We're one step closer to the emulation masterpiece: Super Mario Bros running on the NES, on SNES, emulated on N64 emulated on GameCube on Wii running in Dolphin on a Windows VM on Linux.
If it could remove the sprite flicker than that would be a real boon. The 8 sprite per scanline limit was in my opinion, the most limiting factor of the NES (and it had a LOT of limitations). I noticed a lot of emulators don't actually remove it, but rather than just make the flicker very fast so it's barely noticeable.
It could use different colors, but while the SNES *may* be able to use a high color pallete for NES games, like for rom hacks, it won't magically give the NES proper shading or more colors natively.
@@nebularain3338 There's an option to emulate 8 sprites per scanline but at the cost of reverting the sprite priority. This option is turned off by default. SNES supports 32 sprites per scanline. There will be flicker if the game tries to use more than 64 sprites per frame however. There are side effects to not emulating 8 sprites per scanline. For example, Zelda uses 8 hidden sprites where the top door is in dungeons so that link doesn't walk over the door. See 4:00
Fun fact: Takahashi Meijin (Master Higgins was really based on this guy) is the world record holder for pressing a game controller button 16 times in one second.
@@swarth8632 to bad Nintendo to lazy to develop Backward compatibly and now after see how much people love their old game now they sue every Rom sites they find and charge me overprice game on their stupid new console, yes I say stupid coz Switch is the most gimmicky console I ever see with their Motion Control nonsense and never admit their drift analog is not real 😡 and Yes i have one but it's mostly in dock mode and I only play with Pro controller just to play BOTW.
@@bhirawamaylana466 this guy got a Switch just for BOTW 😂
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@@bhirawamaylana466 Nintendo wasn't lazy, they wanted to hit a price-point. Also not sure why you blame Switch for 'motion control nonsense'? Motion control is pretty standard now: Steam controller has it, every phone has it. Every Nintendo console since the Wii had it. (The analog drift is a real issue.)
That would be impossible because SNES has more memory than NES...there's a reason why Nintendo wanted to make the leap from 8 bits to 16 bits in 1991...to keep up with the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and the NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16!
In the video you are referring to (Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!) he already shows the NES running an NES emulator, however, this is a neat idea.
@@Justin-Hill-1987 it would be only be impossible at full speed. Mathematically any Turing machine can emulate literally any other it can just be ridiculously slow like hundreds of years per clock cycle or some crap.
Anyone remember the NES emulator for the PS1 called "It Might be NES"? It was released years ago and could play a huge library of games from one single disc. Technically though, this is even more impressive, given that the SNES is about 10 times slower than the PS1.
It Might Be NES was far from perfect but when it worked, it worked. Also ability to make saves to Memory Card was amazing. Made playing RPGs a viable endeavour.
That was the first time I ever heard of kirby, by playing a burnt bought disc of what I think is "It might be NES" preloaded with some roms in it. Didnt even knew the disc was an emulator or what an emulator was. That was a brief moment in my life were I thought Kirby was a sony character LOL.
I remember seeing a friend of mine playing it on his PS1 back in the day. I got a PS1 a while ago and was thinking about burning a CD with that emulator, but now I want to try Project Nested on my SNES first!
I'm surprised there was no mention of the work that members of the SNES scene groups, ANTHROX and SWAT, back when the SNES was still a current gen system. They had several NES games up and running on the SNES. Many of the early mapper games (Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Galaxian, etc..), and with a few graphic glitches, plus lack of in game sound. instead they had SNES music playing over the top of the NES games. This was pretty mind blowing to see back in the early 90's though. Keeping in mind thst his being before public NES emulation even existed.
Some one here who gets it the A&S hacks. They were all mapper zero games. There is also a rare Korean 300 and 1 multicart with emulated Super Mario bros, Kung fu with an all original SNES sound font and slightly improved emulated graphics.
Ever since I found-out the SNES had a backwards compatible CPU, I've always wondered if it would be possible to play NES games on the SNES. I'm glad I finally got an answer to that. I get the feeling Nintendo scrapped the backwards compatibility last minute because it might have been a pain in the ass to test every NES game, and they didn't have enough time to replace the SNES's CPU with a decent one that could compete with the Gen/MD.
Nintendo had 2 choices, 1 making the snes directly compatible with nes games by implementing those neseccarry chips in it or 2 making nes games compatible on snes the hard way trough hardware trickery and emulation,like we do now with nested emulator😁
Im sure money had alot to do with it. Why spend 300$ on a Snes of your current Nes could play Mario World just with shittier graphics...Nintendo is well known as the greediest company for a reason....
Given the amount of hardware similarities - the PPU and CPU have emulation modes, the CIC is potentially compatible, and you can literally wire NES and SNES controllers to the other console, and they work perfectly fine - Nintendo had planned to do this, initially. The two stumbling blocks are the new sound system and the lack of CHR ROM/RAM on the cart.
@@shuruff904 That's not how that works. Backwards compatibility would mean the SNES could play NES games, which would have been a massive win for Nintendo. The idea that newer hardware is just older hardware but faster only came about with frameworks like OpenGL and DirectX, as well as the move away from assembler-based, bare-metal game consoles to ones with a proper OS.
megadrive games aren't even that good compared to super famicom library plus megadrive games look/sound worse usually. usa has so many bad cashin games it isnt even funny it was allowed
Been wondering that for years since I had heard of the converter for the Genesis to play Master System games. Would have loved this back in the day for the S.N.E.S.
Many parents decided to not buy a snes for their kids because of it’s incompatibility with nes games,if nintendo just did knew that, they sure would,ve make the snes compatible with nes games, Now i wonder how many parents did know about the 8star nes adaptor to play nes games in a fake way on snes? Because eventrough nintendo was unhappy about it, but what if it did let decided a few parents to just buy a snes for their kids because of this, ,well then nintendo should be thankful to that company behind that 8star nes adaptor😁
This is amazing. Not that practical if you just wanna play the games, but on a technical level it’s kinda mind blowing. Thanks for the excellent video.
@@vasopel An identical instruction set on the CPU helps reduce overhead, but it's not the end-all be-all. There's still the overhead of implementing mappers, implementing rendering, and figuring out how to modify existing roms to be compatible, as well as emulate additional chips that many NES games have, like SMB3. And most of that needs to be done on a CPU that's barely faster than the original hardware. Most emulators have 100x to 1000x the CPU clock rates to work with. The SNES CPU has about 2x the clock rate. What he's done with such little overhead is still technically very impressive.
@@JohnSmith-xf1zu The developer isn't doing "traditional" emulation. He's using a combination of ahead-of-time recompiling of the code, along with just-in-time recompiling of anything the AOT missed. That's why there's a save file; the JIT recompiler saves its recompiles so that the game runs faster, and these can then be re-incorporated into the AOT recompiled binary. So the SNES itself is doing very little emulation at run-time, it's almost all recompiled code. The "emulation" of the mapping and rendering is being done by the AOT ahead of time, basically translating it to something the SNES can read natively. To the SNES, the game doesn't even look like it ever had a mapper: it's all been remapped to SNES address space.
@@marsilies The AOT of Project Nested is very similar to what Yuzu is doing by caching shaders so it runs smoother the next time you play. Both emulators use JIT recompilers. The exe for Project Nested only remaps the ROM data to proper locations without editing anything except the iNES header. There's only AOT if a save file was imported. AOT is mostly there due to RAM limitation and SMB3 is the perfect example because it runs out of memory by the time you can beat 1-1.
Hornby made a NES adaptor for the SNES back in the day, even Bad Influence had it on an episode, but it was never released sadly. But what about Ninja Gaiden Trilogy? Was any of that NES code running on the SNES?
I haven't compared NES and SNES code for Ninja Gaiden but it works well on the emulator. I may have to run a comparison now that you peeked my interest. Of course the same source code was used but modified to play on SNES, I'm still curious what the code looks like. I remember comparing SNES to GBA ports around 2007, The Lost Vikings in particular inspired me to try similar projects.
@@Myself086 i wonder wich of the snes modes ninja gaiden trilogy uses and how the mmc3 mapper of those games were resambled on snes, the only thing they seems to have changed is by replacing the music and snes effects with sounds & instruments from the snes dev-kit sample pack.
What we really need is an FPGA-based NES core for the SD2SNES (aka FX PAK PRO). They've done it for the Game Boy (although I guess that was easier because they had the Super Game Boy's internal to model it on), hopefully its just a matter of time till they do a NES core. You could always just use a MiSTer of course
At that point you're just using the SNES as a power supply. Is a standard SNES the centerpiece unit of anyone's retro gaming setup? Running a nes emulator on a SNES is as much about the technical accomplishment as it is the functionality.
That project would have been impressive enough as a cartridge adapter withonly PPU and sound chip emulation... The fact that he got it working (let alone hitting full speed in some games) purely in software with mapper emulation as well is just mindblowing! I can't even imagine the level of code wizardry this must take...
@@kungfujesus06 I believe that part would be the same either way, the difference being without a physical cartridge, the mappers need to be emulated as well. That just adds another layer of overhead...
@@andrewsprojectsinnovations6352 The PPU's wheelhouse was hardware accelerated scrolling though, right? I'm curious if this project is leveraging the graphics hardware on the SNES to do the same tricks or if in software this is performing similar tricks to commander keen. Of course, this project is all in sparsely commented 6502 asm, so it's hard for me to assess that for myself :-/.
@@kungfujesus06 Yeah I've done some projects in C/C++ but not ASM yet so I wouldn't be much help on that front... However, that doesn't stop me from speculating: as I understand it only a couple of changes would need to be made to run NES games on the SNES PPU (besides simple address translation): 1. Load tiles ahead of the viewport instead of wrapping around like the NES required (much larger tilemaps) 2. Emulate "sprite zero hits" for mappers lacking scanline interrupts Other than that the SNES PPU just appears to be an enhanced version of its predicessor; many, many features were added but very few were removed. I can't see how such performance could be achieved without leveraging the two systems' similarities...
@@LavaCanyon Wait, I was under the impression that those cartridges just use the console to power a Noac inside it, and get controller inputs. Essentially just an NES on a cartridge and literally doesn't use the SNES's power.
@@newgameld2512 I don't know if all of them are that way but yes, many of them are basically a console in a cartridge and uses the SNES for video signal.
Nice video! As for MMC2 (Punch Out), it's not *too* bad, depending on how optimised his background/sprite drawing routine is. He might get away with checking what's getting accessed in advance then scheduling the mapper bank swap, I'm pretty confident the swap happens on background tile 33 (off the screen), so he might get away with that, but honestly skipping the timing of the PPC is a little scary, especially when it comes to games like Battletoads, he might struggle with that one.
Technically if it's "adventure island" it's Master Higgins. "Boku No Jima" has Takahashi, who was based off a real person that Hudson also invented the button-presses-per-second bee gadget for.
If a playing Gameboy on the SNES is called the "Super Gameboy." What do you call playing NES on the SNES? Is it a Super NES?!!!!! I'm confused. Anyway, this is so impressive! Especially getting games with mappers running.
@@PrimedPixelMusic www.nesworld.com/news/biedermangb.jpg A picture of the adapter. I dont know very much about it. I know there is a scan on a article online somewhere. Maybe I do. What would you like to know?
@@ikaruga There was the Wideboy adapter for NES, which developers used. devkits.handheldmuseum.com/GB_Wideboy.htm The one you pictured was planning on translating the Z80 code to 6502, so it seems very similar to Nested. www.nintendoworldreport.com/forums/index.php?topic=43419.0
Personally, I'm holding out for the project that allows SNES games to run on the NES. Oh, and the name of the character in Adventure Island is 'Master Higgins'
In Japan, he is called Takahashi Meijin (Master Takahashi), named after Toshiyuki Takahashi, a former Hudson Soft executive. They changed his name to Master Higgins for the American release
@@uncledot1868 I definitely like Master Higgins better. It's the furthest thing from what a kid like that would actually be called that it's possible for me to think of. It's perfect.
There’s a few things I’m not sure of when it comes to a project like this, namely sound expansion in some Famicom games. Already I’ve noticed the DPCM channel is muted, as shown by SMB3, and so I don’t see something like Lagrange Point or Gimmick! working completely. Still, this is a damn good job for a tough project like this.
I personally think dpcm playback from nes games can be done BUT the emulator needs to convert dpcm samples into BRR format in order to be accepted by the snes,maybe trough patches.
The architectures are actually extremely similar. Apart from hardware address translation and initial mode configuration, the main problem would be audio processing, since the SNES took a radically different approach there.
They used digitized recordings of the nes psg soundchip to make it processible on snes, only the noise channel is ignoired since the snes does contain a digital noise generator, also dpcm sound is not yet supported but it might be possible in the near future by patching dpcm samples into BRR format i suppose.
this is a project i follow very heavily. nice coverage! glad more people are finding out about it. I am happy to attempt to complete games that need testing.
The spiritual successor to NESticle IMO - maybe not the best compatibility, but absurdly capable for the hardware it's running on. Kudos to the author, looking forward to future developments
There was also the Super 8 adapter back in the day. The cheap ones popping up these days are basically stripped down clones of that. It was unofficial and just had an NES SOC using the Super Nintendo as a power source, which is why it has its own video output - it's not using the SNES hardware at all beyond power. It also allowed Famicom cartridges to be played on the SNES. EDIT: The name of the main character from Adventure Island is Master Higgins in the English version of the game. But you're right, the Hudson Soft executive Toshiyuki Takahashi wanted to make himself the Mario of their company. Given how successful the game series was, it kinda worked.
Wrecking crew was straightly ported to the snes, it probably uses mode 1 and the 1st background layer to make it work,while the psg audio had to be digitised first before it could work with that game,also all adress registers had to be line up with that of the snes cpu to make wrecking crew fully work on the snes, so if nintendo wanted, it, they could,ve make nes games compatible on the snes the hard way😁
if this guy wants a challenge he should get Genesis/Mega Drive games to run on Sega Saturn which has all of the main CPUs of Genesis/Mega Drive & all upgrades as in Saturn has a faster 68k & faster SH2s.
Y'know, I wonder why Nintendo never bothered with a Powerbase converter equivalent for the SNES. Like, I know that it's not fully backwards compatible because despite the main CPU being similar, the _everything else_ isn't there (unlike the Powerbase which is just a passthrough as the Mega Drive DOES have all the chips necessary to run Master System stuff), but Nintendo was never shy of selling weird expensive peripherals. And THEY wouldn't have to do all the reverse engineering that the chinese or modern devs have to do. :P
Using a backward compatible CPU is one thing, but you need to consider that the graphics and sound co-processors now work different also. 6502 memory mapping usually has chip registers at specific memory locations. When you go from one system to another, these get moved around and the original program is useless until to gets modified to work with the new hardware. Bit color depth is changed, maybe 1bit or 2bits (3 colors) per pixel on the NES vs 4bit (16 colors) or 8bits (256 colors) on the SNES. Nintendo did port Super Mario Brothers game series to Super Mario All Stars on the SNES with upgraded graphics, but all the stuff remained in the same locations. Sound Chips, number of voices changes, and control registers vary greatly from all the different audio chips.
Wow that’s dope as fuck. I always wanted backwards compatibility on Nintendo systems but I guess back then it would’ve costed a fortune to do. I’m surprised nobody in the gaming community has came up with a solution besides what’s already out there to create an adapter that lets you use your own carts via either emulation, fpga, or either from actual cpu and ppu chips like how the super Gameboy was made.
See also, the Asteroids arcade emulator for the also-6502-based Atari 8-bit computers. It runs the Asteroids ROM, and emulates the display, sound, and input. Seems like something similar is being done here. Neat stuff!
There are lots of reasons why NES games are not directly compatible. a good analogy is that the SNES CPU is a shell and the emulator is the container. that runs the 6502. You have many hurdles that need to be resolved including 2a03 needing to directly communicate with the game for audio, you will need to emulate the memory mapped locations and additional functions. that is just the beginning.
I remember back in the day, 1999-2001, I ended up with some NES roms that had been converted to work on a SNES emulator. Now, the sound didn't work, and the games were all simple games that didn't have any custom-chips, we're talking Mappy and the original Mario Bros. But they worked pretty well. I have no idea if they would've worked on an actual SNES, but I think they would've. So playing NES games on a SNES, certainly isn't anything new. Still, it's impressive to see. Also, finally I know why the SNES has such a crappy processor! I just thought it was to save on money. But it turns out that it was because they had plans to have backwards compatibility.
@@gblargg To my knowledge, Super Mario All-Stars pretty much reuses almost all of the original code from the original games. The only reason the physics on the Mario 1 remake is slightly different (Mario rises slightly when he breaks a brick instead of bouncing down), is because some idiot reversed a variable by mistake during the conversion. Instead of removing a number from the Y variable, it adds it. There's even a hack that corrects the bug. It's literally just a single + that needs to be a - in the code.
Both systems are already very close to each other. Both use 6502-based code and both have the exact same screen resolution, so the main issue is converting graphics and sound data to work on the SNES.
Reminds me of that news interview with a mother who said she won’t be buying her son an SNES if it meant having to buy a new console to play new games or something.
I have a FC Twin that plays both NES and SNES games. It has 2 cartridge slots and uses SNES controllers for both. I ve always wondered what it would have been like have the FC Twin back in 1991.
the photos of the SFC and what people claim was an add-on, it's litterally just a redesigned famicom with the same aesthetics as the famicom, much like the NES 2
Great video! I'm not surprised at all that this is being done. Nintendo briefly considered making the Nintendo NES a 16 bit console rather than an 8 bit console at first, but ended up deciding against it think it might be too much of a leap for gamers considering what had come in gaming already. Thus that at least some Nintendo NES games could be played on the Nintendo SNES through emulation, or other means makes sense.
You are wrong. The SNES CPU is far from a souped up NES CPU. It has a lot of modern, for the time, features and it's not as slow as people think. It has several instructions that makes it punch above it's weight. The biggest bottleneck of the SNES was actually it's memory bandwidth and not it's CPU.
No, it pretty much is a souped-up NES CPU, that's accurate. There's nothing really wrong with that. It's got largely the same instruction set, just with the ability to switch the registers into a 16-bit mode, and it's clocked almost 2x the speed of the NES, so it's still a pretty substantial upgrade. I do agree that people give it way too much flak for being "too slow" though.
Underrated Subbed at 19.1 K I remember subbing to DankPods in November or December 2019, at 14.7 K Why do I keep finding underrated TH-cam channels (high production quality with less than 100 K)
I don't think this is entirely an emulator. To me, this seems like a translation layer, utilizing the SNES graphics architecture and other various protocols to step in for the NES ones. I think the emulation only begins once the custom chips found on some NES games are present for the game to function. But even still, if it takes modifying the rom for it to even boot, then isn't that just a rom hack with different pointers? At no point did you have to load up software to play them from the SNES in real time.
This emulator is incredibly interesting. I'm looking forward to part two. I've been trying to get at least some idea of how it works from the source. It looks like it uses a dynamic recompiler aka JIT with the ability to recompile into ROM to enable reuse of the results aka static recompilation aka AOT. SNES's 128KB of WRAM would not be able to provide enough translation cache for all NES games so I think some static recompilation is necessary for compatibility with some games. I haven't yet tried running it myself so I don't really know how the static recompilation works, I assume it's by playing the generated SMC ROM in the author's custom SNES emulator on a PC for a while and letting it recompile stuff to ROM as you go? Since the SNES CPU offers so few clock cycles over the CPU it goes without saying that the recompiled code has to be as close as possible to a 1:1 match in instructions to the original code, and the emulator can't spend much CPU time massaging data formats for the NES PPU, pAPU, mappers etc to something that works properly on the SNES. The emulator will need to inject additional code to figure out what to do with memory addresses and branch targets that can't be figured out at compile time, or that can but are known to target specific I/O locations. Hopefully most other instructions can be native-ish. There are some aspects of the 6502 that should make this a little easier on the emulator. Zero page and absolute address modes can be determined at compile time. Zero page and absolute indexed generally can't be but because the index is only 8-bit the range of addresses is heavily bounded which should often be enough to still determine a direct translation. I thought I'd seen some profiling on NES or at least some other 6502 program frequency of address mode usage but I couldn't find anything. But I think indirect addressing modes are a fairly small percentage of memory accesses.
Static recompilation works by first playing the NES game on any SNES emulator or on original hardware then importing the SRM file into the exe. The exe itself contains part of my SNES emulator, minus I/O, to emulate the recompiler so I don't have to write it in 2 different programming languages.
@@espfusion Yes but not every destination is saved. Branches are never saved. Jumps are only saved when crossing bank boundary and in ROM. Calls and indirect jumps are only saved when destination is in ROM. Branches and inbound jumps are solved immediately during recompilation. The goal is to record only the entry point for each sub-routine. These entry points are then used by the exe to recompile code. Recompiling into the ROM saves memory and runs faster due to lower memory latency from ROM. Sub-routines recompiled ahead-of-time aren't linked, each call or jump crossing bank boundary will reserve 4 bytes of RAM ahead-of-time.
@@Myself086 Thanks for the explanation, that makes a lot of sense. I'm used to using the same branch target tables for both direct branches that can be resolved internally by the recompiler and indirect branches that have to be resolved at runtime (and maybe generate new code). Never really occurred to be to have a table that only held the latter but it's clear that for static recompilation the former can be created again and doesn't have to be saved. Note when I say branch I mean all kinds of changes in control flow, both conditional/unconditional or direct/indirect. I can see how that's confusing for CPUs like 65xx where branch and jump are distinct instruction types. Do you have any stats on how many of the recompiled instructions aren't done 1:1/some idea of the overhead added in the recompiled code, or maybe some actual translated block examples? I love looking at that sort of thing from recompilers. One other question, is there any support for self-modifying code running in the NES's RAM? I don't know how much NES games actually ever do this and I'm sure if they do it'd be very limited since there's so little RAM anyway. I know PC-Engine games did it almost entirely only for setting up the added block move instructions (they have immediate operands) which would be moot on the NES. If you do support it or plan to I'd like to know the strategy.
@@espfusion I'm always very careful about counting overhead cycles and I try to come up with something better each time. Conditional branches are sometimes coupled with a jump, this results in the condition taking 3&5 cycles rather than 2&3. Reading ROM data adds a varying amount of cycles, there's also some optimization within the block of code to avoid testing memory range multiple times in a row. Indirect jump (opcode $6C) is one that I paid very close attention to, JMPiUnrolled.asm explains the entire overhead with cycle count and manages to take about 90 cycles depending on the game, I use 256 linear linked lists to find my destination. It's called "unrolled" because there's 64kb of repeating code just to speed up this instruction. Non-native return uses a variant of it since v1.3 and has had a major improvement on its overhead. Code running in RAM is read by an interpreter, it only supports jumps for now as a lot of games store jump instructions in RAM but I will be adding more to it as time goes on. Kirby's Adventure has some modifying code in RAM but it shouldn't be a big hit on performance. There's an option to recompile code stored in PRG RAM (6000-7FFF) because Zelda 1 stores some static code there. I intend to add more options based on the challenges I face, maybe some option to tell the recompiler where the self-modifying code is if it gets that bad.
I remember receiving a Chinese Super NES cartridge loaded with over 500 NES roms on it that could be play on my Super NES console. So yeah I think you could play more NES games on Super NES just not natively.
When I first found out the SNES was originally designed to be backward compatible and later when I saw someone port the original Super Mario to the SNES and it was 1:1 except for the sound which used SMAS sounds, I thought about making a Game Genie - like adapter, using period parts, that would allow backwards compatibility. Because of the backwards compatible CPU, the code can be run directly (other than 1/2'ing the clock rate), and I believe the PPU (aka GPU) calls map almost directly, maybe with a little translation required. The major hiccup is the sound - I think this is where they abandoned compatibility when designing the SNES; the adapter would basically generate the NES sounds & then load them into the SNES sound chip. It might still be fun to do, but I'm not sure it would be worth the effort. I'm interested to look at the emulator being worked on here; I'll be honest I'm not sold on the approach, if he has to do generation/patching on the NES roms anyway - why not just make a tool that translates the NES ROMS to the SNES? It seems like that would be way easier, more straight-forward, have less bugs, and more compatibility.... you could also translate from say, the Genesis...
"you could also translate from say, the Genesis" -- The difficulty there is, the SNES CPU works similarly enough to the NES CPU that you can translate a lot of the instructions without doing anything too drastic, they're based on the same architecture. The Genesis CPU works in a completely different way, so you'd end up needing a lot more instructions to get the same behavior, which would end up being way slower.
Calling the 65816 a "16 bit version of the 6502" is selling it short like calling an 68000 a 16-bit version of the 6800. They're both the successors to an 8-bit predecessor sure but they are way more than just a 16-bit wide version.
Hell, I've got an AV Famicom modded with the Hi-Def NES HDMI kit, so my NES output looks just fine, thanks. That being said, I most definitely plan to test this using my FXPAK Pro on my Analogue Super NT!
it'd be very cool to convert that application into a hardware adapter I don't know how much processing power it needs, but regardless there's already an open source arduino based cartridge dumper, so code for that could be used to dump the rom into temporary memory, then convert that dump to an SNES rom on the fly more or less, would be so freaking dope. I wouldn't mind waiting a little bit for the game to load
I think Nintendo originally was going to make NES games compatible with the Super NES but decided to go against it. That is why Nintendo chose an R5A22 CPU, as it is a 65C816 derivative which is comptaible with 6502 and 65C02 instructions. The NES processor (N2A03) is a modified form of 6502.
Yes, and it's a shame that they abandonned backwards compatibility. Imagine a converter that allows you to play NES games on the SNES, like the Master System converter did on the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis.
If Nintendo had actually included this in the original SNES as once intended then it would have utterly blown away the Genesis in sales. Not that it didn't alreay do that--but it could have been by a LOT more with this additional ability imo.
You forget that most gamers owned an NES already so while it would have been nice, our parents back then wouldn't have seen the benefit of it if they already bought us an NES. Now if the Genesis launched with built in backwards compatabilty with the Master System, kids who didn't get the opportunity to play those games could have now at no additional cost.
@@Charlie-eq3dj I have zero doubt whatsoever that having BC on SNES would have helped it sell way more additional units that having BC on Genesis would have helped it additionally sell, by far. Many of the parents who were reluctant to buy the new SNES hardware could at least have rested a bit knowing that all those NES cartridges could be carried over to the shiny new 16-bit console. And there was roughly six times as many NES owners out there than Master System owners ready to upgrade to the next generation. Master System support on Genesis wouldn't have much of an effect, and it actually had a Master System add-on already anyway that kinda proves this, whereas on SNES I think having NES support would likely have added another handful of millions of units sold, especially if it was directly built into the hardware with no need for an additional add-on device.
Not sure if it's taking advantage of this, but NES games can be ported to the SNES mostly by adjusting the memory addresses for the ROM space, and replacing bank switching calls in larger games with pointers to the actual memory addresses. Makes LoZ run like a dream. So if it's by any chance reading the ROM and translating memory addresses, that would explain why the performance isn't dogshit.
I contacted Kosmic about it just a few days before the v1.3 release back in April. He's interested in it but I think he has too much on his plate in terms of SMB ROM hacks.
That’s not the super NES that’s the super Fanicom I own both consoles and who plays on the old consoles instead of the new improved consoles such as the Xbox series X who’s got quick resume game pass with first party games or the PS5 im done with the old gen consoles their great for children to get to see how we used to play games in the 80’s 90’s you should know you can hack the Super Nintendo Nintendo classic and add the entire collection no need to blow in the cartridges anymore
Never say never. There’s a bunch of emulation features and tricks the devs of Dolphin thought would never be possible but now they can do it. Factor 5 games running for example.
If I want a challenge, I try my best to put all the colors to a Rubics cube back in order to no avail. This guy is making nes games run on snes with "math" lol. I am clearly under achieving. Thank god for nerds and challenges they make for themselves. It makes the world go round. BTW this has been done with the Genesis everdrive. I don't know how well it runs though.
I'd love to see a version of the software that can create the SNES ROM files in batches en masse, so you can create a large collection of these in one go, vs having to make these one at a time.
Conquest of Crystal Palace works on hardware. As does captain silver. thier are initial slight glitches which seem to disappear after a few seconds. But I’m testing lots via everdrive.
Mitsumei Gatoru??? That was Mega Man, with Krillin from Dragonball Z, instead of Megaman!!! It even has the only three shots on the screen at a time, component.
Nothing really new. Anthrox and Swat tried to emulate NES onto the SNES in the 90s and there are many mapper 0, A&S nes hack conversions out there. Only thing is the sound was non existent or an original loop on those roms. Then there was a Korean multicart that had a bunch of NES games emulated very well, with slightly more color but have a weird sound font.
I've seen NES games played on super Nintendo. Case in point Ninja gaiden trilogy. I remember having that ROM and it was running the actual NES games on the super Nintendo I don't know if it was emulation or what exactly was going on here but it was running them
Wait why would they need a separate video output for those "NOAC in an SNES cart" things when the SNES has a pixel buss on the cartridge port? All you'd need to do is write a small SNES program that takes the pixel output from the NOAC and puts it up as a graphics layer the same way the Super FX chip did.
I wonder why Nintendo didn't released an adapter for playing Nintendo NES games on the Super Nintendo, because the Super Nintendo was designed to be compatible...
We're one step closer to the emulation masterpiece: Super Mario Bros running on the NES, on SNES, emulated on N64 emulated on GameCube on Wii running in Dolphin on a Windows VM on Linux.
Multiple levels of emulation inception. 😂
all running through a hackintosh! (late reply I know but think about all the potential layers lol)
I bet you could squeeze a gameboy advance in between SNES and N64
its emulation/abstraction all the way down
all while running in minecraft (there is minecraft mods to run a VM within minecraft, its mindblowing)
One improvement I can already see is that the NES games using the SNES color palette look much more vibrant.
Sure and more smooth, since colors palette are pre defined maybe developer can even create a SNES look palette for other projects.
If it could remove the sprite flicker than that would be a real boon. The 8 sprite per scanline limit was in my opinion, the most limiting factor of the NES (and it had a LOT of limitations). I noticed a lot of emulators don't actually remove it, but rather than just make the flicker very fast so it's barely noticeable.
It could use different colors, but while the SNES *may* be able to use a high color pallete for NES games, like for rom hacks, it won't magically give the NES proper shading or more colors natively.
@@nebularain3338 There's an option to emulate 8 sprites per scanline but at the cost of reverting the sprite priority. This option is turned off by default. SNES supports 32 sprites per scanline. There will be flicker if the game tries to use more than 64 sprites per frame however.
There are side effects to not emulating 8 sprites per scanline. For example, Zelda uses 8 hidden sprites where the top door is in dungeons so that link doesn't walk over the door. See 4:00
I love to see some msu1 and Super FX 2 improvement for even faster speed
Fun fact: Takahashi Meijin (Master Higgins was really based on this guy) is the world record holder for pressing a game controller button 16 times in one second.
"I needed a challenge" - A true Programmer's sentiment.
@@rastas_4221 My dumb brain trying to re-connect what my comments mean when returning to projects
@@steventechno thats why you comment.
Other than "i am getting hungry, i should eat" like i did...
@@oz_jones I've been more liberal with comments in my later code in projects for this reason. haha
This is amazing. Imagine if it came out when the SNES was first released? It would have allowed companies to sell their NES titles on SNES carts.
Yes! Then Mega Man 4 - 6 wouldn't have gotten overlooked!
@@swarth8632 to bad Nintendo to lazy to develop Backward compatibly and now after see how much people love their old game now they sue every Rom sites they find and charge me overprice game on their stupid new console, yes I say stupid coz Switch is the most gimmicky console I ever see with their Motion Control nonsense and never admit their drift analog is not real 😡 and Yes i have one but it's mostly in dock mode and I only play with Pro controller just to play BOTW.
Makes you wonder why it didn't happen. This should have been all possible back then. Maybe the NES hardware was less understood.
@@bhirawamaylana466 this guy got a Switch just for BOTW 😂
@@bhirawamaylana466 Nintendo wasn't lazy, they wanted to hit a price-point.
Also not sure why you blame Switch for 'motion control nonsense'? Motion control is pretty standard now: Steam controller has it, every phone has it. Every Nintendo console since the Wii had it.
(The analog drift is a real issue.)
You gotta run this on the project that runs SNES on the NES. So it comes full circle a NES running SNES running NES
That would be impossible because SNES has more memory than NES...there's a reason why Nintendo wanted to make the leap from 8 bits to 16 bits in 1991...to keep up with the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and the NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16!
@@Justin-Hill-1987 look up the video "Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!"
In the video you are referring to (Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!) he already shows the NES running an NES emulator, however, this is a neat idea.
@@Justin-Hill-1987 it would be only be impossible at full speed. Mathematically any Turing machine can emulate literally any other it can just be ridiculously slow like hundreds of years per clock cycle or some crap.
@@It-sJay How much does a Raspberry Pi cost?
Anyone remember the NES emulator for the PS1 called "It Might be NES"? It was released years ago and could play a huge library of games from one single disc. Technically though, this is even more impressive, given that the SNES is about 10 times slower than the PS1.
It Might Be NES was far from perfect but when it worked, it worked. Also ability to make saves to Memory Card was amazing. Made playing RPGs a viable endeavour.
That was the first time I ever heard of kirby, by playing a burnt bought disc of what I think is "It might be NES" preloaded with some roms in it. Didnt even knew the disc was an emulator or what an emulator was. That was a brief moment in my life were I thought Kirby was a sony character LOL.
20 times faster considering the SNES CPU needs at least 2 cycles to complete any opcode.
seen some play throughs of it running a bunch of dendy titles... it, that said it was a crap shoot which games would even load.
I remember seeing a friend of mine playing it on his PS1 back in the day. I got a PS1 a while ago and was thinking about burning a CD with that emulator, but now I want to try Project Nested on my SNES first!
I'm surprised there was no mention of the work that members of the SNES scene groups, ANTHROX and SWAT, back when the SNES was still a current gen system. They had several NES games up and running on the SNES. Many of the early mapper games (Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Galaxian, etc..), and with a few graphic glitches, plus lack of in game sound. instead they had SNES music playing over the top of the NES games. This was pretty mind blowing to see back in the early 90's though. Keeping in mind thst his being before public NES emulation even existed.
Some one here who gets it the A&S hacks. They were all mapper zero games. There is also a rare Korean 300 and 1 multicart with emulated Super Mario bros, Kung fu with an all original SNES sound font and slightly improved emulated graphics.
Ever since I found-out the SNES had a backwards compatible CPU, I've always wondered if it would be possible to play NES games on the SNES. I'm glad I finally got an answer to that.
I get the feeling Nintendo scrapped the backwards compatibility last minute because it might have been a pain in the ass to test every NES game, and they didn't have enough time to replace the SNES's CPU with a decent one that could compete with the Gen/MD.
Nintendo had 2 choices,
1 making the snes directly compatible with nes games by implementing those neseccarry chips in it or 2 making nes games compatible on snes the hard way trough hardware trickery and emulation,like we do now with nested emulator😁
Im sure money had alot to do with it. Why spend 300$ on a Snes of your current Nes could play Mario World just with shittier graphics...Nintendo is well known as the greediest company for a reason....
Given the amount of hardware similarities - the PPU and CPU have emulation modes, the CIC is potentially compatible, and you can literally wire NES and SNES controllers to the other console, and they work perfectly fine - Nintendo had planned to do this, initially. The two stumbling blocks are the new sound system and the lack of CHR ROM/RAM on the cart.
@@shuruff904 That's not how that works. Backwards compatibility would mean the SNES could play NES games, which would have been a massive win for Nintendo. The idea that newer hardware is just older hardware but faster only came about with frameworks like OpenGL and DirectX, as well as the move away from assembler-based, bare-metal game consoles to ones with a proper OS.
megadrive games aren't even that good compared to super famicom library plus megadrive games look/sound worse usually. usa has so many bad cashin games it isnt even funny it was allowed
Very interesting find that i thought one could never do. Many years ago my mother asked me if you could play NES games on the SNES.
Been wondering that for years since I had heard of the converter for the Genesis to play Master System games. Would have loved this back in the day for the S.N.E.S.
@@Kara_Kay_Eschel oh hi
@@RWL2012 th-cam.com/video/hydvYXjmXko/w-d-xo.html
Many parents decided to not buy a snes for their kids because of it’s incompatibility with nes games,if nintendo just did knew that, they sure would,ve make the snes compatible with nes games,
Now i wonder how many parents did know about the 8star nes adaptor to play nes games in a fake way on snes? Because eventrough nintendo was unhappy about it, but what if it did let decided a few parents to just buy a snes for their kids because of this, ,well then nintendo should be thankful to that company behind that 8star nes adaptor😁
This is amazing. Not that practical if you just wanna play the games, but on a technical level it’s kinda mind blowing. Thanks for the excellent video.
When you consider most emulators use vastly more powerful systems to run even NES ones this is remarkable.
well...when you consider the facts (like the ones in the intro of this video)...no,
@@vasopel An identical instruction set on the CPU helps reduce overhead, but it's not the end-all be-all. There's still the overhead of implementing mappers, implementing rendering, and figuring out how to modify existing roms to be compatible, as well as emulate additional chips that many NES games have, like SMB3. And most of that needs to be done on a CPU that's barely faster than the original hardware. Most emulators have 100x to 1000x the CPU clock rates to work with. The SNES CPU has about 2x the clock rate. What he's done with such little overhead is still technically very impressive.
@@JohnSmith-xf1zu The developer isn't doing "traditional" emulation. He's using a combination of ahead-of-time recompiling of the code, along with just-in-time recompiling of anything the AOT missed. That's why there's a save file; the JIT recompiler saves its recompiles so that the game runs faster, and these can then be re-incorporated into the AOT recompiled binary.
So the SNES itself is doing very little emulation at run-time, it's almost all recompiled code. The "emulation" of the mapping and rendering is being done by the AOT ahead of time, basically translating it to something the SNES can read natively. To the SNES, the game doesn't even look like it ever had a mapper: it's all been remapped to SNES address space.
@@marsilies The AOT of Project Nested is very similar to what Yuzu is doing by caching shaders so it runs smoother the next time you play. Both emulators use JIT recompilers.
The exe for Project Nested only remaps the ROM data to proper locations without editing anything except the iNES header. There's only AOT if a save file was imported. AOT is mostly there due to RAM limitation and SMB3 is the perfect example because it runs out of memory by the time you can beat 1-1.
It helps that the NES has a 6502 CPU and the SNES has a 65c816, a 16-bit extension to the 6502.
Now I can finally use my outdated system to play even more outdated games!
It’s a win-win
Now we can start emulating the emulation so we can emulate playing NES games on the SNES.
Not outdated.... vintage..... vintage.
@@GORF_EMPIRE R E T R O
@@RWL2012 These are older than retro. These are vintage, classic. PS1 Jaguar..those are retro.
Hornby made a NES adaptor for the SNES back in the day, even Bad Influence had it on an episode, but it was never released sadly.
But what about Ninja Gaiden Trilogy? Was any of that NES code running on the SNES?
I haven't compared NES and SNES code for Ninja Gaiden but it works well on the emulator. I may have to run a comparison now that you peeked my interest. Of course the same source code was used but modified to play on SNES, I'm still curious what the code looks like.
I remember comparing SNES to GBA ports around 2007, The Lost Vikings in particular inspired me to try similar projects.
@@Myself086 Ooh fantastic, let me know if you do discover anything!!! :)
@@Larry Hello you...I just got your plushie in the mail today, YAY!
what series and episode of Bad Influence is that in...?
@@Myself086 i wonder wich of the snes modes ninja gaiden trilogy uses and how the mmc3 mapper of those games were resambled on snes, the only thing they seems to have changed is by replacing the music and snes effects with sounds & instruments from the snes dev-kit sample pack.
What we really need is an FPGA-based NES core for the SD2SNES (aka FX PAK PRO). They've done it for the Game Boy (although I guess that was easier because they had the Super Game Boy's internal to model it on), hopefully its just a matter of time till they do a NES core. You could always just use a MiSTer of course
The gba everdrive can run nes games on an emulator. Yeah, the gba is a more powerful system but I would assume you are right.
At that point you're just using the SNES as a power supply. Is a standard SNES the centerpiece unit of anyone's retro gaming setup? Running a nes emulator on a SNES is as much about the technical accomplishment as it is the functionality.
Sure but that completely misses the point.
@@michaels9917 The Everdrive N64 X5/7 can run them as well....
@@TheCoolDave Yeah playing NES on the GBA and on the N64 has been possible for 10+ years plus
That project would have been impressive enough as a cartridge adapter withonly PPU and sound chip emulation... The fact that he got it working (let alone hitting full speed in some games) purely in software with mapper emulation as well is just mindblowing! I can't even imagine the level of code wizardry this must take...
Wouldn't that be the more efficient route? Intercept calls to the PPU and sound chips and translate them to the new hardware's op codes?
@@kungfujesus06 I believe that part would be the same either way, the difference being without a physical cartridge, the mappers need to be emulated as well. That just adds another layer of overhead...
@@andrewsprojectsinnovations6352 The PPU's wheelhouse was hardware accelerated scrolling though, right? I'm curious if this project is leveraging the graphics hardware on the SNES to do the same tricks or if in software this is performing similar tricks to commander keen. Of course, this project is all in sparsely commented 6502 asm, so it's hard for me to assess that for myself :-/.
@@kungfujesus06 Yeah I've done some projects in C/C++ but not ASM yet so I wouldn't be much help on that front...
However, that doesn't stop me from speculating: as I understand it only a couple of changes would need to be made to run NES games on the SNES PPU (besides simple address translation):
1. Load tiles ahead of the viewport instead of wrapping around like the NES required (much larger tilemaps)
2. Emulate "sprite zero hits" for mappers lacking scanline interrupts
Other than that the SNES PPU just appears to be an enhanced version of its predicessor; many, many features were added but very few were removed. I can't see how such performance could be achieved without leveraging the two systems' similarities...
I wonder if delivering this as a lock on cartridge that performs the translation would actually solve the custom chip difficulties
Kinda what the china adapters do already.
@@LavaCanyon Wait, I was under the impression that those cartridges just use the console to power a Noac inside it, and get controller inputs. Essentially just an NES on a cartridge and literally doesn't use the SNES's power.
@@newgameld2512 I don't know if all of them are that way but yes, many of them are basically a console in a cartridge and uses the SNES for video signal.
@@alicev1500 Actually, the video signal comes from the cartridge itself. The console just powers it.
@@newgameld2512 Oh. Thanks for correcting me there
How does it work when the SNES doesn't have the NES sound chip?
Nice video! As for MMC2 (Punch Out), it's not *too* bad, depending on how optimised his background/sprite drawing routine is. He might get away with checking what's getting accessed in advance then scheduling the mapper bank swap, I'm pretty confident the swap happens on background tile 33 (off the screen), so he might get away with that, but honestly skipping the timing of the PPC is a little scary, especially when it comes to games like Battletoads, he might struggle with that one.
Technically if it's "adventure island" it's Master Higgins. "Boku No Jima" has Takahashi, who was based off a real person that Hudson also invented the button-presses-per-second bee gadget for.
It is Bouken-jima
@@jendorei it's boku no pico
@@DeAthWaGer ohohohoho so very funny
Yo dawg! I heard you like emulators. So I put an emulator in your emulator, so now you can emulate games while you emulate games!
If a playing Gameboy on the SNES is called the "Super Gameboy." What do you call playing NES on the SNES? Is it a Super NES?!!!!! I'm confused.
Anyway, this is so impressive! Especially getting games with mappers running.
There was a Game Boy Adapter for NES in the works. But it was scrspped, due to SNES getting Super Game Boy. But a NES Boy would have been fun!
@@ikaruga I didn't know about this? Any more info you got on hand?
@@PrimedPixelMusic www.nesworld.com/news/biedermangb.jpg
A picture of the adapter. I dont know very much about it. I know there is a scan on a article online somewhere.
Maybe I do. What would you like to know?
@@ikaruga There was the Wideboy adapter for NES, which developers used. devkits.handheldmuseum.com/GB_Wideboy.htm
The one you pictured was planning on translating the Z80 code to 6502, so it seems very similar to Nested. www.nintendoworldreport.com/forums/index.php?topic=43419.0
@@marsilies Thatvwideboy thing I have heard of before. Also one for N64.
The 65C816 was also used by the Apple IIGS...which was backward compatible with the Apple II, which used a 65C02.
Personally, I'm holding out for the project that allows SNES games to run on the NES.
Oh, and the name of the character in Adventure Island is 'Master Higgins'
In Japan, he is called Takahashi Meijin (Master Takahashi), named after Toshiyuki Takahashi, a former Hudson Soft executive. They changed his name to Master Higgins for the American release
That probably would need a really, really ,really beefy mapper
@@uncledot1868 I definitely like Master Higgins better. It's the furthest thing from what a kid like that would actually be called that it's possible for me to think of. It's perfect.
Someone did just that with a Raspberry Pi a few years ago. Check out the video "Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!".
I think someone piped the video output of a PC into the NES PPU. These devolve into exercises in absurdity, even though technically possible.
There’s a few things I’m not sure of when it comes to a project like this, namely sound expansion in some Famicom games. Already I’ve noticed the DPCM channel is muted, as shown by SMB3, and so I don’t see something like Lagrange Point or Gimmick! working completely. Still, this is a damn good job for a tough project like this.
I personally think dpcm playback from nes games can be done BUT the emulator needs to convert dpcm samples into BRR format in order to be accepted by the snes,maybe trough patches.
The architectures are actually extremely similar. Apart from hardware address translation and initial mode configuration, the main problem would be audio processing, since the SNES took a radically different approach there.
They used digitized recordings of the nes psg soundchip to make it processible on snes, only the noise channel is ignoired since the snes does contain a digital noise generator, also dpcm sound is not yet supported but it might be possible in the near future by patching dpcm samples into BRR format i suppose.
The other big problem is that the object table is hidden behind the PPU, so you can't pull the CHR RAM/ROM bank flipping tricks as easily as the NES
This is really impressive!
One fine example of "This is an incredibly stupid idea and I will make work because I can!" Lol
this is a project i follow very heavily. nice coverage! glad more people are finding out about it.
I am happy to attempt to complete games that need testing.
The spiritual successor to NESticle IMO - maybe not the best compatibility, but absurdly capable for the hardware it's running on. Kudos to the author, looking forward to future developments
Some people are just so very clever ☺️
I am really excited to see a bit more capable version of this emulator down the road.
That's a really cool idea : on the fringes of doable, actually useful, and a nice "what if", would have been seen as sorcery in the early 90's
Made in Québec! Makes me proud!
There was also the Super 8 adapter back in the day. The cheap ones popping up these days are basically stripped down clones of that. It was unofficial and just had an NES SOC using the Super Nintendo as a power source, which is why it has its own video output - it's not using the SNES hardware at all beyond power. It also allowed Famicom cartridges to be played on the SNES.
EDIT: The name of the main character from Adventure Island is Master Higgins in the English version of the game. But you're right, the Hudson Soft executive Toshiyuki Takahashi wanted to make himself the Mario of their company. Given how successful the game series was, it kinda worked.
Super wrecking crew on the super famicom had a original wrecking Crew mode and it's exactly like the NES wrecking crew.
Wrecking crew was straightly ported to the snes, it probably uses mode 1 and the 1st background layer to make it work,while the psg audio had to be digitised first before it could work with that game,also all adress registers had to be line up with that of the snes cpu to make wrecking crew fully work on the snes, so if nintendo wanted, it, they could,ve make nes games compatible on the snes the hard way😁
This is really amazing! Thanks for the video and letting me know about this project!
if this guy wants a challenge he should get Genesis/Mega Drive games to run on Sega Saturn which has all of the main CPUs of Genesis/Mega Drive & all upgrades as in Saturn has a faster 68k & faster SH2s.
Y'know, I wonder why Nintendo never bothered with a Powerbase converter equivalent for the SNES.
Like, I know that it's not fully backwards compatible because despite the main CPU being similar, the _everything else_ isn't there (unlike the Powerbase which is just a passthrough as the Mega Drive DOES have all the chips necessary to run Master System stuff), but Nintendo was never shy of selling weird expensive peripherals. And THEY wouldn't have to do all the reverse engineering that the chinese or modern devs have to do. :P
Using a backward compatible CPU is one thing, but you need to consider that the graphics and sound co-processors now work different also. 6502 memory mapping usually has chip registers at specific memory locations. When you go from one system to another, these get moved around and the original program is useless until to gets modified to work with the new hardware. Bit color depth is changed, maybe 1bit or 2bits (3 colors) per pixel on the NES vs 4bit (16 colors) or 8bits (256 colors) on the SNES. Nintendo did port Super Mario Brothers game series to Super Mario All Stars on the SNES with upgraded graphics, but all the stuff remained in the same locations. Sound Chips, number of voices changes, and control registers vary greatly from all the different audio chips.
Wow that’s dope as fuck. I always wanted backwards compatibility on Nintendo systems but I guess back then it would’ve costed a fortune to do. I’m surprised nobody in the gaming community has came up with a solution besides what’s already out there to create an adapter that lets you use your own carts via either emulation, fpga, or either from actual cpu and ppu chips like how the super Gameboy was made.
See also, the Asteroids arcade emulator for the also-6502-based Atari 8-bit computers.
It runs the Asteroids ROM, and emulates the display, sound, and input.
Seems like something similar is being done here. Neat stuff!
Sness?
Ooooh, you mean the S.N.E.S. Gotcha
I was stunned to see my N64 emulate NES at full speed with no issues but SNES? this Is Insane
There are lots of reasons why NES games are not directly compatible. a good analogy is that the SNES CPU is a shell and the emulator is the container. that runs the 6502. You have many hurdles that need to be resolved including 2a03 needing to directly communicate with the game for audio, you will need to emulate the memory mapped locations and additional functions. that is just the beginning.
I remember back in the day, 1999-2001, I ended up with some NES roms that had been converted to work on a SNES emulator. Now, the sound didn't work, and the games were all simple games that didn't have any custom-chips, we're talking Mappy and the original Mario Bros. But they worked pretty well. I have no idea if they would've worked on an actual SNES, but I think they would've. So playing NES games on a SNES, certainly isn't anything new.
Still, it's impressive to see.
Also, finally I know why the SNES has such a crappy processor!
I just thought it was to save on money. But it turns out that it was because they had plans to have backwards compatibility.
Super Mario All-Stars was the best example of this. They were very likely modified to use SNES graphics ports, and the music engine replaced.
@@gblargg To my knowledge, Super Mario All-Stars pretty much reuses almost all of the original code from the original games. The only reason the physics on the Mario 1 remake is slightly different (Mario rises slightly when he breaks a brick instead of bouncing down), is because some idiot reversed a variable by mistake during the conversion. Instead of removing a number from the Y variable, it adds it. There's even a hack that corrects the bug. It's literally just a single + that needs to be a - in the code.
Both systems are already very close to each other. Both use 6502-based code and both have the exact same screen resolution, so the main issue is converting graphics and sound data to work on the SNES.
Reminds me of that news interview with a mother who said she won’t be buying her son an SNES if it meant having to buy a new console to play new games or something.
This strikes me as a "why would I ever want to do this?" type of project.
Being able to run them on the snes classic canoe emulator would make it worth it for me :)
@@FelipeBudinich you can already run nes games on that though
@@dbowl7111 yes, using retroarch. But I prefer the stock emulator (save states, rewinding, attract mode, better integration with the UI, etc).
I have a FC Twin that plays both NES and SNES games. It has 2 cartridge slots and uses SNES controllers for both. I ve always wondered what it would have been like have the FC Twin back in 1991.
the photos of the SFC and what people claim was an add-on, it's litterally just a redesigned famicom with the same aesthetics as the famicom, much like the NES 2
Great video! I'm not surprised at all that this is being done. Nintendo briefly considered making the Nintendo NES a 16 bit console rather than an 8 bit console at first, but ended up deciding against it think it might be too much of a leap for gamers considering what had come in gaming already. Thus that at least some Nintendo NES games could be played on the Nintendo SNES through emulation, or other means makes sense.
You are wrong. The SNES CPU is far from a souped up NES CPU. It has a lot of modern, for the time, features and it's not as slow as people think. It has several instructions that makes it punch above it's weight. The biggest bottleneck of the SNES was actually it's memory bandwidth and not it's CPU.
No, it pretty much is a souped-up NES CPU, that's accurate. There's nothing really wrong with that. It's got largely the same instruction set, just with the ability to switch the registers into a 16-bit mode, and it's clocked almost 2x the speed of the NES, so it's still a pretty substantial upgrade. I do agree that people give it way too much flak for being "too slow" though.
Underrated
Subbed at 19.1 K
I remember subbing to DankPods in November or December 2019, at 14.7 K
Why do I keep finding underrated TH-cam channels (high production quality with less than 100 K)
I don't think this is entirely an emulator. To me, this seems like a translation layer, utilizing the SNES graphics architecture and other various protocols to step in for the NES ones.
I think the emulation only begins once the custom chips found on some NES games are present for the game to function.
But even still, if it takes modifying the rom for it to even boot, then isn't that just a rom hack with different pointers? At no point did you have to load up software to play them from the SNES in real time.
It has a full recompiling emulator that runs on the SNES, but there is a separate tool that does some beforehand translation and optimization.
I'll have to try this on an EverDrive myself but hats off for the accomplishment whether it's compatible with real hardware or not.
This emulator is incredibly interesting. I'm looking forward to part two.
I've been trying to get at least some idea of how it works from the source. It looks like it uses a dynamic recompiler aka JIT with the ability to recompile into ROM to enable reuse of the results aka static recompilation aka AOT. SNES's 128KB of WRAM would not be able to provide enough translation cache for all NES games so I think some static recompilation is necessary for compatibility with some games. I haven't yet tried running it myself so I don't really know how the static recompilation works, I assume it's by playing the generated SMC ROM in the author's custom SNES emulator on a PC for a while and letting it recompile stuff to ROM as you go?
Since the SNES CPU offers so few clock cycles over the CPU it goes without saying that the recompiled code has to be as close as possible to a 1:1 match in instructions to the original code, and the emulator can't spend much CPU time massaging data formats for the NES PPU, pAPU, mappers etc to something that works properly on the SNES. The emulator will need to inject additional code to figure out what to do with memory addresses and branch targets that can't be figured out at compile time, or that can but are known to target specific I/O locations. Hopefully most other instructions can be native-ish.
There are some aspects of the 6502 that should make this a little easier on the emulator. Zero page and absolute address modes can be determined at compile time. Zero page and absolute indexed generally can't be but because the index is only 8-bit the range of addresses is heavily bounded which should often be enough to still determine a direct translation. I thought I'd seen some profiling on NES or at least some other 6502 program frequency of address mode usage but I couldn't find anything. But I think indirect addressing modes are a fairly small percentage of memory accesses.
Static recompilation works by first playing the NES game on any SNES emulator or on original hardware then importing the SRM file into the exe. The exe itself contains part of my SNES emulator, minus I/O, to emulate the recompiler so I don't have to write it in 2 different programming languages.
@@Myself086 So the emulator saves branch targets to save RAM which the exe uses to perform static recompilation (via emulating the enulator)?
@@espfusion Yes but not every destination is saved. Branches are never saved. Jumps are only saved when crossing bank boundary and in ROM. Calls and indirect jumps are only saved when destination is in ROM. Branches and inbound jumps are solved immediately during recompilation.
The goal is to record only the entry point for each sub-routine. These entry points are then used by the exe to recompile code. Recompiling into the ROM saves memory and runs faster due to lower memory latency from ROM. Sub-routines recompiled ahead-of-time aren't linked, each call or jump crossing bank boundary will reserve 4 bytes of RAM ahead-of-time.
@@Myself086 Thanks for the explanation, that makes a lot of sense. I'm used to using the same branch target tables for both direct branches that can be resolved internally by the recompiler and indirect branches that have to be resolved at runtime (and maybe generate new code). Never really occurred to be to have a table that only held the latter but it's clear that for static recompilation the former can be created again and doesn't have to be saved.
Note when I say branch I mean all kinds of changes in control flow, both conditional/unconditional or direct/indirect. I can see how that's confusing for CPUs like 65xx where branch and jump are distinct instruction types.
Do you have any stats on how many of the recompiled instructions aren't done 1:1/some idea of the overhead added in the recompiled code, or maybe some actual translated block examples? I love looking at that sort of thing from recompilers.
One other question, is there any support for self-modifying code running in the NES's RAM? I don't know how much NES games actually ever do this and I'm sure if they do it'd be very limited since there's so little RAM anyway. I know PC-Engine games did it almost entirely only for setting up the added block move instructions (they have immediate operands) which would be moot on the NES. If you do support it or plan to I'd like to know the strategy.
@@espfusion I'm always very careful about counting overhead cycles and I try to come up with something better each time. Conditional branches are sometimes coupled with a jump, this results in the condition taking 3&5 cycles rather than 2&3. Reading ROM data adds a varying amount of cycles, there's also some optimization within the block of code to avoid testing memory range multiple times in a row. Indirect jump (opcode $6C) is one that I paid very close attention to, JMPiUnrolled.asm explains the entire overhead with cycle count and manages to take about 90 cycles depending on the game, I use 256 linear linked lists to find my destination. It's called "unrolled" because there's 64kb of repeating code just to speed up this instruction. Non-native return uses a variant of it since v1.3 and has had a major improvement on its overhead.
Code running in RAM is read by an interpreter, it only supports jumps for now as a lot of games store jump instructions in RAM but I will be adding more to it as time goes on. Kirby's Adventure has some modifying code in RAM but it shouldn't be a big hit on performance. There's an option to recompile code stored in PRG RAM (6000-7FFF) because Zelda 1 stores some static code there. I intend to add more options based on the challenges I face, maybe some option to tell the recompiler where the self-modifying code is if it gets that bad.
It’s really been a great era for emulation advancements
Ten months later: Still waiting for that part II to spill the technical beans. skeleton.jpg
I remember receiving a Chinese Super NES cartridge loaded with over 500 NES roms on it that could be play on my Super NES console. So yeah I think you could play more NES games on Super NES just not natively.
When I first found out the SNES was originally designed to be backward compatible and later when I saw someone port the original Super Mario to the SNES and it was 1:1 except for the sound which used SMAS sounds, I thought about making a Game Genie - like adapter, using period parts, that would allow backwards compatibility. Because of the backwards compatible CPU, the code can be run directly (other than 1/2'ing the clock rate), and I believe the PPU (aka GPU) calls map almost directly, maybe with a little translation required. The major hiccup is the sound - I think this is where they abandoned compatibility when designing the SNES; the adapter would basically generate the NES sounds & then load them into the SNES sound chip. It might still be fun to do, but I'm not sure it would be worth the effort.
I'm interested to look at the emulator being worked on here; I'll be honest I'm not sold on the approach, if he has to do generation/patching on the NES roms anyway - why not just make a tool that translates the NES ROMS to the SNES? It seems like that would be way easier, more straight-forward, have less bugs, and more compatibility.... you could also translate from say, the Genesis...
"you could also translate from say, the Genesis" -- The difficulty there is, the SNES CPU works similarly enough to the NES CPU that you can translate a lot of the instructions without doing anything too drastic, they're based on the same architecture. The Genesis CPU works in a completely different way, so you'd end up needing a lot more instructions to get the same behavior, which would end up being way slower.
Calling the 65816 a "16 bit version of the 6502" is selling it short like calling an 68000 a 16-bit version of the 6800. They're both the successors to an 8-bit predecessor sure but they are way more than just a 16-bit wide version.
Hell, I've got an AV Famicom modded with the Hi-Def NES HDMI kit, so my NES output looks just fine, thanks. That being said, I most definitely plan to test this using my FXPAK Pro on my Analogue Super NT!
it'd be very cool to convert that application into a hardware adapter
I don't know how much processing power it needs, but regardless there's already an open source arduino based cartridge dumper, so code for that could be used to dump the rom into temporary memory, then convert that dump to an SNES rom on the fly more or less, would be so freaking dope. I wouldn't mind waiting a little bit for the game to load
my first thought was "how well is it going to handle mmc3?" then you immediately cut to it running to Super Mario Bros 3 and my jaw dropped.
I think Nintendo originally was going to make NES games compatible with the Super NES but decided to go against it. That is why Nintendo chose an R5A22 CPU, as it is a 65C816 derivative which is comptaible with 6502 and 65C02 instructions. The NES processor (N2A03) is a modified form of 6502.
Yes, and it's a shame that they abandonned backwards compatibility. Imagine a converter that allows you to play NES games on the SNES, like the Master System converter did on the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis.
If Nintendo had actually included this in the original SNES as once intended then it would have utterly blown away the Genesis in sales. Not that it didn't alreay do that--but it could have been by a LOT more with this additional ability imo.
You forget that most gamers owned an NES already so while it would have been nice, our parents back then wouldn't have seen the benefit of it if they already bought us an NES. Now if the Genesis launched with built in backwards compatabilty with the Master System, kids who didn't get the opportunity to play those games could have now at no additional cost.
@@Charlie-eq3dj I have zero doubt whatsoever that having BC on SNES would have helped it sell way more additional units that having BC on Genesis would have helped it additionally sell, by far. Many of the parents who were reluctant to buy the new SNES hardware could at least have rested a bit knowing that all those NES cartridges could be carried over to the shiny new 16-bit console. And there was roughly six times as many NES owners out there than Master System owners ready to upgrade to the next generation. Master System support on Genesis wouldn't have much of an effect, and it actually had a Master System add-on already anyway that kinda proves this, whereas on SNES I think having NES support would likely have added another handful of millions of units sold, especially if it was directly built into the hardware with no need for an additional add-on device.
Not sure if it's taking advantage of this, but NES games can be ported to the SNES mostly by adjusting the memory addresses for the ROM space, and replacing bank switching calls in larger games with pointers to the actual memory addresses. Makes LoZ run like a dream. So if it's by any chance reading the ROM and translating memory addresses, that would explain why the performance isn't dogshit.
I'm noticing pixel shimmer on scrolling. Are you applying some sort of non-integer aspect correction with nearest neighbor upscaling?
Nice video! I look forward to learning even more about it.
You should definitely check out what Sethbling recently did. Ran the original SMB game code in SMW, using an ACE exploit.
10:30 I could see Kosmic doing this for a laugh.
I contacted Kosmic about it just a few days before the v1.3 release back in April. He's interested in it but I think he has too much on his plate in terms of SMB ROM hacks.
I have a device called Super 8 that allows NES, Famicom, and Super Famicom to play on SNES. Doesn't need a separate power adapter, just works.
That still probably just has a miniaturized NES inside though.
@@renakunisaki Okay?
@@RetroFrito the point is, this video is about running NES games on the SNES *itself* !
That’s not the super NES that’s the super Fanicom I own both consoles and who plays on the old consoles instead of the new improved consoles such as the Xbox series X who’s got quick resume game pass with first party games or the PS5 im done with the old gen consoles their great for children to get to see how we used to play games in the 80’s 90’s you should know you can hack the Super Nintendo Nintendo classic and add the entire collection no need to blow in the cartridges anymore
That's some impressive work!
10:30 So I now have an idea of what game I'm gonna try to get Kosmic to speedrun.
Never say never. There’s a bunch of emulation features and tricks the devs of Dolphin thought would never be possible but now they can do it. Factor 5 games running for example.
Why is in the interview throughout the video your voice only left channel? XLR mic not mixed down to mono? It puts me off 😂
Thx for mentioning Québec City ;)
Now I want to see an Atari 2600 emulator on the nes
So can i play metal gear snakes revenge on the snes just by plugging it in?
If I want a challenge, I try my best to put all the colors to a Rubics cube back in order to no avail. This guy is making nes games run on snes with "math" lol. I am clearly under achieving. Thank god for nerds and challenges they make for themselves. It makes the world go round. BTW this has been done with the Genesis everdrive. I don't know how well it runs though.
I'd love to see a version of the software that can create the SNES ROM files in batches en masse, so you can create a large collection of these in one go, vs having to make these one at a time.
Conquest of Crystal Palace works on hardware. As does captain silver. thier are initial slight glitches which seem to disappear after a few seconds. But I’m testing lots via everdrive.
Imagine if the Snes was backwards compatible with something like a gameshark back in the day that would had been great
what
As long as I cannot play Cheetahmen 2 this project is failed from the get go :p
^^ Nah, very happy to see this :)
2:04 - this literally had me laughing out loud! 🤣
There has been an adapter for a long time to use famicom, superfamicom, NES, and SNES on a SNES. I have used it many times.
Name of this magic product?
There is also the TriStar 64 that plays NES, SNES, and N64 games on the Nintendo 64.
I have a super 8, it works and came out in the 90’s.
It was designed to eventually be backwards compatible but it never materialised. I'm sure people know this.
Edit: Yeah it was mentioned in the video.
means NES games can be playable on NEC PC Engine.
Mitsumei Gatoru??? That was Mega Man, with Krillin from Dragonball Z, instead of Megaman!!! It even has the only three shots on the screen at a time, component.
Nothing really new. Anthrox and Swat tried to emulate NES onto the SNES in the 90s and there are many mapper 0, A&S nes hack conversions out there. Only thing is the sound was non existent or an original loop on those roms. Then there was a Korean multicart that had a bunch of NES games emulated very well, with slightly more color but have a weird sound font.
Nice keep us up to date..
Tested last night and worked on my cfw Super Nt reading from the SD card.
I've seen NES games played on super Nintendo. Case in point Ninja gaiden trilogy. I remember having that ROM and it was running the actual NES games on the super Nintendo I don't know if it was emulation or what exactly was going on here but it was running them
In Adventure Island, "whoever it is this is currently featuring"?!? He's the namesake of the series for crying out loud! It's Wonder boy!
I can't wait to play Elite Dangerous on my SNES.
Wait why would they need a separate video output for those "NOAC in an SNES cart" things when the SNES has a pixel buss on the cartridge port? All you'd need to do is write a small SNES program that takes the pixel output from the NOAC and puts it up as a graphics layer the same way the Super FX chip did.
I wonder why Nintendo didn't released an adapter for playing Nintendo NES games on the Super Nintendo, because the Super Nintendo was designed to be compatible...