2013-01-27

The state of SNES emulation on Raspberry Pi

Some weeks ago I started tweaking basically all Snes9x forks around, questioning the possibility to run decent SNES emulation on Raspberry PI.

First, I went for the pure approach, porting the current Snes9x git master (1.53) to Raspberry Pi, that was however barely usable. byuu's new sound core is very precise but makes it slow (this has become riddle for me, right now).
As second attempt I merged the spc700 sound core from a snes9x-0.40 version (by notaz, ported to Symbian); this was effectively the pre-byuu sound core, and the backport was bloody. As a result, it didn't work: a few samples were being produced resulting in no sound at all.

On my third attempt I looked at the current Pandora port, snes9x-1.39ff, and that worked better; after some hard work it could successfully run. I added native OpenGL ES display support (already added to previous attempt) and then started tinkering with the input code. I stopped after finding a weird bug with the new keyboard input (game input freeze, possibly unrelated to my additions). Ideally I would have added native keyboard and joystick support.

Nowadays there's to say that I've lost most interest on working on this project, thus I've released my patched work as-is, and going on to my next challenge. :)

With this project I was slowly restarting with C/C++ and hacking around; this work, although not completely successful, has taken quite some effort! In the end I will listen to the advice of Toad King, that basically we don't have the numbers to make this work.

I don't want to set a trend of many interrupted projects, but eventually I will sit on something that I like :P

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