Home Page Forums MAME MAME The SNES WIP topic

True, ZSNES gets destroyed with any games that use streaming HDMA audio.

Earthworm Jim 2 (sound effects)
Clayfighters: TE?
Breath of Fire 2 [T-German]
N-warp Daisakusen [PD]

And so on. Test those in MESS if you want to have some fun =)

My feelings are pretty simple: we have 3 (THREE!) features missing from the video emulation and we want to nuke everything? Please...I find it pointless and a real waste of time rather than "my feelings are hurted on it". It's not like, let's say, the old Sega System 16 emulation that was full of crap from the top of the header file to the eof bit, there is something actually good that is (let's say the things plain and simple) ruined by the current g65816 core.
Start by hooking it up something that has a better timing...er, that actually has a timing than now then we'll talk again if the video emulation is good or bad.

mmm... let me state this clearly before I get misunderstood: if someone else shows up today with a brand new implementation which does not break anything and adds the missing features, I would have no problem to throw everything away.

is this likely to happen? no (among other reasons, people interested in fixing the MESS code are already working on it )

if it would depend only on me, otoh, I would simply try to rewrite the more deeper level of the rendering to directly handle pixel positions (not sure how to do it with the current code) since it is needed by OPT.

my first attempt went bad, and I'm currently a bit more interested in NES than SNES. but I'll try again as soon as I have enough spare time to spend on it

eta: NES needs more work than SNES at the moment anyway

Actually, yes. Those 3 features are big and involved and will probably involve major rewrites of the code anyway. And secondly, we fail on a lot of subtle/buggy hardware behaviors (e.g. tile number wrapping for sprites). If we adopt byuu's code all of that goes away and we never have to worry about it again. We can instead spend more time avoiding fixing the CPU timing

About NES: I'm currently listing regressions compared to 0.130 (just a couple that I can see and one of them, the crash in Lagrange Point, has already been fixed locally) and other crashes/freezes which were occurring also in the past

After that, I plan to add a bit of info I collected in the past on mappers [1] (both the supported and the unsupported ones) and to try my luck with adding a few more mappers for chinese bootlegs

[1] I've always been disappointed by the lack of info on most of the mappers. either you check the source of other emus (Nestopia and FCEUMM) or you are on your own... hopefully, MESS source could be a good place to store some of the info

I tell you the truth: I've got the mosaic effect to work a lot better at some point, but I've nuked the code because it was affecting sprites too (likely an implementation flaw).
I repeat it, I just need good plans for all of three and nothing else (and the OBJ flag requires decent timing anyway). If you want to take byuu's code and copycat it, fine and no problem, just don't count on me on doing so.

Let me express my humble, no-emulator-programmer, personal point of view about this 'heated' SNES topic...

Kale and JD have a good point in this discussion because they are the current SNES driver developers, and they are doing lots of improvements to it, spending their spare time to try to fix the whole thing instead of saying what should be done from today forward.

Byuu did a great work with BSNES and was kind enough to open his source code to be used in MESS. He seems to be the most 'SNES knowledged' person here, though, he's been working more as an advisor and I don't think he will have motivation to port his entire code inside MESS by himself because he has his own emulator already.

To other people I don't have much left to say. I just think that if someone else is not happy enough with the current code, put yourself to the test and rewrite this driver from scratch (based on Byuu's code or not) and see if it gets better than the current one. If it shows better results, then replace the current code and nobody will be bothered or harmed in any way.

And pleeeeeease, remember that this is only a personal opinion based on things I've read in this topic. I don't have the power to criticize anyone in this project and this is not the idea

Certainly I don't mean to force my code on you if you don't want it. I actually lose my reference license if you guys use it in MESS, and bsnes becomes less competitive, so I have nothing to gain. I was merely offering in case you were frustrated with working on the SNEeSe-based one now.

It's your baby, and we're grateful for your work regardless of how you go about improving it.


Indeed. Did you know that sprites at X=256 count all tiles in RTO? That's a hardware bug that is required for Super Conflict's title screen to show up properly. And if sprite size=16x32 (mode 6) with OAM big-sprites disabled and OAM interlace enabled, the height is chopped in half to 16x16. It took a lot of time to find all that crazy shit


I have a very hard time with code I didn't write. MESS in particular, I've still yet to even find which file handles $2100-213f writes.

If Kale wants to fix all of the known and unknown problems and is confident he can it's his time and he's welcome to do it. I just thought it'd make sense to bypass the graphics entirely and work on the more interesting issues and/or more X1 variants or whatever