How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by Razengan » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

smabie wrote: post #68

Razengan wrote: post #25

I just want to say that some of the most fun I’ve ever had on the PC has been in a SNES emulator. The sheer variety, depth, hours of content, ease of accessibility, and great music has been nearly unmatched on most other platforms. I highly recommend anyone with an interest in games to grab a bunch of ROM packs (including Japanese exclusive games and fan translation hacks) and spend some of your quarantine on the SNE…

Especially Chrono Trigger! That game is amazing!

Chrono Trigger will always be one of my all-time favorite stories on any medium.

A few other SNES recommendations from the top of my head:

• EarthBound (aka Mother 2, another popular RPG with fun music. Combat may feel too grindy/frustrating though)

• Super Gussun Oyoyo (Lemmings + Tetris)

• Live A Live (RPG where you play characters from multiple timelines)

• Pop'n TwinBee (shoot-em-up and platformer with very colorful graphics in a pastelly palette)

• Terranigma (RPG spanning multiple eras)

• Treasure of the Rudras (Japan-only RPG with fan translation)

• Bomberman (hilarious couch PvP)

• Pocky & Rocky (cute shoot-em-up with a Japanese folklore theme)

• Yoshi's Island (one of the best platformers)

There were a bunch of other obscure titles with unique gameplay mechanics that I can't recall the names of at the moment. Will have to comb my ROMs folder.

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

#142

Post by wolrah » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

shakna wrote: post #120

flatiron wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faxes are unencrypted and send medical crap all the time today.

Most fax machines today aren't actually sending faxes - they're sending emails, using SSL.

As someone who works in the telecom industry and has to deal with faxes in medical facilities all the time, no they're not. I fucking wish they were.

I beg people to use e-fax solutions if they insist on using fax at all, but there are so many damn human macros out there who learned how to do something one way and totally break down if you try to make them do something different.

Annoyingly while most modern fax machines are also network printers and support email in both directions, the majority do not provide any way to configure a mapping so that a user can type in a number like a normal fax machine and the machine will convert it to the required email format for an e-fax service. This would be so easy and solve so many problems.

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

#143

Post by th0ma5 » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #138

Is there any SNES emulator that runs on arm? I've got retroarch v1.3.6 on Stretch on aarch64. It has crashed with a "file not found" and "bus error" for bsnes. Higan segfaults when I try to run it.

I've been running it on a Fire stick 4k but in 32 bit mode

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

#144

Post by nmz » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #138

Is there any SNES emulator that runs on arm? I've got retroarch v1.3.6 on Stretch on aarch64. It has crashed with a "file not found" and "bus error" for bsnes. Higan segfaults when I try to run it.

retropie runs fine on some arm platforms. you can also use lakka. However the latest retroarch is 1.8.5, while the 1.3.6 version is from 2016, I would imagine nothing would work on Stretch, so I recommend an upgrade or any OS that isn't debian. If in doubt, gentoo always works, though its source based.

https://retropie.org.uk/ http://www.lakka.tv/

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

#145

Post by grecy » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

K0SM0S wrote: post #135

DCKing wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "caught" really is the proper word to use, when they credited the PCSX-Rearmed project in the menu of the Playstation Classic. It might be considered somewhat embarrassing they didn't make their own better emulator (I guess?), but it's not as if they were actively hiding it either.

It may be embarrassing from a PR / image standpoint, as seen by the mainstream who doesn't know better and will read some headline followed by sensational lines like «Sony sued emulator projects to death (and lost) and now uses them for profit in products!» The truth is that the amount of work and dedication that goes into a great emulator, with all the quirks and ad hoc settings for the whole library... no corporati…

> The truth is that the amount of work and dedication that goes into a great emulator, with all the quirks and ad hoc settings for the whole library... no corporation on Earth can get that within months

It can and has been done. Have a look at "Connectix Virtual Game Station"[1]. It's a commercial prodcut that played virtually every PS1 game flawlessly on a 233MHx iMac. I spent thousands of hours playing games on that thing, and glitches were very rare in a huge range of games, even the most demanding like Metal Gear Solid.

Jobs even demoed it on stage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix_Virtual_Game_Station

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

#146

Post by ryanmcbride » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

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…

thanks for all the work you do byuu!

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

#147

Post by ridv » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

thristian wrote: post #50

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo consoles seem to always have the best emulators, likely due to being almost all exclusive games. Every nintendo console recently has had a working emulator before the end of the consoles life. I remember nintendo ds emulators adding support for games that had only just come out.

The other reason Nintendo consoles have the best emulators is because Nintendo generally avoids cutting-edge technology, or at least they prioritise "simple" and "cheap" over CPU and GPU performance. Apart from the latest consoles (the Wii U and the Switch), the worst-emulated Nintendo console is the Nintendo 64, which also had the strangest hardware (RAMBUS RAM, a general-purpose GPU, etc.)

On that note about the N64, there is a project (created by a friend of mine in college) that is looking to go down the cycle accurate route that the Byuu has gone down with higan.

It's called CEN 64 and can be found at https://github.com/n64dev/cen64

Lots of work that still needs to be done but it's quite impressive!

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

#148

Post by CobrastanJorji » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

scrooched_moose wrote: post #17

kingbirdy wrote: post #14

Earlier 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...

Random anecdote. For Turner's GameTap, a sort of subscription-based library of games for many different platforms from around 15 years ago, they absolutely were using downloaded ROMs. Worse, they were unable to find clean ROMs for several games, and several of the versions that were used had Demoscene cracktros added in. They got around the problem by just playing through the cracktro, saving the state, and loading that state when a player loaded the game.

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

#149

Post by derefr » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

_v7gu wrote: post #129

willis936 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but if there was a second edition released by Tolkien, that would be canon. There could have been changes in page 527, such as Sam and Frodo run away to start a domestic life together, and it would be official. It would also cause quite a stirring and fracture the community. You see smaller scale scandals of the same variety everytime nintendo rereleases a poorly emulated title. Copyright needs to be fixed.

Canon is whatever your heart (or in the case of roms, the speedrunning community) declares it to be. I'd previously be arguing for authorial intent, but JK Rowling ruined it for everyone.

Maybe if you're just a fan, sure. But there is a very strong and explicit meaning to "the canonical work" when you're doing archival/conservatorial work. There's what the artist created (as seen through the lens of how it was first released/shown, which certainly might involve a publisher or curator—thus the concept of a "director's cut"); and then there's what previous middle-men (curators, other conservators, republishers who acquired the rights after the creator's death, etc.) tacked on after that initial release.

You'll see the effect of this in gaming in the forms of e.g.:

• The https://www.no-intro.org project, whose goal is to curate a database of hashes of "canonical ROMs" (i.e. ones that are don't have demoscene "intro" greetz; but also which don't have the extra headers that some copiers add; and, obviously, which aren't bad dumps.)

• The policies of some emulators (e.g. MAME, Higan) to replace, whenever possible, High-Level Emulation code that "works perfectly" (i.e. matches console output on every frame for every known software title!) with Low-Level Emulation, which requires a BIOS/firmware dump of a chip to run. The goal in these types of fixes isn't to run existing games, but rather to make the emulator match the behavior of the hardware for running even novel or previously undiscovered games, such that it can be a useful tool in future conservation efforts, when the original hardware is long gone.

• The file-formats of some emulators (again: MAME, Higan) which keep individually-dumped coprocessor ROMs as separate files in a software title's archive file/folder, each with their own metadata; rather than inventing custom merged-binary file-formats for each system. This both allows future archivists to easily re-verify that individual dumps are correct; to replace bad dumps with better ones without invalidating the hashes for other ROMs that make up the same software title; and, in theory, this provides a (coincidentally machine-executable) schematic of the software-title-as-hardware-system, which could be used to reconstruct it wholesale in a future where all existing hardware was lost.

• The transition from the archivists at Archive.org preferring to see Apple II disk images in raw bit-dump (DSK) file-format, to wanting them as flux-trace (https://applesaucefdc.com/woz/) files, which in turn means that copy-protected games can now be preserved in their original, copy-protected state, rather than first needing to be cracked.

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

#150

Post by LocalH » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

87zuhjkas wrote: post #118

kingbirdy wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

"Nintendo ... rolls their own emulator(s) ... rather than using existing open source ones" Wouldn't it be possible to reverse engineer these emulators? Maybe the official Nintendo SNES emulator has all the right S-PPU1/2 values in it.

Doubtful. Byuu’s emulator is already much more accurate than Nintendo’s own.