Is SNES mul dead?

[Ultimate warrior]

SNES MUL. Has that project died? It has been several months and we haven't seen an update at all. I seriously need the following games to work good!


Final Fantasy 4-6 (WAY TOO MANY GRAPHICS GLITCHES AMONG OTHER PROBS LIKE NO SFX IN FF4 OR VERY BAD CRACKLING FOR MUSIC IN FF6)

LOZ LTTP ( caves that are dark aren't dark like they are supposed to be, making LOZ PW easier)

Illusion Of Gaia ( Can't even get past the title screen)

Legend Of the Mystical Ninja ( In cutscenes, sound moves a lot faster then the scenes themselves, dialogue doesn't appear)

Super Mario World (Music isn't properly in sync when you die; other annoying graphics problems, especially in boss battles)

Sparkster ( Haven't really played this to much but sparkster's sprite is seriously messed up)

Also, for some strange reason super demo world the legend continues (a SMW hack) and FF4 US version freeze to a white screen as I boot up. I REALLY hope we hear SOMETHING...ANYTHING on if the dev is working on version 0.7 or not. Is emulating on the DS the games I said above excellently impossible? I really hope not, the only reason I got R4 was for SNES mainly. If the project is dead I wish the Dev would at least have the decency to put it up on his website. Or is there a better emulator for SNES?

Is it even possible for DS to match SNES's power? Are we doomed to have horrible problems with the popular games I've mentioned forever?

and don't say "go make your own emulator" or anything to that whim because I KNOW ITS DIFFICULT, I'm just wondering whether or not the dev has just given up.

Finally: How the hell do I get files off of a torrent file? I have like over 4,000 of them and there's one file that I want off of it, yet, I can't get it off!!! I tried downloading some program named utorrent and torrent just sits there saying "downloading"and 0.0%. HELP! I need that file BADLY!!!

[DanTheManMS]

I already answered some of the questions in the DS News forum. Use v0.4 Beta for Illusion of Gaia and turn off speedhacks to get past the title screen. Toggle the Vblank settings (normal speed vs fast speed in v0.6 alpha) to make the SMW bosses workable.

I'll elaborate on what I was talking about earlier. You see, emulators for the PC do much of their work in the background, using up lots of CPU time. They calculate exactly what happens each frame, what the screen should look like after that point, and then paint the new image to the screen pixel by pixel, doing the whole thing 60 times per second. That's fine on the PC where you've got tons of processing power to work with, but on the DS this would not be feasible. It would work, but you'd be getting horrendous speeds, and probably no sound. The SNES emulators for the PSP use this method, but they've got 333 MHz to work with. The DS has two processors at 66 MHz and 33 MHz, the second being used solely for audio emulation.

Rather that using this method (called "software emulation"), the SNES emulators for the DS use the DS's native 2D hardware to speed things up. Rather than calculating what the screen should look like in software, they receive the SNES graphics instructions, quickly translate them into DS 2D hardware equivalents, and blindly paint the graphics to the screen. This greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to render the screen to only about 5% of the CPU time, but it also introduces graphical problems. Because the DS's 2D hardware does not match up exactly to the SNES graphics hardware, some errors occur, especially with transparencies and layer priorities. In addition, the DS doesn't have enough layers to fully emulate all the possible layering configurations the SNES could have, which causes additional problems. You can use the Graphics config menu to work with some of these issues, but not all of them can be fixed.

I haven't heard anything from Archeide in a few months, but keep in mind he's working on it on his own time. Looking back at his first releases, the fact that it's working as well as it is is already a major accomplishment. Maybe he's stopped working on it, maybe he hasn't. He did state long ago that once he lost interest in the project he would stop updating it, so perhaps we've reached that stage. Who knows?

There are two other SNES emulators available for the DS. The better of the two is SnezziDS, but it does not run on slot-1 devices. You can test it in no$GBA if you want to see how it works though. The other is SNES DS, which has not been updated since late 2005 except to add DLDI support. While it does work well for many games, you cannot configure the graphics layering at all in-game, and the default layering doesn't work too well. Due to this, the best method is to apply the layering settings found in the latest snesadvance.dat file by packaging the SNES game directly into the *.nds file, but after Loopy added DLDI support he removed the tools needed to do this. I could upload them if you're interested, but honestly it's probably not worth using SNES DS for most games.

EDIT: If you wish for a comparison between hardware vs software emulation, test the following:
1. NesterDS vs NES DS - NesterDS uses software emulation and is more accurate graphically, but requires frameskip just to maintain full speed. NES DS uses hardware rendering so it can run really fast.
2. HW vs SW renderer builds of jEnesisDS v0.4a - this is the same version of jEnesisDS but with both a hardware and software renderer. Notice how the software one requires 2-4 frameskip to maintain full speed, while the hardware one doesn't even offer frameskip because it wouldn't help at all (again, only 5% of the CPU time is spent drawing the screen with hardware emulation).

[Ultimate warrior]

Well, I was really hoping sometime in the future we could get a really good working SNES emulator for DS, but after what you said, it looks like that isn't going to happen. Damn....

[RemyK313]

Thank god for people like Dan the Man who actually knows what's going on and can break it down to layman's terms. There seem to be a lot of people who think they know tons about emulation just because they've been using other people's emulators to run games.

[DanTheManMS]

Heh, most of what I say is actually half guesswork. I use these emulators extensively enough to get a basic understanding of how they work, but I have very little coding experience (having issues making Pong in Java, lol) and know little about the technical details of the DS system. I know various tidbits here and there though, and it's enough to get by.

I mostly get what I know from hanging around various DS homebrew message boards all the time. Being a member of PocketHeaven for over a year has also helped me gain a better understanding of how emulation on the GBA/DS works. I've also worked with speedhacking SNES games for the SNES emulators for the GBA, which has proven to be useful even for games that can't possibly run on the GBA or DS (an SNES emulator for the GP2X just implemented SA-1 coprocessor chip support and used my speedhacks to make Super Mario RPG playable, which I'm rather proud of).

Thank you for the compliment however. It's good to know that my words are being read, heh.

[spannernick]

Has anyone got Pinball Fantasies working..?