Topic: SNES VC for older 3ds

@subpopz that analogy really helped me to understand, thanks

Technically no one's really breaking any rules, so if you want it to end, you can just not post and let it phase out on its own.

@Discostew
I'm not going to lie I understand what most of you are trying to say. The fact still remains that the new 3ds does not meet the ghz required to accurately run SNES emu according to y'all.

All a ROM is is the game itself correct? So why emulate a system when you could merely substitute those processes or work around them with more powerful hardware? Wouldn't you want a game to run better than it originally did? The slowdown on SNES games being completely done away with with the better hardware of the new 3ds.

As I've pointed out many times a emulator is just a program and the program can be optimized for various systems. Take my laptop for example its powerful but not too of the line, it can run SoniComi at top speed on the lowest graphics setting but drags along at the top settings. Shouldn't the same hold true for emulation? Considering the slow drip of games their VC department should have plenty of time to optimize it for the 3ds. Then it would be simple to still support VC for its recent consoles.

@GameOtaku I can answer your question simply with another question. If such a thing were possible with SNES emulation like how one can just use a stronger PC to make a game run/look/play better, then why hasn't anyone done it before? Why must now be the time where that's possible? If you have ever programmed an SNES emulator or been part of the process in its creation, improvement, etc, you'd know that it is just not possible because of how tightly synchronized the SNES's chips are with each other, and how specific everything works.

Before you bring up something like the Gigadrive (the Megadrive emulator that M2 made for 3DS that further enhances those games to allow more parallax layers, stereoscopic 3D, etc), I need remind you that in order for them to utilize it in the way they planned, they didn't simply make an emulator to achieve those results. The games themselves were altered to utilize them, making them basically less emulated and more natively-designed for the 3DS.

Again @Discostew everyone has failed to answer the glaring contradiction that the new 3ds DOES NOT HAVE A 3 GHZ PROCESSOR. If what all of you say is 100% accurate then new 3ds emu should drag, sputter and have problems!

And still, shouldn't that answer your own question?

If new 3DS is not powerful enough to provide 100% perfect universal SNES emulation... Where does that leave the original model?

@GameOtaku It takes a 3Ghz CPU to reach cycle-accurate emulation of the SNES. Pretty much every other SNES emulator doesn't go that far because the majority of games do not need to be that accurate. Cycle-accurate means not only going through the loop one cycle at a time so it can hit every instruction, interrupt, etc at the correct cycle (and order), but instructions/opcodes that take more than 1 cycle to complete are handled in pieces to maintain cycle-accuracy. With other emus, shortcuts are taken to reduce the needed power requirements, such as determining how many cycles can be skipped, then simply skip them, or handling opcodes immediately, no matter how many cycles they are meant to span over. These kind of shortcuts work for the majority of games, but there are a few, like a certain Speedy Gonzales game, that become unplayable or can't be completed without having down-to-the-cycle accuracy.

Here is an article by the guy who made the most accurate emulator. It's a good read, and I would hope anyone else with doubts would read it too.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

@subpopz
That's really the point here. How much inaccuracy is acceptable? It's all in the eye of the beholder. I see a "hacked" 3ds run Mario world with just slight glitches which could (arguably) be caused by the hacking process, but the overall gameplay was fine you must admit. Again it goes to what someone considers an acceptable level. For example Megaman 5 I played it religiously back in the day and know it in and out by heart. On 3ds VC however it seems off sometimes, like it's been sped up in places and slowdown on the beginning of Starmans stage seems to be missing, but overall the experience was great I had no complaints.

Optimization is really the key, could they simply have worked within the confines of the original 3ds hardware to produce a good enough result @Discostew? The biggest problem I have with everything that is really giving me the biggest trouble in accepting it for truth is that everything but SNES is so easy to emulate up to about the early 2000s. Take the PSP playing PlayStation 1 games. It's not that many generations ahead and it's able to play them with no problems. Aren't disc based system so much more complex than cart based systems for emu?

@GameOtaku Considering that the PS1 and PSP share a similar architecture much like how the GBA and 3DS do (with regard to Ambassador games), I'm under the impression that you haven't really done your research on the matter, and are simply saying that because one things works well, this other thing should work well when it's not even in the same scope.

Please, before you continue any further, research this subject and the examples you plan to argue with.

@Discostew
Like their VC team is so overwhelmed with just one game per week that they couldn't put time and effort to either figure out which games could run well enough for the original 3ds or outsource to Arika or M2 for something along the lines of the 3D classics.

As I said it was merely something to appeal to gamers to force them to upgrade since they could have done other VC titles but they focused only on new 3ds snes VC all last year. Why did they not just bring StarTropics from WiiU to 3ds or release the gba games. Even if they didn't have save states they played well enough. Honestly all the new 3ds (outside the reasonably priced $99 non xl which can be found no where just like the xl 3ds and switch) is is a glorified SNES emu. Is that what most are saying?!

Well, SNES sound emulation through the mid 2000s was pretty bad (yes, if Super Mario World is the only thing you care about, you may not have noticed because it played fine. Aside from one emulation flaw that made all mods that used a particular music replacement engine/tool incompatible with actual hardware and newer emulators.)
Chrono Trigger had some pretty bad sound errors, if you're familiar with how it sounds on a real console (and the PS1 port of CT used an equally awful sound engine, except unlike emulators it couldn't be updated so it was even worse)
Emerald Dragon was another good example of awful emulated sound. On the last ZSNES after winning a battle you could just hear the music sticking on the win music and it's pretty obvious that's not what it's supposed to sound like. (I do remember participating in beta-testing the fan translation for that game, and I recall different versions of both ZSNES and SNES9x out at that time had game-crashing issues that were caused by sound emulation errors that were not because of the translation. Because there were reportedly many SNES games that would at least some point sync the game engine to the sound chip, so sound dying = whole game freezing)

I've heard that even on Wii VC, Nintendo didn't properly emulate the sound on SNES games but used some kind of workaround (playing samples, I guess recorded off an actual console)?
I remember some people ripped the Mother 2 ROM off the Japanese version of Brawl, and played it in an emulator and what remained of the sound was mostly random noises, since the game was no longer running with whatever patchery Nintendo was doing. I wonder if that's why it never got a Wii release anywhere?

@KingMike
I played Sailor Moon Another Story in high school on an emu but it seemed to run better on zsnes than it does on 9snes . It didn't have the glitching out opening text back then compared to now (though it could be a different ROM that I use now that was ripped improperly)

@GameOtaku This is going to be blunt, but it needs to be said.

There is a reason why folks who have worked on emulators have a better understanding of their limits than those who haven't worked on emulators and just assume they know what they are talking about. There really isn't anything new you could bring up regarding SNES emulation that folks who actually work on emulators haven't already thought about.

So basically Nintendo is saying that if you want to play 25 year old games legally you must buy a new console for about $300 instead of hiring Arika or M2 to get their games out to a larger audience they'd rather focus on the smaller group of people than the large audience the og 3ds and 2ds has?! If sega and m2 could put out classic games at a cheap price Nintendo doesn't have much excuse.

@GameOtaku It worked on ZSNES because both were broken. On a real console, you can't just write graphics (such as the text) whenever you feel like it. It can only be written during "VBlank" period (the time when the console is between frames). But before bsnes, emulators wouldn't enforce the write-protection, allowing flawed code to run. (such as one of my fan-translations, which I re-did the coding years later to make it work on newer emulators)

GameOtaku, I suggest reading these articles. You'll get a better grasp of the technical challenge in emulation and why accuracy matters.

http://samizdat.cc/shelf/archives/2005/01/back_to_the_cla.html

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

Chalk it up to Nintendo deciding that the regular 3DS hardware wasn't quite where it needed to be to meet their standards. Nobody expects you to like it and heck, you don't even have to accept that the job couldn't be satisfactorily done; But there's no reason to not believe that Nintendo didn't feel like the return was there to justify the extra effort to optimize it to the degree desired.

Nintendo isn't withholding SNES classics on the 3DS VC just to annoy you, nor are they foolish enough to think that Super Mario World and Link to the Past are New 3DS system sellers and temptation for millions of regular 3DS owners to upgrade. They're not cutting out millions of regular 3DS owners like myself just arbitrarily.

I've heard of a new Genesis homebrew that could serve as a benchmark for crazy-accuracy emulators. Overdrive 2, is it?
Supposedly it twists the hardware in ways it wasn't intended. Was there something about enabling a 128KB VRAM mode, despite that official consoles only have half that? I'd imagine if the hardware had been designed to allow such an upgrade, and maybe this homebrew dependent on whatever glitchy result occurs? (I do recall the "Blast Processing" term was a result of programmers doing something kinda screwey that only worked on certain models, and as such would've been a bad idea to market what the programmers were originally speaking.)

And an example of what sounds like extreme accuracy needed: games with possibly bad code that depends on hardware flukes... the Pinball Dreams trilogy for Game Boy (Dreams, Fantasies and EU-only Mania). Those all crash on emulators upon entering actual gameplay. I asked some people if there was anything special those games did, and it sounded like they just has really tight timing, or some other minute detail of the hardware that just happened to work on a real console. (Speedy Gonzales for SNES was one example.
Supposedly Spinderman: The Return of Sinister Six on Master System was another game with bad code that logically should've failed.)

According to Natsume, that was kinda similar to the case with Harvest Moon 64 (the devs basically brute forced their way in to make a messy code that somehow worked).

Glad to see it could be released on WiiU in the end though.

@GoneFishin
I think it's pretty stupid to turn away potential sales to millions of people who own the original 3ds and have no reason to upgrade to the new at this point especially with all new models being $150-200 since NoA is idiotic in only having xl models available for retail.

Honestly I've read what y'all have been linking me to but it simply doesn't make good common sense. Blaster Master Zero and Shovel Knight for example are in the same style as SNES games and games like Mario World and Link to the Past are 25 years old so by logic they should actually run better on newer, more powerful hardware.

You could make the argument that emu even in new 3ds is awful according to y'all, I'd be willing to bet too that some think SNES VC on WiiU is lacking. So it really does depend on the person. As I've never played most of the SNES library is be none the wiser as to how "accurate" it really is.

Which is why there's another reason rather than "business conspiracy" as to why they didn't release SNES games on the older 3DS SKUs. What you're saying doesn't make a lot of sense. So yeah, ask yourself that question. Why would Nintendo refuse to take your money as an owner of the non-new SKU of the 3DS? They're a business. They wouldn't refuse to sell something unless the quality was sub-par.

The non-XL SKUS didn't sell. They launched both SKUs of the New 3DS in Japan and Australia, the non-XL SKU sat on shelves. So how stupid of Nintendo to silently discontinue SKUs that didn't sell. By your rationale they would have been far better of mass producing SKUs people didn't want to buy. I'm glad you're not running the show at Nintendo, they'd be bankrupt in a week.

Emulation is not the same as running the game natively. Did you actually read any of what was linked?

Well no, it's not a subjective thing. Either a game can be emulated well while maintaining a solid framerate or it can't. The Wii U has several orders of magnitudes more power than the 3DS. It's not at all the same thing.