Hacking NDSSFC/CATSFC revival

[Deleted member 319809]

Educated guess: Disabling the audio in the emulator's settings just mutes it, it doesn't stop the audio emulation from happening.

It kind of does. I say kind of because the SNES APU gets halted and the sound gets muted on top of that, but S9xProcessSound still gets called.

Yay GG codes! Also yay for (if I'm reading right), the emulator using the old-format BSNES codes... which means my converter pack isn't needed anymore, meaning less work and trouble for everybody involved.
Shut up I'm lazy.

Indeed, I used the old BSNES format in source/nds/gcheat.c - it ignores "disabled" and "enabled" and just disables everything unless you go into the cheats menu to enable a few codes.

How's it working out?

 

[Rydian]

I just got back from a family visit (which started a bit after my original post), still catching up on crap before I fire up games.

 

[ShadauxCat]

Glad to see someone else has taken over. I simply have too many other things on my plate to devote time to this anymore, and my dstwo is broken to boot, so what time I have had to work on it, I haven't been able to.

The one thing I'd like to see is the two projects merged. I created a github for it so that we could avoid creating more and more new versions, and move toward something more collaborative so multiple developers could contribute. If you'd be willing to merge back up to the original branch, I'll add you as an administrator for the original branch and let you take over. Just helps (from a user standpoint) if there's one single standard place to look for updates.

 

[Deleted member 319809]

Oh hi Shadaux. I didn't know you were around.

If the pull request thing works well, I'll join your project.

At least, though, I uploaded new versions on filetrip with the same project name so that people would see "You might want the latest version of CATSFC" instead of being in the dark and not knowing it's NEBSFC or something like that. In hindsight I did very well

 

[ShadauxCat]

Merged it in. I'm not a github guru but I think you should have push/pull permissions on the main branch now. Let me know if you don't.

 

[Deleted member 319809]

It works. Thanks!

Now I can look at your list of issues and close some that have been done. I should also add the audio-caused FPS desync issue in there...

 

[Deleted member 319809]

1.11 is now out with more optimisations, raising the FPS for many games.

It also has a shiny new icon and a shiny new boot screen, and the .psd is provided in the source on Github for both.

 

[Rydian]

Hm, was there always a bit of input lag (meaning sometimes a quick button press isn't registered), and was the intro right with Ridley in Super Metroid always so painfully laggy?

I never used the DSTwo's SNES emulator enough to see that stuff to begin with since I've got a PSP, so I'm curious if it's some sort of regression or if it was like this at these places to begin with.

 

[WiiUBricker]

Oh my god, who was the one who claimed that the input lags couldn't be resolved due to the dstwo's bottleneck and forced me to buy a PSP for SNES emulation? Screw you, seriously! (j/k)
As far as the name goes, I'm all for a new name. The continuation of using CATSFC as the name only makes sense if the git repository wasn't dead for more than a year. Give credit where credit is due and all credit at this point belongs to Nebuleon.

 

[Flame]

great little project you have here Nebuleon, thanks for the all the work you doing for the community.

 

[Rydian]

Oh my god, who was the one who claimed that the input lags couldn't be resolved due to the dstwo's bottleneck and forced me to buy a PSP for SNES emulation? Screw you, seriously! (j/k)
As far as the name goes, I'm all for a new name. The continuation of using CATSFC as the name only makes sense if the git repository wasn't dead for more than a year. Give credit where credit is due and all credit at this point belongs to Nebuleon.

Talkin' to me? I'm talking about there being a form of input lag I didn't even notice before, but that's maybe because I only fire up the emulators on the DSTwo to show they're imperfect.

And yeah, I'm for a new name too, but mentioning in the credits or something the first version was form the Supercard team, then BassAceGold, then ShadauxCat.

 

[PJM]

I like the idea of a name change too, but rather than change the name every time someone abandons the project and someone else picks it up, why not just pick a more permanent name and stick with that?

back in 1997 or so, I used ZSNES, and today, it's still called ZSNES.

 

[the_randomizer]

I like the idea of a name change too, but rather than change the name every time someone abandons the project and someone else picks it up, why not just pick a more permanent name and stick with that?

back in 1997 or so, I used ZSNES, and today, it's still called ZSNES.

And Zsnes is still "being worked on" despite having the last version released over six years ago, I doubt we'll ever see the alleged 2.0. Maybe by then it will have REAL SPC700 sound emulation.

 

[Deleted member 319809]

Erm, just fired up LoZ and it hangs with the "rain sound" playing, because I disabled something. Probably SNES Open Bus. I'll think I've squeezed a lot of performance in, so I'll re-enable that. And maybe compile with GCC's -O3 optimisations again, because NDSSFC 1.06's Makefile had them and I screwed with a lot of things to experiment. The next release, 1.12, will be much more polished, after trying some of the games I own.

On the subject of trying games, ...

Hm, was there always a bit of input lag (meaning sometimes a quick button press isn't registered), and was the intro right with Ridley in Super Metroid always so painfully laggy? [...]

... Super Metroid lags? I thought it was a pretty standard BG/sprite game, so it should have performance comparable to Super Mario World. What FPS do you get during the sequence? (I don't own that game)

As for the name... I agree with both sides, but more with the "ZSNES is still ZSNES" side. However, I still think it's quite important to distinguish the SuperCard Team effort from the GBAtemp community effort. That's why I would sooner go behind the BAGSFC name, or CATSFC, than NDSSFC. On the one hand, the community members who made NDSSFC what it is now should be thanked (but I did that recently in the copyright file), but on the other hand, it is a community effort, and I don't even know who took NDSSFC 1.06 and made the sound not crackle like crazy, BassAceGold or ShadauxCat. (That was really annoying, now that I compare NDSSFC 1.06 with CATSFC 1.11.) I do know that ShadauxCat made Yoshi's Island playable at 3-5 FPS with slower sound, instead of unplayable at 2 SPF with still-correct sound. Thanks!

GBASFC, though it's confusing because it implies two consoles? TempSFC? Keep CATSFC? Revert to NDSSFC?

 

[the_randomizer]

I doubt the DS will ever get an Snes emulator with accurate sound, it just isn't powerful enough...just sayin'.

 

[mechagouki]

Tried it with Secret of Mana last night, the menu screen font issue is still not fixed, rendering the game virtually unplayable. It's working in Snes9xTYL on the PSP, is it simply impossible to fix on DS?

 

[the_randomizer]

Tried it with Secret of Mana last night, the menu screen font issue is still not fixed, rendering the game virtually unplayable. It's working in Snes9xTYL on the PSP, is it simply impossible to fix on DS?

The game uses pseudo hi-res mode 7 (512 x 448 usually) for the menus with VWF or variable width font, which is tricky to emulate properly on lower-clocked CPUs because it's somewhat more taxing on the CPU. Most Snes games use 256 x 224 as the resolution.

 

[Deleted member 319809]

Tried it with Secret of Mana last night, the menu screen font issue is still not fixed, rendering the game virtually unplayable. It's working in Snes9xTYL on the PSP, is it simply impossible to fix on DS?

Can you report this on GitHub?

https://github.com/ShadauxCat/CATSFC/issues

I'm not sure if you can add images there, but if not inline, put them on ImageShack.

 

[2-bias]

Looks like i need to dust off my DS.
Oh, and i'm fine with a new name as long as DS2 Skin Installer will work. So i think you have to keep the folder name. NDSSFC, BAGSFC or CATSFC will work. To bad Stormwave doesn't seems to be around anymore and he never added the support for iPlayer Skins.

 

[mechagouki]

Posted issue on GitHub, here is the image I attached: