Snes9x
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Snes9x is a popular cross-platform emulator for the SNES. Initially the collaborative effort of Gary Henderson of snes96 fame and Jerremy Koot of snes97 fame, Snes9x is now maintained by Matthew Kendora and Brad Jorsch.
Snes9x has several capabilities which its Super Famicom and Super Nintendo counterparts did not have; it can "smooth" the appearance of the screen through a variety of anti-aliasing schemes, and it has a better quality of sound output than the original console systems. In addition, it can create screenshots of games, it can "save" the game at any point by recording the game state, and it can capture sound files, saving them as SPC700 sound format files which can be read by an external player or a specialized Winamp plugin, such as Alpha-II SPC player. SPC700 sound format actually sounds more realistic in Snes9x than on the actual Super Famicom or SNES console. Also included is a built-in Game Genie, which allows users to enter cheat codes for their games, and the ability to record tool-assisted speedruns.
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Current status of emulation
The latest full version of Snes9x is version 1.43, released on the 1st January 2005.
The following lists were taken from the readme.txt of version 1.43 (WIP1), released in June 2004.
What's Emulated?
- The 65c816 main CPU. - The Sony SPC700 sound CPU. - SNES variable length machine cycles. - 8 channel DMA and H-DMA (raster effects). - All background modes, 0 to 7. - Sound DSP, with eight 16-bit, stereo channels, compressed samples, hardware attack-decay-sustain-release volume processing, echo, pitch modulation and digital FIR sound filter. - 8x8, 16x8 and 16x16 tile sizes, flipped in either direction. - 32x32, 32x64, 64x32 and 64x64 screen tile sizes. - H-IRQ, V-IRQ and NMI. - Mode 7 screen rotation, scaling and screen flipping. - Vertical offset-per-tile in modes 2, and 4. - Horizontal offset-per-tile in modes 2, 4 and 6. - 256x224, 256x239, 512x224, 512x239, 512x448 and 512x478 SNES screen resolutions. - Sub-screen and fixed colour blending effects. - Mosaic effect. - Single and dual graphic clip windows, with all four logic combination modes. - Colour blending effects only inside or outside a window. - 128 8x8, 16x16, 32x32 or 64x64 sprites, flipped in either direction. - SNES palette changes during frame (15/16-bit internal rendering only). - Direct colour mode - uses tile and palette-group data directly as RGB value. - Super FX, a 21/10MHz RISC CPU found in the cartridge of several games. - S-DD1, a data decompression chip used only in Star Ocean and Street Fighter 2 Alpha. The compression algorithm is integrated into Snes9x, but you may still use the old graphics pack cheat as a speed boost. - SPC7110, similar in use to S-DD1, but the algorithm is still unknown. - S-RTC, a real-time clock chip. Dai Kaijyu Monogatari II is the only game that uses it. - SA-1, a faster version of CPU found in the main SNES unit together with some custom game-accelerator hardware. - C4, a custom Capcom chip used only in Megaman X2 and X3. It’s a sprite scaler/ rotator/line drawer/simple maths co-processor chip used to enhance some in-game effects. - OBC1 is a sprite management chip. Metal combat is the only game to use this. - Greater DSP-1 support, enough that all games should load, but some may have graphical glitches. - DSP-2 support. Only used in Dungeon Master - DSP-4 partial support. Top Gear 3000 goes in game but still very glitchy - SNES mouse. - SuperScope (light gun) emulated using computer mouse. - Multi-player 5 - allowing up to five people to play games simultaneously on games that support that many players. - Game-Genie and Action Replay cheat codes. - Multiple ROM image formats, with or without a 512 byte copier header. - Single or split images, compressed using zip and gzip, and interleaved in one of two ways. - Auto S-RAM (battery backed RAM) loading and saving. - Freeze-game support, now portable between different Snes9x ports. - Interpolated sound. - Justifier support. Konami's Justifier is similar to the Super Scope and used in Lethal Enforcers - Seta-10 CPU (ST010). This is used F1 Race of Champions 2
What's Not?
- DSP-1 support not complete, enough to play Mario Kart, Pilotwings and many others. All DSP-1 games should boot, but may display graphical errors. - Any other odd chips that manufactures sometimes placed inside the cartridge to enhance games and as a nice side-effect, also act as an anti-piracy measure. (DSP-3, DSP-4, SETA 11 and SETA 18, as examples) - Pseudo hi-res. mode - SNES hardware uses interpolation to give apparent increase in horizontal resolution, which is only partially emulated. - Mosaic effect on mode 7. - A couple of SPC700 instructions that I can't work exactly out what they should do. - Fixed colour and mosaic effects in SNES hi-res. (512x448) modes. - Offset-per-tile in mode 6. Luckily I haven't found a game that uses it, yet. - The expansion slot found in many carts.
On a sidenote, Snes9x was also the first SNES emulator to feature emulation of the SDD-1 chip used in, among other games, Star Ocean.
It should also be noted that the FAQ document bundled with the Windows port may be one of the more amusing, if not overly verbose, FAQs on the net.
External link
- Snes9x.com (http://www.snes9x.com/)
- Snes9x on IRC (http://www.snes9x.com/IRC/snes9x_irc.html) (java-based applet)