>Today, SNES emulation is in a very good place. Barring unusual peripherals that are resistant to emulation (such as a light-sensor based golf club, an exercise bike, or a dial-up modem used to place real-money bets on live horse races in Japan), every officially licensed SNES title is fully playable
I had to look up the 'dial-up modem' reference - apparently it's a Japan-only peripheral called the "Famicom Network System" that did in fact have software available that allowed for bets to be placed on live horse races.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System
https://segaretro.org/Telebradesco_Residência
https://www.sega-brasil.com.br/Tectoy/Telebradesco_Residenci...
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1995/3/22/dinheiro/26.html
That Wikipedia link says that the Famicom (NES) was in 37% of households. Nintendo only shipped 130,000 modems, a tiny percentage of the total Famicom units sold.
Similarly you could have some shim code for the online games like the horse race one that talks to some community run server, re-enabling a new kind of net experience.
One could imagine, for instance, connecting an actual USB barcode reader to emulate the Barcode Battler, or providing a text box to hand-type a barcode number.
I don't see anyone actually bothering to simulate the entire horse betting network complete with virtual bank accounts, but if you're really interested, Raphael Assenat reverse engineered quite a bit of the JRA-PAT system for fun here:
https://www.raphnet.net/divers/retro_challenge_2018_09/index...
It's a pretty good read as well!
https://zelda.gamepedia.com/BS_The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ancient_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview_games_from_The_Leg...
The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there.
Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-d...
The existing emulators are more than good enough to be replacements to the commercial offerings (and in most cases, a lot better... e.g. the lookahead rendering).
While what you suggest might be a factor in their actions, I don't think it's an especially good one.
As far as rolling their own emulators, I don't doubt that they do. But I do doubt that they're doing so without researching the existing open source emulators.
That’s interesting, I wonder if that is the case the for the PS1 emulator on the PS3/Vita used for the PlayStation Classics titles
Wouldn't it be possible to reverse engineer these emulators? Maybe the official Nintendo SNES emulator has all the right S-PPU1/2 values in it.
In the off chance anyone is able to help with this, I've set up a Discord channel (#ars) for coordination here: https://discord.gg/Fx7TfKh
Every member of the bsnes-emu project is on said server.
Thanks so much!
You've probably done that already, but I figured it was worth a shot. I'll update if I actually get a response.
I imagine that the official documentation was leaked rather than publicly released. Nintendo wants to make money selling re-releases of classic games, so they are extremely unfriendly towards emulator developers. Just look at the all the propaganda on their corporate website: "The introduction of emulators created to play illegally copied Nintendo software represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers [...] Such emulators have the potential to significantly damage a worldwide entertainment software industry which generates over $15 billion annually, and tens of thousands of jobs." [1]
[0]: https://archive.org/details/SNESDevManual/mode/2up [1]: https://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp
That was done with the NES too:
What is this emulator doing that causes it to emulate so slowly? Even if it's doing perfect emulation, are modern processors still so slow that they can't emulate a couple 35-year-old processors at something closer to real time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_desi...
I highly recommend anyone with an interest in games to grab a bunch of ROM packs (including Japanese exclusive games and fan translation hacks) and spend some of your quarantine on the SNES.
I'd like to get them to play A Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger, but I don't think that they're patient enough. Still, beautiful games with great soundtracks.
Exactly! and even more so with the filters in modern emulators. Along with the funky cool music, many SNES games are easily on par in the looks department with most mobile games, so kids won't be turned off by the first impression or anything.
If you have kids sitting bored at home, consider repurpos an extra/older PC or Mac [0] as a pseudo-console + emulator for the SNES (and other platforms).
A few other SNES recommendations from the top of my head:
• EarthBound (aka Mother 2, another popular RPG with fun music. Combat may feel too grindy/frustrating though)
• Super Gussun Oyoyo (Lemmings + Tetris)
• Live A Live (RPG where you play characters from multiple timelines)
• Pop'n TwinBee (shoot-em-up and platformer with very colorful graphics in a pastelly palette)
• Terranigma (RPG spanning multiple eras)
• Treasure of the Rudras (Japan-only RPG with fan translation)
• Bomberman (hilarious couch PvP)
• Pocky & Rocky (cute shoot-em-up with a Japanese folklore theme)
• Yoshi's Island (one of the best platformers)
There were a bunch of other obscure titles with unique gameplay mechanics that I can't recall the names of at the moment. Will have to comb my ROMs folder.
They don't need to remaster or remake anything, just release it as is, and I'm sure it would sell well. I would anyway prefer the original with original graphics and soundtrack to a 3D remake or similar.
Many people who stream older console games on twitch seem to use them as well as people who like to play romhacks.
This wasn’t possible for N64 titles until relatively recently[1]. Interestingly, the method of cracking N64’s boot security sounds rather standard when compared to the 3DS and switch glitching[2][3].
1. https://youtu.be/z5uOK0nR934
https://gamesconnection.co.uk/blogs/games-connection/what-is...
In the past, even when the console was still on sale, there were game backup devices.
Dolphin is also nowhere close to the accuracy of emulators like bsnes. There are many games that plain don't boot, mysterious bugs that have resisted debugging for years and years (some game breaking, e.g. if you have too many characters unlocked you cannot finish Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn on Dolphin), etc.
1: Sound was eventually implemented, I don't remember if it was before or after I upgraded to a Pentium though.
I've got retroarch v1.3.6 on Stretch on aarch64. It has crashed with a "file not found" and "bus error" for bsnes. Higan segfaults when I try to run it.
Or, to put that another way: there's no real difference between a bug introduced by wrapping a game in an imperfect emulator, and a bug introduced during recompilation/porting/remastering of the game. Either way, you now have a new "variant" of the game with its own bugs, but one which is also a canonical, supported release of the game.
Interestingly, sometimes—because of one of these slight variances—the fastest [and so preferred] version of a game to speedrun, is a Nintendo-sanctioned emulated (e.g. Virtual Console) release of the game. It says something important, I think, that these releases of the game aren't automatically shunned by the speedrunning community, the way that runs of the game under an arbitrary emulator on someone's PC would be; but rather are just treated as their own separate category-set, in the same way the speedrunning community differentiates different region releases, or version releases, or port/remaster releases.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-sourc...
It's a lot, yes. Not practical for these purposes. But there's a reason we don't use 64bit encryption.
64bit encryption is easily brute forced.
If you want to keep it in a table, sure that's 18 exabytes (multiplied by element size in bytes), but that's before compression. I imagine multiply output compresses very well. And that's a lot of RAM. But not anywhere near "heat death of the universe" amounts.
I bet FAANG easily have that much RAM. Each of them.
Then anyone who has the ability to start converting that to VHDL or any sort of identification of components can start on part of it and contribute to the repo.
With some started, it may be possible for less expert people who have a little bit of VHDL or whatever to contribute to some degree with expert supervision.
