A Question for You about vNES / vGBX

[HeXstunner]

I can easily tell you because Jamie 7 the rest of us have been saying this since the day people began to constantly ask for vSNES.

Super NES consoles are much more complex than even Sega Genesis consoles; Super NES consoles use two microprocessors for program calculations instead of one (unlike the NES or Sega Genesis, for that matter; the NES uses one processor for program calculations & another for picture rendering, whereas the Genesis uses only one processor for everything).

To make matters worse, the Super NES' second processor is not on the console's motherboard, but inside the game cartridge itself. This opens the door for increased inconsistencies (such as the fact that SNESonline only has limited game support so far).

Because the Super NES uses two microprocessors to run 16-bit games, this means calculations are spread across two different chips & the stress of calculating events are evenly distributed; if you want to emulate this behavior using Java (which is a very horrible programming language for this,) you need to do a special speed-hack algorithm & better programming techniques (such as those HeXstunner mentioned in the Intelligent Discussion thread). This is ignoring the fact that one of the two virtual processors is actually found within the cartridge's ROM.

In short, it's slow because it's difficult to emulate the full technical capabilities of the Super NES in one simple shot. You can easily do this with an NES, Atari, Commodore or even a Genesis console, but it's not as easy with a Super NES. I'm very sure HeX can vouch for this.

I could not have said it better my-self, Yea, Hardware is one of the biggest problems and because of this it will be a while before i can emulate anything other then the SNES original hardware. Chips like FX will have to wait till i perfect the emulator. Also speed did not play a factor when i made this emulator because my only focused was to prove people wrong about writing a SNES emulator in Java. It may sound funny but when i first made it i was running way to fast. i had not put in a clock cycle and when i finally did put one in it slowed it down to a crawl. This is why i blame it on my programming MATH. Also I made this emulator in a rush and did not use Best Practice code so the code is very sloppy. This is why i have not released the code yet. i need to clean it up. I also need to transfer the Graphic part of the emulator to the Computer Graphic card. by doing so will speed up the emulator because it will no long just depend on the CPU and will use your PC Graphics card to render the graphics. No i will not be using DirectX but just what is available on your hardware system. I have a class to automatically detect your hardware and use what i can from it. this will keep the emulator Platform Independent.

I have not worked on the emulator since Sep 2009, this is when i decided to teach other people how to emulator and started to write a book in doing so. This is what i have been working on. This book will estimate about 800 pages and will try to teach all the Lingo and Source code on my oldest Emulator i have. It is one of my first emulator i wrote back when i was learning how to emulate. It is very basic but it will help people understand how to do this. When this book is done i will come back to the SNES and continue to work on that. Please be patient because at the present time, i am working alone on this and still looking to create a team to help with the work. This is where my book comes into play.

[goldblattster]

 What makes the Genesis more hard to emulate? Is it just its 16-bit ness, or something more?

[Rikimaru]

Anyways, the reason why people prefer Flash is speed, but the reason why people prefer Java is the fact that it's so much more powerful than Flash (in a practical sense).

 Flash is faster than Java? It is not. And this. There is a Java PSP emulator - jpcsp (but i suppose it is HLE).

[TechEmporium]

Yes; it's not only HLE, but it doesn't emulate the full hardware at the proper capacity (mainly because the console is a very recent console & that Java doesn't readily access hardware resources as well as C/C++/ASM can).

And thanks for informing me about my mistake about Flash & Java execution speed.

[goldblattster]

What does HLE mean?

[rnr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_emulation

[TechEmporium]

Compare this to Java; HeXstunner's SNESonline is an LLE emulator (it concentrates on low-level emulation to accurately run the console's CPU clock cycles & other functions) whereas JPCSP is an HLE emulator because it concentrates more on speed than accuracy.

The fact is that HLE compatibility is most effective on certain consoles that are as technically advanced as fifth generation consoles or older. Because the younger generation of consoles are more technically advanced, you'll run into major problems when you try to emulate them using strictly HLE or strictly LLE.

[HeXstunner]

yea, i do use LLE, i prefer it to HLE because i love the way games just naturally work when i run them for the very first time. dont full yourself though, i also put in a lot of game specific hacks. then little by little i remove them once i find the correct way of codding the emulator.

[Camo Yoshi]

Back when Snes9x was in it's early days there were TONS of SuperFX speed hacks since SuperFX emulation was very slow.

[Rikimaru]

yea, i do use LLE, i prefer it to HLE because i love the way games just naturally work when i run them for the very first time. dont full yourself though, i also put in a lot of game specific hacks. then little by little i remove them once i find the correct way of codding the emulator.

 I doubt SNES emu can be HLE. SNES did not have a lot of common libraries which games used. jpcsp emulates OS functions, which most games use.

[TechEmporium]

If you're trying to emulate a Super NES, you can use HLE (as a matter of fact, ZSNES uses HLE to emulate Super NES consoles, which explains one of two reasons that the DOS version doesn't work properly on any AT or XT computer).

Trust me; I've tried it on my Toshiba T1200 without success.