SteveWinwood
Member
Movie companies didn't either for a very long time, until they saw money in it of course. Luckily it's easier to preserve this stuff digitally than some of the film is.
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SNES emulation finally 100% (ST0018 dumped)
- Thread starter acm2000
- Start date
Movie companies didn't either for a very long time, until they saw money in it of course. Luckily it's easier to preserve this stuff digitally than some of the film is.
It's always nice to read posts that praise emulation rather than condemn it relentlessly. As easy as it is to think about the latest Pokemon being pirated and getting serious hours on an emulator, people often forget the quiet brilliance of your MAMEs or older consoles and games that are impossible to track down let alone still be able to play.
Growing up on the old Atari, C64 and Amiga means that I get some serious nostalgia dopamine when I have a chance to play through some of them. Donald Duck's Playground will always have a huge impression on me and it's been at least 20 years since I last played it via the big floppy.
Shadow2222
Member
I can't speak for BSNES specifically, as I have never used it, but nearly every emulator supports controllers (and I have used the 360 wired controller for them), so you should be able to.
Could you/someone explain this to me?
if you mean plug and play as in a wired 360 controller I believe so. I've only used the other 2 snes emus. If you mean a wireless 360 pad with a play and charge hooked to it then no, the wire doesn't pass info only electricity for power. A DS3 and motionjoy software should do the trick though.
Evidently, ￥14,900.
To emulate something 100% accurately, you're going down to the transistor level and emulating every single hardware blip and bloop.
I think someone with a decent rig can expect to 100% accurately emulate the original Pong cabinet at less than half speed, for example.
(This might have changed since I read that particular factoid)
BSNES is called 99.99% accurate because it's as close to the 100% accuracy mark you can get without getting down to the transistor level. As he's said, it's an exponential thing. That final .01% of accuracy would require stupid amounts of power.
Zombie James
Banned
Amusingly, that article is written by byuu, and is pretty much a more layman version of the one on his website.
Bomber Bob
Banned
What a fascinating story!
Dunno why took so long to get a dump thought.
Just throw the old ST-0018 in the acid and manually read the thing
Dunno why took so long to get a dump thought.
Just throw the old ST-0018 in the acid and manually read the thing
water_wendi
Water is not wet!
hestonlaugh.gifIt means you can now play this snes game:
But I think the more important point is that the SNES, as a platform, is now fully "archived" and preserved for the foreseeable future.
EatinOlives
Member
A lot more so these days. Clearly none of the companies pushing significant amounts of DLC (like Arkham City, though I think some of the DLC is in-disc?) are thinking about what's going to happen to all this content 30 years from now when MS/Sony stop hosting it. See also: online passes, or multiplayer in general.
We can only hope that all the publishers will eventually make GOTY editions of all these games with every single piece of content (DLC included) for that game on disc, or else we're going to have a hilarious number of half-complete games in 2040. Absolutely abysmal when we're talking about preservation of art.
That's not 100% emulated at all, and probably never will be in our lifetimes.
Correct. Emulation in the common sense is generally an approximation of the original hardware. True, 100%, cycle-for-cycle emulation of every chip, memory access and function call is extraordinarily processor-intensive.
A "perfect" emulation of the Wii would actually look much worse than the results you get from Dolphin, as it would not receive the benefits of Direct3D manipulation.
Yeah, you'd think that development for zsnes should have ended long ago, and all the efforts should have been directed at snes9x, since that's the one that can be ported to non-x86 platforms.
bsnes is a nice effort but it won't be practical for a while, and there will always be a place for an efficient but not accurate emulator. ZSNES on the other hand, is kind of a relic.
fake edit: mmm, the last update on zsnes.com is from 2007.
real edit: double post, sorry
I have been using bsnes exclusively whenever I felt like playing an SNES classic for at least 3 years now. It's perfectly practical.
Well put! There is something deeply conforting in the emulation scene's ability to preserve and protect gaming assets into the future. Just knowing that a particular favorite game will still be THERE somewhere down the road.
chickdigger802
Banned
Could someone explain to me how 100% emulation of the SNES isn't feasible and yet we have this:
which exceeds the original platform?
Don't see your point. the Dolphin emulator is broken somewhat for pretty much all games. It does make good screenshots and short youtube videos.
Are there any 100% compatible games for it yet?
I agree. The combined success of encryption on consoles and the extreme slowdown of sequential performance improvements in hardware are actually a bit concerning in this regard. There's basically no chance that you'll be able to play PS3 games in 10 years on anything other than a PS3 (that's still working) or any successor platform with backwards compatibility.
Another good reason to want all games on PC.
This is really not true. There are minor problems with quite a few games, but the majority can be completed 100% without issues.
If you mean retail games, no. And there never will be. 100% emulation is just not feasible with current technology.
The closest you can get is making it look like it behaves correctly, but it's not actually timing accurate.
Most emulation fakes hardware calls to and from the code by figuring out what the intent of those calls was. Once that's done, the emulator reproduces them using the techniques of the platform doing the emulation. That's how emulators like Dolphin can clean up their games so well. They aren't reproducing the Wii's rendering methods precisely, they're just approximating them using DirectX equivalents. What emulators like bsnes do is attempt to actually mimic the operation of the original hardware, instead of just its functionality. It's more accurate, but far more resource intensive to pull off.
Genesis Knight
Member
Will anyone even bother trying to do PS3 or 360 emulators in the near future? Or is the power needed just too much and the complexity too great?
Tarin02543
Member
Damn, thanks to this thread I've learned there is an f zero with formula 1 cars.
I must play this title.
I must play this title.
For simply playing games, cycle accurate emulation is more of a hindrance than an asset. For example, the PSP emulator on Vita isn't very accurate in terms of timing, but the results of that are strictly positive: some games load significantly faster or feature better and more consistent framerates than on the original hardware.
PS2 and Wii emulation being at its current level should give you an indication of how far off even rudimentary 360 emulation is.
Right, but having at least one guy working towards 100% accuracy is a boon. The speed-over-accuracy SNES emulation scene benefited massively from the research and work put into BSNES, even if people get all salty and refuse to admit it. Having a better understanding of the hardware you're trying to emulate always helps.
Indeed. I vaguely recall an emulation error that made Star Fox (SNES) play faster on most emulators, which was actually a benefit when it wasn't causing the game to crash or deadlock. >_>
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Wait, is this basically a more advanced version of the Bung Game Doctor? Cuz like... for whatever reason, I want to dump my own carts to my computer, because it'd make me feel special. If this lets me do that... well, that'd be great, since I could never get my hands on a Game Doctor.
Joe Shlabotnik
Banned
Pretty sure any and all emulation discussion is perfectly acceptable, just don't promote downloading ROMs you don't own or point to ROM sites, etc. ROMs are the minefield, not emulators.
Most emulators come with a bunch of filters now, you can cycle through them and see which suits you best. Some try to compensate for the increased resolution, but I actually prefer "blurry" scalers that attempt to recreate a CRT display--prior to HD displays, games were programmed to take advantage of the properties of CRT displays for some color tricks and natural anti-aliasing that wasn't possible in the hardware itself. Old games are really not supposed to look "sharp".
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Nah, old games look razor sharp if you play them with an RGB cable on the original hardware.
The only old-school concession I make, personally is adding scanlines back in with an XRGB.
RPG Wizard
Member
Nah, that's not why I'm frustrated with him. From the last time I checked his site, (which was many months ago) I dislike his "only I can be trusted for perfect cartridge dumps" stance, to the point where he's gotten a ton of donated carts for dumping himself to ensure that they're perfect. (I can't remember if they're sealed or not.)
Feels like a bit of a spit in the face to everyone else who also cares about archiving SNES games to be dismissed so casually, especially when they've done testing and authentication themselves.
I'm also irked about his stance on "being as accurate as possible to the original", (to the point where if a game crashes on a certain level if played on the SNES, it should do the same on an emulator) and then his Der Langrisser translation "fixing mistakes the devs made".
The guy's very talented, but his decisions are not free from criticism.
(I'm ignoring all of the old bad blood from donut, as I wasn't around for it, it's ancient history, and no one should really care anymore.)
Joe Shlabotnik
Banned
Well yes, I'm not talking about emulating an RF switch connection or something (although that's kinda neat, in its own way). It was still never meant to be played on a high resolution monitor, though.
Zombie James
Banned
bsnes doesn't have that NTSC filter anymore, either, since it switched to 19-bit rendering.
SNES pxel art relies on the NTSC color space and natural bleeding to make it look as intended.
Here is a comparison I saved. Here's the image in its raw form:
Here's what it looks like with an NTSC RGB filter:
As someone who owns FF6, a SNES, and a 27 inch Sony CRT, the second image looks much closer to reality. The colors are the biggest improvement, for me. The natural blurring/anti-aliasing adds a lot of three dimentionality to the scene as well, in particularly the stones of the castle. The dithering works well in the second shot thanks to the bleeding, but not in the first shot. The highlights on the stones work far better in the second shot as well.
edit: I had an extreme example saved as well:
I know this is a very extreme closeup, but notice how the second shot gives off the illusion of much greater detail and 3 dimentionality. It's incredible to see how the pixel art acts with the CRT display technology to create something quite special.
That's a shame.
Here is a comparison I saved. Here's the image in its raw form:
Here's what it looks like with an NTSC RGB filter:
As someone who owns FF6, a SNES, and a 27 inch Sony CRT, the second image looks much closer to reality. The colors are the biggest improvement, for me. The natural blurring/anti-aliasing adds a lot of three dimentionality to the scene as well, in particularly the stones of the castle. The dithering works well in the second shot thanks to the bleeding, but not in the first shot. The highlights on the stones work far better in the second shot as well.
edit: I had an extreme example saved as well:
I know this is a very extreme closeup, but notice how the second shot gives off the illusion of much greater detail and 3 dimentionality. It's incredible to see how the pixel art acts with the CRT display technology to create something quite special.
That's a shame.
This "accurate" emulation thing is quite interesting i have to say, and i find amazing that transistor level emulation of Pong only runs at 5-10 fps on modern machines.
And the acid thing? So awesome, i really love to see much dedication it really shows how much you love what are you doing.
And the acid thing? So awesome, i really love to see much dedication it really shows how much you love what are you doing.
EatinOlives
Member
It really makes me wonder if there were any particular techniques/formulas for determining how colors and their combinations looked on a CRT. Just thinking about making an image and having to account for the fact that it would look FAR more different on a CRT makes my head hurt.
Man I love this, someone posted some LTTP shots and I wanted it so badly (or I think it was from an unfinished plugin). Either way, it needs to get to SNES9x STAT
Creating them on a CRT back in the days helped in the process I guess. As for filters on emulators, I suppose trial and error with funky slide controls for various settings.
Theonik
Member
People were using CRT monitors back then. Also they probably did a lot of testing on different TVs like some studios do today I guess. A pixel artist at the time wouldn't really have to worry about you playing them on entirely new displays now.
Edit: Partially beaten but I wanted to help elaborate a bit. When it comes to filters, it comes down to lots of research and trial and error. Something like HLSL on MAME took a lot of knowledge of how CRT screens worked.
moniker
Member
Looking at http://snes9x.ipherswipsite.com it says "Win32: Added Blargg's ntsc filter (three presets). (OV2)" for latest version.
Isn't that the same filter that bsnes uses?