Homebrew SNES9x for Old 3DS

[RupeeClock]

I was amazed to see this running Starfox and Super Mario RPG so well, that's for sure.
On my N3DS, they seem to run flawlessly from the brief time I tried them out.

Out of curiosity, I decided to try running the SNES Test Program on v1.0b, and whilst it passed the Electronics Test, it has issues on three instances of the Character Test.
For comparison, I tested against Snes9x 1.54.1 on Windows.

Spoiler: Results

The main menu fills the overscan area, whilst the character test does not use it. For some reason, the blue 16px bottom area of the main menu persists during the character test.

During this step, the array of Super Star sprites is supposed to have a gap which moves horizontally. On Snes9x for Old 3DS v1.0b, it does not display this gap as it should.

During this step, the image shown should start off mosaic pixelated, then enhance to reveal the unobscured image. Snes9x for Old 3DS v1.0b does not appear to be able of mosaic effects, such as screen transitions in some areas of Super Mario World.

During this step, the SNES should switch to a hi-res mode and display many Service Marios in two particular layouts. For some reason, Snes9x for Old3DS v1.0b displays only a single permutation in an oddly cut up and mangled fashion. Odder yet is that before this is another hi-res mode test using Super Star sprites moving across the screen at different scales, which is not an issue.

Maybe the odd hi-res quirks are a result of the fixes for games like Kirby's Dreamland 3, but I doubt it. It looks more like a tiling issue. I don't know what sort of games that might affect.
The mosaic effect issue is a broader issue though as a great deal of SNES games use it.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Seems to work fine on all the games I already had. As I recall, there used to be issues with Space Megaforce's intro, but that doesn't seem to be a problem now.

 

[Cid2mizard]

In version 0.71, you have included a new icon, in version 0.80 the icon has already disappeared :/

 

[DiscostewSM]

I was amazed to see this running Starfox and Super Mario RPG so well, that's for sure.
On my N3DS, they seem to run flawlessly from the brief time I tried them out.

Out of curiosity, I decided to try running the SNES Test Program on v1.0b, and whilst it passed the Electronics Test, it has issues on three instances of the Character Test.
For comparison, I tested against Snes9x 1.54.1 on Windows.

Spoiler: Results

The main menu fills the overscan area, whilst the character test does not use it. For some reason, the blue 16px bottom area of the main menu persists during the character test.

During this step, the array of Super Star sprites is supposed to have a gap which moves horizontally. On Snes9x for Old 3DS v1.0b, it does not display this gap as it should.

During this step, the image shown should start off mosaic pixelated, then enhance to reveal the unobscured image. Snes9x for Old 3DS v1.0b does not appear to be able of mosaic effects, such as screen transitions in some areas of Super Mario World.

During this step, the SNES should switch to a hi-res mode and display many Service Marios in two particular layouts. For some reason, Snes9x for Old3DS v1.0b displays only a single permutation in an oddly cut up and mangled fashion. Odder yet is that before this is another hi-res mode test using Super Star sprites moving across the screen at different scales, which is not an issue.

Maybe the odd hi-res quirks are a result of the fixes for games like Kirby's Dreamland 3, but I doubt it. It looks more like a tiling issue. I don't know what sort of games that might affect.
The mosaic effect issue is a broader issue though as a great deal of SNES games use it.

The sprite issue may be a result of speeding up sprite rendering. Before, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, the emulator initially rendered sprites per scanline and could mimic the effect. On the original hardware, there are only so many sprite cycles/pixels per scanline, so once it hit its limit, it would reject any more. What you see on the original hardware is not sprites being turned off and on, but the result of hitting the limit because the hardware is designating a different sprite to be the "first" sprite. This is why on many games you'd see sprite tearing/flicking. So this was handled in early builds, but the number of calls to do this were up to 32x224 or 32x239 (as 256 is the cycle limit, and with sprite blocks being 8 pixels wide would make 32 blocks), causing some undesirable slowdown. When the speed up occurred, it disregarded handling by scanline, and went full out with doing up to 128 sprites for the full screen. So no limit checking is done, and all sprites on-screen are shown, hence why there's no gap.

Mosaic, or lack thereof, is an an issue with the 3D hardware because it doesn't have such a function. It would be doable with a pixel/fragment shader, but the 3DS doesn't have a programmable one.

 

[Canzah]

Seems like what you want is only for the width to be stretched, but the final height to be retained as the original. Now, if you select 4:3 the final rendered output is always 320x240 - you can tell because the top screen looks about the same width as the bottom screen. Your method is likely to look better, so I'm willing to try to this.

Aye, that's what I'm suggesting, and it's what the PC version of SNES9x 1.53 does in fact if you use Window Size x1. All in all I do indeed think my suggestion will most likely look better since you'll only be stretching pixels horizontally rather than in addition doing so vertically thus creating extra unnecessary blurring like it does now. Pretty sure SNES VC also only stretches horizontally into the 4:3 aspect ratio without doing any vertical stretching, hope you can iron it out

 

[gladiac1337]

Hi @bubble2k16 and all the other gbatempers,
I am not sure if I am a fan of the new Arial font change (github: 2e4b14b) because it is not as sharp as the old one was. It looks quite washed-out. What do you guys think? I kinda liked the old font
cheers, glad

 

[Instandhaltung]

I am not sure if I am a fan of the new Arial font change (github: 2e4b14b) because it is not as sharp as the old one was. It looks quite washed-out.

I'm with you!

 

[ArtemisM]

I hate to say anything negative against this project, but the arial font is kinda...yeahhh :/

 

[RupeeClock]

I'll admit the change in font wasn't all that great either, I was actually quite enjoying the bitmap font with no smoothing.
If you wanna try a different font, maybe try Droid Sans?
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Droid+Sans
Don't forget to include the license somewhere in the release, like a readme or a screen on the interface.

 

[kenseiden]

...I think I must be the only one who likes the new font.

 

[RusN]

can anyone compare it with pocketsnes ? Is snes9x playing 60fps flawlessly ?
Edit I tried it and here is the results:
Super Mario Kart
PSNES = 40 FPS wo/sounds SNES9X = 60 FPS w/sounds
Sunset Riders
PSNES = 35-40 FPS wo/sounds SNES9X = 60 FPS w/sounds

 

[Knight of Time]

Alright guys, I was playing Kirby Super Star lately, and while the speed is pretty good with it, I ran into some colour issues, as shown in the attached screenshots.

Any chance that they would be fixable in a future release? I'm crossing my fingers that the colour issues can be fixed without too much difficulty.

 

[kenseiden]

Alright guys, I was playing Kirby Super Star lately, and while the speed is pretty good with it, I ran into some colour issues, as shown in the attached screenshots.

Any chance that they would be fixable in a future release? I'm crossing my fingers that the colour issues can be fixed without too much difficulty.

Did you try adjusting the In-Frame Palette Changes option?

 

[RupeeClock]

@Knight of Time There is already a fix for this in the options.
You need to set In-Frame Palette Changes to Enabled (more accurate, slower).

Also, use the most recently nightly if you aren't.
https://github.com/bubble2k16/snes9x_3ds/blob/master/snes9x_3ds.cia

 

[Canzah]

Some more suggestions on improving the 4:3 mode, I'll be using a 224p game for the take of explaining.
Using the latest nightly, with the uncropped 4:3 option and the game being tested is Fire Emblem 4.

This is what it looks like on a 3DS with the 4:3 uncropped enabled:

And here's two screenshots from the PC version of SNES9x with 4:3 aspect ratio being kept (naturally all kinds of filters such as blinear etc are turned off) superimposed on the 3DS SNES9x viewspace:
First one is like I said, without any kind of filters or anything, basically what it actually should be looking like on 3DS in the uncropped 4:3 option, unblended pixels aside:

And here's another screen of PC version, but with the pixellate shader applied on top, otherwise identical to the one above:

As you can see, no matter if you use the pixellate shader or not on PC, it still ends up better and sharper looking than what we currently get on the 3DS.
Furthermore the aspect ratio is wrong though I assume that will hopefully be fixed as I mentioned the proper resolution values before.
The reason I'm posting this is to hopefully improve the 4:3 scaling to get a sharper image than we have right now, and if it wouldn't be too taxing on the 3DS maybe even implement the pixellate shader.
What pixellate does is as follows:
"This shader is supposed to appear the same as nearest neighbor (aka "unfiltered"), except with minor corrections when using a non-integer scale that are increasingly less noticeable the higher it is scaled. This shader is very useful to anyone who wants to keep things as sharp as possible without worrying about scale factors"
You can get the shader here: https://u.nya.is/khgidf.cg

I actually also took a screenshot with blinear filter instead of pixellate and while the difference is minimal, blinear does come out slightly blurrier than pixellate:

This is all just suggestions but anything that could get the 4:3 modes sharper than they currently are would definitely help a ton.

 

[ArtemisM]

^ Genealogy of the Holy War is the shiz, just saying

 

[Helix Fossil]

I'm not sure if this is what is considered the mosaic effect, but there are some levels in Dreamland 3 that are nigh impossible to beat because areas that should be translucent (water, forest leaves, etc.) are solid colors instead. Is there any way to fix this?

 

[Canzah]

I'm not sure if this is what is considered the mosaic effect, but there are some levels in Dreamland 3 that are nigh impossible to beat because areas that should be translucent (water, forest leaves, etc.) are solid colors instead. Is there any way to fix this?

Please read the last 3 or so pages of the thread.

 

[Instandhaltung]

I'm not sure if this is what is considered the mosaic effect, but there are some levels in Dreamland 3 that are nigh impossible to beat because areas that should be translucent (water, forest leaves, etc.) are solid colors instead. Is there any way to fix this?

Please download the newest nightly:
https://github.com/bubble2k16/snes9x_3ds/blob/master/snes9x_3ds.cia

By the way, this problem was addressed during the last pages of this thread. I encourage you to read the threads in the future :-)

 

[Helix Fossil]

Ah, wonderful. Sorry for the lack of attention on my part.