Homebrew SNES Emulator

daxtsu

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Do any current 3DS emulators function with the Super FX chip yet?

All three Retroarch cores support it, but how playable the games that use it are depends on the core being used, O3DS/N3DS, and the game itself. Under best conditions (N3DS, PocketSNES), Star Fox (SuperFX 1) isn't very playable, for example, but Yoshi's Island (SuperFX 2) is, but not at the title screen.

IIRC it uses the Super FX chip, so no.

For knowledge's sake, it's actually the DSP-1 chip, and it is supported by the RetroArch cores. It's only BlargSNES that can't play it at the moment.
 
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Naxster

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Those are all the installed titles in the system. You have to find the blargsnes one. In my case it's called "CTR-P-BLRG" and it launches just fine from there.
How do i find the blargsnes? I'm afraid that i might mess something up. :(
I think i just give up the hope of ever playing snes games on my 2DS :(
 

Garrincho

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How do i find the blargsnes? I'm afraid that i might mess something up. :(
I think i just give up the hope of ever playing snes games on my 2DS :(

it's really simple, and I don't think you'll break anything from launching a title. Do you have CTR-P-BLRG on the list? If so, that's BlargSnes for sure.
 

Naxster

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it's really simple, and I don't think you'll break anything from launching a title. Do you have CTR-P-BLRG on the list? If so, that's BlargSnes for sure.
Thank you mate! It worked! :D
But is it possible to launch it from the home menu instead of FBI?
Also it's too bad that Donkey country 3 is slow, man i really wanted to play that game again:(
 

Garrincho

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Thank you mate! It worked! :D
But is it possible to launch it from the home menu instead of FBI?
Also it's too bad that Donkey country 3 is slow, man i really wanted to play that game again:(

I think it's the only workaround to play the CIA. Also Donkey Kong Country 3 is not slow all the time, only on certain parts of certain stages, at least for me. What sucks is that you have to boot it like 10 times until it works.
 

Naxster

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I think it's the only workaround to play the CIA. Also Donkey Kong Country 3 is not slow all the time, only on certain parts of certain stages, at least for me. What sucks is that you have to boot it like 10 times until it works.
Do you mean that you have to boot blargsnes like 10 times for it to work?
It works great for me everytime i launch it :)

EDIT: ahhh now i see what you mean :P
 
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DiscostewSM

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I believe that issue with DKC2/3 is due to a timing communication issue between the cpu and spc cores, where one is waiting for confirmation of things from the other, and vice versa, but ends up in an infinite loop if the timing is off. Don't quote me on this though. It's not something I'm knowledgeable in.
 

radiostarbuck

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I'm new to the Nintendo 3DS and perhaps I don't understand the limitations of the platform, but I don't get why my iPhone has no trouble at all playing Super FX chip games but the 3DS can't. Is the hardware that less powerful? Isn't the 3ds running 3D games that are much more hardware intensive?
 

Xenosaiga

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I'm new to the Nintendo 3DS and perhaps I don't understand the limitations of the platform, but I don't get why my iPhone has no trouble at all playing Super FX chip games but the 3DS can't. Is the hardware that less powerful? Isn't the 3ds running 3D games that are much more hardware intensive?
That's like comparing a calculator to a desktop computer.
 

daxtsu

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I'm new to the Nintendo 3DS and perhaps I don't understand the limitations of the platform, but I don't get why my iPhone has no trouble at all playing Super FX chip games but the 3DS can't. Is the hardware that less powerful? Isn't the 3ds running 3D games that are much more hardware intensive?

You didn't mention specific models here, so I'll assume you mean an Old 3DS (i.e. 2DS, the original 3DS from 2011, and the 3DS XL from 2012-2013 or so, not the "New" models), as well as a fairly recent iPhone (say the iPhone 5 or so). The 3DS is a really weak system to begin with: 268Mhz ARM11 (ARM11 is a very weak ARM CPU to begin with, compared to say a Cortex or anything newer). For comparison, the original iPhone 5 had a 1.3GHz (yes, gigahertz) CPU, and a more efficient architecture behind it as far as I know. Clock speeds aren't everything, yes, but when you have roughly four times the clock speed, and more efficiency behind it as well, it's pretty clear who the winner is.

Then came 2014 and the "New" 3DSes, which bumped it up to 804MHz, but we're still stuck with the ARM11 architecture, so while the large clock speed boost helps a lot, it's still pretty weak compared to your iPhone. Even the New 3DS struggles to emulate some of the Super FX games ala Starfox (but not Yoshi's Island when in-game), so short of writing dynamic recompilers for the SNES and Super FX, it's probably not likely even the New 3DS will see *every* SNES game running at full speed (the Old 3DS certainly won't).
 

radiostarbuck

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You didn't mention specific models here, so I'll assume you mean an Old 3DS (i.e. 2DS, the original 3DS from 2011, and the 3DS XL from 2012-2013 or so, not the "New" models), as well as a fairly recent iPhone (say the iPhone 5 or so). The 3DS is a really weak system to begin with: 268Mhz ARM11 (ARM11 is a very weak ARM CPU to begin with, compared to say a Cortex or anything newer). For comparison, the original iPhone 5 had a 1.3GHz (yes, gigahertz) CPU, and a more efficient architecture behind it as far as I know. Clock speeds aren't everything, yes, but when you have roughly four times the clock speed, and more efficiency behind it as well, it's pretty clear who the winner is.

Then came 2014 and the "New" 3DSes, which bumped it up to 804MHz, but we're still stuck with the ARM11 architecture, so while the large clock speed boost helps a lot, it's still pretty weak compared to your iPhone. Even the New 3DS struggles to emulate some of the Super FX games ala Starfox (but not Yoshi's Island when in-game), so short of writing dynamic recompilers for the SNES and Super FX, it's probably not likely even the New 3DS will see *every* SNES game running at full speed (the Old 3DS certainly won't).

Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for. I am talking about the New 3ds and I'm working with an iPhone 6s Plus so the disparity between hardware is enormous. My question.... well not really a question, more of a complaint is that I can purchase a 3D version of StarFox 64 from Nintendo and it plays like a dream, but the game that came out in 1992 and is obviously less sophisticated than the newer version, runs like garbage.

Nintendo has a huge opportunity to take advantage of their enormous back catalog of games that lots of people would love to play and it seams like some of the most popular games are being left out of Virtual Console.
 

daxtsu

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I can purchase a 3D version of StarFox 64 from Nintendo and it plays like a dream, but the game that came out in 1992 and is obviously less sophisticated than the newer version, runs like garbage.

Nintendo has a huge opportunity to take advantage of their enormous back catalog of games that lots of people would love to play and it seams like some of the most popular games are being left out of Virtual Console.

The thing about that though, is when you're running SNES games on your phone or 3DS, PC, whatever the device, you're not just running the games themselves, your device is also simulating/emulating the actual SNES hardware, so there's a lot more for the 3DS/PC/whatever to have to deal with than simple game logic. When you run a 3DS game on a 3DS, for example, all it has to be worried about is moving enemies/showing your lasers being fired, etc.. Emulation is a lot more demanding than a native application, since all of the hardware has to be emulated, not just the emulated game's code.
 

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