Snes9X 1.42 wip

clessoulis · Post by **clessoulis** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 7:23 am

Does anyone know why no matter what resolution I put snes9x in it has a black board at the bottom of the screen? Also does snes9x 1.5 the one that theres no windows build of yet support HQ4?

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 7:44 am

Snes9x 1.42??? WTF??? You do mean Snes9x 1.502.. I hope.

The black board is probably because you may have checked the "Extend Height" option.

Also, I think HQ4x wasn't included due to performance reasons.. but that's only my guess. Remember that HQ4x runs extrodinarily well when using compiler processor optimizations (yay archopt). On the other hand, we use an ASM optimized version.. whereas Snes9x probably uses a C/C++ version... Yes.. ASM still good for speed increases.

Nightcrawler · Post by **Nightcrawler** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:10 pm

1.43 is STILL the latest version for Windows. Remember, they can't update their Windows port anymore..

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 5:43 pm

Nightcrawler wrote:1.43 is STILL the latest version for Windows. Remember, they can't update their Windows port anymore..

where the hell have you been?

clessoulis · Post by **clessoulis** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 6:13 pm

Wtf cant they update there windows port anymore?

Also i'd use zsnes but zsnes is so dated in resolution option. My moniter goes up to 1680x1050 so using a 4:3 resolution stinks first off.

Jipcy · Post by **Jipcy** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 6:42 pm

clessoulis wrote:Also i'd use zsnes but zsnes is so dated in resolution option. My moniter goes up to 1680x1050 so using a 4:3 resolution stinks first off.

Wow.

clessoulis · Post by **clessoulis** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 7:13 pm

Dear lord thank you. Custom resolution is amazing

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 7:44 pm

funkyass wrote:
Nightcrawler wrote:1.43 is STILL the latest version for Windows. Remember, they can't update their Windows port anymore..
where the hell have you been?

Pray it's sarcasm. Seriously, 1.51 for all ports (including Windows) will be official sooner or later... 1.502 for Windows users right now

clessoulis wrote:Dear lord thank you. Custom resolution is amazing

Yes... especially when this was implemented in the last May WIP.... support (GUI options) has improved since then anyhow.

Nightcrawler · Post by **Nightcrawler** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 2:57 pm

have here a Windows port of Snes9x 1.5, which also has a bunch of problems fixed (of previous Windows versions), and has a few other improvements made to it.

Note: This version (1.502) is not an official release.

There is NO official release as far as I know beyond 1.42 for Windows. Therefore, isn't my statement true? Why would you expect people to be using a non official release and roll your eyes if they are not?

Not to mention, why does the SNES9x website suck even more than ZSNES as far as being several years out of date? There's barely even a hint to be found that any modern day development is even going on.

Furthermore:

http://snes9x.ipherswipsite.com/

Once again, no Windows version beyond 1.42.

How is anyone to be expected to know about any release beyond that? I don't visit the SNES9x board. I think I'd have coronaries if I did and found out worse things were going on there than they are over here.

What ever happened to projects that actually had a website that actually reflects development in the past several years or had news. How about project communities that only expect users to be using the latest official release? What happened to those things? Oh wait, that's only the SNES emulation community. The rest of the world seems to be OK.

BSNES is probably the ONLY SNES emulator that has a web page that actually reflects it's even been worked on in the past year.

Am I the only one who seems to think there is a problem here?

P.S. Not that this is directly related, but maybe M Kendora wasn't so crazy after all.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 3:06 pm

Nightcrawler wrote:
have here a Windows port of Snes9x 1.5, which also has a bunch of problems fixed (of previous Windows versions), and has a few other improvements made to it.

Note: This version (1.502) is not an official release.
There is NO official release as far as I know beyond 1.42 for Windows. Therefore, isn't my statement true? Why would you expect people to be using a non official release and roll your eyes if they are not?

Well, there's 1.43, and that IS official and supports Windows.

Not to mention, why does the SNES9x website suck even more than ZSNES as far as being several years out of date? There's barely even a hint to be found that any modern day development is even going on.

Furthermore:

http://snes9x.ipherswipsite.com/

Once again, no Windows version beyond 1.42.

How is anyone to be expected to know about any release beyond that? I don't visit the SNES9x board. I think I'd have coronaries if I did and found out worse things were going on there than they are over here.

What ever happened to projects that actually had a website that actually reflects development in the past several years or had news. How about project communities that only expect users to be using the latest official release? What happened to those things? Oh wait, that's only the SNES emulation community. The rest of the world seems to be OK.

BSNES is probably the ONLY SNES emulator that has a web page that actually reflects it's even been worked on in the past year.

Am I the only one who seems to think there is a problem here?

P.S. Not that this is directly related, but maybe M Kendora wasn't so crazy after all.

M Kendora was probably fed up somewhere along the line.. but I'm not familar to the circumstances around that.

Speaking of the Snes9x website.. it isn't really Opera friendly by default... (minor gripe, but meh)

I'm not fond of our situation with the ZSNES website either...

Emulation websites are where you get the info anyways... you'd like to think the ZSNES WIPs are known (some do seem to be informed, others aren't)... but meh... an official word certainly is better.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 4:42 pm

How is anyone to be expected to know about any release beyond that? I don't visit the SNES9x board. I think I'd have coronaries if I did and found out worse things were going on there than they are over here.

Oh yeah, it's worse. I can't even visit the public forums on snes9x.com at work, because like zsnes.com, nobody has access/cares enough to add a simple checkbox to the registration page to defeat the countless pornography spam bots. I don't need coworkers seeing that on my screen, even if it is just text. At least with this board, the moderators yank them quick enough that I very rarely see them if at all.

BSNES is probably the ONLY SNES emulator that has a web page that actually reflects it's even been worked on in the past year.

And I think SNEeSe is the only other one that actually discourages WIPs from being distributed to the general public. Though I could be wrong on that.

Am I the only one who seems to think there is a problem here?

You do seem the most upset by it, for whatever that's worth. We're very fortunate ZSNES, SNES9x and SNEeSe are being maintained at all, having virtually lost all of their initial developers. Most projects die off immediately when that happens.

P.S. Not that this is directly related, but maybe M Kendora wasn't so crazy after all.

He had good intentions, but flipped out because he didn't follow the true golden rule: "On n'est jamais si bien servi que par soi-même."

bobthebuilder · Post by **bobthebuilder** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 10:16 pm

I was sadden when MK said he was quiting/giving up, but his temper tantrum changed my mind.

FitzRoy · Post by **FitzRoy** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 12:03 am

If you go back and read his rant today, it almost seems like a prophecy of bsnes.

Nightcrawler · Post by **Nightcrawler** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 2:25 pm

Deathlike2 wrote: Emulation websites are where you get the info anyways... you'd like to think the ZSNES WIPs are known (some do seem to be informed, others aren't)... but meh... an official word certainly is better.

I disagree with this sir. If I had some more time, I'd go searching through the board for some factual evidence, but a large number of people over the past few years have come HERE to report bugs using the last official version of ZSNES reported on ZSNES's website. Then of course they are berated for not using or knowing about WIP releases.

I think more people then you realize go to the ZSNES web page when looking for the latest version of the software. I mean, isn't that what you NORMALLY do for MOST software?

Pagefault explained ZSNES's web page situation and I hope the next time he speaks to _Demo_ he asks him to point the domain(or just give/sell it to pagefault) to a page that someone who actually cares enough to edit it can do so. _Demo_ has done great things for the emulator and still contributes from time to tome, but his active caring prime days are well over and nobody being able to update the web page for years at a time is proof that he doesn't care about such issues anymore. So, why not allow people who DO to pick up the slack?

I don't know why this whole issue upsets me so much. I guess I just get tired of seeing all the people pass through here with old versions and getting put down because they didn't know about WIP releases. It could all be solved with a simple web page update. Either tell people about the WIP release there so they will use it, or if you don't want WIP being used by the public, discourage it and DON'T harp on people in the forum for using an 'old' version which happens to be the last official release.

I'm not pointing at ZSNES staff directly, but the community here in general .

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 4:35 pm

Nightcrawler wrote:
Deathlike2 wrote: Emulation websites are where you get the info anyways... you'd like to think the ZSNES WIPs are known (some do seem to be informed, others aren't)... but meh... an official word certainly is better.
I disagree with this sir. If I had some more time, I'd go searching through the board for some factual evidence, but a large number of people over the past few years have come HERE to report bugs using the last official version of ZSNES reported on ZSNES's website. Then of course they are berated for not using or knowing about WIP releases.

Well, I guess communication could be better here. However, the users that actually have had major issues (specifically those that use Linux) have been encouraged to use SVN because it is relatively significant (a segfault won't get you very far anyways).

I think more people then you realize go to the ZSNES web page when looking for the latest version of the software. I mean, isn't that what you NORMALLY do for MOST software?

Yes, but some take the extra step to find out if there are even newer versions because of CVS/SVN for open source projects. Obviously not everyone will take this route, but when an issue that applies to them personally, a WIP or SVN build would certainly help them immensely. Of course not every issue is fixed, but at least issues that are very notable (especially with stuff dealing with paths).

Pagefault explained ZSNES's web page situation and I hope the next time he speaks to _Demo_ he asks him to point the domain(or just give/sell it to pagefault) to a page that someone who actually cares enough to edit it can do so. _Demo_ has done great things for the emulator and still contributes from time to tome, but his active caring prime days are well over and nobody being able to update the web page for years at a time is proof that he doesn't care about such issues anymore. So, why not allow people who DO to pick up the slack?

I don't think it's entirely fair to say _Demo_ doesn't care, but rather the reluctance to allow access to the front page can be certainly be questioned.

I don't know why this whole issue upsets me so much. I guess I just get tired of seeing all the people pass through here with old versions and getting put down because they didn't know about WIP releases. It could all be solved with a simple web page update. Either tell people about the WIP release there so they will use it, or if you don't want WIP being used by the public, discourage it and DON'T harp on people in the forum for using an 'old' version which happens to be the last official release.

I'm not pointing at ZSNES staff directly, but the community here in general .

Having an SVN thread and post-1.42 WIP thread is not enough? I think there is reluctance to help in "dealing" with some issues regarding to the core (it's not the most easily updatable thing here). However stuff that is non-emulation related is much easier to deal with as you can see where the progress is most visible (and can arguably be the least impressive, but for the average user feel feature-bloatish or improved feature-wise). As I said earlier, I guess it could be better communicated, but sometimes people still "do not get it" and will be replied to appropriately. I'm very happy there is no Custom Res thread anymore.

xamenus · Post by **xamenus** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 8:06 pm

Nightcrawler wrote:Am I the only one who seems to think there is a problem here?

Trust me, you're not. I have been pretty much anti-WIP for some time now. My line of thinking is that if someone wants an updated ZSNES, they can just use zget.

When it gets to the point where the first response in every single thread in ZSNES Talk is "Download the latest WIP.", you know its time for an official release. It is at that point now.

My hope is that after the release of 1.50, WIP releases will be much less frequent (if not nonexistent), the ZSNES website(s) will be updated and organized, and that the documentation will be hosted in the main ZSNES SVN instead of its own.

Otherwise, I'm getting more and more convinced that ZSNES has jumped the shark. :(

bobthebuilder · Post by **bobthebuilder** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 7:47 pm

FitzRoy wrote:If you go back and read his rant today, it almost seems like a prophecy of bsnes.

I didn't even think any of that stuff was still online. It is quite weird to see my own posts in that thread. It is so old, I don't even remember having made them. Here is the the rant FitzRoy is talking about.
http://www.snes9x.com/forum/topic.asp?w ... IC_ID=9869

Tallgeese · Post by **Tallgeese** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 8:52 pm

FitzRoy wrote:If you go back and read his rant today, it almost seems like a prophecy of bsnes.

Ha ha no.

Let's not even GO there or joke about that. That's like saying Nostradamus predicted 9/11: utter baloney. He went nuts/flipped out/et cetera and that's about it.

Besides, even byuu has been known to temporarily go 'OK, fuck obscure game bug #8769868".

FitzRoy · Post by **FitzRoy** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 9:36 pm

No, I think it's a good joke. Posted 6 months before bsnes began, and pretty much touches on everything:

-obsessive accuracy, fixing games that nobody plays (but kind of fails to explain why it's important)
-not falling into a "good enough" mindset.
-prioritizing the core over special chips
-not trading accuracy for speed or being held back by porters
-probably more shit that I'm too lazy to find

Certainly, MKendora didn't explicitly say someone was going to do this, which is why I'm not at all serious about calling it a prophecy. But it's timing and content are eerie enough.

Still a rant though. Focused, unemotional writing could've made the same points in half the space.

Joe Camacho · Post by **Joe Camacho** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 9:53 pm

You can say that he predicted a new trend or the increase of popularity of said trend in the scene. But predict an specific emulator. Nah.

Tallgeese · Post by **Tallgeese** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 10:00 pm

Joe Camacho wrote:You can say that he predicted a new trend or the increase of popularity of said trend in the scene. But predict an specific emulator. Nah.

The problem with saying something like that is if he actually predicted it, it would've utterly defeated his reasoning behind leaving in the first place. It wasn't a prediction, it was a rant and nothing more.

FitzRoy · Post by **FitzRoy** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 10:02 pm

FitzRoy wrote: Certainly, MKendora didn't explicitly say someone was going to do this, which is why I'm not at all serious about calling it a prophecy. But its timing and content are eerie enough.

Still a rant though.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Wed Nov 22, 2006 1:40 am

Despite my occasional nitpicks about MKendora merely saying, but not actually doing the things he talked about ... I must say, I am in near total agreeance with everything he talked about in that thread.

To highlight a few points:

Let's take a simple, made-up problem for a moment. Game A is really popular, and requires register 34 to return a constant 7. Game B was only released in Japan, and expects many different values, but never 7, and indeed, the source is register 34. On the other hand, you have the GB42 chip that runs some random game. Right now, the GB42 would be focused on. That's the state of emulation. For the majority of both users and developers, register 34 just is not as interesting.

This is just as true now as ever. Only we're really reaching deep into the end of the barrel. What's the focal chip being worked on now? ST-011. Which is only used in one game, "Quick-move Shogi Match with Nidan Rank-holder Morita". In the mean time, not a single SNES emulator even gets basic SNES IRQs emulated correctly yet, so scores of games break every time any change is made in core timing.
Don't get me wrong: I absolutely appreciate the very hard work that's being put into these chips by everyone, but it's definitely the wrong priority to focus on one specific game when so many others have such serious problems in my opinion. But then, everyone's free to work on whatever they like, and some people just happen to prefer emulating new chips. Yeah, it's a lot more fun and visibly rewarding, exactly as MKendora was saying.
The good news is, there's only maybe 1-3 chips left. ST-018 being the only one I can even think of off the top of my head. I guess we'll find out how right or wrong MKendora was when the last few chips are finally emulated here in the near future.

It doesn't stop there. The SNES community is bleeding away experience ... anomie and I combined weren't equal to Gary, and now it's just anomie. When live keeps anomie away, will the next programmer equal anomie? If not, aren't we as a community losing?

While I don't know Gary, I'll agree that anomie was easily my superior. Both in intelligence and SNES hardware knowledge. And now his time with us is very, very limited. And now I'm burning out quickly, but still trying my best to hang on. Who's going to replace me? Nobody at the moment seems to be interested in the insane kinds of tests myself and anomie were running. But someone will come along, most definitely. Who probably won't make it as far as I have before leaving.

There's a reason not many people want to start a new emulator project. The inital time investment is pretty massive, and the end result, while superior to most emulators in accuracy, would have fewer features, and no special hardware support, and you'd get a lot of criticism for the fact that it has lower speed and doesn't play a lot of favored games.

Sound familiar? If I were paid only a dollar for all the people who discredit my work as inferior and won't even touch my emulator because it lacks (choose one or more): savestates, SA-1 support, SFX support, DSP-4 support, 60fps on a 386 support, ... I could retire from work and have the extra time needed to add all of that by myself.

---

Unfortunately, I've never spoken directly with MKendora. He left a few months before I decided to step in. In the only indirect communication I've had with him, he was slightly condescending, but no more than I am toward people now. I really don't see why he's so hated; but again, I wasn't there. So whatever. Hopefully there's a lot I don't know about, otherwise I'll be just as despised when I eventually leave and everyone realizes how similar our viewpoints were.

And finally, I'm absolutely certain not even bsnes lives up to MKendora's expectations. I'm just as disappointed by it as well. But that's another story. I'll probably write up an article on that on my website here in a few days/weeks/decades, though I kind of touched on it already re: S-CPU hardware multiplication cycles.

The only thing I truly find eerie about that rant, is the fact I knew absolutely nothing about MKendora or that rant until after I wrote up my own rant (which is now lost after the2d.com died), and made significant progress on doing exactly what he was talking about before realizing someone out there even shared my viewpoint. In fact, I probably don't give him nearly enough credit for being the first to get a little public support behind the idea of a hardware accurate emulator. I couldn't have gotten as far as I did if people were responding to my rants with as much hatred as eg Evan threw toward him.

Jipcy · Post by **Jipcy** » Wed Nov 22, 2006 2:10 am

byuu wrote:And now I'm burning out quickly, but still trying my best to hang on.

Why is this happening to you? And for that matter, why does this happen to anyone?

My only hope is that all the talented people in the SNES community can work together to produce something great. Easily accessible open-source code is one way to enhance this, I think.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Wed Nov 22, 2006 2:22 am

Jipcy wrote:
byuu wrote:And now I'm burning out quickly, but still trying my best to hang on.
Why is this happening to you? And for that matter, why does this happen to anyone?

Mmm, the craziness of something else broken on a change or fix... it gets tiresome quickly. You can't believe the kinds of stress that must be released when the obvious stares in your face, but mocks you because something else is preventing it to "just work nicely".

My only hope is that all the talented people in the SNES community can work together to produce something great. Easily accessible open-source code is one way to enhance this, I think.

Sharing info is certainly one thing, but discussing details like in a more active fashion would be better. However, everyone has a life and job > you > emulation. It is better to gather as much research as possible (as do scientists in real life do) to eventually get the right answer, or close to it anyways.