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

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

#161

Post by knorker » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 8:05 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #103

knorker wrote: post #101

Error in the article: 32x32bit multiply (i.e. 2^64 bits) is not a "heat death of the universe" thing. It's a lot, yes. Not practical for these purposes. But there's a reason we don't use 64bit encryption. 64bit encryption is easily brute forced. If you want to keep it in a table, sure that's 18 exabytes (multiplied by element size in bytes), but that's before compression. I imagine multiply output compresses very wel…

Performing those 2^64 operations on the original SNES hardware as would be required to profile its unknown behavior, on the other hand...

Ah, yeah I see now.

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

#162

Post by rm445 » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 12:00 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.

Not helpful to you except as an existence proof, but you can install Retropie on a Raspberry Pi and it will play SNES ROMs fine. I believe the emulator is a variant of SNES9x.

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

#163

Post by flatiron » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 3:49 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.

SSL e-mail isn't ETE though

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

#164

Post by Narishma » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #145

K0SM0S wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

It may have run most popular games with few glitches, but it was far from being accurate.

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

#165

Post by DCKing » Sat, Apr 04, 2020, 8:46 AM UTC

robotnikman wrote: post #157

DCKing wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that the Virtual Console SNES emulator doesn't really have a reputation for inaccuracy. For sure it's not as accurate as Higan/bsnes but by all accounts it's pretty decent. Of course it was made for running in different constraints. It runs many games very well on the New 3DS' 804MHz ARM11 or the Wii's 729MHz PowerPC G3. Bsnes won't run much in those constraints.

IIRC each game for the Virtual Console comes bundled with its own emulator, tuned specifically to run that game. So there is no single Virtual Console 'emulator'.

I thought this was true for N64 Virtual Console games, but most older consoles were using pretty much the same emulator.

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

#166

Post by sjwright » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #116

sjwright wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I don't understand this reply—it doesn't disagree with anything I said. If Tolkien publishes intentional changes, they are some form of canon, even if it's of the "Han shot first" variety. Tolkien changing the words on page 527 is new canon.

If the publisher modifies the work particularly in a manner devoid of creative intent—such as unintentionally omitting page 527—the modification cannot possibly be considered canonical. Imperfections in an emulator are not the work of the original author and they're certainly not any form of artistic intent.

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

#167

Post by sparcraft » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

praptak wrote: post #82

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.

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".

It is also about consistency. Let’s say for argument’s sake they decided to sue the creators of the emulators. If even one time Nintendo cooperated with and assisted the emulator developers, it is easy for the defense to argue that Nintendo implicitly endorsed the work and therefore why are they suing them.