Homebrew Suggestion A SNES Classic emulator (Canoe) port?

[0bvious]

There has been a LOT of work going on in the SNES Classic/Mini community to get all SNES roms running on the inbuilt emulator, known as Canoe. The Hakchi builds that sync with the SNES Classic are still being updated.

I would love to see the entire emulator ported over to Switch homebrew. There has been some work to rip it from the console. I can't post here for copyright reasons, but there is a repo on GitHub. I also saw some time back someone had managed to get it running on Raspberry Pi.

Reasons for porting SNES Classic (Canoe) rather than just using Retroarch:

1. The lovely Nintendo interface
2. Canoe has proven to have less lag than SNES9X
3. All the work done to patch SNES games to work on Canoe would find a new home, plus a heap of art and tweaks done by the community
4. Ability to copy over games and saves from an already hacked SNES Mini

What are the chances of this, realistically?

 

[TotalInsanity4]

I'd imagine it's somewhere between "semi-realistic" and "impossible", given that it's a closed emulator on semi-custom hardware

 

[the_randomizer]

But Canoe also only has 80% compatibility vs Snes9x 99%, and as far as lag goes, RetroArch has implemented features that eliminate input lag. But I don't see Canoe being able to be ported TBH.

 

[notimp]

Three people liked --

- porting a closed source proprietary piece of software (how?)
- releasing it (would you want to get sued now - or tomorrow at 20 past noon?)
- not being able to differentiate between a gui interface and an eumulator
- not knowing - that you can already port over saves (I for sure did)

and trying to make this into the SNES mini homebrew community, which was the most horrible one that existed yet. (Nothing but "I have this unique request" pandering - late in life for profit tutorial projects, a gaggle of programmers that forked the main tool most people already had used - for literally no reason (now that sfroms finally are created without being malformed - the entire format can die right away), retroarch core ports that tauted "individual game improvements" every week (what?), and people trying to get USB controllers going with PSX games - because everything plugged into the normal controller ports, didnt support analog signal mapping of controlsticks), people that recommended to each other "which usb stick works" (what?), devs that released retroarch core ports with bundled bios files on github, devs that tried to launch their youtube channels with "boot screen" projects - for a console that usually boots in 6-7 seconds, while your TV is still switching the HDMI port...

Anything released after the second to last hakchi2 release about 2 weeks after the innitial release of the system - was outright horrible. Complexity for no reason, that went straight into "unmanagable mess".

(How do I change button mappings to play Spyro with a SNES pad, on a hacked console, with a lashed kernel, with one of the "supported" USB hubs, onto which I had attached a USB drive, that could only be filled by deleting it entirely every time first, via two competing forks of the main tool (hakchi2), and then launched on a version of a retroarch port, that might have been functioning - depending on weather I had a usb drive attached or not, also - coming of one of three different branches, which had the bios included first, but not later - and where most people had to mess arround with command line parameters to start the correct emulator, that then would launch - if your usb harddisk was found, and the file system on it didnt cause frequent read errors and crashes -- but of course, no analog stick inputs were transmittable.

The snesmini mod scene was a 20 stories high dumpster fire.

If you "started" with it - chances are, that you learned nothing, and only found it fun - because until the very end - the "maintainers" of that scene made sure - that every "individual question" had to be answered. Which for some reason - always ended up in "how do I run simpsons game on mame" four times a week.

Want to repeat that?

Ehm, nope.

 

[the_randomizer]

Lol dude, quit pissin in your own cereal and get over it. This is their thing, not yours, what they do is NOYFB. The OP asked an innocuous question, who are you to complain?

 

[notimp]

Sure - I'll just self censor my opinion, because I dont have enough "rank" to voice it. Where on earth are you from? California?

Should have first participated in one of those Jerry Springer shows, to become famous for trying to start a fight (google meet me outside girl), then have gotten 20 mio twitter followers, 10 advertising deals, half of which I didn't disclose, and an invitation to the met awards, for me to voice the inherent tought, that - every developer in that scene, who added something after madmonkey and ClusterM, could have had their work die in a fire - and the scenes output would have been less harmful to the emulation scene - than it turned out to be today.

Here is why - at any time - in last year, you could have given any proponent in the scene the advice to pay 50 usd for rasp pi3 and a "case", and they would have been better off, than following that scene. (Better functionality, upgrade path, ease of use
- also BT, LAN, WLAN, sdcard support out of the box, drivers for most filesystems, better interface to navigate a high number of roms in, didnt have to be erased every tim you added a rom, you didnt had to use usb controllers for analog support, ...) - and thats coming from someone that thinks, that retropie is too convoluted for its own good (I can navigate it, but...)

Canoe was nice - but shouldnt be expected to be ported, because there is no source.

edit: This was how their general idea of a great setup looked like in the end:

src: h**ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5dSMbkKpjs

And it was still less capable (- and an outright nightmare to maintain), than a pi3 running retropie. Because you had incompatibilities between:

- the main software tool (4-6 forks over its lifetime, and an innitiative to shift people over to a certain fork midway trhough the scenes lifetime)
- the method you used to mount the USB drive
- the compiled versions of retroarch (3 different projects, some of which went with different versions for USB drive and not...)
- the file system
- usb breakout dongles
...

People also released on reddit as their primary public release channel - and again, apparently with an update frequency of "every week 2 new mame games are now "better supported"'

Also I didn't mention the ram disk project, the doubleboot project (which was not supported by the "main tools switchover" that was propagated for the first 4 months or so..), plugin hell, cpu loops - that caused lag in games (was patched out fairly quickly) -

and on a positive note - "better per game settings, for canoe, by changing a 4 bit hex number - that where attributed over time", from hacks that mad it first possible to run certain games on canoe first (which now are somewhere on reddit with hopefully not so dead file links).

Oh, one note on the 4 digit per name number. It was different per game, and sometimes, one number for better sound, but a different number for better transparency effects, and no - you can't go with two at the same time. Still, thank you for finding out through testing.

Try to keep that in mind, when you are forced to answer "simpsons doesnt work - I have seen youtube video" four times a week.

Yes, why not bring that over to the switch scene?

 

[guitarheroknight]

Three people liked --

- porting a closed source proprietary piece of software (how?)
- releasing it (would you want to get sued now - or tomorrow at 20 past noon?)
- not being able to differentiate between a gui interface and an eumulator
- not knowing - that you can already port over saves (I for sure did)

and trying to make this into the SNES mini homebrew community, which was the most horrible one that existed yet. (Nothing but "I have this unique request" pandering - late in life for profit tutorial projects, a gaggle of programmers that forked the main tool most people already had used - for literally no reason (now that sfroms finally are created without being malformed - the entire format can die right away), retroarch core ports that tauted "individual game improvements" every week (what?), and people trying to get USB controllers going with PSX games - because everything plugged into the normal controller ports, didnt support analog signal mapping of controlsticks), people that recommended to each other "which usb stick works" (what?), devs that released retroarch core ports with bundled bios files on github, devs that tried to launch their youtube channels with "boot screen" projects - for a console that usually boots in 6-7 seconds, while your TV is still switching the HDMI port...

Anything released after the second to last hakchi2 release about 2 weeks after the innitial release of the system - was outright horrible. Complexity for no reason, that went straight into "unmanagable mess".

(How do I change button mappings to play Spyro with a SNES pad, on a hacked console, with a lashed kernel, with one of the "supported" USB hubs, onto which I had attached a USB drive, that could only be filled by deleting it entirely every time first, via two competing forks of the main tool (hakchi2), and then launched on a version of a retroarch port, that might have been functioning - depending on weather I had a usb drive attached or not, also - coming of one of three different branches, which had the bios included first, but not later - and where most people had to mess arround with command line parameters to start the correct emulator, that then would launch - if your usb harddisk was found, and the file system on it didnt cause frequent read errors and crashes -- but of course, no analog stick inputs were transmittable.

The snesmini mod scene was a 20 stories high dumpster fire.

If you "started" with it - chances are, that you learned nothing, and only found it fun - because until the very end - the "maintainers" of that scene made sure - that every "individual question" had to be answered. Which for some reason - always ended up in "how do I run simpsons game on mame" four times a week.

Want to repeat that?

Ehm, nope.

TL;DR

 

[notimp]

Again
Another wall of garbage text

Does such a thing exist?

Also, this part:

Three people liked --

- porting a closed source proprietary piece of software (how?)
- releasing it (would you want to get sued now - or tomorrow at 20 past noon?)
- not being able to differentiate between a gui interface and an emulator
- not knowing - that you can already port over saves (I for sure did)

is actually factual - and the answer to the questions in here.

The rest is opinion.

Listing some facts of that "scene".

But sure - if you want to go with "garbage" - you can. I think that automatically trumps all arguments. Especially, when there were so many of them..

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

TL;DR

To mirror to the general behavior in this topic: Not interested. Life goes on.

 

[0bvious]

Wow. Sore spot.

I liked watching the SNES Classic scene develop. I learned a lot about SNES games over there, and was super happy to get a bunch of classic games running on my Nintendo hardware pretty close to the way Nintendo intended.

Imma wait and see.

 

[Kafluke]

Why bring drama here? Most people dont give 2 shits about some other scene and what might have happened there.

 

[Deleted-351540]

Sure - I'll just self censor my opinion, because I dont have enough "rank" to voice it. Where on earth are you from? California?

src: h**ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5dSMbkKpjs

Looks about right. You can't even censor website links properly. What on Earth makes anyone think you can censor your opinion?

Not that I think you should censor your opinion. It's your opinion and you're entitled to it. Even if it isn't the greatest opinion.

FWIW: You'll get more responses by trimming out the fat on your comments. I promise that almost nobody read any of your wall of texts dude.

 

[CeeDee]

Bringing Canoe over wouldn't magically port over the frontend, luckily, this guy's going places.
Anyhow, I'd like it, at least, better than RetroArch, which with my use has never particularly been the best.

Never had any issues with my SNES Classic, but I don't have some clusterfuck with USB or anything like most nowadays seem to. The optimal setup is just a regular mini SNES, some custom games, and maybe an 8bitdo controller and/or some sort of an internal storage increase.

 

[Tonydaexpert]

I will settle for the GUI thing someone was working on

 

[mightymuffy]

Aside from the reasons stated by (the more mild mannered) peeps already;

1. The lovely Nintendo interface
2. Canoe has proven to have less lag than SNES9X
3. All the work done to patch SNES games to work on Canoe would find a new home, plus a heap of art and tweaks done by the community
4. Ability to copy over games and saves from an already hacked SNES Mini

I'd say your list really focuses on numbers 1 and 4 (like randomizer says Retroarch has sorted out lag issues really well recently):
1. The interface IS nice, but can be easily ported without the emulator itself (we've already seen a decent wip of it shown on the Switch)
4. Like 1 I can see this becoming a thing without the need of the emulator port.

So yeah, nice idea, but not really worth anyone's time.

EDIT:

Never had any issues with my SNES Classic, but I don't have some clusterfuck with USB or anything like most nowadays seem to. The optimal setup is just a regular mini SNES, some custom games, and maybe an 8bitdo controller and/or some sort of an internal storage increase.

Exactly! A simple mini OTG adapter nestled in the back, with a thumb drive is all that's needed - I can hardly see mine it's that small: feck knows what that guy is going on about posting a picture like that (or what it has to do with a question about porting an emulator in the first place...)

 

[notimp]

Retroarch has not solved the lag issue - they have overengineered a fix.

Imho.

Here is how my logic goes on this one. The vba-next (native) port from catlover007 for the switch still has noticibly less input lag than, the retroach port of vba-next.

What retroarch did in the release where they communicated, that they "solved the issue, better than original" - was to double/triple/quadruple/.... the CPU load ("run the game several times"), for a lookahead feature, that sometimes really saves frames of input lag ("better than the original"), and sometimes simply ruins games. They didnt change (?) the underlying process structure to "just" reduce input lag, because according to them this was not possible. Afaik.

They did it, because they were hit by a barrage of people telling them - that their product was far worse in terms of lag, than Nintendos own canoe emulator. On Snes games.

Their "lag fix" probably will not be applicably for a switch retroarch port - ever (doubling cpu load isnt something we are looking forward to), and other devs managed to port libreto cores, with less input lag than retroarch on the switch already.
--

Also - I took this topic as an impulse to visit the snesminimods scene again - where now (finally.. )

- mods are starting to flip:
https://old.reddit.com/r/miniSNESmo..._been_trying_to_figure_out_where_to_find_the/

- and of course you need to double zip your zip files, to circumvent an autodetect feature, thats meant to deal with the command line parameters in the new version of the main tool, and was introduced two months ago, and...
https://old.reddit.com/r/miniSNESmods/comments/8mhseu/adding_zipped_mame_roms_confusion/

Ahoi, and smooth sailing..

 

[0bvious]

I do understand that the GUI is a separate thing.

Anyway. Canoe for the win.

 

[yadspi]

Bringing Canoe over wouldn't magically port over the frontend, luckily, this guy's going places.
Anyhow, I'd like it, at least, better than RetroArch, which with my use has never particularly been the best.

Never had any issues with my SNES Classic, but I don't have some clusterfuck with USB or anything like most nowadays seem to. The optimal setup is just a regular mini SNES, some custom games, and maybe an 8bitdo controller and/or some sort of an internal storage increase.

I just have it dual booting the NES Classic Kernel and managed to trade 1 of the controllers for a NES one.

 

[davidgilmour]

Anything released after the second to last hakchi2 release about 2 weeks after the innitial release of the system - was outright horrible. Complexity for no reason, that went straight into "unmanagable mess".

The snesmini mod scene was a 20 stories high dumpster fire.

I have not yet modded my mini snes. What troubles will I into? What do you advice me to do when starting to mod it to avoid frustration?

 

[Girtana1]

I will settle for the GUI thing someone was working on

I saw that on YT too, looked really sick and I hope it goes somewhere

 

[FanNintendo]

where is Snes classic emulator (canoe) for Switch now it been 6 month already should b released now