Slashdot Mirror
Whatever Happened To SNES Emulators For The Playstation?
Kyudosha asks: "With the recent emergence of some of these high-quality SNES emulators for Dreamcast, I find myself wondering about those emulators that aimed to do the same thing for the PSX. I seem to remember a few... what happened to them? The PSX has good hardware, it should be able to handle SNES emulation, shouldn't it? Plus, with the advent of some of these compilers for the PSX, wouldn't it be easier to port, say, SNES9x to to the PSX?"
...from most pawnbrokers and second hand-ish places like swapmeets ("trash 'n treasure"). That's what I've been doing. However, the top accessory on this page is some sort of emulator plug-in for the PSX. There's an FAQ for it here. There's a NES emulator or two listed at that site too. But again, I strongly recommend that you actually obtain the original hardware, it's much more fun.
The PSX is a 6 year old console, with the main processor being a 33MHz MIPS r3300a. The SNES had a much slower 16 bit processor (I don't recall the MHz, but has an example, the SuperFX chip found in some of the later games, such as Doom and Starfox, ran at 16Mhz.), that, just for the sake of arguement so we have some numbers, ran at 8Mhz. That gives us 4 opcodes for each 1 opcode of original SNES bytecode to update the registers, access the emulated memory, and/or call the appropriate BIOS function to place a pixel/sprite/soundbyte. If you had done any kind of research before asking a wetdream question like this, you would see that this is not going to happen. You cannot expect the PSX to be capable of anything that a 486 33Mhz cannot do. Now that we have the speed out of the way, let's check memory.
Emulators themselves are very small compared to the size of the ROM's they play. For example, my copy of snes9x for linux weighs in at 1.2 meg. The PSX has 2 megs of RAM (a little less than than actually available though, due to 64k lost to BIOS caching) leaving us not very much to play with; about 756k or so. SNES roms are exponents of 2 in size. Some, very very few, but some can weight in at 512k needed to fit. But, you don't give the impression of someone who cares about emulation for the same of emulation/education/history/etc. You just wanna play the games, right? Final Fantasy 3 = 3 megs. Zipped. Roms for the SNES are mostly 2 megs and up, making emulation on the PSX a pipe dream.
One of the biggest problems I see with the emulation and console dev scene today are the 'Hey, how about' people littering, loitering, and otherwise not providing anything constructive to the people who actually care about it. We don't need ideas; knowing about the actuall systems involved, we have had more ideas before we even took the screws off the casing than you had since you bought the console. Yes, MAME would be a cool port. Snes9x would be a cool port, FreeAMP would be a cool port...We already have thought about it, and those that care have already begun working themselves on those pieces of software. Both scenes are littered with tons of people constantly emailing saying "Hey, I can't code myself, but I had this great idea..." Wasting our time, and losing our respect.
Now, what *SHOULD* be done is this. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and decide YOU want to do this. YOU want to code. YOU want to make SNES emu a reality on (insert console). YOU should be asking "Hey, Im new to coding on this console, but I really want to port SNES9x to the PSX. I'm aware of the limitations such as speed and memory, but Im looking for any advice the group may have on #1 getting started on console dev and #2 ideas on how I might get around these limitations" Then you will get some positive responses. For example, to get around the memory limitation, how about redirecting memory access to the ROM to the actual rom on cd? Yes, it will slow things down. For the speed issue, how about very high level emulation instead of low level? Frameskip? Coding the cpu core in ASM? DYnamic recompilation? For PSX development in general, check out all of the sites that have been up forever and a day, such as http://napalm.intelinet.com http://start.at/loser-psx http://consoledev.com and, for the Linux PSX hacker,
http://psxdev.de
The emualtion and console dev 'scene' is not for people who expect things to be handed to them. Its for the people who want to do it themselves. If you aren't willing to try it yourself, don't whine when someone won't do it for you.
Side note: NES (NOT snes, nes) emulator was released a while back for the PSX. Speed was roughly 5% of the original NES, with full frameskip and no sound.
Toodles
Toodles D. Clown