a SNES Classic title, or a SNES Online title, are just "how that version of the game is ."…

> Interestingly, sometimes—because of one of these slight variances—the fastest [and so preferred] version of a game to speedrun, is a Nintendo-sanctioned emulated (e.g. Virtual Console) release of the game.

Not that that necessarily has anything to do with bugs. Some VC games simply have reduced lag when a lot is loaded, because they throw somewhat more power at the game than the original console could.

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

#87

Post by sjwright »

derefr wrote: post #44
delroth wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, when you think about it, if a game behaves differently when run in an emulator, as part of an emulator-and-ROM bundled software product released by Nintendo... then that behavior is just how that particular release of the game has been canonically chosen to behave . Any bugs in the emulation of a Virtual Console title, or a SNES Classic title, or a SNES Online title, are just "how that version of the game is ."…

I don’t agree. Canonical status is bestowed by the artist/author, not the publisher, and certainly not a republisher. If Lord of the Rings is republished with page 527 arbitrarily missing, that omission doesn’t become canon.

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

#88

Post by kzrdude »

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

I wonder what the security solution was, assuming this didn't use SSL/TLS

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

#89

Post by SSLy »

fiblye wrote: post #85
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If ever there's a law passed that allows Nintendo to get non-licensed emulators banned entirely, I have no doubts they'd do everything in their power to have them wiped from existence by the next day. If they give up and give assistance to emulator devs, there's no going back on it.

Luckily laws are limited to countries.

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

#90

Post by lambertsimnel »

jacobush wrote: post #70
matheusmoreira wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess many - Sega was uuuuuuge in Brazil. It was almost like a PC.

Interesting. Do you remember the Mega PC? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_Mega_PC

It was a Sega Mega Drive and a PC.

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