Pocketsnes Bounty

[Hamburglar]

I see people do this a lot over at PPCGeeks, where there's a huge demand for something no one can seem to figure out and people put together a pot of donations if a programmer comes through. I hope this is acceptable here (I can't see why not) but if it isn't, I apologize.

I will start off the pot with $100 of my own money. People can throw in whatever they want...$1 to infinity. I will routinely update this post with what it's up to.

I know the Wiz is capable of running the SNES at full speed, with transparencies on, near-perfect sound and no horizontal tearing. Take a look at the Genesis/MegaDrive emulator. That thing is flawless. Now I know SNES is way more technically advanced, but I am sure it can be done.

If it is accomplished by the PocketSNES developer(s) (or even if someone begins a new SNES emulator??), I and whoever replies here with a dollar amount will donate the total final amount for their troubles.

I know that there is the PSP but the screen on that is awful. I know there are netbooks but they're too big. I know Pandora will soon be out, but it's not as portable, it's thrice the price, and I am uncertain its screen will be as amazing as the Wiz'. That's the reason for this thread. The Wiz needs a emulator as amazing and flawless as the Genesis/Mega Drive one.

Total donations as of 2/7/2010:
$100

 

[crow_riot]

that's a nice idea. i hope it's leading to fullspeed SNES, too.

 

[Exophase]

Are you sure you're qualified to determine that "flawless" SNES emulation can be done? I personally believe things can be improved, but not without substantial redesign to the video rendering by someone who has a lot of experience with writing high performance 2D emulation code. And it'd probably have to be done mostly in ARM assembly.

Bounties for emulators rarely do anything around here. I don't think the amount will be compelling to most who possess the ability to contribute unless it's at least in the thousands. At best you might end up with someone who was going to do it anyway happening upon the money. But I don't think you'll see substantial results here because the Wiz code already reflects all the work that went into SNES emulation on GP2X and even GP32 (on the same token, represents the work that didn't go into it).

 

[Hamburglar]

Well I didn't think I was going to be the determiner of what was flawless. Right now it's near flawless. If it reaches 60fps for most games with no horizontal tearing, I'd say that were flawless (willing to ignore sound glitches).

I just don't know any other way. I donated a modded XBox 1 to the ZSNES team which cost me like $250USD and eventually a flawless SNES emulator for the XBox was released based on ZSNES (previously it was based on SNES9x). I just figured also that a decent dollar amount shows people really care and are determined to see it. I know the hundreds of hours of coding that goes into this would equal barely minimum wage; but that wasn't my intention at all. These dudes deserve $50 an hour if you ask me. But like most, they do it for the love. I just don't want to see support for the Wiz die so prematurely.

 

[Exophase]

Well I didn't think I was going to be the determiner of what was flawless. Right now it's near flawless. If it reaches 60fps for most games with no horizontal tearing, I'd say that were flawless (willing to ignore sound glitches).

I'm not questioning the status you've given PicoDrive, I'm just asking if you're qualified to determine that that's an attainable goal for SNES emulation on Wiz.

I just don't know any other way. I donated a modded XBox 1 to the ZSNES team which cost me like $250USD and eventually a flawless SNES emulator for the XBox was released based on ZSNES (previously it was based on SNES9x). I just figured also that a decent dollar amount shows people really care and are determined to see it. I know the hundreds of hours of coding that goes into this would equal barely minimum wage; but that wasn't my intention at all. These dudes deserve $50 an hour if you ask me. But like most, they do it for the love. I just don't want to see support for the Wiz die so prematurely.

ZSNES for XBox is a port. Convincing an open source project to port their code is not at all unprecedented or that substantial; it's often a project goal to incorporate official support for as many platforms as possible. The effort for that particular endeavor would be nowhere near hundreds of hours, and it sounds like they were happy to perform the service and just needed the hardware. I wouldn't consider that a bounty, just a practical donation.

In this case you're not liable to find someone who doesn't have a Wiz but would be so invested in improving SNES emulation for it. Just in case you aren't aware (and really, I'm not saying you aren't, I just want to make sure), porting ZSNES to Wiz is not an option. You're right, this is probably the best thing you can do, but that's because there isn't very much that can be done. I don't mean to discourage you or this effort, I just wanted to make sure no one got their hopes up.

 

[madtwinz]

There was a question about WIZ port at ZSNES forum and they said that it's almost impossible - too much work to do, faster and easier way would be starting from scratch a new emulator. Over majority of code is done in x86 assembly, so it can't be just ported to work on ARM processor device (like WIZ), it must be rewritten... XBOX was in fact Pentium III (x86) based console, so it was possible to port it.

 

[Hamburglar]

May I ask an incredibly stupid question? If Wiz runs Linux, and there are SNES emulators for Linux, why can't those emulators run on the Wiz?

 

[Exophase]

May I ask an incredibly stupid question? If Wiz runs Linux, and there are SNES emulators for Linux, why can't those emulators run on the Wiz?

For the reason madtwinz said, more or less. Linux is not a virtual machine, it can only run binaries natively compiled for the architecture it's running on. Wiz is ARM, PCs run x86. Emulators for Linux are often portable and can be recompiled producing ARM binaries, but ZSNES isn't portable since it's mostly written directly for x86 architectures. A stock SNES9x compiled for Linux would be substantially slower than the binary available for Wiz.

 

[zaephen]

May I ask an incredibly stupid question? If Wiz runs Linux, and there are SNES emulators for Linux, why can't those emulators run on the Wiz?

For the reason madtwinz said, more or less. Linux is not a virtual machine, it can only run binaries natively compiled for the architecture it's running on. Wiz is ARM, PCs run x86. Emulators for Linux are often portable and can be recompiled producing ARM binaries, but ZSNES isn't portable since it's mostly written directly for x86 architectures. A stock SNES9x compiled for Linux would be substantially slower than the binary available for Wiz.

I have similar issues with my computer as I'm running a x86_64 version of ArchLinux. Kega-Fusion and ZSNES won't run on it as they have x86 assembly in them .
I have actually got ZSNES running by installing a bunch of "lib32" libraries (although I removed it all as I prefer Snes9x) but never did get Kega-Fusion working.