SCDSTWO SNES Emulator Beta soon

[phoenixclaws]

I'm just glad that Earthbound works

 

[DiscostewSM]

the news is awesome, the list is not

i thought the whole point of extra RAM was to emulate the Super FX chip (or any other chip it has)?
hopefully they'll get there further in the development

It requires more than just RAM to emulate the chips. They're probably just working on what's best to get "most" titles up and running by emulating the SNES first before emulating the special chips (which games require both).

 

[shakirmoledina]

a good majority of the games work so it shouldnt be a problem... if its emulator related then the issue will be fixed (we hope) but still there seems to be around 3 games on tht list

 

[nl255]

Any idea if the unpacked 96MB version of Star Ocean works? I know the normal version requires SDD-1 emulation but someone made a hacked version that does not need any special chip support so that it would work on carts like the RetroZone SNES PowerPak. Unfortunately, it might be too large to run on the DSTwo.

 

[The Catboy]

Great the only games I wanted to play don't work

Bull shit

 

[PeregrinFig]

If Secret of Mana, Earthbound, Castlevania IV and the translated DQVI work, this will be perfect to me. Honestly, the only games on the incompatible list I would have even wanted to play were Kirby Super Star and Yoshi's Island, and there's Super Star Ultra and Super Mario Advance 3 for those. I'm so glad this is finally getting released soon, it feels like the wait has lasted forever.

 

[murkurie]

as long as Zelda, and donkey kong work, I'll be fine with it

 

[RupeeClock]

TBH, was there Link to the past rerelease on gba? 3 in 1 can play it perfectly.

The SNES release is better than the GBA release IMO.
That, and the GBA doesn't have the romhack Zelda Parallel Worlds, which is great.

If I'm not mistaken, F-zero and Mario Kart are mode-7 games, but they may be able to emulate them. They're not SuperFX.

 

[1Player]

just saw the list...most RPG works so I'm happy.

not being able to play Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
does bother me a little

 

[Rydian]

Mario Kart uses the DSP-1 chip (as do a couple other titles).

 

[DiscostewSM]

Any idea if the unpacked 96MB version of Star Ocean works? I know the normal version requires SDD-1 emulation but someone made a hacked version that does not need any special chip support so that it would work on carts like the RetroZone SNES PowerPak. Unfortunately, it might be too large to run on the DSTwo.

When reading your post, I was thinking, "WTH? 96MB!?!", but checking online, it's 96Mb with the graphics decompressed (which is about 12MB). The DSTWO has 32MB built in, so, I'd assume it would fit, but that depends on how the SNES emulator works.

 

[nl255]

Any idea if the unpacked 96MB version of Star Ocean works? I know the normal version requires SDD-1 emulation but someone made a hacked version that does not need any special chip support so that it would work on carts like the RetroZone SNES PowerPak. Unfortunately, it might be too large to run on the DSTwo.

When reading your post, I was thinking, "WTH? 96MB!?!", but checking online, it's 96Mb with the graphics decompressed (which is about 12MB). The DSTWO has 32MB built in, so, I'd assume it would fit, but that depends on how the SNES emulator works.

Hopefully the SNES emu won't refuse to run it because it detects it is a S-DD1 game even though the S-DD1 code is never called (but is still present in the ROM).

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Special chip games that MIGHT run well in the future if speedhacks support is added:
Super Mario RPG

Games that definitely won't run well:
Yoshi's Island
Star Fox

Don't know about the other ones.
Super Mario RPG will never run fullspeed, but it could be fully playable with speedhacks.

Super Mario Kart uses DSP-1, most emulators support DSP-1 even if they don't support any other special chips, don't know about this emulator though.

- From experience with PocketSNES on the GP2X, which is very fast, and ran Super Mario RPG at 25-40FPS with speedhacks depending on the area you were in, but all other SuperFX games ran like shit. GP2X is dual core 240mhz, should be comparable to the SCDS2's 360mhz + the DS's internal 2x 67mhz.

 

[Deleted_171835]

This is awesome.
I would be able to play Super Metroid and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars on the go.

I need to purchase a SCDSTWO

 

[indask8]

I don't expect anything more than a near full speed compatibility for regular games and DSP-1 games.

With some luck, maybe the SA-1 games (Mario RPG, Kirby) will run as well as on PSP (playable but slowed down half speed).

Maybe the review's compatibility result will surprise us.

 

[RupeeClock]

I'm thinking DSP-1 games may be playable provided you have frameskip.
I captured this screen on the DStwo's NDSGBA.

The background appears to be a mode-7 effect and it displays perfectly with no noticeable slowdown on the current frameskip.

 

[DiscostewSM]

GP2X is dual core 240mhz, should be comparable to the SCDS2's 360mhz + the DS's internal 2x 67mhz.

The GP2X's dual core literally has no bottleneck between the cores because of them being on the came chip (not dual CPU, but dual core), whereas the DS and the DSTWO's CPUs have an extreme case of it. They couldn't do the job, and, they'd need to transfer data between each other in a 2-way link, and as far as we know, the only data able to be sent to the DSTWO is input via buttons and touchscreen (which can be done with about 8 bytes per frame, 240 bytes per second).

Plus, the DS does not have 2x 66Mhz CPUs. It has a 66Mhz ARM9, and a 33Mhz ARM7.

 

[DiscostewSM]

I read up on the DSP-1 chip, and I now understand why Super Mario Kart and Pilotwings won't work.

I'm thinking DSP-1 games may be playable provided you have frameskip.
I captured this screen on the DStwo's NDSGBA.

The background appears to be a mode-7 effect and it displays perfectly with no noticeable slowdown on the current frameskip.

That is because the effect doesn't require any additional hardware/chips to produce it. Just like Mode 7 is native to the SNES via a single mode with a single alterable layer, the GBA can produce this effect via Mode 1 (that has 1 alterable background) or 2 (with 2 alterable backgrounds), and both systems do this at the scanline level.

The DSP-1 does not generate a Mode 7 effect, but it helps improve on it because it is used as a math coprocessor, capable of floating point and trigonometric calculations for 3D math algorithms. That is why I think games like F-Zero aren't listed as "not working", because they don't require the chip, but can still do Mode 7.

 

[_Chaz_]

After such a long wait, I kind of expected support for on-board chips.

Oh well, as long as layers finally work right I can play some awesome games on the go.

 

[DiscostewSM]

It's sad, but understandable. The DSTWO doesn't have an FPU (floating point unit), which means that in order to even get the DSP-1 chip emulated, you'd have to handle emulating floating point calculations as well. Pretty sure that the compiler takes care of that, but expect that to be slow.