there are more accurate emulators nowadays, although because the human race is horrible, we bullied the dev of the most accurate snes emu to suicide
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Oof, that's...very sad. :(
I had not heard of that, and am not sure I want to..
Near, creator of bsnes/Higan/ares. Their story is tragic.
/reads the first few lines of an article.
yeaaah figuring that out quick :(
Oh my ... That's awful. I'm just discovering this myself. Even IGN put out an article https://www.ign.com/articles/near-bsnes-remembrance
Yeah, Near was a genius, too. They invented the MSU-1 virtual expansion "chip" for the SNES, which allows for CD audio and video on SNES games (and with an appropriate flashcard, it can interface with and run on actual SNES hardware).
Bsnes?
And Higan.
And Ares
sorry for my ignorance but what does accurate mean in this context?
That the emulator behaves exactly as genuine hardware does.
For one, there are sometimes hardware quirks in consoles that are used to implement features. Like the video screens along the track in Mario Kart 64, the N64 has shared memory between the CPU and GPU, which they used to generate that effect. It's difficult to replicate that behavior in an emulator.
Then there's lag. You might argue that an emulator can provide a better experience by obliterating lag via brute force, but that wouldn't be the authentic experience the real hardware would provide.
Or a simple one I've noticed with SNES emulators: None of them get the sound quite right. It's hard to explain, there's a high pitched "rattle" that isn't present on a genuine SNES, it's almost like any emulation is too perfect and isn't sanding down a rough edge the original hardware did?
Most closely matches the behavior of actual SNES consoles.
This requires very careful emulation of the timings of the various buses and co-processors, as well as on-cart chips which may or may not be present. For instance, a Speedy Gonzales game has a button in the final stage which crashes almost every emulator because enters an infinite loop reading from an open bus and waiting for the value to attain a specific pattern. However reading from an open bus is generally specified to be the last value loaded into the bus, which in this case is the load instruction itself, $18. So the value is read to be $1818 by most emulators, which doesn't match the pattern expected.
However, this is only if you're emulating with instruction level accuracy. It is possible for the value of the bus to change in between the instruction being loaded and the value of the bus being loaded due to an HDMA load being triggered, but this requires a cycle accurate emulator.
we bullied the dev of the most accurate snes emu to suicide
To be fair, interacting with people on the internet is almost always a crapshoot for developers.
It's why most of them don't do it.
I've added it to the Megathread, thanks for the suggestion ✌️
You may already know, but just wanted to report that the megathread is down.
Edit: Back up
It was a temporary domain error, seems fine now.
You are amazing. :)
It's good for low-power devices that can't handle more demanding emulators, but bsnes is considered the gold standard for accuracy now.
BSNES isn't even on the Megathread though... There's only Mesen2, which only has development releases available, not stable releases.
No clue why it isn't on there, but bsnes is available as part of higan, ares (kinda?), standalone, or as one of many bsnes RetroArch cores (bsnes-mercury is generally the most recommended from my experience).
ETA: If you're not into RetroArch, I'd highly recommend ares.
It's cool. I've decided to try out Snes9x and BSNES. Thanks for the info!
It's lightweight so it doesn't require the higher specs that bsnes needs (and all of the accuracy improvements you will not notice) and is more compatible with ROM hacks too. IMO it's still the go-to SNES emu.
I still use it and just put it on a tablet the other day. Haven't had any issues
Oh excellent. I just don't understand why it's not on the Megathread. The Megathread has other instances of multiple emulators for the same platform being listed, but only one SNES emulator listed.
The megathread recommendations for emulators aren't great. Use the emulation wiki instead. https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Super_Nintendo_emulators
Thanks!
I did a quick search online and can't find any recent issues. I'm not sure why it's not on the thread
That's why I thought I'd ask. :)
On the bright side, it's now on there. ;)
I believe Retroarch still ships multiple Snes9x cores, and Retroarch is still in the megathread, so you can go for that
It's cool. I got it figured out. Thanks though. ;)
Just hasn't really been in the spotlight is all; SNES9x is still great.
I still use Zsnes actually.
The other day I tried to use bsnes and it was stuttering in a CPU capable of running Red Dead Redemption 2. I went to check the task manager and it was using 20% of one of my 4GHz cores, and it still stuttered. I remembered that I used to emulate these games with Zsnes in a 800 MHz Pentium III CPU, so I decided to go back to Zsnes and it worked perfectly, using less than 10% of one 4GHz core.
Theres some something nice about zsnes's innacuracy and hacks. Makes me nostalgic for the early days of gaming console emulation. There was a time in my late teenage years in which it was all I was interested in. It was such a cool concept.