Homebrew Retroarch is Now King

[Plasmaster09]

It's based on a very old version of SNES9X (1.43, released 15 years ago) and there are some minor sound and graphical glitches, like the afore-mentioned mosaic effect. IIRC an effect during the battles in Mario RPG is missing. Nothing groundbreaking, but I wouldn't describe SNES9X emulation as "perfect". It is serviceable and - considering the limitations it has on OG 3DS - an admirable effort. That said, it is "good enough" for most people and miles better than whatever the PSP had, SNES on PSP was a nightmare for me.

To be fair even Nintendo emulation has its caveat, with the audio volume generally lower (and of course most special chip games outright not working), but I find it more reliable than SNES9X and Retroarch.

Yeah no matter what, Hi-Res games will look bad on 3DS. The screen simply doesn't have enough pixels.

Wait, you're telling me Bubble's Snes9x core is OLDER than the 2010 core in Retroarch? How does the 2010 one manage to perform leagues WORSE on an o3ds?!

 

[Rahkeesh]

Newer snes9x cores tend to be more accurate rather than more optimized. Current Snes9x is way more demanding than 2002 or bubble's.

Bubble additionally uses some GPU acceleration to run even faster on o3DS.

 

[Clydefrosch]

It's possible I was wrong.
After reinstalling retroarch one more time, deleting the cfg for the nth time and setting it back up again, manually deleting all the installed tiles and installing them fresh, it -seems- like gpsp is now running more stable. I still got a crash after about 45 minutes, but it might've been an issue on my end.

 

[BORTZ]

This is all exciting news. I would rather just have a folder of GBA games rather than needing to install titles on my homescreen.

 

[Plasmaster09]

Newer snes9x cores tend to be more accurate rather than more optimized. Current Snes9x is way more demanding than 2002 or bubble's.

Bubble additionally uses some GPU acceleration to run even faster on o3DS.

Ah. Wish someone could port 1.5 or something with the GPU acceleration. (Oh, and the Retroarch core is 2010. I think there's also 2002 but why use that??)

 

[Rahkeesh]

2010 is not fullspeed on all games and not even 2005/plus, that's why 2002 is also there.

 

[Clydefrosch]

Not true. Old 3DS can run gpSP just fine with dynarec on.

so, after eating my words on gpsp not crashing anymore, I took a gander at this one too, just to be safe, but even with frameskips and dynarec, gpsp on o3ds remains a stuttery mess. 30-45 frames is the best this manages on most games.
not sure if maybe some super simple game might make it to 60fps, but most games dont.
possibly an rpg or two could be 'playable' if you turned off sounds and didn't look closely at what happens, but that's about the best this will do on o3ds

 

[Plasmaster09]

so, after eating my words on gpsp not crashing anymore, I took a gander at this one too, just to be safe, but even with frameskips and dynarec, gpsp on o3ds remains a stuttery mess. 30-45 frames is the best this manages on most games.
not sure if maybe some super simple game might make it to 60fps, but most games dont.
possibly an rpg or two could be 'playable' if you turned off sounds and didn't look closely at what happens, but that's about the best this will do on o3ds

I can't even get it to start- I put the bios in the right place and whatnot but I always get an ARM11 exception crash. It does load the Retroarch menu (so it kind of starts I guess) but the crash happens whenever I pick a game to load.

 

[ChibiMofo]

Yeah no matter what, Hi-Res games will look bad on 3DS. The screen simply doesn't have enough pixels.

Are we still talking about SNES games? The SNES had a resolution of 256×224. The 3DS Top screen is 800 x 240 pixels (400 x 240 pixels per eye), and bottom touch screen is 320 x 240 pixels. The 3DS has all the resolution it needs to handle any SNES game.

 

[Zense]

Are we still talking about SNES games? The SNES had a resolution of 256×224. The 3DS Top screen is 800 x 240 pixels (400 x 240 pixels per eye), and bottom touch screen is 320 x 240 pixels. The 3DS has all the resolution it needs to handle any SNES game.

Several SNES games use something called the hi-res mode, and that's what they're talking about here. Secret of Mana and its sequel use it at 512x224 pixels, if I'm not mistaken.

 

[Plasmaster09]

Several SNES games use something called the hi-res mode, and that's what they're talking about here. Secret of Mana and its sequel use it at 512x224 pixels, if I'm not mistaken.

...which is still quite a bit smaller than the 3DS top screen's resolution. Unless something exceeds 800 horizontally or 240 vertically, it should be fine.
Edit: Turns out the actual max for hi res mode (512 x 448) definitely won't fit on the top screen. However, I'm pretty sure that there's maybe a small few games that used the FULL hi res mode at all (for menus) and maybe one or two games that actually utilized it for gameplay.

 

[Zense]

...which is still quite a bit smaller than the 3DS top screen's resolution. Unless something exceeds 800 horizontally or 240 vertically, it should be fine.
Edit: Turns out the actual max for hi res mode (512 x 448) definitely won't fit on the top screen. However, I'm pretty sure that there's maybe a small few games that used the FULL hi res mode at all (for menus) and maybe one or two games that actually utilized it for gameplay.

Either way I would call it pretty game breaking if you can't use the menu like in an RPG because the 3ds can't display it. How would you do your item management and equipment which is a large part of the gameplay of those games?

Also as far as I know, the top screen resolution is only 800 pixels when 3D is used, which for emulators is basically never. It's explained by Nintendo as being 400 pixels per eye.

 

[Rahkeesh]

Its not quite as bad in retroarch where you can use bilinear filtering to make downscaled hi-res somewhat readable. Bubble's doesn't have anything available like that and renders 224p before doing its scaling.

 

[Feffe]

The Hi-Res games do technically run on 3DS, but you'll end up with blurry screens when in Hi-Res mode.

This is how Secret of Mana menu looks at the beginning of the game

I mean, it's playable... but it's far from an ideal solution. That's probably why Nintendo avoided releasing any HiRes games on 3DS VC.

 

[Pickle_Rick]

so, after eating my words on gpsp not crashing anymore, I took a gander at this one too, just to be safe, but even with frameskips and dynarec, gpsp on o3ds remains a stuttery mess. 30-45 frames is the best this manages on most games.
not sure if maybe some super simple game might make it to 60fps, but most games dont.
possibly an rpg or two could be 'playable' if you turned off sounds and didn't look closely at what happens, but that's about the best this will do on o3ds

I set my 3ds to old 3ds speeds and it runs full speed.

 

[Clydefrosch]

I set my 3ds to old 3ds speeds and it runs full speed.

It does slow down significantly when I do that. Maybe it didn't stick right? If I clock my n3ds down to 200mhz with rosalina, I don't even get fullspeed in the language selection screen for advance wars.

 

[Pickle_Rick]

It does slow down significantly when I do that. Maybe it didn't stick right? If I clock my n3ds down to 200mhz with rosalina, I don't even get fullspeed in the language selection screen for advance wars.

Something isn't right there. GPSP was the recommended way to run GBA on the old 3DS before it started crashing.

 

[Clydefrosch]

Not even with vsync and bilinear filtering turned off. I also noticed that clock speeds will reset if you downclock in the homemenu and then start retroarch (or when restarting from the retroarch menu).

gpsp was recommended, from what i remember, because there was no other option. not sure when gba injection became a thing, but it still had those blurry filter issues early on, without savestates and such.
also, peoples definition of "playable" vary widely. many thought of the average 30-40 frames as perfectly playable, and some people argue that if the classic mario bros minigame that came with all mario gba games runs at 60fps, that's proof gpsp is running fullspeed.
for what its worth, what made me buy a n3ds back then, was fullspeed gba emulation. before i was aware of the crashing issues.

 

[Pickle_Rick]

Not even with vsync and bilinear filtering turned off. I also noticed that clock speeds will reset if you downclock in the homemenu and then start retroarch (or when restarting from the retroarch menu).

gpsp was recommended, from what i remember, because there was no other option. not sure when gba injection became a thing, but it still had those blurry filter issues early on, without savestates and such.
also, peoples definition of "playable" vary widely. many thought of the average 30-40 frames as perfectly playable, and some people argue that if the classic mario bros minigame that came with all mario gba games runs at 60fps, that's proof gpsp is running fullspeed.
for what its worth, what made me buy a n3ds back then, was fullspeed gba emulation. before i was aware of the crashing issues.

No. There's videos of it running full speed on YouTube. If you change the clock speed in the app it'll actually work.

 

[Clydefrosch]

No. There's videos of it running full speed on YouTube. If you change the clock speed in the app it'll actually work.

What video?
I'm literally running it on both an actual o3ds and on a new 3ds and reducing the clock and it's not full speed.