Biggest complaints with snes9x.

If you're having problems with Snes9x, or think you've found a bug, this is the place to be.

Biggest complaints with Snes9x.

compatibility
7
7%
customization
11
12%
lack of language support
7
7%
buggy/locks up
8
9%
to slow
5
5%
lack of suitable netplay
18
19%
controls hard to setup
9
10%
zipped snes9x scares me (I know you are out there)
4
4%
other (write a little about it below)
25
27%
 
Total votes: 94

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Gogo
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Post by Gogo »

compatability list - I'm pretty sure there is a list somewhere of games that DON'T work, which I suppose can be considered a compatability list, however mebbe I'll try and work it into the faq or readme...

Loading times - Generally it takes a long time to check the 5000 or whatever number the goodsnes list is up to, since it checks the roms and gives you information off tot he side including the official name of the rom and the cart size - your best bet is to sort your roms so that aren't in one big folder.... Perhaps by alphabet, or sectional alphabet.

WIP Progress - You can usually get some updates by hanging around the IRC channel a lot, though I'll see if anyone else thinks this is a good idea. My biggest concern is that of your good developer; It would suck to say "we have finally integrated toaster support." only to find toaster support accidently turned .figs into .chrcl whenever you set it to maximum darkness, resulting in us being forced to pull it from the program. Cause then people'd be like "dammit, why'd you get rid of toaster support" and then all the developers would feel like the creators of fable.
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Anonymous

Toaster support

Post by Anonymous »

Well- what can I say? Thank you so much for considering my suggestions.

I remember a few years back... there used to be a really well maintained compatability list of roms that looked at ZSNES, Snes9x, and maybe a few other emus. This was a while back though- before Cowering's Good tools, I believe, or FX emulation.

Emulation has come so far in the last 3 years- there are considerably more working roms than not working.

The real bonus with a compatability list being integrated into the rom select folder, is that it can attract developers who wouldn't normally take interest. 'Passers by', if you will, who might pick up on the few major problems left for snes emulation, and have a look at the code.
I would have thought that a developer is far more likely to tackle a problem where the hand-full of issues needing to be resolved are already identified, as opposed to having to play through thousands of roms to identify the problem games on their own.
If the roms can be clearly organised into 'working/non-working/not perfect' like MAME32 (for example), we might just be able to attract a few extra casual developers.

It really is just a thought, but to the untrained eye Snes9x is pretty much perfect, and some potential developers may simply not take interest because the game specific problems aren't as well highlighted as they might be (ie. within the 9x.exe).

Anyway- thanks again for your considered response and best of luck.
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Gogo
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Post by Gogo »

there's always the "What's not emulated" section of the readme...

What's Not?
==========
- DSP-1 support not complete, enough to play Mario Kart, Pilotwings and many
others. All DSP-1 games should boot, but may display graphical errors.
- Any other odd chips that manufactures sometimes placed inside the
cartridge to enhance games and as a nice side-effect, also act as an
anti-piracy measure. (DSP-3, DSP-4, SETA 11 and SETA 18, as examples)
- Pseudo hi-res. mode - SNES hardware uses interpolation to give apparent
increase in horizontal resolution, which is only partially emulated.
- Mosaic effect on mode 7.
- A couple of SPC700 instructions that I can't work exactly out what they
should do.
- Fixed colour and mosaic effects in SNES hi-res. (512x448) modes.
- Offset-per-tile in mode 6. Luckily I haven't found a game that uses it, yet.
- The expansion slot found in many carts.

Though, I'm see if Jimmy can give me a complete list of non-working shtuff for adding to the readme since I like that idea... not like I have much of a say :P

**edit... That may be outdated, best wait for a more up-to-date copy-paste job before starting any tasks.
Go here: http://sgibbons.deviantart.com/
It has shiny shines! ~ UPDATED 01/23/2006
adventure_of_link
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Post by adventure_of_link »

Gogo's quote of the Snes9X readme.txt wrote:- The expansion slot found in many carts.
Which games used an expansion slot? I know Super GameBoy does, but are there any others?
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Clements
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Post by Clements »

I think that refers to Sufami Turbo carts.

http://www.gamersgraveyard.com/reposito ... turbo.html
adventure_of_link
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Post by adventure_of_link »

Oh ok, thanks Clements. When I saw that in the readme I was like "WTF?!". Thanks again for the help, as well as a relevant pic. :D
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* Snes9X EX (Android)
* Snes9X 64-bits (PC/Mac)

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Anonymous

Post by Anonymous »

[quote="Gogo"]there's always the "What's not emulated" section of the readme...

What's Not?
==========
- DSP-1 support not complete, enough to play Mario Kart, Pilotwings and many
others. All DSP-1 games should boot, but may display graphical errors.

can you tell me 1 game that has a DSP-1 and displays graphical errors?
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Post by Clements »

Player1 wrote:can you tell me 1 game that has a DSP-1 and displays graphical errors?
Super Mario Kart. The area around the edge of the track is not displayed properly with 1.43 Final.
Anonymous

dont forget the fact that it messes w/ ur registry!

Post by Anonymous »

Dont forget it messes with your registry!
Clements wrote:Cons of Snes9x include:
  • Sound isn't too accurate;
  • Bad sound interpolation;
  • No lowpass filters;
  • Kreed's filters look terrible due to lack of nVidia hardware filtering;
  • Kreed's filters have a large black border at the bottom;
  • OpenGL filter requires a restart;
  • Limited choice of filters (No ScaleXx, hqXx);
  • GUI menus are not resizable;
  • GUI does not support the XP Theme;
  • No GUI customisation options/skins
  • Icon looks rough on XP;
  • Netplay desyncs on a LAN setup;
  • No movie support through inputs or AVI etc.
The compatibilty is superb though, no glitches in any of my games. It just misc. stuff needed to make the emu better IMO.
Last edited by Anonymous on Mon Feb 21, 2005 1:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
funkyass
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Post by funkyass »

if someone else already said what you wanted to say, you don't need to say it.
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kolechovski
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Post by kolechovski »

Something I no longer see in that "What's not emulated" thingy...is it now possible to toggle sound channels in that latest version? I know that had been one of the tintentions a while back, but there was some problem.
The soldier was forced to desert his dessert in the desert.
Anonymous

Post by Anonymous »

the .avi movie record isn't working
Anonymous

Post by Anonymous »

I'd like to see that win32 compatibility is maintained in the future.
And please fix the sound.Clayfighter has horrible sound bugs - some others too.
Graphics are the strongest point of Snes9x,not too many problems.
Clements
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Post by Clements »

Heh, almost all the 'complaints' I had are now fixed with the latest version and Snes9x improvement7.
Anonymous

Post by Anonymous »

For me it is to fix the issues regarding opengl rendering and the newer nvidia cards/drivers. Currently snes9x still crashes every time you load a game...Hopefully I don't get a "Use xx Driver as they work" ...because that kind of advice is laughable at best. Also how about hardware accelerated opengl with anisotropic filtering :)
Anonymous

Post by Anonymous »

My only problem is the black bar at the bottom (which, from what I've read, is staying), but you've all read about that already :P
Anonymous

Post by Anonymous »

Diagonals on the D-pad, Im using a xbox controller port & my xbox controller, but for some reason I can get the snes9x to detect diagonal direction.
Anonymous

Post by Anonymous »

Does Mario Kart work fully on any of the non-MacOS X versions of snes9x? I have 1.4.3 for OS X and I can't seem to get to work well enough to play. I've gathered that it requires the emulation of a \"DSP 1\" that's within the cartridge itself in order to play the game. So I'd like to know whether the problem lies in the OS X version or not.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
inca

[edit] Sorry for my blatant ignorance. My ROM was corrupt. All is well again. =)
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consumer
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Post by consumer »

Well, these comments may be a little late in coming, but since they are the best ones (they are MY comments afterall, so I have to think so :roll: ) I think its a worthwhile post.

I used Zsnes up until just a few months ago; and I changed reluctantly since I had used Zsnes since 99' or so, and had grown attached. I realize now that because of compatibility, I have to use both Zsnes (Zsnes is now my backup plan now) and Snes9x, so I didn't check 'compatibility' as something to be improved. In fact, compatibility is great on Snes9x and I am contented.

Snex9x has some great video modes, with much better looking scanlines that Zsnes, however, it lags behind Z in that if you do a full screen stretch, the scanlines look bad AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, the ratio gets way messed up. The stretch ratio, while slightly distorted, never looks too bad on Z. I end up playing Sne9x in 800x600 16-bit, output image-scanlines--which looks beautiful, just wish it could fill more of the screen. (I use 800x600 because I don't like using video modes that are different from my desktop standard--calle me anal but a monitor I owned once went on the fritz on me and just repeatedly made the sound that it makes when its changing resolution or color depth). Sure, I could comprimise somewhere else, but when it comes down to it, I want 800x600 with scanlines, taking up as much of the screen as possible while maintaing the aspect ratio...and that covers that desired feature...

Next--

Zsnes has got great button mapping features. If there's a function in Zsnes that is activated by pressing a button, you can map it to a controller effortlessly. Snes9x lacks a Turbo mapping button--this alone is the button I'd like to map. I could, of course, use controller mapping software, but I don't like to have a lot of extra software on my computer, and I can live without the feature, so I end up going without it. If the turbo was mapped to the controller, it would be best to have it function optionally when you held it down, or toggled it.

Both of these desired features, plainly, are pretty minor. Overall, Snes9x, kicks 155.

The fact that I left Zsnes at all is really a testament to 9x's strengthts, and as a veteran emu'er, my opinion counts.
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Post by Deathlike2 »

consumer wrote:The fact that I left Zsnes at all is really a testament to 9x's strengthts, and as a veteran emu'er, my opinion counts.
The greatest saving grace of Snes9x is the bilinear filtering over Mode7.

Otherwise, there is very many negatives, mostly in the accuracy and bugs.

Sound accuracy is not so great in games like FF3 (like the Flash or Noiseblaster from Edgar's tools). There's still a bunch of rendering bugs like the following:

http://www.snes9x.com/phpbb2/viewtopic. ... highlight=

Sadly no dev has bothered to comment on it... (actually, there was a comment, but no actual analysis of what the problem was)

There's also the bug with Snes9x's implementation Super2XSai... load up Final Fight 2 and you'll see random pixels all over the screen..

In any case, ZSNES has its quirks and still have its own bag of bugs, but at least you can see the work that's put into it. I have seen little life of Snes9x and frankly it's sad to see that. When I've at least posted a bug report on a ROM in ZSNES, I get an answer back and a fix (as a bonus I guess)... with Snes9x, I'm not getting answers. I posted an older forum about the Trial in Chrono Trigger and got an answer, however it made no sense since other emulators (ZSNES, BSNES) rendered it properly.

In sum, Snes9x needs lots of help and the lack of activity and the current state of the emulator (which probably has more hacks than ZSNES) makes it rather undesirable for this veteran emulator user (having used Snes9x when it got sound, and that was many years ago).

Some reference pics of the Trial (well, it's from the intro anyhow)...
Snes9x's rendition:
Image
ZSNES's rendition:
Image

Note: Filters were applied, Snes9x (bilinear), ZSNES (HQ4x) Neither filter contributed to any negative effects.

See the black blocks? They aren't supposed to be there.
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