New desiccated SNES box?

[Näkemiin]

Hello

I am wishing to make up a desiccated SNES emulation system, but I have a many questions.

I am looking at getting a Mini or Nano ITX motherboard With a Efficeon 900mhz to 1200mhz or a Via C3 500 to 1300mhz or possibly hold out for the new C7 CPU. I would rather stay away from Intel chips but the Pentium M is also a option.

I have read the supplied infomation given with ZSNES but I was wanting to know in real world do you think any of those CPUs would be adequate? If so what would you think would be a realistic minimum? Also how much RAM would you suggest for sustained trouble free play?

I would like to use 5 genuine SNES controllers. At the moment I use the LPT port. But all the motherboard tend to not have LPT ports. I have seen those USB adapters. Is it possible to use 5 of them? If so is there any DIY guides on how to make them?

What OS would you recommend as well? I would like to make it boot strait in to the emulator and all it has to do is run the emulation. I have use Linux in the past and still have it running on a PC, but I am not exactly well versed with it.

Is ZSNES the best emulator for me as well? I would like to boot directly in to the emulator and if at all possible would love to use the snes pad to navigate the emulator. If there is a better emulator for me could you posible point me in the right direction.

Thank you for reading this, any help or advice would be most appreciated

Tom

[franpa]

a cyrix 600mhz and 700mhz are roughly equal to a 100mhz pentium 1.

i would say... get a celeron, pentium 3/4/m, or amd brand processor... because anything is better then a cyrix chip... thats why you cant buy them anymore because people soon relised how crap they are and returned them.... company went broke.

300mhz or faster processor and 64mb of ram (128mb for windows xp)

[Deathlike2]

Cyrix is really no more... VIA bought them out I believe. Even then, those processors are completely inferior. I'm not sure how good they are for ZSNES.. I just wouldn't touch them unless they were primarily used for surfing the web.

If you really are considering ZSNES for this project though.. the DOS version (however bad that sounds) does seem the most ideal.

The processor/memory is not a huge deal any Athlon or P3 with at least 500MHz (800Mhz to be safer) and a decent video card that supports VESA 2 would be nice..probably a Geforce 2/Radeon 8500 at least.

The sound card MUST be of the ISA variety though (well, the mobo as well).. preferably an SB16/32/64 (using a non-Creative/non-ISA sound card will prove very difficult as ZSNES's sound support is poor in DOS). RAM is probably not a factor in most cases.

If you must use Windows, sound card support is less of an issue (the SB16 is only needed for DOS specific support). Make sure to get a decent amount of RAM dependant of the OS (if you're using Win95, you won't have to worry about RAM as much say for WinXP, 2x the minimum requirement should be sufficient)

For the Linux box, ideally you want to use an NVidia card (better driver support).. I have no idea what the sound support is for certain sound cards and which cards are ideal for it... (someone else should be able to answer that question).

For the controller issue, you probably want to use the USB port instead of the LPT port..

http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?catego ... aid=304970

I'd think you need like two of them, one for port 1, one for the multiplayer adaptor (port 2-> 4 more controller ports if I recall correctly). You probably should have to the multiplayer adaptor to support the 5 player thing (though most games don't really need that many in the first place) unless you plan to get more USB adaptors for your other controllers.

Then again.. using USB excludes the use of DOS altogether.

[DataPath]

If you're willing to fork out cash, you can buy (for about $750) a Transmeta Efficeon TM8820 Reference Design Kit that uses even less power than the VIA, has better performance, and has an embedded SD card reader (edit: not so sure about the SD card reader - the documentation says "Secure Digital Card connector" and I don't see a slot for an actual reader anywhere), so that you could put DOS on a card, along with ZSNES, and some games, and it would boot practically instantly (the traditional hard drive route does still work, of course).

And to top it all off, you could probably run the thing for (my best estimate) ~10 hours on a laptop battery (using an SD card instead of a hard drive), which would be ideal because laptop batteries have about the same dimensions as the motherboard, so you could machine your own case for it and the whole thing would be about the size of two laptop batteries stacked on top of each other.

[Näkemiin]

Thank you for the replies

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The old Cyrix/Via chips had a half clock speed floating point unit, So if its a 600Mhz chip the floating point calculation unit is only running at 300Mhz. They old C3 also had no L2 cache and no SSE support.

The ones I was looking at are the newer ones that have full speed floating point calculations, 64kb of full speed onchip L2 cache, full SSE hardware support and a improved branch prediction.

I guess the newer ones are a lot better. But don’t know how that would relate to emulation performance.

They were getting around this on Sandra
PM 1400Mhz, ALU 6000MIPS, FPU 1900 MFLOPS, SSE2 2500 MFLOPS
P4 2000Mhz, ALU 5200 MIPS, FPU 1500 MFLOPS, SSE2 2700 MFLOPS
P3 1000Mhz, ALU 3400 MIPS, FPU 1300 MFLOPS, SSE2 N/A
MB8600, 1Ghz ALU 3200 MIPS, FPU 970 MFLOPS, SSE2 1600 MFLOPS (Transmeta Efficeon)
Duron 800Mhz, ALU 3300 MIPS, FPU 1266 MFLOPS, SSE2 N/A
C3 1000Mhz, ALU 1600 MIPS, FPU 370 MFLOPS, SSE2 N/A
PII 400Mhz, ALU 1100 MIPS, FPU 500 MFLOPS, SSE2 N/A
K6III 450Mhz, ALU 950 MIPS, FPU 530 MFLOPS, SSE2 N/A

Again however don’t really know how that will relate to the performance of a SNES emulator.

Does any one know whet extensions ZSNES can use? And whether it is floating point intensive or integer based primarily?

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I am a bit of a bomberman nut so minimum is 4 controllers really. 5 player would be nice as its what I have it set-up as right now. Those USB adapters look the answer. If I can use a normal SNES 5 player adapter and just use two of those USB adapters I could but the hole system inside a real SNES case.

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Very interesting concept there DataPath. I already have a Ipod HDD though that I was wishing to use. So am just going to use that and plug it in the mains.

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Does any one know how to setup the controller to navigate and pick games in ZSNES? Its probably really simple and I am just being bum or something like that.

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Thank for all the help

Tom

[Agozer]

Does any one know how to setup the controller to navigate and pick games in ZSNES? Its probably really simple and I am just being bum or something like that.

Enable Use Joypad1 in Misc --> GUI Options.

[Näkemiin]

Thank you Agozer

Tom

[AntoineWG]

I am wishing to make up a desiccated SNES emulation system

Desiccated? Just stuff your PC full of the little silica gel packets that you get when you buy a pair of shoes or some electronics. That should keep it dry!

Anyways, the floating point performance doesn't have a large impact on ZSNES' performance until you start enabling some of the sound and graphic filters. A Sempron or Athlon processor would do well and are generally less expensive than even a Celeron. The VIA/Cyrix processors are really best avoided. Pretty much anything faster than 1.5 GHz (1500+ from AMD) should do the trick and then some, though.

There's an option under the Misc menu to control the GUI with a controller, but a mouse really does work better.

You can get a notebook hard drive adaptor for about $10USD, but don't go leaving the computer on 24/7. The hard drives generally aren't designed for continuous operation.

I'm not sure if the USB parallel adaptors will work. Usually they don't have an IRQ and won't work. You may need to get a PCI card, but you don't need 5. There are plans out there to build a 5-controller SNES or PSX adaptor.

[Deathlike2]

I am wishing to make up a desiccated SNES emulation system

Desiccated? Just stuff your PC full of the little silica gel packts that you get when youbuy a pair of shoes or some electronics. That should keep it dry!

I'm pretty sure he meant dedicated, but it's still funny nonetheless.

[Näkemiin]

LOL sorry, its this MS word replacing words randomly :S

But thank you for the information. Its all helpful. I have trouble getting really small mother boards for AMDs. So its really only Transmeta, Via or Intel. May just get the Intel to be on the safe side.

Tom

[paulguy]

having a mouse actually wouldn't be a bad idea because, youknow, the snes DID have a mouse.

[adventure_of_link]

You can get a notebook hard drive adaptor for about $10USD, but don't go leaving the computer on 24/7. The hard drives generally aren't designed for continuous operation.

1. Heh, so much for the arguments of "start a motor, and it'll run forever" eh ?

and 2. So you're saying if I use my laptop for 3+ hours at a time, I will end up killing its hard drive ?

[Ichinisan]

You can get a notebook hard drive adaptor for about $10USD, but don't go leaving the computer on 24/7. The hard drives generally aren't designed for continuous operation.

1. Heh, so much for the arguments of "start a motor, and it'll run forever" eh ?

and 2. So you're saying if I use my laptop for 3+ hours at a time, I will end up killing its hard drive ?

I've known people who leave their laptops on 24/7 with AC power. I know them because I've had to replace their hard drives.

[adventure_of_link]

Wow...

And to think I was going to turn one of those OQO PC's into a fully functional Linux server...

Looks like I'd have to blow another $90 for another Seagate 80GB

[Deathlike2]

Wow...

And to think I was going to turn one of those OQO PC's into a fully functional Linux server...

Looks like I'd have to blow another $90 for another Seagate 80GB

OQO?

Hmm.. I wonder if I have to suggest to a friend with a laptop to use a desktop hd on his laptop instead... I presume that's possible?

[adventure_of_link]

Using Linux, as long as it's setup for external USB usage, it should work

Just look at the Damn Small Linux Pendrives

PS: www.oqo.com

I think we discussed these once before...

[Bahamut_ZERO_Clue]

Cyrix CPUs are not meant for workstation usage. Those CPUs are really for spacesaving, low power and heat, moderate usage Server units that have little space to begin with. They are roughly equal to 0.70x's the speed of a equally clocked Pentium and 0.35xs the speed of any AMD Athlon of equal speed.

[AntoineWG]

I'm not sure exactly where you are, but this may be helpful: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=1210&

I can attest to notebook hard drives not being designed for continuous on-time. My friend left his on for almost days while he was downloading some movies. After about 80 hours, it started making funny noises then crashed horribly. The notebook was fine, but the hard drive lived only long enough to copy the important data off of it.

[Deathlike2]

Using Linux, as long as it's setup for external USB usage, it should work

Just look at the Damn Small Linux Pendrives

PS: www.oqo.com

I think we discussed these once before...

Yea, I think we have too. Oh well. Just don't use a VIA processor though.. I wonder how the Transmeta ones hold up... probably not good at all I suspect because I haven't heard anything new about them.