Homebrew SNES9x for Old 3DS

[georgejane8]

so Nintendo was lying when they said O3DS can't handle SNES games lol

 

[Shin Akuma]

I dont know but i cant stand it if pics aren't glowy etc.So i messed around a bit with the original pic cleaning some things and adding some glow shadows on the colorful buttons.
Also the original was indexed and converted back to RGB mode which made the a bit bigger(30kb more)
This is a small edit i did cause i love slick things on awesome stuff bubble gave us
anyone likes it?then pick it up ;p

 

[DiscostewSM]

so Nintendo was lying when they said O3DS can't handle SNES games lol

No, they are not.

 

[Arcanine9]

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs has a screen tearing issue, where lines show up at the top of the screen. I uploaded some screenshots showing it. Second pic shows it the best.

 

[bubble2k16]

@Shin Akuma - And in the end, turns out it was my fault! The updated DSP core introduced some bugs that is of no fault of the original game developers! I normally just place my ROM in separate folders, A-F, G-M, N-Z. Easier to navigate and find ROMs. The fix is already available in page 41 of this thread in v0.62 beta. Now you can play Clock Tower with better sound / music.

@georgejane8 - From big N's standpoint, it is impossible to make an pixel-accurate SNES emulator on O3DS. This port of SNES9x gives up a lot of things. In the end, it's an emulator that is only 'playable' if you are forgive the inaccuracies.

@Arcanine9 - Yes I know a few games do suffer from this 'split-screen' tearing. It's probably some timing issue, but I doubt I'll fix this unless its massively affecting playable / looks.

 

[Jacko Wacko]

v0.62 beta

For the first time I'm releasing a beta because I don't have the time to test the whole set of games in my library, and also the time to update all my posts and Github releases.

So here's a quickie for all the fixes I've managed to put into v0.62 beta:

- Improved zoomed-in Mode 7 appearance. Games like Seiken Densetsu, ActRaiser 1/2 look better when viewing the Mode 7 textures near to the ground. Thanks for Discostew for the motivation!

- Improved sound handling to ensure that it is not panned slightly to the left. It turns out the solution was simply to ensure both channels start at the same time instead of starting the left channel first, then the right. BlargSNES does exactly just that, and I simply incorporated the same idea. Let me know if the music is still panned to the left.

- Added option to change in-frame palette handling. There are three options to choose from:
> Enabled. (Slow, accurate, but never as accurate as software)
> Disabled Style 1 (faster, less accurate)
> Disabled Style 2 (faster, less accurate) works a little differently from Style 1
Most games are by default Enabled. Only Bahamut Lagoon and Front Mission Gun Hazard are by default Disabled Style 1.
Setting enabled fixes the colours in Judge Dredd, Wild Guns and Batman Forever.

- Fixed Clock Tower to run again. It was my fault that it froze, not the game's developers!

- Fixed Star Fox flickering problem when there are frameskips.

- Fixed outside-of-track texture problem with Super Mario Kart’s Bowser Castle stages.


I'll continue testing more games this over the next few days before I push the official release out.

Sound is perfect. However, this version ruined the backgrounds on some of the DKC2 levels bubble2k16

 

[georgejane8]

No, they are not.

Its good enough for me! Screw the N3DS!

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

@Shin Akuma - And in the end, turns out it was my fault! The updated DSP core introduced some bugs that is of no fault of the original game developers! I normally just place my ROM in separate folders, A-F, G-M, N-Z. Easier to navigate and find ROMs. The fix is already available in page 41 of this thread in v0.62 beta. Now you can play Clock Tower with better sound / music.

@georgejane8 - From big N's standpoint, it is impossible to make an pixel-accurate SNES emulator on O3DS. This port of SNES9x gives up a lot of things. In the end, it's an emulator that is only 'playable' if you are forgive the inaccuracies.

@Arcanine9 - Yes I know a few games do suffer from this 'split-screen' tearing. It's probably some timing issue, but I doubt I'll fix this unless its massively affecting playable / looks.

Ah I see. Great job on this! I can't tell the difference. The games I want to play work great!

 

[sj33]

Its good enough for me! Screw the N3DS!

Why? Because you don't have one? I'm not planning to get a PS4 Neo, but I'm not going to start getting all protective over my standard PS4.

This emulator is great, but a commercial emulator by Nintendo themselves would have to adhere to much higher standards of emulation accuracy, This runs so well on the old 3DS due to clever optimisation, taking shortcuts and sacrificing accuracy for speed - precisely because the hardware necessitates this.

 

[georgejane8]

Why? Because you don't have one? I'm not planning to get a PS4 Neo, but I'm not going to start getting all protective over my standard PS4.

This emulator is great, but a commercial emulator by Nintendo themselves would have to adhere to much higher standards of emulation accuracy, This runs so well on the old 3DS due to clever optimisation, taking shortcuts and sacrificing accuracy for speed - precisely because the hardware necessitates this.

Because I don't want to buy one?

 

[sj33]

Because I don't want to buy one?

No-one saying you have to?

Anyway, gave the latest build a go on my old 3DS. It's quite incredible how well this runs given it's a port of Snes9x rather than being 'from scratch'. The frameskipping is handled so elegantly that it's hardly noticable.

 

[TheGag96]

I tried out the Super Mario World Hack "Yoshi's Strange Quest" and found some bugs/quirks. The hack uses a textbox/dialog system that (IIRC) uses Layer 3, which on this emulator causes the screen to become incredibly garbled whenever it's active (though no crash occurs, and if you close the boxes then everything works fine). Also, the hack seems to trigger an SRAM write every second or so and pauses emulation for a bit every time it happens. It could be that my SD card is slow, but it might be worth it to only save SRAM to a file every so often, or do it on a separate thread.

Amazing work on this emulator so far though!

 

[ArtemisM]

so Nintendo was lying when they said O3DS can't handle SNES games lol

No, they told the truth. This emulator forsakes accuracy for speed. SNES VC is accurate.

 

[ArtemisM]

I tried out the Super Mario World Hack "Yoshi's Strange Quest" and found some bugs/quirks. The hack uses a textbox/dialog system that (IIRC) uses Layer 3, which on this emulator causes the screen to become incredibly garbled whenever it's active (though no crash occurs, and if you close the boxes then everything works fine). Also, the hack seems to trigger an SRAM write every second or so and pauses emulation for a bit every time it happens. It could be that my SD card is slow, but it might be worth it to only save SRAM to a file every so often, or do it on a separate thread.

Amazing work on this emulator so far though!

The game is likely using the SRAM as extended memory. As for the pauses during SRAM writing, that's normal.

 

[bubble2k16]

@dekece, @Jacko Wacko - For the corrupted tiles problem in DKC1/2, are you able to help to change the color palette settings to Disabled Style 1 or Disabled Style 2 to see if it corrects the problem?

 

[Deleted User]

In the sense that the disabled style # should prevent corruption? I can give it a try over the weekend, in the sense that you need ot wait a bit for corruption to start appear it seems (like 1-15 mins, so not too bad).

 

[bubble2k16]

@dekece - Yes it seems rather random. Even on Disabled Style 1/2 it sometimes appear, but it seems much less. Before this update, DKC1/2/3 was internally running on Disabled Style 2. After the update, the 3 games and almost every other game runs on Enabled.

 

[Jacko Wacko]

@dekece - Yes it seems rather random. Even on Disabled Style 1/2 it sometimes appear, but it seems much less. Before this update, DKC1/2/3 was internally running on Disabled Style 2. After the update, the 3 games and almost every other game runs on Enabled.

I've done the testings bubble2k16 on DKC 1, 2 and 3. Respectively switched from the color palette settings but still random corrupted tile issues exists. Anyway, thank you for your continued hard work on making this emulator very much playable. Being able to play all the DKC titles alone is worth not giving up on an old system such as the O3DS.

 

[Louis Miles]

I tried out the Super Mario World Hack "Yoshi's Strange Quest" and found some bugs/quirks. The hack uses a textbox/dialog system that (IIRC) uses Layer 3, which on this emulator causes the screen to become incredibly garbled whenever it's active (though no crash occurs, and if you close the boxes then everything works fine). Also, the hack seems to trigger an SRAM write every second or so and pauses emulation for a bit every time it happens. It could be that my SD card is slow, but it might be worth it to only save SRAM to a file every so often, or do it on a separate thread.

Do you mean like this?

And in Super Mario World, that uses this message-patch: http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=section&a=details&id=6863 (it is used by many smw hacks), the layer 3 corrupt somehow when a message shows up, or tries to show up:

First it looks like this

And then the layer 3 is corrupted everytime:

The game itself works perfectly fine, it seems to be just an error with displaying or something.

 

[bubble2k16]

@Jacko Wacko - Thanks for the testing and the results. I've just been able to reliably reproduce the corrupted tiles consistently without waiting for 15 minutes. I suppose I should be able to find the source of the problem soon.

 

[9thSage]

This emulator is great, but a commercial emulator by Nintendo themselves would have to adhere to much higher standards of emulation accuracy, This runs so well on the old 3DS due to clever optimisation, taking shortcuts and sacrificing accuracy for speed - precisely because the hardware necessitates this.

Thanks for posting this, it's refreshing to have someone saying this instead of jumping to the 'they LIED!!!11' conclusion. Same for everyone else who's saying it too.

I tried to explain this same thing to a guy a while back (his argument being that the impressive but terribly inaccurate SnesDS exists, so they must be lying) and he just kind of rolled his eyes at me. Ah well!

*edit*
Nevermind about the Starfox thing, I forgot I was forcing the emulator to run at New3DS speeds...can't very well make a bug report on something I don't have the patience to test in 'old' 3DS mode since forcing the CPU to clock up isn't exactly the intended operation of the emulator.