Released in late 1990 in Japan. Of course, the hardware was finalized well before then. And the CPU is still based off the 6502 design that dates back to the 70s.
I never heard "nes" or "snes" or n.e.s. Or s.n.e.s. It was always just Nintendo and Super Nintendo. I didn't hear the acronyms or abbreviations until adulthood. That being said, if I don't use my childhood terminology I tend to use the single letter abbreviations. I don't know why. The acronyms just don't make very pleasant sounding words I guess.
My theory on the short controller cords, after playing it for a while, is to make you keep the unit close to you so that you can reach the save state button. Hitting the reset button takes you back to the main menu where you can save wherever you are at that moment. It came in really handy but wouldn't be useful if it was across the room from you out of reach.
Nintendo 64 emulation is extremely hard to achieve. The reason is because they used a very complicated system architecture compared to other consoles like the PS1. This means that, while most consoles require a processor several hounded times more powerful to achieve emulation, the N64 requires a processor several thousand times more powerful. The raspberry Pi 3 cannot reliably emulate an N64, but it can emulate a PS1 to near perfection. Only Intel powered SBCs can accurately emulate an N64, even the more powerful smartphones can sometimes struggle. The system architecture and how shaders and other rendering techniques work are quite important for how much power you need to achieve perfect emulation. This is why we have quite good Wii U emulation on CEmu but we still don't have any PS3 or Xbox 360 emulation. The NES and SNES processors have been reverse engineered to such extent that we now have 99.9% perfect and efficient emulation. Nintendo may actually be the only one out there able to code an efficient N64 emulator, as they know how the entire system architecture works.
On the other hand, they built the thing, so they could probably do it more efficient than most, bot needing to rely on guesses about architecture and such.
And what is this 'complicated system architecture' exactly? Could it be the fact that the N64 was a 64-bit console while the PS1 was a 32 bitter... wow mystery solved
I know N64 emulation works flawlessly on a 3500 MHz system lol As I said in my bigger post, I had problems doing it on a 1.05 GHz system, so, there is some truth to your words there.
The AXP223 is a PMIC (Power Management IC), which does power regulation providing stable, correct voltages for the various power rails of the SoC and other components.
Hello, I'm one of them fancy N64 emulation people. The problem is not so much the MIPS processor itself, but the RCP. Well, it's more like the relationship between the main processor and how the RCP's DMA to the main memory. Just like playstation emulation (I'd assume), it's the execution time that's lost between juggling the timings between the RCP's RSP, RDP, DMA to main memory thru the main processor, and the main processor executions in an attempt to get the dead-on 93.75 MHz which in many cases requires the true 62.5MHz clock of the RCP. Since the RCP is a vector processor, you might have dozens of vector operations that need to complete within _n_ -cycles of the main processor dead on. That's kind of a simplified example, but making it work is easy, making it accurate is the hard part when juggling around the ever-growing number of code and asset pipeline stages the 90's was fond of doing.
Most N64 emulators don't actually emulate the RCP. As there are only like 10 programs written for the RCP, they just have a port of those programs for the PC built in the video plugins, and this PC program talks to the emulated main CPU as the RCP would. Of course, this is what led to all the terrible N64 emulation issues we been having for years, as games may tweak those programs, or abuse bugs of em, or blending modes not available etc etc etc.. But well HLE is more than fast enough to run in that chip on the NES mini, but nintendo will have to tweak the HLE side to do the rest of the job (as they did on virtual console)
I haven't heard much about n64 emulation that's any good. But it stands to reason Nintendo themselves should have a technical advantage in building emulators for their own systems in that they designed the things in the first place and probably have extensive documents regarding the hardware design and so on. (It's also worth noting Nintendo has working n64 emulation already, and given the hardware that runs on, worst-case scenario for an n64 mini is they shove a cut-down Wii into a box. - incidentally doing this would immediately cover them for gamecube and wii games as well, down the road, so it's not the craziest of ideas.) I get the feeling that emulation in general though is hitting something of a brick wall due to timing and synchronisation issues. While I'm not 100% convinced by his reasoning, it's still interesting to read what byuu had to say on the matter of accurate SNES emulation. Because his primary constraints, he claims, are all in timing and synchronisation, and as a result he claims an emulator has to be entirely single-threaded if it hopes to have any degree of accuracy to it. And of course, as is pretty obvious, Higan/BSNES demands some pretty hefty single-threaded performance considering there were working SNES emulators on 100 mhz pentium systems back in the day. Accuracy comes at a price. And it seems synchronisation between different hardware chips in a system is persistently one of the biggest problems. (even though by definition, all of this should be running in parallel, it runs in parallel at a very finegrained resolution that requires timing that 'parallel processing' in emulation simply can't replicate. - It makes me wonder though if perhaps a parallel implementation would work out if you shift the entire emulator onto a GPU, rather than bothering with doing anything on the CPU? GPU's seem more suited to massively parallel workloads. But I'm still not sure they can do any better at the synchronisation problem...)
Nintendo don't do a very precise emulation job either. Mario 64 for example is missing the vanish cap effect on VC, which kinda points out to their emulator also using HLE techniques just like the rest. The biggest advantage nintendo actually have is that they use the "one emulator, one game" approach, where they can finely tune the HLE engine to run the target game perfectly, and don't have to worry about making an emulator that runs all the games. But there are REAL N64 emulators, or ways to make those emulators run games precisely. That parallei plugin in particular actually emulates the RCP coprocessor whole on the GPU using the vulkan API, which allows you to get precise N64 graphics and no glitches, but at a playable speed.
I don't see why I should buy these emulation stations when I already have a Pie which can do the same thing. But if they manage to emulate DK64 well I will buy a possible N64 Mini. That game did not even run great on the original hardware and emulation of it is a nightmare.
I don't know if it was the first, but the Turbografx-16 not only came with one controller, but you had to buy the TurboTap accessory to even be able to plug a second controller in! Although, with it you could plug in five controllers IIRC.
They make 5" LCD HDMI screens for raspberry pi's, they even come a bit smaller IIRC. I have one of the 5" ones inside my PC displaying system information, temps, clock speeds and the time. It's also touch capable if you wanted.
So Ben the reason the ram is bigger in the SNES Classic is because of the rewind feature. And there are NES classic being remade and sold this summer. And the 720 is to keep cost down. But also because 720 scales perfect from the old 320x240 resolutions that these consoles put out. Less scaling artifices. And interpolation has been fixed this time around. Also side note Star Fox 2 was little re balanced a little bit. And game may ran worse witch is hard to believe than it does on the Classic. Star Fox 2 was being made to use some features that only the FX2 I guess has some extra features the original did not. Most people just assume FX2 is a FX with a different crystal so runs faster. Turns out talking to a old dev I know that helped work on that game. Star Fox 2 used some new feature that helped draw a little quicker. He says all emulation software for SNES just takes what they have for FX and speeds up the clock for FX2. I guess FX Fighter had it come out would have used this feature too. Now having said that. I have played it on repro carts. On emulation. And on the SNES classic. And Star Fox 2 does not feel that wildly different from what I played before.
"Why couldn't they do more NES minis?" Well, assuming they're good on supplies for plastic molding and NES controllers, they could. But if they used some of the stuff to make NES minis, they'd have less to make SNES minis. SNES minis are already hard to come by. There's a finite amount of classics of either kind they could make. They chose to allocate it the way they did.
Yeah but it really doesn't, none of those games are higher res than 240x180 (Or what ever it is, fucking tiny), and on a screen that small those games look beautiful at those resolutions, you plug an N64 into a 3 inch composite screen and it looks like a modern DS game.
Ginger Ninger that doesn't mean the snes classic itself doesn't require a 720p screen. Since it's HDMI it's not hard to believe Nintendo would only expect you to only use it on a modern tv. The issue is not the games themselves.
Here's something you might not realise: The controllers don't just use the same connector, they ARE Wii classic controllers. They work with a Wii as if they are a Classic controller (obviously though, they lack all the buttons and the sticks). But this also goes in reverse - a Wii classic controller works just fine on a SNES classic. For the most part this isn't very interesting, but I did discover that the 'home' button on a Wii Classic controller has the same function as the reset button. (returns you to the menu) So if you're wondering how to get around having to go over to the console to press reset and access the menu, there's your answer. XD (this also means you could in theory hack together an attachment that you can stick between the console and controllers that mimics the behaviour of the home button on a Wii classic controller, to bring the reset switch closer to where you're sitting.)
I had a semi working N64 emulator on running on the second gen PSP. It worked for awhile, but after I got a blue screen of death. I just scrapped the idea of running the emulator. It was a fun little task while it lasted.
N64 emulation is a very mixed bag even on modern hardware. The N64 was crazy difficult to develop for and this makes emulation more of a problem. Some games work nearly perfect to where others only work with specific emulator. Then many games just won't work properly at all.
Thank god you answered my curious concerns of the difference in boards between the NES Classic and SNES Classic. I wanted to try putting MAME on one of my many NES and SNES classic consoles and I’m happy I stuck with the SNES classic for the extra RAM. Deff shows in Street Fighter 3 Third Strike , Battle Garegga and PC Ultimate Doom with Sigil running in it 👌 solid Deff worth messing around if you have a spare NES or SNES classic consoles to run other systems
I have an SNES Classic and the controller cable doesn't affect me. But, my SNES Classic is connected to my old 27 inch CRT TV with the help of a HDMI to stereo composite adapter.
I remember having difficulties emulating N64 on a 1.05 GHz AMD K9 with 768 MB of RAM. I don't even remember what GPU I was using at that point; this was back in 2005, so, it was an old system by that time already. Of course, back then I had no clue what I was doing in regards to emulation, so, it's possible I wasn't setting Project64 up correctly. But I do remember it being quite difficult to get everything running right.
I know it's been said that smartphone hardware is too specialized, but couldn't you try to use one of those LCD (or even OLED) screens in a Pi or NES/SNES classic portable, thus having a real high quality digital screen?
Sure, but... He could choose a more common one (if there is such a thing, otherwise just pick whichever one or two) from a big brand like Samsung or LG then try to hook that one to a RPi.
I first got decent N64 emulation on a K6-2 500Mhz w/Voodoo2 . It ran that good because it had the GLIDE API helping it. Early N64 ran like shit if you didn't have a 3Dfx card.
A friendly Nintendo suggestion. I know that a theme on this show is making home consoles portable, but with the Switch already being portable, you can't change it into something that it already is. I do have another idea though. Remember the PlayStation Vita TV? What if you made a "micro-console" out of the Nintendo Switch? It basically would require you to strip the Switch of its battery and screen, and combine it with the Dock in as small of a form factor that you could possibly make it. Nintendo's latest console is a tiny box in your pocket!
Ben, keep an eye on Ali Express my friend. 3.5" HDMI screens can be had, though they are only 480p. There are many, many cool things out there. :) So many cool things out there for portables these days!
It depends on how cycle accurate you want the emulation to the ratio of traditional PC power. Snes9x requires about 1~1.6 GHz of CPU power, whereas Higan-Accurate requires about 3.5 + GHz. The worst problem is actually getting the SA-1 emulated accurately which requires, according to Higan author Byuu and ZSnes and ePSXe author _demo_, somewhere about 7.5~9.0GHz or higher estimated CPU power which is currently next to impossible outside LN2 rigs.
It's good thing the SNES classic came with more ram storage. Makes it a better option for modding to add more games too it. Why it is still odd it wasn't more than 21 games added to it originally. I currently have over 206 games including more Snes games, NES, and some Genesis games. Some of the 512mb store is offheaded it seems. Only allows a lil over 200mb of storage for games but I still have over 100 mb left after installing more games and emulator mods. Btw it doesn't take much to emulate N64 that well. I can run it on my phone lol but smart phones are basically portable computers these days and have more than adequate cpu processing and graphics capabilities for retro games.
The Smallest screen I could find that works with a Pi Zero is the: "Waveshare 800*480 4" HDMI LCD For Raspberry Pi 3B/2B/B+/A+/Pi Zero" with a cost of around $45. It has a backlight on/off switch, HDMI Out Port already on the PCB, and a Micro USB Port for Power in on the PCB. But if you don't like those ports, there is a header there also. It's also IPS and Touch Screen. I don't think any Retro games exceed the 800x480 screen resolution.
TotalMK Definetly not. Genesis and NeoGeo AES had the largest resolution, up to 340 x 280 px. Some SNES used 500 something resolution just to render kanji
No, in Japan it's Contra. Gryzor is the name they used in Europe for the arcade original and the computer ports. Just read the first paragraph on wikipedia or look up pics.
For some reason, people used to think it was Gryzor in Japan, but it never was. It was always Contra. Most games even say Contra in English on the box art.
Yeah they did keep the data bus on the usb. Also the controller ports even though they are Wii ports are not wired the same so a Wii controller will not work in them without an adapter
its the same board they used for the NES classic, just the software is different. You can even hack it to emulate PlayStation and N64 games. (USB and SD card mod helps with storage ;) )
You're actually not voiding the warranty. The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975 says that it is against federal law to prevent a person from repairing their own item by saying that their warranty is void if they do so. If a company says your warranty is void tell them that you know about the Warranty Act of 75 and they will immediately drop the act and take care of you.
Not sure if you're just not staying up to date on the courts, but Apple and John Deere are fighting in the legal departments to make that act null and void.
They try to use EULA and one-sided agreements to curb people fixing their own stuff. But EULA are held under extra scrutiny under law. Alot what ends up in EULA's don't have the legal right to be there. As a huge part of contract law is both-sides should be able to negotiate the deal. Take out that negotiations and you see how quick the law favors the consumer. Problem is most people can't afford the lawyer to fight the case or lack the appropriate legal knowledge.
It's one thing to open it for legitimate repair but like others said usually owners will open their consoles for modifications. Just have to make sure if repairing something that no damage is done because if anything is damaged due to neglect then 'poof' goes the warranty.
As someone heavily involved with PC emulation, I'd suspect that an "appropriate" (not too overkill but also something with some overhead) rig required would be something like what you'd see from 2005 in the mid range. So for example, Pentium 4 640/650 w/ 512MB-1GB RAM is probably enough for a good level of PC emulation. Realistically, Nintendo should be able to emulate with much less because of their software engineers but at the same time, that level of overhead might be desired for emulation aiming for accuracy without the GPU as the primary renderer.
That was an interesting thing that was mentioned about Ultra emulation. If Nintendo wanted to go out of their way to emulate Dolphin and Revolution as well it would make sense to use a clone of the Wii/Wii U chip and use that to go all the way back to N64 era software and use the same architecture with each "mini" i.e. mini 64, mini gamecube, mini wii.
Ben, I'm sure you can find the proof of concept online. Shortly after hakchi2 hit for the NES CE people started obviously throwing on retroarch and related emulators. When this was done someone pretty quickly threw N64 on that and bone stock settings/build it didn't run great, chopped the framerate down like 20-40fps+ kind of ranging on the title. Someone decided that wouldn't stand and went and either found or custom built a faster variant of the retroarch N64 emulator and it improved almost to 100%. But, then going into the retroarch emulator settings the video maker tweaked the emulator settings without compromising frames per second performance (no skipping) and got it to run 100% 60fps at 720p running Mario Kart 64 and a few others in the same clip too. N64 would be the maximum allowed with the parts of the NES(and SNES) CE. The only change would be making a larger storage chip so they can take the notably larger N64 carts (8 to 64MB each) plus the ability for their save states and storage for rewind.
N64 runs well (other than sound emulation coding(?) problems) on a Sony PSP, so that's some idea. The CPU was 222-333 MHz, depending on the generation, I believe, but you could overclock the earlier ones with custom firmware to 333MHz. I don't recall the GPU, but it was somewhat better than the PS1's, so that's pretty efficient.
Could you guys try taking apart a Nintendo Switch and upgrading the Wifi antenna to see if it helps any? I've been debating it but I dont really want to be the first person to try lol.
I'm glad Ben (and I'm sure a few others on the team) were able to take our comments about pronunciation, and turn it into something light-hearted and funny. Almost believe my comment about comparing how long it takes to say them (Snes vs S.N.E.S.) was read by them directly, but ahhh... wishful thinking :). Either way you say it, I'll keep watching every new video. PS. S.N.E.S. lol.
N64 emulation surprisingly doesn't take as much as you think. This is because N64 was the first system where we pushed high level emulation. The computers at the time were just way too slow to do it the old way. In particular, you absolutely needed to take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration, even though the N64 didn't really have that. (It did have a separate chip for the graphics, but it's really more like a CPU.) This was revolutionary at the time. You could run Mario 64 on a 256Mhz Pentium II. Other games would take stronger or weaker CPUs. And some games just weren't amenable to the practice. But the point was you could do it. And it's how all emulators for more recent consoles works. However, there's also a downside. Despite computers becoming faster, there really wasn't a push for more accurate emulation. And the state of N64 compatibility, especially if you want to avoid bugs, is not that great. Unlike every other emulator, Nintendo's virtual console emulator is actually better than the PC ones for some games, like Donkey Kong 64. In fact, you are actually encouraged to fire up a Wii U emulator and run Donkey Kong 64 on that rather than on a N64 emulator, if you want a better experience! And it seems that you need a lot of power for that game, too. So it's iffy. Nintendo would need to be selective in game selection to keep the requirements down. And they're going to have to do a whole lot more quality testing. Really, I wouldn't expect anything that hasn't already been released on VC.
@2:25 you ask if they left the data pins on the USB port connected, but I don't think you mention it again after you took it apart. Is it still hooked up?
If your taking ideas for console tear downs I'd like to see how the game gear stacked vs the GBA. Graphics wise the GBA seemed on par with the game gear even though the game gear was older.
True that, the other day, I said, "I haven't checked the Ben Heck Show lately. I wonder what new videos they have up? Ah... glue gun... glue gun... and more glue gun. Guess I haven't missed anything."
For me the SNES classic is worth the price for 3 reasons: the controllers actually feel like SNES controllers (and it comes with two!), the front end UI is great, and it’s ridiculously easy to drop more games on it. Considering my Raspberry Pi, NesPi case, 8BitDo controller and 128Gb SD card set me back about £100- the SNES classic is easily worth £70 in my book, but I wouldn’t pay more.
Largest known commercial SNES rom is 6 megabytes. Largest known games (which used a 2:1 hardware decompression chip - it decompresses data almost transparently, so you could view it as a cheaper way to get double the ROM.) are 96 megabits. (12 megabytes.) The SNES mini doesn't include either of those though, so... Eh. My guess is most of that RAM goes to an operating system and the menu, and stuff like those border graphics, upscaling and so on. That's a lot of overhead, but that's emulation for you; - not a particularly efficient process, when comparing the hardware and software doing the emulation vs the actual original hardware...
The hardest part of emulating the N64 is the 3D graphic standard. Back then there was none, everything was either software or proprietary. While 3Dfx came up slightly earlier, it wasn't adopted by Nintendo. So your emulator needs to interpret the proprietary 3D data and convert it into OpenGL in real time. And since the programmers often used some undocumented hacks, it is really hard to make the OpenGL result at least look flawless. That's why all N64 emulators can only emulate a few games without too much annoying graphic glitches. Also you need a lot of "horsepower" to emulate. The PS2 is a different problem. While it does run on some kind of OpenGL, it's graphic power depends on a Vector-CPU which is really hard to emulate because a numeric CPU often needs hundreds of steps to do what the V-CPU does in a few steps.
The micro USB does have the data input and they're just as hackable as the NES Classic.
6 лет назад
The SNES mini classic actually does fair N64 emulation (provided you use a compatible controller). It's not perfect and some games don't work, but with the right emulator the actual board wouldn't need a big upgrade to work flawlessly.
From what i've heard the rewind function function takes up looots of space on the SNES classic, also there are savestates eating memory, so not just the roms. N64 games are very hard to emulate, like Perfect Dark, i've never seen it emulated with perfect speed and without any glitches in the graphics, not even on fast computers. Should be possible with a good optimized emulator, but maby not with a weak little ARM cpu?
Put it this way Ben, the RPi3 and retropie struggle with N64, this could be due to the emulators not being actively developed but instead hacks and mods are placed on the source cores.
Be interesting to compare the N64 Classic with the SNES Classic when it inevitably comes out as they won't get away with using exactly the same hardware in that one.
