The future of emulation? Is it possible with zsnes?

Hyllian · Post by **Hyllian** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:20 am

Hi, I'm new here and a big fan of zsnes.

I like many emulators and today I saw something that shocked me!

If you enter this link: http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?t ... ge=8&pp=15

You can see what I mean. Now it's possible to remake all textures in N64 games and run it on emulators. I think this is the future of emulation. Rice released today a version of his graphic plugin, which incorporates that functionality.

So, I was thinking about zsnes, I wonder if it's possible for zsnes to do the same thing?

It would be amazing and wonderful to see many snes classics remade in HiRes glory!

What do you think?

Noxious Ninja · Post by **Noxious Ninja** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:22 am

Doing with N64 emulation is actually pretty easy. Doing it with ZSNES would be vastly harder.

whicker · Post by **whicker** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:25 am

uhh, that's kind of different.

Sprites and 2D tile graphics are generally pretty clean looking. There's already HQ2X, etc. that do a pretty good job at estimating what a higher res drawing would look like.

The muddy and atrocious textures of the N64 days, however, could really use some upping and I am certainly going to try the plugin when I get the chance.

snkcube · Post by **snkcube** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 6:21 am

There's already a thread about this. http://board.zsnes.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2739

Hexlord · Post by **Hexlord** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 7:10 am

I am pretty satisfied with the picture quality.

The future of SNES emulation should be towards perfect emulation of the CPU, sound, and other hardware chips in the console itself.

All games = Playable. That's the ideal future.

kieran_ · Post by **kieran_** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 12:21 pm

Play your game in a DR mode. Everything becomes pretty.
I am sure that the same thing would happen with a HQxx feature, but my pc is way to slow to implenent these, so it DR all the way for me.

Nightcrawler · Post by **Nightcrawler** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 3:46 pm

That's a pretty interesting concept for N64 games. Nice innovative way to breath a bit of new life in those old games.

I agree with everyone else though, applying that to ZSNES would be quite different. The N64 is a 3D system.. so handling textures is much easier. With the SNES.. adding such a feature would be quite difficult and the filters are already in place for a similar effect.

Stifu · Post by **Stifu** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 6:16 pm

He posted that on the Kega forum as well...

Hyllian · Post by **Hyllian** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 6:57 pm

Stifu wrote:He posted that on the Kega forum as well...

Any objection?

Stifu · Post by **Stifu** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 7:20 pm

Hyllian wrote:
Stifu wrote:He posted that on the Kega forum as well...
Any objection?

I think it's useless and totally unadapted for 2D emulators and games... You don't seem to realize the amount of work it'd take either. If you really want to make MD and SNES games look better, remaking the games from scratch for PC (for instance) is probably easier and would give a better result... (if you had the required skills and the time)

No offense, but you kinda sound like a kid that got all excited about cool 3D stuff he saw about that N64 thingy, and thought it would be cool to have this thing applied to every video games he likes, but things don't work this way.

I'm quite happy with the filters we have...
Getting someone to rework the graphics of a game in a higher resolution would most likely end up making it look like a homebrew garbage hack, or something, in my opinion. That's just my point of view though...

Hyllian · Post by **Hyllian** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 9:47 pm

Stifu wrote: I think it's useless and totally unadapted for 2D emulators and games... You don't seem to realize the amount of work it'd take either. If you really want to make MD and SNES games look better, remaking the games from scratch for PC (for instance) is probably easier and would give a better result... (if you had the required skills and the time)

If I knew how hard it would be to acomplish this task, do you think I would be asking about it? You didn't understand that I asked it simply because I didn't know about it. It was just a question, not an order!!

No offense, but you kinda sound like a kid that got all excited about cool 3D stuff he saw about that N64 thingy, and thought it would be cool to have this thing applied to every video games he likes, but things don't work this way.

Useless comentary...

I'm quite happy with the filters we have...
Getting someone to rework the graphics of a game in a higher resolution would most likely end up making it look like a homebrew garbage hack, or something, in my opinion. That's just my point of view though...

Ok, we don't share the same opinion.

Stifu · Post by **Stifu** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 10:10 pm

You simply asked, I simply answered, no need to whine.

daft · Post by **daft** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 5:28 am

Bumped to demonstrate that implementing high-res sprite capability isn't pointless for sprite based gaming, as demonstrated in the following (in game) screenshot of Paper Mario 2 for N64.

This method is superior to using video filters to "enhance" low-res graphics due to the ability to add gradients and improved shading that wasn't previously there.

I have seen how this new feature has generated a lot of attention in N64 emulation. All of a sudden, hundreds of people are a lot more interested in playing the new high-res versions of N64 games. This would breathe a lot of life into SNES gaming. I'd help out in making high-res texture packs if support was added.

LobStar · Post by **LobStar** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 5:39 am

I didnt know they made a paper mario 2 for n64

anyway, N64 games use 3D style things to handle their graphics, and games NOT in 3D tend to be much hard to manage with that feature. granted, its a nice thought, very few if anyone owuld be willing to redo an SNES game, especuially when there so little benefit for it. The huge amounts of work required would be incredible as well...And what about translation patches or hacks? The graphics wouldnt work right then if things moved and expanded, not to mention having to dump those textures since EVERYthing on the SNES is pretty much a texture anyway. Think of the poor vram hehanywa... neat idea, not to easy and efficant to do, and not worth the time. Time spent coding this is better spent correcting the timing and such. However, if you think differently, fire up cvs.exe and have a go : ) just dont rely on someone else to implemnt such a pointless feature...

Reznor007 · Post by **Reznor007** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 6:44 am

Doing it with a 3d system like N64 is easy, since the game itself only really sees the geometry data, the rasterizer is what does the final texture stuff, so it is tivial really to replace the N64 texture with a different one. On a 2d tilemap/sprite system, the game knows what is in every pixel.

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 6:57 am

daft wrote:
I have seen how this new feature has generated a lot of attention in N64 emulation. All of a sudden, hundreds of people are a lot more interested in playing the new high-res versions of N64 games. This would breathe a lot of life into SNES gaming. I'd help out in making high-res texture packs if support was added.

no emulator that is emulating hardware that has no 3d-acceleration will be able to do this reasonably; take for example snes emulation. Its possible to have the emulator subsitute a game's 8 bit tiles for larger ones of the same colour depth, but you would need to do them all, and suffer a incredible performance hit as the emulator would need to do all the fancy PPU effects on more data. If you want 32-bit textures, you'd be better off rebuilding the game from scratch.

In short, trying to get zsnes, or snes9x to do this is a fruitless endeavor.

Gospel · Post by **Gospel** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 6:20 pm

Rice has created a monster.

FirebrandX · Post by **FirebrandX** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 9:56 pm

Edit nvm

Esturk · Post by **Esturk** » Sat Apr 23, 2005 12:37 am

Hexlord wrote:I am pretty satisfied with the picture quality.

The future of SNES emulation should be towards perfect emulation of the CPU, sound, and other hardware chips in the console itself.

All games = Playable. That's the ideal future.

I agree with you 100%. In my opinion that is the case for all emulators.

Neo Kaiser · Post by **Neo Kaiser** » Sat Apr 23, 2005 1:18 am

Anyway will this new feature can slow down an N64 emulator?

Breadfan · Post by **Breadfan** » Sat Apr 23, 2005 2:24 am

The emulator relies on plugins for all the rendering... So, since this feature is exclusive to the Rice plugin, I can only assume that its optimised for the task...
Hardware and texture memory would be responsible for most of the slowdowns, I would imagine. I, personaly haven't experienced slowdowns, but if you have an old card, then it would be expected.

Neo Kaiser · Post by **Neo Kaiser** » Sat Apr 23, 2005 10:50 pm

The plugin refuses to allow me tu use texture options. I guess that my G-Force 2 MX is to weak to use those options.

Breadfan · Post by **Breadfan** » Sun Apr 24, 2005 7:47 am

Have you disabled the option 'Hide advanced options' under the 'General' tab.

xamenus · Post by **xamenus** » Sun Apr 24, 2005 4:06 pm

Esturk wrote:
Hexlord wrote:I am pretty satisfied with the picture quality.

The future of SNES emulation should be towards perfect emulation of the CPU, sound, and other hardware chips in the console itself.

All games = Playable. That's the ideal future.
I agree with you 100%. In my opinion that is the case for all emulators.

Jikmo · Post by **Jikmo** » Sun Apr 24, 2005 4:43 pm

it'd be possible, but it would probably be pretty slow, and it'd look very... odd

but you can be sure someone will put the option in snes9x, and then people will be begging to have the option in zsnes

right now im just waiting for the option to be implemented in a psx plugin.