I was recently talking fwith a friend and retro fan. He made a comment along the lines of: "in theory, emulating snes games should be easier than that the original famicom. EeThe reason is that the majority of carts, with the exception of stuff like starfox, which had a different design, namely adding stuff like a superFX chip to the cart. He went on to say the main reason for this iiywas certain components like an MMC were much more standardized, and with the exception of the capiWcity of the rom chips, many, if not all of the games could in theory have their roms switched out and still run correctly..." I think that sounds like a bunch of rubbish to me, one of the things I do know, was that with the original nes, developers were given a lot of leeway with their board designs, the existance of different mmc's being one of the results. Also, I know this is a kind of n003b question, and as I'm relatively new here, please understand I have googled this topic, in an attempt to save asking you fine Gentlemen and Ladies about this. The results were rather inconclusive, not giving a concrete answer to either opinion. So, I defer to your collective tech knowledge of the pcb design of the nes/snes. I'll be happy to admit that I'm wrong, if thats the case, and will pass along any additional info provided to my friend in it's unedited form. Also, thanks for reading this somewhat long question, I just wanted to be concise when asking this, so as to making it easier to understand the question. Best Wishes, Lordcutter TL;DR? Fiend says most, except special (like starfox) carts on the snes by and large share a very similar pcb layout, and use the same chip to read large rom files a bank at a time(MMC) I'm skeptical as the previous nes/famicon did have radically different board layouts and several different MMC units to get around the original nes needed to have components inside the cart to solve low memory address, while I don't know much about snes tech vs "old original nes tech that required some form of an MMC. -thanks again, any concrete tech info on the two systems would be great and highly appricated.
emulating what is on the carts (i.e. the program/game) and getting the data into the console are 2 different things. You do not emulate the cart. So what he is saying doesnt make much sense to me.
What does PCB layout have to do with emulation? Are we talking about software emulation or emulating a game cart with hardware? Yes it's more difficult to emulate FC carts than SFC carts due to the mappers (MMC). Most SFC carts in fact do not have any sort of mapper. It's significantly easier to emulate a FC console however..
Agreed, I was just trying to explain the details of the conversation as completely as I could. Any thouts/opinion about the part about snes being more uniform in production of cart, in regards to pcb design? Such as them mostely using similar components inside a lot, if not all of the snes game carts (with the exception being stuff like starfox required)
Yes, SNES carts are more uniform. All licensed SFC/SNES games are manufactured by Nintendo, enforced by the lockout chip. Each cart contains Nintendo PCB which fits into a Nintendo enclosure. This didn't start with the SFC though, licensed NES carts had uniform enclosures and a much smaller set of PCB (and mappers) than FC carts since FC publishers could freely manufacture their own carts. This trend of licensing continues to this day since it means more profit for Nintendo and higher standards for games/higher consumer trust.
Clearly your friend has no idea what goes into writing an emulator. Emulating the NES/Famicom is FAR easier than emulating the SNES. This should even be apparent to those without much technical knowledge. The NES has 3 main things to emulate. The 6502 family related CPU which isn't that hard to emulate. The PPU (graphics) chip which isn't too terribly complex to emulate reasonably well. And the APU (audio processing unit) which is actually in the CPU chip too. I'm not sure how hard it is to emulate it since I haven't gotten around to trying that myself but comparing what I know about both to the SNES... The SNES has a much more complex 65816 CPU. Writing a CPU core emulation for this is a much bigger job than for the NES. Then it has a second CPU which is the SPC700, which is the sound processor. I'm not certain if emulating the sound on the SNES is harder or not, but doing so accurately might be. But already you have alot more on the CPU front to emulate. Next you have the big component in the SNES which is the PPU. Compared to the NES PPU the SNES PPU is very complex due to all its features. For one the SNES PPU has several graphics modes in which everything behaves significantly different than in other modes. It also has features that allow for that translucent water and fog and light beam effects you see in many games. Many more things I won't bother noting. In short your friend is very wrong. While it's true that SNES cartridge have less differences between each other than NES carts, most NES carts don't contain very complicated MMCs (memory mapper chip). Most are very simply and some are moderately complex and very few are highly complex. Infact actually other than MMC5, the only other mappers that are complex to emulate are only complex due to additional sound hardware, or possibly some chinese/hong kong unlicensed originals that you may not bother to emulate anyway. Here is an easy measure. Lookup how many different NES emulators are available and compare that to the number of SNES emulators. While the NES and SNES may not be equally as popular as each other I'm thinking if it were that easy to emulate SNES the difference in number of projects emulating either wouldn't be so drastic.
Even if the SNES CPU wasn't more complicated it is also readily apparent that the 6502 has a LOT more documentation than the SNES CPU does. The fact it was used in the extremely popular Apple][ is reason enough. And a few derivations that were similar enough to make it easy to adapt any 6502 work for other purposes. Now if one was to say "in an information vacuum, a SNES might be easier to emulate than a NES to the tune of 80-90% compatibility" they might be right.
Hm? the SNES also uses a 6502, albeit a slightly upgraded one found in the Apple IIGS. There's nothing special about it, it's identical to the off the shelf 65816 which has datasheets. There really is a lot of SNES documentation, official documentation no less unlike the NES, so the real difficulty in SNES emulation has always been that SNES has a huge feature set, and if accuracy is your concern then there is a lot more stuff to time and sync. The SPC 700 is similar to the 6502, but it has some enhancements and a new syntax. While powerful, the audio system is kind of easier than the NES' since it's fully digital and it's easier to resample the 32 kHz output than the NES' 1.78 MHz.
