Byuu is one of my hacker heroes. He's passionate, opinionated, and dedicated. The steps taken to map out the SNES, and make bsnes accurate makes it one of my favorite non-library open source projects. I highly recommend checking out his emulation articles on his site[1], and also his piece on ars [2].
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
You can play word games looking for precise definitions of anything. I don't have a clear-cut definition of the word "hacker," but in most places it's clear who is or isn't (I'm definitely not at this point in my life, though I might have been five years ago when I registered here). Yeah, there are some edge cases - maybe someone thinks he's a hacker because he runs Gentoo and knows a little shell scripting but people who contribute substantially to open source projects think he's not - but the vast majority of people clearly are or are not hackers.
Reddit started out like Hacker News, because it was initially best known for being funded/mentored by Paul Graham, so people who were interested in him went there. It mutated into the Reddit we know today - which is why pg felt the need to fork a new community a year or two into reddit's evolution. HN would probably do the same thing given a laissez faire attitude. It's up to HN to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
It is very interesting because it is a story about the longevity of hardware and software and how, in the end, the decision whether a platform is useful or not is up to the USER and nobody else.
While not obvious by the headline, the reason for acquiring them was to make bsnes better. The reason for selling them is he's done with what he needed them for on the project.
Late weekend means different stories make the front page.
As other people have mentioned the use of these carts was not to collect (which could lead to interesting discussion about collecting) but to help with programming an precise emulator. There has been previous discussion about that emulator; and about whether it's better to have something that just plays the game or something that exactly models how the games would play on the real hardware / firmware.
I'd gently agree that this article isn't interesting to me. But it's more interesting than a bunch of stuff on HN.
Wow, that's incredible! Major props to byuu for doing this in the quest for better emulation. Wish I could justify the cash to pick this up, though it does make me think about picking up an SNES again.
With regards to emulation and a return to the classics, I got an Open Pandora (http://openpandora.org/) recently and have been having a blast returning to all my old cartridges, type-ins, tape archives, and so on.
My first computer was an Oric-1, the ZX Spectrum, and I have (had) masses of tapes of things I'd done with those machines .. to think those old tapenames are sitting there in a little emu dir, in my pocket right now, for the train-ride .. pure joy of computer.
You're the first person 'in the wild' I've come across with an Open Pandora. Nice to see they've finally got to a point where they're selling them, it was spun out of the old Gamepark (GP32/GPxx consoles) and had a serious amount of emu devs involved.
Yeah I've been there since the GP32 days, and have Pandora #008 (the eighth one to ship) so I'm kinda lucky that way .. and yeah, the emu guys are really key to the Pandora scene, a bunch of them are still kicking out titles and optimizing things extremely tightly.
The Pandora really is a fabulous machine - maybe its too expensive - but to the HN crowd that shouldn't matter much. Its an amazing amount of power in my pocket, and with MOAI now onboard, I have the ability to use it to develop apps for Android and iOS and Windows, and so on, simply by ssh'ing to it and firing up vim. ;)
I've recently been picking up old consoles/computers both to revisit some old games I loved, but also because I'm getting into demo development for retro hardware. I'm currently hunting for a Vectrex -- can't beat developing for a system with 1KB RAM and with a unique vector display.
I just wish I had kept all my old hardware from my childhood; I sold my NES and all my games for something like $20 in ~1998. Quite a shame.
I've sold everything up to my PS2. I've found better to just have a gamepad adapter to USB and use an emulator in the rare occasions I want to play Super Mario Bros.
I have an arcade cabinet in my living room so I usually just stick to joypad tho :)
I have kept every single 'special' computer along the way, since my first coding days, and I have to say that there is definitely a kind of zen state that occurs when you return to the old systems after decades, and re-code things. It has actually improved me as a modern developer, to return, see what it was I did in my youth, fix it, and move on. :)
So .. in this sense, I will represent to you dear reader the value of such activities by enthusiasts/archivists/mad-scientists who still collect and keep these old systems in order.
Does anyone remember the Oric-1/Atmos line?
Well .. It Lives!!!!
The revival of software development as a social, fun activity, on these machines is producing a virile scene, indeed .. from the demo tree, of course, mostly, but some recent releases have been very special.
The Oric-1 sort of missed a lot of big effort in the 80's, if it'd had just a small percentile more attention, the titles would have been amazing. Nevertheless, the machine has some merits in the 8-bit fashion, and new-school developers are pushing its limits with extraordinary results never thought possible in the mindset of the 80's market.
(Edit, fixed links and added Elite&Stormlord, fabulous games..)
None of the above games were made in the 80's, when the Oric-1 was born. These are all new, revived products, from talented individuals pushing their Oric-1 machines to the limits ..
By way of 'virtues of collectors', here are the Top 150 Games in the Oric scene:
For Oric-1/Atmos/Telestrat users who still turn the machines on today, a lot of it happens with the Oric Defence Force. But there are more groups, and http://oric.org/ provides a unique experience for Oric users, what few of us are out there. Many of us need to learn French. ;)
Emulation of the Oric/Atmos works quite well (http://oric.free.fr/emulator.html), but I am fortunate to be able to turn my old hardware on, and the effort to get the machine on the 'net, and thus connected to this amazing archive and new activity, is a surety.
In short, the collectors value is in the future of the machine. If it still turns on, and works, then use it. And make it available to others to use, even if you don't use it.
> when you return to the old systems after decades, and re-code things.
One of the things that fascinate me is the architectural trade-offs made to deal with the differences in memore and storage.
I grew up with a C64 and Amiga, and have in particularly been delving into old Amiga software. And while a "big" computer compared to the C64 or Oric (which I only remember from the regular "doorstop" insults from C64 users...), you see the difference all over the place.
E.g. a symbolic disassembler that, instead of assuming what we'd likely do now, that it could read everything into memory and build all kinds of structures to help disassemble things, would do two passes, one to identify code sections and one to attach labels and outputthe result.
Or how cut and paste from the shell on the Amiga was structured so that writing the data to the clipboard would happen in a separate task (thread/process) to the one you cut and pasted from, because your clipboard could be located on a floppy or other slow device (most would have it assigned to a directory in a ram disk, but for people with only 256KB or 512KB RAM who wanted to be able to cut and paste "a lot" of data, it might very well be assigned somewhere weird, and even a harddisk might be extremely slow), and so there was otherwise a risk of locking up the UI.
I come away from processes like that thinking about how wasteful a lot of modern development is. Of course most of the time it doesn't matter. But when it does, a lot of modern developers just have never been exposed to styles of development that would help them easiest conserve resources.
(And for a lot of development it does matter greatly. E.g. it annoys me greatly that my Android phone with a CPU several hundred times faster than my Amiga (the comparison being particularly interesting because the Amiga at the time was in competition with the Acorn Archimedes range, running one of the earliest ARM CPU's at around the 8MHz mark, and it was a pretty even match), and a screen resolution and bits per pixel that's not more than about 10-15 times higher, and read/write speeds even to the slow flash of current phones that's still ten times higher than the 20MB harddisk I had back then, is still substantially more sluggish even for basic user interface updates when nothing much is running...)
Fully with you, except I LOL'ed about one thing: an assembler that only makes TWO passes? Ha hah! ;)
Yeah, I'm learning new tricks and have a newfound appreciation for those wireheads who always seemed hell bent on optimizing the crap out of code that I had already deployed .. definitely, returning to the 8bit mindset has made me a much, much better programmer. Whereas 'good enough' works most of the time, 95%, I've developed another sense, maybe borne from operating at the Mhz level, for when things could be 'just a little bit tighter', and I think that all came from a return to the Oric-1 and 6502 assembly ..
And yeah, totally with you on the Android phone being slow point of view. It infuririates me to no end to return to an Android project after 2 or 3 years and realize "oh shit, I have to be responsible for ALL of this crappy pile of code, just to get something up on the screen". Its one of the reasons I moved on from pure 100% Native development, to developing with things like MOAI (which I love) .. one set of code that runs on iOS/Android/Mac/Win/Linux/Chrome/&etc. is far better than having to have a full repository for each platform, different languages, different text files, all for doing the same purpose: putting a button up on the screen, or whatever.
A return to the 8bit scene can give even the most proud, arrogant developer, a reality adjustment to just how devolved we have become .. I yearn for a mobile platform that ships with its own compiler, or multi-pass assembler, at the very least .. ;)
I have to agree with you - maybe it's because I grew up during the time of those consoles and with absolutely-not-realistic graphics but I actually miss that good-old-days video games look since nowadays most games are trying to look realistic like Unreal or Doom or FarCry wow-ing user when they were released.
Maybe my taste is strange but if the game is trying to be very realistic then it's already small things that can annoy me and throw me off, while a totally unrealistic 80s/90s videogame look is perfectly acceptable. I actually prefer it probably for exactly that reason. I don't want all my video games to look super-realistic; while that might be a selling-point for the FPS crowd I think other games should NOT buy into that race and instead focus on the gameplay and on showing me pretty colors.
Multiplayer bomberman on SNES (or maybe Genesis / Megadrive) is an amazing experience.
The rise of smartphone gaming has meant that many more games are being made where "shiny graphics" are not important. I'm really pleased about that. There are many more people experimenting with interesting and fun gameplay ideas.
Now all I want is for people to experiment with ideas that have been forgotten about in current titles. An example would be, in real time strategy, to have "supply routes" - maybe drones build roads to supplies which they mine, and roads make quicker and easier production, but are attackable.
I think the limited graphics helped in the same way a book makes your imagination do all the work.
Recent games with super-graphics have to work harder - either they hit your sweet-spot or disappoint (true that limited graphics was sometimes too limited...)
There's a large gap between games that appeals to me and games that are approaching uncanny valley territory.
For my part, I'd date the "end of interesting games" to approximately the rise of Doom. These games are nowhere near realistic enough to enter the uncanny valley, but to me that's when enough games lost their appeal to me that I stopped playing much.
There's nothing objective about that timing, of course.
Just to me, Doom never appealed, and indeed most FPS's don't appeal, and Doom heralded an age where most games changed in a way that made them less interesting to me. It is conveniently also a way of indicate roughly the timing of the fall of the Amiga and other not-so-3D-capable computers and game consoles, and the styles of games popular on them.
There's definitively exceptions - I bought Sim City 3000 and Alpha Centauri and Terminus long after Doom (those specific games because I've never owned a console nor a Windows PC, and they were amongst a small set of commercial Linux ports available after my last Amiga gave up the ghost).
I'm actually contemplating making my own "retro style" game (only thing stopping me is lack of time to devote to it at the moment) exactly because I keep seeking something that evoke the type of fun for me that the games I grew up with did (what I'd like to do is some sort of mix between International Karate + and Chambers of Shao Lin - never martial arts games don't interest me much).
Of course a lot of this is down to pure nostalgia, and a lot of people would get disappointed if they actually went back and played these games again (with exceptions - I have a Minimig, an Amiga FPGA reimplementation, - and there are certainly games that survive even being blown up on a crystal clear 42" LED TV despite the fact I last saw them on a grainy 26" CRT 20+ years ago).
But there's also a stylistic difference, whether in graphics (cartoon-ish pixel art with lots of metallic gradients vs. "realistic" art that often try to look real), music (80's chip-tune electronica with lots of inspiration from a strange mix of Jarre, heavy metal and others), as well as big changes in gameplay (e.g. 80's games were usually far less forgiving in terms of losing lives and ending the game), and 2D vs. 3D (even for games which today are nominally 2D the graphics is still often in a 3D style).
Well, I never was much of a gamer. But Doom was the first game realistic enough to trigger motion sickness for me. I have been unable to play any FPS since. (I can't even watch many of them.)
I think a big part for me is I want it to be a video game and NOT reality. That's also what ruined playing EVE for me; it is such an amazing game and CCP cannot be praised enough for working hard to stay innovative but for me EVE got way too real and one has to be quite masochistic I think to enjoy playing it. Playing alone is like you are constantly missing out and playing in a corp becomes more like a job with responsibilities than anything, there is not much you can do if you just want to log in and spend some time playing and NOT having to worry or check corp and alliance news or follow fitting rules or having to justify yourself after getting ridiculed on killboards, attend corp meetings or report to your "officer" and what-have-you. Despite being awesome, it stopped being FUN. It's dead-serious to the point people try to interfere with your gameplay in real life.
Same with the ultra-realistic games, they try hard to be very realistic so I judge them on that level whereas trashy video games make it clear they are trashy and from there on I can accept it as just that and can appreciate it when they excel at being trashy. The same goes for movies for me.
My biggest non-purchase regret was when a friend going off to college offered to sell me his SNES and ~150 games for $150 (about 50 games were Japanese superfamicom carts, including all the DBZ, DQ, and FF RPGs).
I have my old NES, and my wife has her old Sega Genesis, and we spend almost as much time playing those as our newer games.
God, what a great system that was. I was 11 when that thing came out, and after seeing just how great the quality jump was from the NES to SNES (and my half-remembered, dust-covered Atari before that), it suddenly became clear to me just how good video games were going to get in the future.
It was a lesson in Moore's Law that even an 11 year old could understand.
What's really interesting -- and what most people don't understand about pre-5th gen consoles (Playstation, N64, etc) -- is that cartridges weren't just physical containers for code, but contained their own logic. When you have a disc, it's just a storage mechanism, but a cartridge back in the NES and SNES days had a fair amount of power over the functioning of the system. Several cartridges contained ARM chips, in fact, and boosted the computing power of the console tremendously; this sort of thing is why the 3rd and 4th gen consoles were able to last for so long.
NES games were produced for 11 years after the console was originally released (and the console itself was produced for 20 years!) because of this flexibility; SNES games were produced 8 years after the console was released as well. Cartridges were just incredibly powerful, and I'll always miss them.
In fairness, TVs have always been dogs. My old CRT TV back then would take about five seconds to show a picture and like 15 to get as clear and bright as it was supposed to be.
But yeah, when I fire up my old NES or Genesis, I'm struck by how much time modern systems waste with loading. I can already be through level 2 of Super Mario Bros. by the time Assassin's Creed III actually lets me start playing.
this sort of thing is why the 3rd and 4th gen consoles were able to last for so long.
NES games were produced for 11 years after the console was originally released (and the console itself was produced for 20 years!) because of this flexibility; SNES games were produced 8 years after the console was released as well.
Not that I disagree that cartridge logic can extend the lifetime of a console, but the Playstation 2 is 12 years old, and Playstation 2 games are still being produced too (e.g. FIFA Soccer 2013). The last batch of Playstation 1 games were released in 2005 (with minor exceptions in other regions), the PS1 was released in 1994.
The problem with cartridges is that they hugely increase the cost of the primary case - non-extended games - for the advantage of the few cases where it's actually used to its full extent. I think accessories, like the N64 Expansion Pack, make much more sense for that purpose.
That said, I prefer cartridges too; CDs and DVDs are just too finicky.
Plugged in a N64 a year or so ago. Then spent a good 10mins fiddling with and cleaning the plugs while a friend commented on my progress. At that point it dawned on us that it wasn't broken. Golden Eye and Super Mario Cart really did have graphics that were that bad - and we loved it just as much.
The N64 had a lot of texturing issues that dramatically reduced the quality from what it "should've been". The PlayStation on the other hand was great, except for the fact that textured polygons were just ridiculously slow, so most games used a lot of shaded polys, e.g. the characters in Final Fantasy 7.
Looking back, nearly all of my favorites from that generation (Tales of Destiny, Symphony of the Night, etc) were really just 2d games with higher quality sprites than the SNES. Funny how that works out.
If I'm remembering this correctly, the Playstation had another large problem in that it used integer coordinates for everything, making it very difficult to avoid the infamous "wavy textures" with textured polys. I think a decent portion of the time, shaded polys were chosen because they ended up looking better, not just because they were faster. If you haven't already, check out the fascinating (and long) developer retrospective on Crash Bandicoot, where (amongst other, more interesting things) they mention their rationale for using flat shading on Crash:
I'm really fond of the PlayStation's brand of 3D as well: There is something really charming about low-res, low-poly 3D, with nearest neighbor texture scaling and 2D "sprites" everywhere. I have some degree of nostalgia for the N64, but that combination of little texture memory and gratuitous bilinear texture scaling is not nearly as appealing.
I think that a lot of gamers feel that way. In retrospective it’s funny to look at those times, see how 2D games were much better, but nonetheless pushed away by their 3D equivalents.
Today we probably take 3D for granted, but we forget that back then it was jaw-dropping to see Mario in 3D and jump in something that looked like an endless world.
These days I just prefer good games over games that use a specific art style or technology. The 2D/3D worlds got also mixed together and I don’t think that it has that much meaning compared to the 3D defining times, i.e. there are a lot of 2D side scrollers that use gorgeous 3D backgrounds and the marketing hype is long gone.
What was the advantage of using a 64-bit processor in a consumer electronics device like the N64? Presumably addressing more than 4GB of memory was not an issue back then.
Well, you could utilize more precise operations but, according to Wikipedia, games rarely took advantage of it:
"The Nintendo 64's central processing unit (CPU) is the NEC VR4300, a cost-reduced derivative of the 64-bit MIPS Technologies R4300i. Built by NEC on a 0.35 µm process, the VR4300 is a RISC 5-stage scalar in-order execution processor, with integrated floating point unit, internal 24 KB direct-mapped L1 cache (16KB for instructions, 8KB for data). The 4.6 million transistor CPU is cooled passively by an aluminum heatspreader that makes contact with a steel heat sink above.
Clocked at 93.75 MHz, the N64's VR4300 was the most powerful console CPU of its generation. Except for its narrower 32-bit system bus, the VR4300 retained the computational abilities of the more powerful 64-bit MIPS R4300i, though software rarely took advantage of 64-bit data precision operations. N64 game-titles generally used faster (and more compact) 32-bit data-operations, as these were sufficient to generate 3D-scene data for the console's RSP (Reality Signal Processor; see below) unit. In addition, 32-bit code executed faster and required less storage space (which was at a premium on the N64's cartridges) Though powerful, the CPU was hindered by a 250 MB/s bus to the system memory; not only that, but in order to access the RAM, the CPU had to go through the RCP (Reality Co-Processor), and could not use DMA to do so (the RCP could). This problem is further compounded by the RDRAM's very high access latency.
Emulators—such as UltraHLE and Project64—benefit from the scarcity of 64-bit operations in the game's executable-code, especially when running with a 32-bit machine architecture as a host. These emulators perform most calculations at 32-bit precision and trap the few subroutines that actually made use of 64-bit instructions."
What was that scam that lit up HN last week? Pay for item. Report item as "not as described." Get reversal. Keep item?
It looks like a cool collection. I didn't know games would be worth this much. Especially considering how practically all aren't in mint condition, many have missing manuals etc.
They are not cheap, $35~ per game. They are all in boxes and some games are easy to be found and dirt cheap, some of them are probably almost impossible to find with box or at all. I remember trying to score an European Chrono Trigger with box and I was looking at $100+.
It's a good collection and everything's done, you get it all in one shipping and everything's clean and verified.
I didn't even know there was a European Chrono Trigger. Certainly the only one of my friends who'd ever played it was the Canadian. So I'm not surprised if it's more expensive than anything else, because it would be very rare (and, unusually for rare videogames, it's also a fantastic game).
In 40 or so years when nobody can obtain a working SNES, and someone wants to look back and understand how the SNES hardware worked, they won't be looking at ZSNES' source code for that purpose. (hopefully we will have transistor layouts ala Visual6502, but you never know ...)
bsnes aims to emulate the hardware as closely as possible, with a side effect that it runs every game as a result. Other emulators aim to play the games, with the side effects of bugs in the least popular titles which nobody notices.
For today's hardware, Snes9X is the best choice for just playing games. But in ten years when cell phones can run bsnes at full speed, and you have to emulate an x86-32 to run ZSNES anyway, why not use something more reliable and guaranteed? GUIs are just frippery, easy to replicate or improve upon separate from emulation.
Yes, and he wasn’t really into collecting all those cartridges. As far as I understand he bought all SNES games to scan the labels on the covers and check his emulator’s accuracy.
Specifically, to document the memory-map each one used.
Traditionally, SNES emulators have used the internal game header and a whole stack of heuristics to guess at what memory-map each game expected, but that's not exactly what you'd call a preservationist approach, and caused problems for homebrew that wanted to set up a perfectly legitimate memory-map that no commercial games happened to use. Now there is (or there will be) a standard database of game SHA256 → known memory map that SNES emulators can use, and a way for homebrew games to explicitly specify what memory-map they want.
I am neither a gamer nor a game collector. However, the size of this collection and the effort you put in to amass it are incredible.
If the only reason you want to sell this collection off is to get more money that can be invested in improving emulation for European and Japanese sets of the games, would not a KickStarter/Indiegogo campaign be a better idea?
You would get to keep your prized collection, while the emulation efforts get funded by people who would benefit from it.
It's kind of insulting that the author of this article chose "A Reddit user" as the first three words. Perhaps "BSNES creator" or "The most fanatic Super Nintendo fan on Earth"? Surely "uses reddit" is not the most interesting quality of Byuu :(
There's some 3DS people trying to get a Chinese firm to do it, and they want $20,000 just to image the chip. No actual modification work.
You need access to machines and tools worth millions. Hobbyist level techniques like nitric acid and etchand sand to stain the ROMs just doesn't work even at SNES-era complexity.
It could be done for less in bulk, the issue is supply and demand. Very, very few people paying for this kind of work combined with wild costs for equipment.
That's pretty cool. I hope someone buys it because it's dev support in a sense. I own an NES,SNES,N64 and also stuff like the CDi (yeah I wanted to complete the Zelda collection...don't those games are horrible :D)
I always enjoy plugging them in. A good game doesn't need fancy graphics in my opinion.
I remember the day we got an SNES. One of my clearest childhood memories. My brother's and I collected 24 games and it was by far our most treasured possession. Too bad I've lost nearly all my patience for games that aren't fast-paced, competitive, and multiplayer!
I found that I'd reached the same stage. If it wasn't multiplayer with the chance for competition, I couldn't get into it. If you're looking to branch out a bit though, I found just playing through co-op games with the same people I'd normally, 'train' with so to speak, was a great way to get back into the vibe of single player and non-competitive multiplayer.
Then again if you're happy with things that way, then no need to change things up.
http://byuu.org/articles/emulation/snes-coprocessors
The process required an electron microscope!