Does anyone know how to port a snes game to the dsi?

[Settar]

So ive been playing some mario rpg recently and i want to play it on the go.I dont have switch online and modding my switch is hard as hell for me,so i only have a dsi.most snes games when i try to run them on ds(i) snes emulators like snemulds either dont work or they're graphics are glitchy.
So does anyone know how to port a snes game to the DSi?

 

[Laguna78]

There is no way, emulation is the only way to go as DS or DSi have no built in way to play snes games. FYI the snes games on nintendo online store on DSi is not ported but emulated by nintendo snes emulator which is not accessible and is just designedx for specific games.

 

[RAHelllord]

All you have to do to port a SNES game to DSi is to fully reverse engineer the original SNES game, rewrite all code to the instruction set of the DSi, convert all assets to something the DSi can handle, then compile and sign it correctly.

If you're starting from scratch you'll have to learn coding for both the SNES and DSi, and I'd estimate you can do that with about 12-15 years of hard study, if you really want to and take to the material well, and then it'll be another 4-5 years to actually reverse engineer and port that single game in your free time.

 

[sarkwalvein]

All you have to do to port a SNES game to DSi is to fully reverse engineer the original SNES game, rewrite all code to the instruction set of the DSi, convert all assets to something the DSi can handle, then compile and sign it correctly.

If you're starting from scratch you'll have to learn coding for both the SNES and DSi, and I'd estimate you can do that with about 12-15 years of hard study, if you really want to and take to the material well, and then it'll be another 4-5 years to actually reverse engineer and port that single game in your free time.

But it will run silky smooth as a native application, and you may even add some features like improved menus and fonts for a small screen. Those would be 15 years well spent.

 

[Lostbhoy]

Just add .nds to the end of the rom...

 

[1vanchom]

If it were possible to port games to other platforms using only ROMs, emulation wouldn't be so important to us. Only those companies or studios that made their games can do that job because they own the source code, you know, the original material.

Most of the time, porting a game doesn't require a big team. Usually 3 or 4 people, but they have access to all the resources and code that we don't have. So "native" SNES games are impossible.

And that's why your request sounds a bit funny, because knowing that it's impossible is basic knowledge. Sorry.

 

[RAHelllord]

If it were possible to port games to other platforms using only ROMs, emulation wouldn't be so important to us. Only those companies or studios that made their games can do that job because they own the source code, you know, the original material.

Most of the time, porting a game doesn't require a big team. Usually 3 or 4 people, but they have access to all the resources and code that we don't have. So "native" SNES games are impossible.

And that's why your request sounds a bit funny, because knowing that it's impossible is basic knowledge. Sorry.

It's technically not impossible, projects like the Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time decompilation projects show that the lack of source code isn't always a deal breaker. The problem is mainly that it does take a highly dedicated and very knowledgeable team many years of hard work to even just get the first half done, and then will take more years to port it to other platforms.

If OP actually wants to put in all of the work required it's possible, its just going to take a decade or two of grueling work.

 

[Settar]

All you have to do to port a SNES game to DSi is to fully reverse engineer the original SNES game, rewrite all code to the instruction set of the DSi, convert all assets to something the DSi can handle, then compile and sign it correctly.

If you're starting from scratch you'll have to learn coding for both the SNES and DSi, and I'd estimate you can do that with about 12-15 years of hard study, if you really want to and take to the material well, and then it'll be another 4-5 years to actually reverse engineer and port that single game in your free time.

Yeah man sorry but i dont think im gonna spend 15 years of my life learning how to code for two consoles just to port snes games to the dsi.

Post automatically merged: Jul 5, 2024

If it were possible to port games to other platforms using only ROMs, emulation wouldn't be so important to us. Only those companies or studios that made their games can do that job because they own the source code, you know, the original material.

Most of the time, porting a game doesn't require a big team. Usually 3 or 4 people, but they have access to all the resources and code that we don't have. So "native" SNES games are impossible.

And that's why your request sounds a bit funny, because knowing that it's impossible is basic knowledge. Sorry.

Oh okay,thanks tho!

 

[4d1xlaan]

Just add .nds to the end of the rom...

.ds.gba, good times

 

[Micolash]

if mario rpg could be ported to the DSi, someone would have done it already. Without the Source Code it would be a difficult feat to pull off.

 

[emcintosh]

For SNES-on-DSi, your best option is to find a SuperCard DSTwo. SM RPG cartridges include an SA1 chip, which makes it a more resource-intensive game to emulate. The DSTwo manages better than other flashcarts as it has an extra CPU in it. But they're out of production so are rare and expensive, so you might be better off getting a (n)3DS or having another go at hacking your Switch.

 

[Egoistamamono]

Do Reverse Engine then, and port it to DS...

 

[plasturion]

lol why reverse engine? Just make a game from scratch that includes all its features.
Most ports are not even 1:1 the same anyway. You need some obeservation and creativity instead of reverse engine.

 

[mrparrot2]

It is possible and doable **If the tooling exists**. Let me ellaborate.

When Apple abbandoned the motorola 68k architecture in favor of PowerPC (dont quote me on this, I am writing this from memory), they wanted to keep compativility with older software writen for the 68k. Instead of emulation, which would be slow, they decided to provide a static decompiler that would **convert** 68k binaries into PowerPC. This conversion wasn't correct 100% of times, but It ws good enough most of the time.

So what is **static recompilation**? Instead of using an emulator to, you know, interpret each instruction of the target machine into the host (like those old SNES emulators), or use a JIT (Just in time recompiler) to lazily convert functions writen in the target platform to the host (like UltraHLE, for example), static recompilation attempts to convert the entire software to the host machine at once. The advantage of this technique is that the generated binary would be faster than the technique I cited before, but the disadvantage is that you would not be able to suport every game without a Lot of tweaks.

An emulator that did use such technique was Corn for the N64. That thing was so fast It was able to play Mario 64 and Star Fox 64 at Full speed in a 500mhz k6-2, which was quite an achivement. In contrast UltraHLE ran Mario 64 on a crawl in this machine. The problem here is that Mario 64 and Star Fox 64 was the only two games this emulator ever get to suport.

How dos they achive this? By recompiling the game to x86 beforehand rather than on the fly.

But what If the game did use some self code modification? Or generated MIPS code on the fly while It was running? Sorry, but you were out of luck.

But If such tooling existed for SNES games to recompile to ARM, then It would be the programmers job to find the missing pieces.

The question is If someone is whilling to spend years of their lives working in such tooling. At this point It may be better to Just rewrite It from Scratch.

 

[DSoryu]

Yeah man sorry but i dont think im gonna spend 15 years of my life learning how to code for two consoles just to port snes games to the dsi.

Well, then keep waiting until someone decides to reverse engineer a game that is already available as a Remake for the Nintendo Switch, good luck lmao.

 

[Cris1997XX]

God, some of these posts are just too fucking cringe...lazy teens who want something but they're too scared to put any actual effort into it