Homebrew mega drive and snes updates

[tlangford]

Why is there not anyone updating megadrive and snes emulators?

Is there demand for them?

timbo

 

[RupeeClock]

There's only two worthwhile Megadrive/SNES emulators on the DS, jEnesisDS and SNEmulDS. The former hasn't been updated since 2008, the latter since 2007. :\

Games will be playable, but there are playback issues.

 

[Dookieman]

Of course there is demand for them. But just because there is demand doesn't mean that it will get done.

 

[Vague Rant]

Why is there not anyone updating megadrive and snes emulators?

The people who know how haven't and the people who don't know how can't.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Why is there not anyone updating megadrive and snes emulators?

The people who know how haven't and the people who don't know how can't.

Precisely. Sure there's probably quite a bit of demand, but nobody's stepping up to the challenge so we'll have to make do with what we've got, which is still an incredible achievement for the relatively underpowered DS.

 

[RedHero]

Of course there is demand for them. But just because there is demand doesn't mean that it will get done.

Usually if there's enough demand someone will get it done.

I'd love to to see great SNES and Genesis emulators that can run most of the good games with little to no trouble. The DS may not be a powerhouse, but it most certainly should be able to emulate most Genesis and SNES games almost perfectly if the emulator is good enough.

 

[DanTheManMS]

You have tried the latest jEnesisDS release, right? It runs most games very very well.

 

[RedHero]

You have tried the latest jEnesisDS release, right? It runs most games very very well.

Latest version I tried was 0.7.4, and I couldn't find a newer version just now. Most games do run very well, but the main problem I have with it, is that I couldn't find any way to adjust the screen properly. It doesn't show everything. The sides are just cut off, like this:

.. ____
| |...... | |
| |___ | |

The block in the middle represents the upper DS screen, and the empty space at the sides of the screen represent the part that seems to be cut off.

 

[Vague Rant]

Urgh, for fuck's sake. That's just how it is; jEnesisDS uses hardware emulation, so there's just no way to scale horizontally. If you prefer slow and scaled, you can try the jEnesis version with software emulation, but it's just not worth it. If you want Genesis emulation on the DS, jDS is as good as it gets. Also, I hope you're aware you can press L and R to scroll the screen, and there's also an option to have scrolling follow the d-pad.

 

[dobz]

Urgh, for fuck's sake. That's just how it is; jEnesisDS uses hardware emulation, so there's just no way to scale horizontally. If you prefer slow and scaled, you can try the jEnesis version with software emulation, but it's just not worth it. If you want Genesis emulation on the DS, jDS is as good as it gets. Also, I hope you're aware you can press L and R to scroll the screen, and there's also an option to have scrolling follow the d-pad.

how do make it follow the d pad, i didn't realise you could do that?

although pressing L and R were obvious

Edit: You can't fucking make it follow the d-pad you got my hopes up

all you can do is manually position the screen which is even more useless than L & R

 

[RedHero]

Urgh, for fuck's sake. That's just how it is; jEnesisDS uses hardware emulation, so there's just no way to scale horizontally. If you prefer slow and scaled, you can try the jEnesis version with software emulation, but it's just not worth it. If you want Genesis emulation on the DS, jDS is as good as it gets. Also, I hope you're aware you can press L and R to scroll the screen, and there's also an option to have scrolling follow the d-pad.

Ah, I appreciate that there's some people who at least try to make something. But seriously, stop acting as if the emulator is perfect. Playing with a cut-off screen may be acceptable to you, but it's not for me.

 

[Vague Rant]

I said nothing about it being perfect. I said it's as good as it gets on the DS. I'm not forcing you to find it acceptable, I'm telling you that if you don't like it, you can go buy something else, because chances are nothing better is coming on the DS. Nobody actually cares what you think or whether you like the emulator.

 

[Islay]

ROFL what is there to update about they may still have bugs and be beta, but thats only because there creators over estimated what could be done and reached as far as they can go with the DSlite so at 0.76 or what ever there at, there at the best they can do.

 

[Vague Rant]

That's just nonsense. Do you truly believe that or are you just making things up to sound knowledgeable?

Urgh, for fuck's sake. That's just how it is; jEnesisDS uses hardware emulation, so there's just no way to scale horizontally. If you prefer slow and scaled, you can try the jEnesis version with software emulation, but it's just not worth it. If you want Genesis emulation on the DS, jDS is as good as it gets. Also, I hope you're aware you can press L and R to scroll the screen, and there's also an option to have scrolling follow the d-pad.

how do make it follow the d pad, i didn't realise you could do that?

although pressing L and R were obvious

Edit: You can't fucking make it follow the d-pad you got my hopes up

all you can do is manually position the screen which is even more useless than L & R

You go into the settings and hit "Follow DPad", *snip

 

[RupeeClock]

You go into the settings and hit "Follow DPad", *snip.

Hmm, didn't know that setting was there myself.
Makes playing Sonic much better, thanks.

 

[dobz]

That's just nonsense. Do you truly believe that or are you just making things up to sound knowledgeable?

Urgh, for fuck's sake. That's just how it is; jEnesisDS uses hardware emulation, so there's just no way to scale horizontally. If you prefer slow and scaled, you can try the jEnesis version with software emulation, but it's just not worth it. If you want Genesis emulation on the DS, jDS is as good as it gets. Also, I hope you're aware you can press L and R to scroll the screen, and there's also an option to have scrolling follow the d-pad.

how do make it follow the d pad, i didn't realise you could do that?

although pressing L and R were obvious

Edit: You can't fucking make it follow the d-pad you got my hopes up

all you can do is manually position the screen which is even more useless than L & R

You go into the settings and hit "Follow DPad", *snip.

Point taken, I thougth those icons on the top were meaningless.

Cheers angry dude

 

[DanTheManMS]

I love how the "y cant i make the screen fit?" question is asked in nearly every jEnesisDS thread I see. Pretty sure it's in the ReadMe file somewhere.

The software-based renderer version that Vague Rant was talking about is v0.4a I believe. Go download that and give it a shot to get an idea of what must be sacrificed in order to get horizontal scaling in the emulator, namely sound and speed. It does however have two different blending modes that make the scaled graphics look better for various games.

The reason for the difference is simple (well, sorta). Almost all versions of jEnesisDS use hardware rendering, that is, they basically translate between the dedicated 2D hardware systems of the Genesis and the DS. This means that the DS spends very very little CPU time actually drawing to the screen, because the DS has already taken care of handling the sprites and background layers and transparencies and priorities using its own 2D hardware. The DS doesn't really know what the screen looks like at any given time, since it's almost blindly executed the draw commands it's been given. Now the DS's 2D hardware draws to the screen line-by-line, so you can scale vertically simply by skipping a line here and there. Doing the same horizontally is not possible.

The DS also contains a single "framebuffer" mode in which the screen is mapped to a chunk of memory, and writing to that memory will change the colors of the various pixels on the screen. By using this, you can calculate in memory what the image is supposed to look like, then paint it to the screen pixel-by-pixel by manually modifying every byte in that chunk of memory. Since you know what the screen is supposed to look like before you draw it to the screen, you can modify it with things like scaling and filters and effects before drawing. But the process of updating the screen this way is very CPU intensive, affecting the overall emulation speed. Frameskip helps here because it lets the DS spend more time working on game logic and less time displaying the results to the screen.

Other comparisons: NES DS uses hardware rendering, NesterDS+ is more accurate graphically but runs much slower. Goomba Color for the GBA uses hardware rendering and thus can run at full speed on the GBA's 16 MHz processor, while it took several versions for Lameboy's software-based renderer to run the games at fullspeed on the DS's 66 MHz processor (also try the Goomba Color DS test build - if you turn off the frame limiter you get INSANE speeds). All SNES emulators for the GBA and DS use hardware rendering, which is why you can get full speed but also have such severe graphical glitches.

In short, hardware emulation gives you speed, software emulation gives you accuracy. With jEnesisDS, Lordus chose to focus on the former.