¤ archaic ruins ¤

SNES9x
by Jerremy Koot and Gary Henderson
"Snes9x is the result of well over a year and a half's worth of part-time hacking, coding, recoding, debugging, divorce, etc. (just kidding about the divorce bit). Snes9x is coded in C++, with three assembler CPU emulation cores on the i386 Linux, MS-DOS and Windows ports."
INFORMATION
Homepage: http://www.snes9x.com/
License: Freeware
Released: May 12, 1999
Language: English
Platform: MacOS, MS-DOS, N64, Unix, Win9x, others
Programmed in: Assembly & C++
Other: Editor's Choice Award Winner!
DOWNLOAD
SNES '9x
SNES '9x Ports
Emulation projects merged into SNES '9x
CONTACT
Chad Kitching - TrepSNES Author / Past MS-DOS Porter
Jerremy Koot - Main Programmer / Win9x Porter
Jesper Svennevid - AmigaOS Porter
John Stiles - MacOS Porter
Richard Bannister - VSWC MacOS Author
Trent Trautman - BeOS Porter
DOCUMENTATION EXCERPT
Snes9x: The Portable Super Nintendo Entertainment System Emulator
=================================================================

Introduction
============

Snes9x is a portable, freeware Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)
emulator. It basically allows you to play most games designed for the SNES
and Super Famicom Nintendo game systems on your PC or Workstation; which
includes some real gems that were only ever released in Japan.

Snes9x is the result of well over two years worth of part-time hacking,
coding, recoding, debugging, divorce, etc. (just kidding about the divorce
bit). Snes9x is coded in C++, with three assembler CPU emulation cores on the
i386 Linux and Windows ports.

Snes9x is better than a real SNES:
o Freeze a game at any position, then restore the game to that exact spot at
  a later date - ideal for saving a game just before a difficult bit.
o Built-in cheat cartridge.
o Built-in peripheral emulation. The SNES mouse, Multi-player 5 and SuperScope
  external add-ons are all emulated, they cost extra money with a real SNES.
o Stereo sound - yes I know the SNES produced stereo sound, but who actually
  paid the inflated price for the special lead just so you could hear it?
o No more cartridge contact cleaning!
o Some SNES hardware features that be turned on and off during game play,
  games might be using one of these features to deliberately make a section
  of the game more difficult. Easy, just turn the feature off.
o Networked game play.

Snes9x is worse than a real SNES:
o Unless your computer is very fast (Pentium II+), some games just can't
  hit every frame being rendered and the emulator starts to omit rendering
  some frames to keep the emulator running at a constant speed - to you
  it appears as if the graphics aren't moving as smoothly as they should.
o Not all games work; bugs and missing features cause some games to fail to
  work or renders them un-playable.
o You have to wait for your computer to boot before you can play games,
  no waiting on the real SNES!
o The SNES has an analog low-pass sound filter that give a nice bass to
  all the sounds and music - Snes9x doesn't emulate this. If you have
  a posh sound card, you could try fiddling with it mixer controls to produce
  a similar effect. Turning on interpolated sound helps a lot.

What's Emulated
===============
- The 65c816 main CPU.
- The Sony SPC700 sound CPU.
- SNES variable length cycles.
- 8 channel DMA and H-DMA (raster effects).
- All background modes, 0 to 7.
- Sound DSP, with eight 16-bit stereo channels, compressed samples, hardware
  attack-decay-sustain-release volume processing, echo, pitch modulation
  and digital FIR sound filter.
- 8x8, 16x8 and 16x16 tile sizes, flipped in either direction.
- 32x32, 32x64, 64x32 and 64x64 screen tile sizes.
- H-IRQ, V-IRQ and NMI.
- Mode 7 screen rotation, scaling and screen flipping.
- Vertical offset-per-tile in modes 2, and 4.
- 256x224, 256x239, 512x224, 512x239, 512x448 and 512x478 SNES screen
  resolutions.
- Sub-screen and fixed colour transparency effects.
- Mosaic effect.
- Single and dual graphic clip windows, with all four logic combination modes.
- Colour effects only inside a window.
- 128 8x8, 16x16, 32x32 or 64x64 sprites, flipped in either direction.
- SNES palette changes during frame (15/16-bit internal rendering only).
- Super FX, a 21/10MHz RISC CPU found in the cartridge of several games.
- SNES mouse.
- SuperScope (light gun) emulated using computer mouse.
- Multi-player 5 - allowing up to five people to play games simultaneously on
  games that support that many players.
- Game-Genie, Action Replay and Gold Finger cheat codes.
- Multiple ROM image formats, with or without a 512 byte copier header.
- Single or split images, compressed using gzip, and interleaved in one of two
  ways.
- Auto S-RAM (battery backed RAM) loading and saving.
- Freeze-game support, now portable between different Snes9x ports.
- Interpolated sound.

What's Not
==========
- Only partial DSP1 support, enough to play Mario Kart but no more. The DSP1
  is a math co-processor chip that was inside the cartridge of some games,
  notably Mario Kart and Pilot Wings.
- 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, e.g. SA-1, S-DD1, C4, etc.
- Direct colour mode - uses tile and palette-group data directly as RGB value.
- Pseudo hi-res. mode - SNES hardware uses interpolation to give apparent
  increase in horizontal resolution, use the TV mode to get the same effect.
- 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.
- Horizontal offset-per-tile in modes 2, 4 and 6. Just noticed that Chrono
  Trigger uses that.
- Various pixel priority problems with sprites and transparency effects.

What You Will Need
==================

CPU
---
Faster the better, but 486DX4 100 minimum when using 8-bit graphics and
minimal or no sound, Pentium 166 or higher for transparency effects and
Pentium 200 or higher for Super FX games.

Memory
------
16Mb or more for Linux. Sun workstations shouldn't have a problem.

Screen
------
X Window System ports needs an 8, 15, 16, 24 or 32 bit X server running;
transparency effects are available at all depths, but don't look good with
only an 8-bit display. For maximum emulation speed, have the X server switched
to 8-bit and don't enable transparency effects, or 15 or 16-bit with
transparency effects enabled.

The Linux SVGA port is very limited at the moment due to no 16-bit screen
modes being supported on my main development machine. However, the Linux X
Window System version now has a full-screen mode, so there's hopefully no need
to use the SVGA version.

Disk Space
----------
1Mb for the emulator.

Software
--------
Access to SNES ROM images in *.smc, *.sfc, *.fig or *.1, *.2, or sf32xxxa,
sf32xxxb, etc., format otherwise you will have nothing to run!

Please note, it is illegal in most countries to have commercial ROM images
without also owning the actual SNES ROM cartridge.

Joystick Support
================

The Linux port now makes use of the new v1.x joystick kernel drivers written
by Vojtech Pavlik (vojtech@ucw.cz) to allow the use of a wide varity of
different joystick/joypad types to control SNES games.

Older versions of the drivers are included in recent development Linux
kernels. Download the lastest driver version from 
http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~vojtech/joystick/

Refer to the documentation that comes with the drivers to enable support for
your type of joystick/pad in Snes9x.

Netplay Support
===============

The Linux and UNIX ports of Snes9x support networked game-play, where
each player of a multi-player SNES game can be on their own workstation.
Due to the nature in which the emulated SNES games where written and speed
general lack of speed of the Internet, only local-area network game play is
usually possible.

Start the s9xserver process on one machine, then start snes9x on each
workstation giving the extra command-line flag -server <hostname> where
<hostname> is the name of the machine where the s9xserver process was
started. Is is also possible to specify the server name by setting the
environment variable S9XSERVER to the server hostname.

Snes9x normally uses network port 6096 by default, this can be changed by
specifying -port <port num> on the command line of the server and snes9x,
or by setting the environment variable S9XPORT.

The first snes9x session to connect to the server becomes player 1 and dicates
what ROM all other snes9x clients will have to run before connecting to the
server. The second client to connect becomes player 2, and so on. As each new
snes9x client process connects to the server, existing games in progress are
reset to the beginning to keep everyone in sync.

Some SNES games randomise game play and screen layout using data from the SNES
sound chip, notably the Bomberman series. Since Snes9x doesn't keep the sound
generation in exact synchronisation with the CPU emulation (if it did you'd
keep hearing breaks in the sound), you find such games can vary the screen
layout and baddy movement between Snes9x sessions given that all other
external input is identical, thus making it difficult to play multi-player
networked sessions with these games. To network play such games, either switch
off sound (-ns) or wait until I provide a re-sync option in a future release.

Super FX
========

The Super FX is a 10/21MHz RISC CPU developed by Argonaut Software used as a
game enhancer by several game tiles. Support is still buggy and I've no
idea what the problem is. Oh well, may be one day... Anyway, games that work:
Yoshi's Island (best single-player game on SNES, if you like platform games),
Doom, Winter Gold and Dirt Trax FX.

Games that don't work:
StarFox, StarFox 2, Stunt Race FX, Vortex.

All games that actually work are extremely playable on my 200MHz K6 desktop
machine. Frame rates will suffer for people with slower machines.

Lots of Super FX ROM images available are in an odd interleaved format that
I haven't worked out how to auto-detect. If your ROM image isn't working try
using the -i2 command line flag.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Henderson
gary@snes9x.com
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