what's wrong with SnesGT???

vanfanel · Post by **vanfanel** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 10:13 am

well, well, well, my little emulator people... we're a bit off topic here, I dare to say.
Regarding the original purpose of this thread, I updated to the latest DirectX 9.0c, updated my graphics and sound drivers, and those SNES GT betas have bad sound, full of static and gaps. It's fixed if I set a huge sound buffer, but that's not a solution for me. It's the same on an Atom machine or a Core2Duo one, so I guess the betas are wrong after all... Version 0.218 works fine, except for some graphics glitches in Equinox.

Any other explanation? Could it be caused by the GMA950 or GMA965 graphics on those computers? Upgraded the graphics drivers for those, too..
Thanks!

PD: I got an Snes96 beta on IRC #emu at earthint around 1996, the first experimental beta with SOUND support! Sounded like my ass, but hey...it was awesome! now, boy, you can polsih my balls, for I finished Mr Nutz on this one!

I.S.T. · Post by **I.S.T.** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 10:51 am

Might be the sound drivers still. Are they Realtek?

I.S.T. · Post by **I.S.T.** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 10:51 am

Palin wrote:I don't remember how long ago this was (must have been the late 90s) or what ZSNES version but when I got into emulation transparency definitely didn't work correctly. IIRC I first encountered the Zboards when trying to figure out how to see anything while playing Chrono Trigger (in the section with moving transparent fog inside the ruined dome cities.) There was a big explanation in the forums on how to turn off different BG layers so you could see anything (was probably a sticky.)

I also remember the wind "shrieking static" effect and the more recent "Square Sound Rape" that was finally resolved by Blargg's sound core.

Heh, back then my family had dial-up so I would go to my brother's dorm room at the local university to use his amazing internet connection to download emulators and roms.

Lots of games had/have major problems with sounds before blargg's core, FYI. It's just that they're mostly not nearly as well known.

vanfanel · Post by **vanfanel** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 12:38 pm

@I.S.T : the Asus Eee Box B202 uses an Azalia ALC888 Audio Chip, so yes, it has a realtek audio chip.

Is the High Definition Audio Codec the driver for this thing?? An audio codec and a device driver aren't the same thing! But that's all Reltek has to download...those strange HDAC!

vanfanel · Post by **vanfanel** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 3:27 pm

Sound drivers updated. Nothing: same static/gaps on the betas...
Jeez, if only I could contact the developers about this...
What beats me is that I can't find any other reference to this missbehaviour of the SnesGT betas! Am I the only user of this incredible emulator?

Exophase · Post by **Exophase** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 3:32 pm

vanfanel wrote:PD: I got an Snes96 beta on IRC #emu at earthint around 1996, the first experimental beta with SOUND support! Sounded like my ass, but hey...it was awesome! now, boy, you can polsih my balls, for I finished Mr Nutz on this one!

I remember that beta >_> When I got it on IRC everyone was heckling me for running it on my P75. The first thing I ran was FF4 (mode 7 opening and everything) and it ran like half speed. But I was still somehow in awe over the sound, which was a huge deal back then. I started out on #emu on undernet, but I was eventually on #emu on espernet (before it was banned from the server) and I'm sure at least one of the authors of SNES9x was there. I also remember pestering Zophar for unreleased builds of Genecyst ;p

Emu scene was so exciting back then.. there'd be several posts a day on emunews. Us people who had 1-2 year old computers instead of something cutting edge were putting all our hopes in various emu authors wringing as much speed as possible out of what they were doing. Before ZSNES came along, NLKSNES had reached really impressive speeds (people were playing SMW on 486's). SNES96/97 was always ahead of the curve in terms of compatibility but always lagged behind in performance (yeah, these days with such an emphasis on accuracy it must sound like a joke to care about performance that much but back then it was everything to a lot of us).

When ZSNES eventually came out I was playing Chrono Trigger on the same P75 with the CPU emulated at like 30% (or what it considered 30% anyway). It totally broke the game but I got to hear the music this way :> This was before SPCs came along.. no idea if there was an SPC player that would have ran at an acceptable rate on that computer.

vanfanel · Post by **vanfanel** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 4:55 pm

Exophase: you must remember the Nesticle code stealing, then! Mindraper! hehehe! Where could that Mindraper be nowadays?
Damaged Cybernetics back in 1995... hoh, we were waiting for the N64 to come out and emulating Master System games with Massage! how lame...how exciting!
DOS wasn't that bad for emulation...was it?

Palin · Post by **Palin** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 5:03 pm

I.S.T. wrote:Lots of games had/have major problems with sounds before blargg's core, FYI. It's just that they're mostly not nearly as well known.

Oh yeah, I know there were other problems. Its just that I was very very familiar with certain Squaresoft games on the original hardware so it was really obvious to me when something was wrong with the sound.

When the Chrono Trigger "monster scream" sound effect was fixed; that was a day of rejoicing.

creaothceann · Post by **creaothceann** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 5:37 pm

I remember "playing" SMW on my trusty 486er (DX-4 100 overclocked to 120 MHz; 8 MB RAM (later upgraded to 12 MB)) with a ZSNES version that had no GUI except the F1 menu. With univbe driver and no sound for maximum speed.

vanfanel wrote:DOS wasn't that bad for emulation...was it?

No other apps running + direct hardware access = nice.

adventure_of_link · Post by **adventure_of_link** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 7:15 pm

vanfanel wrote:well, well, well, my little emulator people... we're a bit off topic here, I dare to say.

WELCOME TO THE ZSNES BOARD

that being said, my earliest emulator memory comes from 10th grade, in keyboarding class, when someone had a Nesticle disk with a bunch of NES ROMs along with it. He put it on nearly half the computers in the classroom, and it was so awesome! I was even playing things like Zelda 1 and 2 that I never even got a chance to play. The savestates feature in it was also awesome. It's like

PUSH BUTAN
RECV PLACE TO RESTART UPON CLOSING EMULATER

Fast forward to about a year or so later, and I ended up obtaining a Pentium MMX 200MHz w/ 64MB of RAM and a 6GB HDD with windows 98se installed. Then I was playing Jnes and it was also an awesome emulator. This is when I realized that I could use a joypad to play games with instead of the keyboard. Later on during that time, I managed to get into SNES emulation using Snes9X v1.29 and 1.39 (the latest one that the PC could use, because in 1.40, 1.41, and IIRC 1.42 they disabled the no graphics filter option, which made it LAAAG like there's no tomorrow. Hell I was playing super play action football in ZSNES 1.36 going like 35-45FPS IIRC (same for super mario world) in the minimal 256x224 window. I was even playing Game Boy ROMs then as well using BGB (which is an emulator I still recommend to this very day.)

Fast forward to Thanksgiving 2003, when I got my Intel Celeron computer (2.7GHz CPU, then 256MB (now 1.25GB) of RAM, then 40GB (now 40+250GB) HDD, then sole CD burner (now CD burner/DVD ROM drive) and a regular CD drive, then windows XP SP1 (now kubuntu 9.04 Linux). I was playing even Super Mario RPG and Kirby's Super Star at full 60/60 FPS (even in the Snes9X early 1.4x builds that had the no graphics filter option disabled!) It was like a Godsend. I even got into some N64 and PSone emulation stuffs. Some of the games didn't go so fast and I needed a bigger controller anyway for both of those anyhow

(and to be fair to this very day ePSXe with the pete's software GPU plugin gets like ~45FPS in Linux on this computer. I believe I got 60FPS in windows)

Fast forward to September 2005, when I got my AMD Sempron Laptop. At the time this thing kicked major ass. Unrelated note, but I was running Windows Media Player on that thing at 30% CPU vs. ~50% on the celeron. It ran just about every N64 and PSone game with full graphics, at 640x480 windowed mode!

And this is my little narrative on emulation.

gllt · Post by **gllt** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 8:09 pm

adventure_of_link wrote:
vanfanel wrote:well, well, well, my little emulator people... we're a bit off topic here, I dare to say.
WELCOME TO THE ZSNES BOARD

PUSH BUTAR
RECV BAWW

DancemasterGlenn · Post by **DancemasterGlenn** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 9:29 pm

Lawlz.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 9:52 pm

I remember running my first CPU simulation application that was written using punch cards on my good old trusty UNIVAC (using the card to tape convertor, of course.)

Before then, me and Qin Shi Huang threw around ideas, but it was difficult keeping track of it all as we had to write our notes on oracle bones.

gllt · Post by **gllt** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 9:56 pm

byuu wrote:I remember running my first CPU simulation application that was written using punch cards on my good old trusty UNIVAC (using the card to tape convertor, of course.)

Before then, me and Qin Shi Huang threw around ideas, but it was difficult keeping track of it all as we had to write our notes on oracle bones.

You forgot the part where I love you.

Gil_Hamilton · Post by **Gil_Hamilton** » Thu Apr 30, 2009 1:27 am

NESticle. 1999.

This didn't last long, as I found LoopyNES and FWNES, and started giggling when I saw sites saying PunchOut and Ninja Turtles 2 wouldn't work right because all the copies on the internet were bad dumps(guess which games glitched in NESticle but not in LoopyNES).

Exophase · Post by **Exophase** » Thu Apr 30, 2009 10:26 pm

vanfanel wrote:Exophase: you must remember the Nesticle code stealing, then! Mindraper! hehehe! Where could that Mindraper be nowadays?
Damaged Cybernetics back in 1995... hoh, we were waiting for the N64 to come out and emulating Master System games with Massage! how lame...how exciting!
DOS wasn't that bad for emulation...was it?

Somehow I wasn't around for the NESticle code stealing incident, or didn't hear about it at the time.. I was gone from fall 97 to late 98 so it might have been then. 'course I heard about it afterwards. I remember Mindrape had a website somewhere talking about it years afterwards. I do remember those Damaged Cybernetics ROM packs >_>

I've rattled this before, but NESticle was great in spring 1996 when it was released (same day Phantasy Star 1 was finally dumped properly, it was a huge day in emulation for me), or it blew iNES and Pasofami away anyway. And it came out of nowhere and was updated quickly. Of course I wouldn't have been caught dead using it1999.

Yeah, DOS was great for emulators. None of the Windows alternatives ran very well on my hardware. I think just getting something out to the screen fast enough was too much overhead - fortunately that gap has shrunk a lot, but there are still platforms where writing straight to the framebuffer can make a big difference.

I remember at one point I desperately wanted to move to Linux because I thought that SNES97 would somehow run better in it (this was before ZSNES of course). You know, because all the cool kids were using Linux and it was so "advanced" that surely it somehow made emulators faster than even DOS. I was a pretty naive kid but with all the hype back then it's not hard to see how I came up with such a silly notion. Unfortunately I never even got my harddrive to be partitioned correctly, which is probably just as well.

Gil_Hamilton · Post by **Gil_Hamilton** » Fri May 01, 2009 1:39 am

Exophase wrote: I've rattled this before, but NESticle was great in spring 1996 when it was released (same day Phantasy Star 1 was finally dumped properly, it was a huge day in emulation for me), or it blew iNES and Pasofami away anyway. And it came out of nowhere and was updated quickly. Of course I wouldn't have been caught dead using it1999.

It was what was installed on the school computers, and what people were recommending.
Hell, the major emu sites still listed it as the best for years afterwards, so it was a LOT of people's first NES emulator.

Yeah, DOS was great for emulators. None of the Windows alternatives ran very well on my hardware. I think just getting something out to the screen fast enough was too much overhead - fortunately that gap has shrunk a lot, but there are still platforms where writing straight to the framebuffer can make a big difference.

Yeah.
I remember when we got our Soundblaster Live and I quit being able to get sound out of ZSNES DOS.
I did a LOT of monkeying around to squeeze that last drop of performance out and back to 60 FPS.

Wound up using my Gravis Gamepad Pro(blech) in 4-button gamepad mode, mapping start to the space bar, and holding my gamepad next to my keyboard. Forget what I did with L, R, and select.
It squeezed the last few clock cycles out for me.

Post by **odditude** » Fri May 01, 2009 4:08 am

Gil_Hamilton wrote:Gravis Gamepad Pro(blech)

made contra really interesting... you never knew if you were actually going to duck or just aim down at an angle while the bullet took your head off... ahh, memories =)

my intro to emulation was nesticle 0.20, followed by genecyst (initial) and snes9x 0.14, i believe. snes9x would play megaman x at a smooth 30fps on my p166 mmx, with one or two bg layers disabled (though i don't remember if that was with audio enabled or not). the platforming aspect was more entertaining when you happened to be invisible for the whole after-hit period due to the blinking sprites!

vanfanel · Post by **vanfanel** » Mon May 04, 2009 6:07 pm

Back on topic:

Those of you who claim that SnesGT betas have the same speed as the 0.218 version (last official release): What OS are you running it on?? Xp? Vista? WiNE? What?
Sound card?

Post by **grinvader** » Tue May 05, 2009 9:20 pm

vanfanel wrote:Back on topic:

Persistent, aren't you ? Resistance is futile.

>>What OS
>>WiNE

What

emacs