Homebrew To Snes9X Developers:

[panzeroceania]

If anyone knows any snes9x GX or any snes9x or wii emulator authors that don't come to this forum, could you inform them of this thread?

I was wondering if the latest bsnes performance core which is getting a lot faster and closer to snes9x in terms of speed (still a fair way off) would be possible to port to the wii and get around 60fps on games like super mario world, etc.

It's only been ported to OSs on x86 machines as far as I know but has less bugs than snes9x.

In any case bsnes is typically a lot slower, so don't misunderstand me.

byuu, the author of the emulator, has recently made a "performance core" which makes a few sacrifices to greatly improve the optimization and speed of the emulator. I think it is to the point where a Wii port could be possible and that would be awesome for many people.

Let me know what you think.

here is a release of the latest Work In Progress build

it includes a new GUI he is writing, the source code, as well windows binary builds in the "out" folder

http://panzeroceania.com/hotlinks/bsnes_v068r22.tar.bz2

there is also the latest stable release

Windows binary: http://panzeroceania.com/hotlinks/bsnes_v068.zip

Source Code: http://panzeroceania.com/hotlinks/bsnes_v068.tar.bz2

also here are links to his website

http://byuu.org/bsnes/

http://byuu.org/

http://code.google.com/p/bsnes/downloads/list

 

[Jacobeian]

I think snes 9x 1.52 already uses full processing power on Wii (I sometime got frame skipping in some games) so porting bsnes as it is actually (the performance core still runs slower on my computer than snes9x 1.52) would certainly not run full speed, high-accuracy has obviously still a price.

You could also try to compare VBA (running Golden Sun 2 for example) with bsnes running on the same computer, it is actually the limit of what the Wii can do without dedicated optimization (asm rewrite, dynamic recompiling, etc)

Also remember the Wii is "only" running at 729 Mhz and has limited L1/L2 cache so even if the Power PC is powerful and cannot directly be compared to X86, maybe it would be like running bsnes on a 1Ghz celeron, who knows ?

I've also read there and there that the assembly code output by gcc for the Power PC was not that much optimized. But don't quote me on that, I've looked at some asm output and noticed there was usually a bunch of instructions and registers used to do a simple thing but maybe it is intentional... someone more knowledgeable of PPC assembly should probably answer on that.

Lastly, we would have to know if bsnes is indeed portable to other platforms, compatible with devkitppc (it uses newlib 1.18.0 and gcc 4.4.3) and how easily portable it is (is the core properly separated from the UI, is it well documented, is there platform specific code mixed with emulation code, etc ?). You know, there are good reasons why snes9x always has been the emulator of choice when porting to other platforms, because it was designed to be easily ported on whatever you want.

EDIT: the link for the source code does not work for me

 

[panzeroceania]

you can get the source at http://byuu.org/bsnes/


I'll try to fix my mirrors.

also it may not run full speed but it'd be interesting to see how it ran on non demanding games.

 

[Bladeforce]

Hmmm when does one know that the slowdown comes from the emulator OR that's what the real SNES did. I know from experience quite a lot of snes games had slowdown and the better emulators just reproduce that through an emulator. So please list the games that you have problems with slowdown I really do think it's more of a snes problem than the emulators

 

[mightymuffy]

.....WHY though??
Even a simple Wii port would take a lot of work as you'd expect, and with Tantric's fantastic version of snes9x running everything bang on (bar the very odd exception such as the hugely demanding - for SNES - Yoshi's Island) it's just wasted work.... sorry if I'm sounding mean, but unless someone is willing to spend a lot of their spare time for basically next to nothing reward, the idea is rather pointless imo....

 

[StupidGamer1]

I believe we don't need another snes emulator. snes9xGX runs all my favs (except doom,go ahead and laugh) full speed,sound and playability. The idea I agree with ^ is pointless.

 

[Bladexdsl]

yeah snes9x pretty much is near perfect sure it slows down on some games when you have the enhancing filters on (2xsal etc) but it's worth it the games look fantastic even on my 60" plasma! all tantric needs to do is get the cover mod in the newest versions and it will be perfect to me!

 

[Jacobeian]

Well, the most obvious reason is that BSNES is way more accurate than SNES9X. I imagine Panzeroceania could easily point us to a list of games that does not work properly (or doesn't work at all) in snes9x while BSNES is said to have 100% compatibility with commercial games and have cycle accurate video/audio emulation, while snes9x, which its limited accuracy, can show various emulation glitches (more or less noticeable).

That's said, most people generally play the same bunch of popular games, which all emulators already emulate quite correctly, and don't really care about single-pixel or single-line glitches, hence why they say snes9x is "perfect" for them and there is no point to port another game since all what they want is playing the game.
I'd say that maybe only 2% of emulator users care about accuracy.

 

[panzeroceania]

yeah I'm not going to go into great depth or detail because it's not worth any flame war, nor is it that important.

People have many different reasons for using an emulator like bsnes.

I personally really like that it works almost identically to a real SNES, the audio quality is great, and because it is accurate to the hardware, translations and hacks that are made to run on it, will also run on my real SNES.

For me it's about getting more people aware of the emulator, and if it could potentially run just as well for them as snes9x, then it could really help the SNES scene as a whole.

As of right now SNES9x isn't seeing any active development. Bsnes on the other hand is in active development and is constantly getting better, and people are constantly discovering more about the SNES hardware.

I guess my thought is that if more people could use it, it'd help everyone.

It'd help make sure people are getting great video and audio quality, it'd help make sure your experiences are just like on the original SNES, it'd make sure that hacks and translations are made to work on a real SNES unlike some that were made for zsnes and snes9x and don't work on a real SNES.

I'm not slamming Snes9x, quite the contrary, I have always loved this emulator, and think it's pretty remarkable how many systems it's been ported to. It's like the "Print: Hello World" of ported emulators.

I just figure, if there is a better alternative that is still improving, why not try for it?

that's all.

Of course this is just a humble request, I don't know if I'd ever be able to handle a task like this myself, which is why I came here. I know it would require a lot of work and wouldn't want anyone to attempt it unless they really enjoyed it and thought along the same lines that I do.

From what I can tell there isn't many other people who are interested as I am, which is fine, at least I know

I guess I just figure most people don't know about bsnes, and I think that's a shame as it's really doing a lot of great things, and recently was released with a performance addition which maintains most of the accuracy while getting speeds very close to snes9x.

 

[koji2009]

Hello hello, my name is Koji and I was a fairly minor character in the world of SNES9x (I had direct contact with all the devs and handled the official tech support forum for a number of years)

While not one of the main programmers, I did have close contact with them and had regular involved discussions about the hardware and what not... Would it be possible to port bsnes to the wii? If the emulator is written in pure C (it appears mostly to be so, but I didn't dive entirely through the code) it would be relatively easy to get some semblance of the emulator running, that said... bsnes is not optimized for speed, but for accuracy. Even their "speed core" is much more accurate than SNES9x and requires a significant amount of extra processing powers.

To get some of the more advanced (IE special chip games) running full speed on the wii, it would likely require software hacks. These hacks would in turn kill some of the accuracy. SNES9x is by no means the perfect emulator in terms of accuracy, but with over 97% compatibility and only a few games giving any noticable form of graphic or audio glitch... it's a great codebase for ports to other hardware and was the primary reason it has been chosen as the SNES emulator of choice to port (compared to Zsnes which is too heavily x86 assembly based) to an insane number of devices.