Hacking Emulators in 3D

[coryspacecowboy]

Thanks to Ninjhax I have been feeling pretty nostalgic, remembering many years ago playing snes games on the pc. I just now had a flashback, I remember hitting keys on mistake that would make different "layers" disappear and re appear. For example one key would make the background disappear, or the foreground, or sprites. I'm not the most technological savy person in town, but I would think since these layers are built into the games themselves, at least with super nes titles, that we could enable the games to be emulated in 3D. It seems so obvious after i thought of it that I assume someone must be working on this. So I'm just curious, is anyone working on this? And are the games universal for the most part in that layer one would normally be foreground, layer 2 is normally sprites, etc?

 

[Nemix77]

Ummm I think the main goal right now is to get emulators optimized and working at full speed on the 3DS first then afterwards (in which case I mean never going to happen) someone might look into implementing 3D effect into the emulators that do not require too much power on the 3DS example: NES, GB, GBC and Master System, it's more of a luxury enhancement than anything; an emulator working at full speed is better than one that has 3D effects but does not run at full speed.

 

[Abcdfv]

Yeah getting emulators that run well is the priority, and the games all handle layers and rendering differently so it would be a lot of effort

 

[gamesquest1]

Ummm I think the main goal right now is to get emulators optimized and working at full speed on the 3DS first then afterwards (in which case I mean never going to happen) someone might look into implementing 3D effect into the emulators that do not require too much power on the 3DS example: NES, GB, GBC and Master System, it's more of a luxury enhancement than anything; an emulator working at full speed is better than one that has 3D effects but does not run at full speed.

screw that i want 2 fps and 3d

 

[shinyquagsire23]

I threw the idea around for a bit (but for the Oculus Rift) and managed to get VBA running in a 3D environment, but it never got much farther than that (it was still a flat image in a 3D space). In theory, you could do two render loops in which each layer is slightly shifted to put it at a different depth, and then put these two renders to each eye. The real question is whether it would actually be comfortable, and how well it would actually work. For a game like Pokemon, it would actually be possible to have BG1-3 render at the same height and have just textboxes (and maybe sprites) pop out. And if you added a sort of hooking mechanism to figure out where in the game you are through RAM you might be able to adjust the layer heights as well for better-turned viewing.

So I'd say it *might* be possible, however one of the main issues as of now is software vs hardware rendering and whether or not the 3DS can actually afford to do two renders in the first place. Stable performance is probably the first concern, and once we have that we might be able to mess with rendering.

 

[piratesephiroth]

2D games in 3D are boring, I have no idea why people insist on this subject.
Just get one of the SEGA 3D classics and tell me how impressed you are after you play it for 5 minutes.

Maybe if someone finds a magic way to run Mario Kart, F-Zero or even Star Fox in 3D it will result in something useful (though that looks VERY UNLIKELY)

 

[yuyuyup]

I threw the idea around for a bit (but for the Oculus Rift) and managed to get VBA running in a 3D environment, but it never got much farther than that (it was still a flat image in a 3D space). In theory, you could do two render loops in which each layer is slightly shifted to put it at a different depth, and then put these two renders to each eye. The real question is whether it would actually be comfortable, and how well it would actually work. For a game like Pokemon, it would actually be possible to have BG1-3 render at the same height and have just textboxes (and maybe sprites) pop out. And if you added a sort of hooking mechanism to figure out where in the game you are through RAM you might be able to adjust the layer heights as well for better-turned viewing.

So I'd say it *might* be possible, however one of the main issues as of now is software vs hardware rendering and whether or not the 3DS can actually afford to do two renders in the first place. Stable performance is probably the first concern, and once we have that we might be able to mess with rendering.

That would be so bad (bad as in good,) how much work is that to make a 3d capable rom? Do you think that is a huge undertaking? I would love to see more 3d roms (I have a passive 3d screen and a DK2)

 

[ore9ore]

Two words: Virtual Boy
I hope some dev make efforts to develop a new Emulator (Virtual Boy) and not only ports of DSmode emulators.(that it's also a great thing)

 

[shinyquagsire23]

That would be so bad (bad as in good,) how much work is that to make a 3d capable rom? Do you think that is a huge undertaking? I would love to see more 3d roms (I have a passive 3d screen and a DK2)

The only game I really have a good knowledge of is Pokemon Fire Red, so for that I could definitely make the proper hooks for it. I might end up doing it once Christmas Break hits and I'm bored to death, but for now it's just a theoretical concept. Some games will probably work better than others though, isometric games would probably look horrible in 3D since it's most often done in tiled modes which can't be turned into actual 3D easily. Mode7-like would be difficult as well, although you could maybe fake it by forcing the other BG which is usually used as a skybox of sorts much deeper than usual.

The biggest issue though is how different the layer's use can be between screens. In Pokemon alone the screens change a lot in how they are used. For example, the bag and menu screens could render with a lot more different levels of depth due to it using a layer for text, a layer for a foreground, and a layer for background in most cases, all of which could be separated safely. The overworld, however, couldn't be separated easily (unless you did some weird per-tile depth hax which would be painful to implement) because some tiles appear over the player but might look strange if it were pulled to another level of 3D with it's neighboring tiles being at a lower level.

With some systems like NES or GameBoy it might be a bit more feasable to just split both BG's at their own level for all games, since it's most commonly foreground+background rather than the mixed uses it has on GBA.

 

[N00b Smasher]

2D games in 3D are boring, I have no idea why people insist on this subject.
Just get one of the SEGA 3D classics and tell me how impressed you are after you play it for 5 minutes.

I already did, and Sonic 1 looks pretty damn cool in 3D. I didn't expect such an old game to look so vibrant, by comparison it looks pretty plain without 3D. In fact, I wish Sega gave the same treatment to the rest of the classic Sonics, as well as other old games.