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Games Entertainment

Whatever Happened To SNES Emulators For The Playstation? 13

Posted by Cliff from the anxiously-awaiting-vapour dept.
Kyudosha asks: "With the recent emergence of some of these high-quality SNES emulators for Dreamcast, I find myself wondering about those emulators that aimed to do the same thing for the PSX. I seem to remember a few... what happened to them? The PSX has good hardware, it should be able to handle SNES emulation, shouldn't it? Plus, with the advent of some of these compilers for the PSX, wouldn't it be easier to port, say, SNES9x to to the PSX?"
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Whatever Happened to SNES Emulators for the Playstation? More

Whatever Happened to SNES Emulators for the Playstation?

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  • ...from most pawnbrokers and second hand-ish places like swapmeets ("trash 'n treasure"). That's what I've been doing. However, the top accessory on this page [shadowgames.com] is some sort of emulator plug-in for the PSX. There's an FAQ for it here [emusphere.com]. There's a NES emulator or two listed at [emusphere.com]that site [emusphere.com] too. But again, I strongly recommend that you actually obtain the original hardware, it's much more fun.
  • Nice try, but that device doesn't provide SNES emulation.

    Based on the discussions in the newsgroups, SNES emulation on the PSX is marginal if it's possible at all due to the slow CPU in the PSX.

  • Emulators have several advantages over real hardware:

    Emulators are software, and software is often free.

    If you want to play games from a bunch of different consoles, then you have to either manually switch your connections around all the time or buy an extra a/v switch. (I only have one input on my receiver available for a game console.)

    When you start getting a number of different consoles, you get quite a bit of clutter.

    If you have to manually change connections or unpack each console, odds are you'll find yourself not bothering very often--you may well find that you get more use out of older games with an emulator.

    Of course, you have the obvious disadvantages: Different feel of the controllers and imperfections in the emulation.
  • As so many others have pointed out, the playstation 1 is vastly underpowered to handle emulation of SNES. However, what about the playstation 2 ? From what I know about its specs, it should have no problem emulating an SNES. And also, if there were projects begun to develop SNES emulators for the playstation 1, perhaps they should be continued on the new playstation 2 platform .

    Question: If the playstation 2 can play playstation 1 games, does it do so in such a restricted environment (like 2mb of ram, limited processing power), or would it allow more extended use of the hardware? Why I'm asking, is that if there was a SNES emulator for the playstation 1 that wasn't fast enough, would it possibly be usable on the PS2?
  • Emulators are software, and software is often free.
    Okay, that's a crap arguement. Software is rarely free. Most emulators are shareware. That is not free, not even free as in speech. What's more you can pickup old consoles for next to nothing. A$12-15 will get you a SNES. I picked up Micromachines for the SNES for A$8 last weekend.
    ...manually switch your connections...
    Most old consoles use RF passthrough boxes. You can chain them all through the one coax cable and tune your TV (or whatever) accordingly.
  • Hey Toodles, nice flame. Eat me. My MAIN question was if it had been DONE already. I became fast aware of the limitations of the system. My main question was about those defunct projects and whether or not they got anywhere. Insofar as memory limitations and speed limitations, I am considering an attempt to port limited titles opcode by opcode to the PSX to see if it can be done reliably. MY suggestion to YOU is that YOU should get down off of your soapbox and just go code. -K
  • In most emulators though, you can save wherever you want, you don't have to spend money on the console (there are plenty of emulators that aren't shareware), and sometimes in newer emulators you actually get a higher quality game. Snes9x for example can take advantage of OpenGL and Glide to help smooth out the picture. Not only that, but most emulators have features for Action Replay, Gameshark, GameGenie, Goldfinger etc., on a normal system, it's not possible to have different codes from all three of those at once.
  • Not exactly on-topic, but there has been a release of an emulator called "Sintendo" for the Dreamcast which, AFAIK, is a port of SNES9X.

    You can find it's homepage here: http://sintendo.dcwarez.com/ [dcwarez.com]

    Works pretty good, some games run a little slow, but then it's still in a very early release phase.

  • The PSX only has 2 megs of video ram, and 1 meg system. That is not enough room for most games.

    And the CPU is also not fast enough, hell, even the Dreamcast emulators are no where near a decent playable (i've tried them).
  • IIRC, Final Fantasy Anthology is effectively an emulator and a couple of SNES roms. I suppose theoretically you could change the roms on the disc for your preferred roms, but I don't know how much of the SNES functionality is emulated, or if it is just enough to run the games on the disc.
  • IIRC, the Playstation 2 doesn't "emulate" the Playstation 1. I believe that the IO controller is the same CPU (running at the same speed) as the Playstation 1. They included the 2MB of memory onto that controller to make it seem like an actual playstation.

    That is why you don't see any improvement in the frame rates of your favorite PSX game when you play it on a PS2.

  • Dreaming. Just....dreaming (Score:3)

    by Toodles ( 60042 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @12:10AM (#497475) Homepage
    Nope. Uh-uh. Not gonna happen.


    The PSX is a 6 year old console, with the main processor being a 33MHz MIPS r3300a. The SNES had a much slower 16 bit processor (I don't recall the MHz, but has an example, the SuperFX chip found in some of the later games, such as Doom and Starfox, ran at 16Mhz.), that, just for the sake of arguement so we have some numbers, ran at 8Mhz. That gives us 4 opcodes for each 1 opcode of original SNES bytecode to update the registers, access the emulated memory, and/or call the appropriate BIOS function to place a pixel/sprite/soundbyte. If you had done any kind of research before asking a wetdream question like this, you would see that this is not going to happen. You cannot expect the PSX to be capable of anything that a 486 33Mhz cannot do. Now that we have the speed out of the way, let's check memory.


    Emulators themselves are very small compared to the size of the ROM's they play. For example, my copy of snes9x for linux weighs in at 1.2 meg. The PSX has 2 megs of RAM (a little less than than actually available though, due to 64k lost to BIOS caching) leaving us not very much to play with; about 756k or so. SNES roms are exponents of 2 in size. Some, very very few, but some can weight in at 512k needed to fit. But, you don't give the impression of someone who cares about emulation for the same of emulation/education/history/etc. You just wanna play the games, right? Final Fantasy 3 = 3 megs. Zipped. Roms for the SNES are mostly 2 megs and up, making emulation on the PSX a pipe dream.


    One of the biggest problems I see with the emulation and console dev scene today are the 'Hey, how about' people littering, loitering, and otherwise not providing anything constructive to the people who actually care about it. We don't need ideas; knowing about the actuall systems involved, we have had more ideas before we even took the screws off the casing than you had since you bought the console. Yes, MAME would be a cool port. Snes9x would be a cool port, FreeAMP would be a cool port...We already have thought about it, and those that care have already begun working themselves on those pieces of software. Both scenes are littered with tons of people constantly emailing saying "Hey, I can't code myself, but I had this great idea..." Wasting our time, and losing our respect.


    Now, what *SHOULD* be done is this. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and decide YOU want to do this. YOU want to code. YOU want to make SNES emu a reality on (insert console). YOU should be asking "Hey, Im new to coding on this console, but I really want to port SNES9x to the PSX. I'm aware of the limitations such as speed and memory, but Im looking for any advice the group may have on #1 getting started on console dev and #2 ideas on how I might get around these limitations" Then you will get some positive responses. For example, to get around the memory limitation, how about redirecting memory access to the ROM to the actual rom on cd? Yes, it will slow things down. For the speed issue, how about very high level emulation instead of low level? Frameskip? Coding the cpu core in ASM? DYnamic recompilation? For PSX development in general, check out all of the sites that have been up forever and a day, such as http://napalm.intelinet.com http://start.at/loser-psx http://consoledev.com and, for the Linux PSX hacker,
    http://psxdev.de


    The emualtion and console dev 'scene' is not for people who expect things to be handed to them. Its for the people who want to do it themselves. If you aren't willing to try it yourself, don't whine when someone won't do it for you.


    Side note: NES (NOT snes, nes) emulator was released a while back for the PSX. Speed was roughly 5% of the original NES, with full frameskip and no sound.


    Toodles

  • Aw. That hurts. It really does. (T_T)

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