Idiot Taskforce EmuRangers

Fighting for the understanding of proper emulation philosophies and great justice.

[emurangers]

What could I do with a 3DS development kit? Or maybe rather should?

-- Black

[emurangers]

Split scrolling status bars

After a big ol' hiatus, we're back! Today, I want to talk about the Nintendo Entertainment System and mappers.

Memory Management Controllers, mappers for short, are special chips inside NES cartridges that allow the game to access more graphics and storage space, to a degree determined by the specific mapper used. Some also add more sound capability, but we're not talking about that now.

The second most common trick allowed by a mapper is a splitscreen effect. In Super Mario Bros 3 for example, the status bar remains on a fixed position on the screen while the level scrolls all over. More subtle is that the status bar has not only its own tilemap, but its own tile graphics as well! This in stark contrast with sprite-based status bars like in the Mega Man series, and Sprite Zero bars like SMB1. Explaining that goes beyond the scope of this post.

But what happens... when a NES emulator does not (fully) support such a mapper?

That. That's what happens. You can't tell how much time you have, how many hits you can still take... you can tell almost nothing! And that pretty much means you're playing blind, but not in the usual way and not on purpose.

This was Black Asshat, signing off and being lonely.

[emurangers]

VRAM writes

Here's a common one that you're likely to see in Japanese role playing games on the SNES that never got an official translation.

If the game is popular enough, at some time a couple guys will try to create their own translation. And that's very nice of them because Japanese is really hard to read.

Something nice about Japanese is that on the whole, most characters are the same size. Usually square, which means that it's pretty much trivial to display Japanese text on a tile-based system like the SNES.

Western writings, on the other hand, tend to have varying widths for each character. And that's why we have VWF engines. So when a game is officially translated, the translation team often drops in a VWF engine to make things look nice. Of course, so do the hackers.

The only difference is that a lot of these fan translations are tested on inaccurate emulators. Emulators that do things like allowing the game to write to Video RAM while the screen is still being drawn:

  There's palette effects and wavy backgrounds, and there's changing the actual tile data. The actual SNES doesn't let you do that, for its own safety. On an actual system, the text would be broken in some stupid way:

So yeah. Those hacks aren't gonna be playable for long. The stupid thing is, there's plenty valid ways to do it. After all, official translations have the same hurdles to overcome. There is no excuse!

Black Asshat, going out for a pizza. 

[emurangers]

Star Fox

Here's one example of inaccurate emulation making a noticable difference. It's a small and pretty simple example, but that's good for starting. 

Most... "popular" Super NES emulators run both revisions of the SuperFX chip at the same speed. This is wrong, because the first revision (from Star Fox) actually runs at half the speed of the second (from Yoshi's Island). The net result is that Star Fox runs at about twice the speed it should.

Black Asshat, signing up for your newsletter. 

(adapted from "Why Accuracy Matters" by byuu) 

[emurangers]

Emurangers?

We are the Idiot Taskforce, and we fight to teach gamers the worth of proper, accurate emulation and preservation. We are opposed in this goal by those who would prefer raw speed and compatibility with only the more popular games.

http://byuu.org/bsnes/

Black Asshat, signing off.