Making SNES ROMs using C#
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Making SNES ROMs using C#
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Re: Making SNES ROMs using C#
#2link to the repo: https://github.com/KallDrexx/DotnetSnes
Re: Making SNES ROMs using C#
#3Neat, but with restrictions like no reference types and looking at the examples, they are far from idiomatic C# as to be almost indistinguishable from C I'm trying to figure out the motivation. Maybe it's "because you can" which is fine, but are there any advantages to this approach over using C directly?
EDIT: I overlooked the reddit post and comments and jumped straight into the repo, it looks like the creator is on an insane quest to get C# to run anywhere haha, I didn't realize the C tanspiler was by the same author.
Re: Making SNES ROMs using C#
#4Neat, but with restrictions like no reference types and looking at the examples, they are far from idiomatic C# as to be almost indistinguishable from C I'm trying to figure out the motivation. Maybe it's "because you can" which is fine, but are there any advantages to this approach over using C directly? EDIT: I overlooked the reddit post and comments and jumped straight into the repo, it looks like the creator is o…
How about il2cpp? Then you could just use LLVM to compile it to just about anything
Re: Making SNES ROMs using C#
#5Neat, but with restrictions like no reference types and looking at the examples, they are far from idiomatic C# as to be almost indistinguishable from C I'm trying to figure out the motivation. Maybe it's "because you can" which is fine, but are there any advantages to this approach over using C directly? EDIT: I overlooked the reddit post and comments and jumped straight into the repo, it looks like the creator is o…
This is firmly in "they asked whether they could but not whether they should" territory, and I love it for that.
Re: Making SNES ROMs using C#
#6This is genuinely pretty cool. Without dynamic allocations and garbage collection, I'm not sure how much C# buys you, but it's still neat and I think further updates might end up making this much neater.
Re: Making SNES ROMs using C#
#7Neat, but with restrictions like no reference types and looking at the examples, they are far from idiomatic C# as to be almost indistinguishable from C I'm trying to figure out the motivation. Maybe it's "because you can" which is fine, but are there any advantages to this approach over using C directly? EDIT: I overlooked the reddit post and comments and jumped straight into the repo, it looks like the creator is o…
>are there any advantages to this approach over using C directly?
Presumably the fact that you don't have to use C.
Re: Making SNES ROMs using C#
#8This is genuinely pretty cool. Without dynamic allocations and garbage collection, I'm not sure how much C# buys you, but it's still neat and I think further updates might end up making this much neater.
Kind of safer C++, with less foot guns
Re: Making SNES ROMs using C#
#9Neat, but with restrictions like no reference types and looking at the examples, they are far from idiomatic C# as to be almost indistinguishable from C I'm trying to figure out the motivation. Maybe it's "because you can" which is fine, but are there any advantages to this approach over using C directly? EDIT: I overlooked the reddit post and comments and jumped straight into the repo, it looks like the creator is o…
> far from idiomatic C# as to be almost indistinguishable from C
C# could be much nicer to write than C. "Low-level" C# is still idiomatic, even if you use memory-safe constructs i.e. Span and friends.
There is nothing wrong with writing C# that has structs, ref Ts and not a single class.
At work, I have ported a certain C dependency to C# to fix long-standing bugs, get rid of C build systems and portability problems and gain 2-10x performance improvement (by fixing suboptimal data structure use and switching to text scanning with SearchValues which is heavily vectorized).
The end result is still idiomatic and arguably easier to read. But yes, it looks very different to the average enterprise codebase.
Re: Making SNES ROMs using C#
#10Neat, but with restrictions like no reference types and looking at the examples, they are far from idiomatic C# as to be almost indistinguishable from C I'm trying to figure out the motivation. Maybe it's "because you can" which is fine, but are there any advantages to this approach over using C directly? EDIT: I overlooked the reddit post and comments and jumped straight into the repo, it looks like the creator is o…
Author here, yes I am on an insane quest to get C# to run anywhere and SNES was just a random side tangent to that :D.
So the code in the game example is very much a "port directly from the example C code to make sure it's possible and it works". The next step was to start looking at where things can be made more idiomatic.
For example, C# supports static methods in interfaces now. This means instead of passing function pointers around for things you can create a class that implements an interface and call `InitObjects()` instead of `InitObjects(&initFunction, &updateFunction, null)`, and I think I can do that in a no overhead way.
There are some other ideas I have for making things more idiomatic, but I really wanted to make sure I had a working ROM first before I started mangling the examples and trying to figure out if it's my transpiler or my logic that's breaking things.
There is a limit to how idiomatic I can make it though. Since the SNES has limited memory, any stack variable you create risks accidentally overwriting other memory. So it seems like you want to limit how many stack variables you use, which ends up meaning storing things in pointers and globals when using them.
There are some other slight advantages, like better enums, but yeah. At the end of the day this is a usecase of my transpiler allowing C# to be used on non-standard platforms.