The future of emulation? Is it possible with zsnes?

[creaothceann]

You ditch the whole tile engine (or leave it running, who cares) and simply paste homemade graphics with a homemade engine on top.

This "home-made engine" would be almost as complex as a rewrite of the game in question.

Why don't you start your own project page? This discussion goes nowhere.
Tell us in a year or two how far you got...

[blackmyst]

You ditch the whole tile engine (or leave it running, who cares) and simply paste homemade graphics with a homemade engine on top.

This "home-made engine" would be almost as complex as a rewrite of the game in question.

Why don't you start your own project page? This discussion goes nowhere.
Tell us in a year or two how far you got...

What do you mean complex? I wouldn't exactly call putting a few flat textured quads on screen complex (the artwork is a whole different subject but that's the case for any game on any system). I don't know how hard it is to write the equivalent of the cheat finder for memory adresses (and like I said, maybe looking at the CPU->GPU communication would make things easier), but you'd only have to do that once. And from what I gather it'd be a hell of a lot less fiddly than what the creator of this thread intended.

Besides, I wouldn't want to have to recreate faithfully from scratch all the countless complexities that go on in the gameplay engine itself. Which you would have to do if you'd just remake the whole thing.

[Nightcrawler]

No.. your post did not exist when I was writing mine as you wrote yours a minute before I wrote mine.

But since I see it now. What you are proposing will not work either.
How would your overlay engine know what to overlay? You still have the problem that your 'frontend' does not know what it is looking at.

What do you mean by how would it know what to overlay? It overlays everything. o.o

You ditch the whole tile engine (or leave it running, who cares) and simply paste homemade graphics with a homemade engine on top. It's a whole separate app that you see on screen. Just take the absolute minimum amount of information that you need to know from the program for gameplay purposes, say, foreground scroll x and y (you can think of your own method to scroll backgrounds since those don't have an impact on gameplay anyway most of the time, and if they do, well, just find those values too), any tileswaps that happen, x and y locations of sprites on the screen and what they're doing in terms of animation.

How do you find these values? Same way as you find cheat codes. Or it could be even simpler maybe, since you only need to know what the main CPU sends to the GPU. Every "graphics pack" would have a little precompiled list of memory adresses that it needs, that's how it knows what it's looking at.

Lots of work to do? Sure. But remember what this whole topic is about in the first place....completely redrawing a game's graphics. That's no small task to begin with.

It doesn't matter if you're doing an overlay or replacing graphics, you have to know WHAT graphics go on the screen. And I already went over how there is NO way to know without reverse engineering the ROM. If there is a way to know, please feel free to correct me.

A cheat code finder isn't going to do anything. You need to know where the data comes from in the ROM. If that tile is decompressed to RAM and loaded to VRAM, there is no way to know where it came from without reverse engineering.

Where's your little 'precompiled list' going to come from? It's going to come from someone's reverse engineering. Half the people I know of with the skills to do such a thing aren't going to do it. You don't realize how much effort went into JUST the Star Ocean graphics packs alone.

What would make you think people would do this to more than one or two games? I'd say yes.. Super Mario World could be one since it's documented out the butt on it's locations and compression algorithms, but aside from a few well documented games.. you're not going to be able to do anymore.

This is all assuming such an overlay program or modified emulator were created. Come back in several years and we can talk again.

I think the both of you severely underestimate the work and feasibility of what it is you are trying to do.

Please lock this topic and end the madness. Nobody has presented a feasible idea.

[kevman]

Not only does this no longer have anything do to with Zsnes, but all this can possibly lead to is pointless bickering. Oh, wait. Too late.