Hello, im thinking about buying one of these but first i have a question

Will SNES emulation development ever be completed so that i can just load up donkey kong country, super mario kart and it will be running at full speed with sound etc...

if so how long will it be untill the development reaches this stage.

Also out of interest why is it that the SNES emulator isnt performing quite so good yet, i know the authors have done a fanatastic job at what they have acheived so far but i thought the mega drive/genesis and snes were of a similar power, and i see thethe mega drive/genesis emulator on the GP2x runs near perfect so is the SNES emulator lagging behind at the moment becuase it hasnt been worked on as much?

Thanks for your help.

This link holds the answer to all your questions.

1) Yes.
2) It already is for most games. For the rest, who knows? Could be a month, could be a year.
3) Special graphics chips and routines that are difficult to emulate.

Basically...

SNES is complicated, so it's difficult to emulate.

Many game already run at what I would consider full speed (meaning there's frame skip but no/not much slow down). No transparency in squidgeSNES and special chips don't work or don't work well.

Mario Kart runs very nice.
Donkey Kong Country is playable.

SNES emulation is very good for the GP2x, not excellent (like in the Genesis) but very good. I'd say that about 80% of the games I tried work very well. However, I do overclock to 285mhz which maybe a bit excessive but I can play most titles full speed and sound no problems. Some games have a transparency issue but I believe there is a workaround for it. Some games simply won't load (Ive tried Illusion of Gaia several times but couldn't get it to work). Seems like that really big roms in excess of 4 megs give the emu problems. Dunno, just an observation. And fx chip heavy games will not work very well at all. I really love stunt race fx but the emu wouldn't load it. So I'd give SNES emulation a solid "B" with room for improvement.

The guys above know what they are saying. Before I bought my GP2X I had the false impression (mainly from these forums) that SNES emulation was sketchy. It's actually very good.

People just want it to be perfect as it was a very popular machine.

I was also pleasantly surprised how decent the SNES emulation is, I also overclock to around 290mhz but the games I play run full speed no frameskip, and full sound. Main games I play are civilization, sim city, final fight 1/2/3, super hq criminal chaser, harvest moon, on the ball, parodius da!, sunset riders,super star wars,tetris battle gaiden, uchuu race astro go! go! and all these run superb.

Yeah, I'd have to agree. "B" is a good grade. Though I wonder, how much would a dynarec CPU emulator boost performance? I know it'd probably be necessary for Super FX games to be playable... I say this because I can only clock to 255mhz... It would be nice for SNES emulation to be >=~45 fps for all (with the exception of Super FX, that'd be nice though ) games at 240mhz.

Doing a dynarec on the cpu wouldn't improve performance by much as it's already in asm and isn't the main bottleneck. Remember the snes is only 2mhz or so, and the graphics takes the bulk of the time (you can easily got >100fps if you don't run the graphics emulation).

I actually beat illusion of gaia a couple of months ago, it worked great for me on squidgesnes v.38c i think it was. Maybe you have a bad rom?

Ever since the latest version of Squidgesnes, I no longer have to overclock at all. I have yet to find a game that doesn't run really well, with the possible exception of Star Ocean but that's a translation and a massive ROM as well. All in all, I find SNES emulation on par with the Genesis emulation... at least for all of the games I'm playing.

I just downloaded SquidgeSNES v0.392 and have two roms not working with it! (Prince_of_Persia_2 & Seiken_Densetsu_3) They work VERY well on SNESgp2x though.

Why coders don't compine the two emus to get a better one?

Just want to add that Prince_of_Persia_2 does not show transparency and plays bad sounds when run on SquidgeSNES. The other rom does not display graphics.

Sorry, but SNES is needs a bit of improvement for GP2X. Although you can probably get great results on a GP2x that has been clocked to 285 - 290mhz there is a chance that your GP2X will only overclock to 245-250mhz, which in my opinion is not enough to run certain SNES games smoothly (stuttering sound, choppy graphics). I have no idea if anyone is still working on the Squdge emulator, but if they release more updated versions we may see emulation vastly improved so all GP2X users can play smooth SNES games.

Mega drive on the other hand is simply superb and runs almost flawlessly on 200mhz

smoothness is fine for me, but the layers and transparencies are tricky. i have been playing final fantasy V for a few hours and just had to stop as there is no display once at the ghost ship (transparant water has to be turned off and then your characters are left on a black screen)

boo

ninja sauce: try the Transhack option in the menu. Sometimes it's enough to get through those tricky bits.

you can also disable the sound...
I made that when I was playing during leson...save batteries and increse FPS

see you

PS: but reduce scores a lot :'(

What are the chances of getting this transparency/layer issue sorted out in the future? Would it eat a serious amount of CPU power to get it sorted or something?

It has laready been sorted out. No one seems to listen (er .. read), but I'll say it again (er .. type):

NK's emu has FULL transparancy support, but you need to overclock to get full speed.

Oh right, fair enough I've only used squige snes, for some reason I was under the impression it was the best one by far, I'll have to give that other emu a shot then.

Does SnesGP2X have sound though? Does the modded version?

Yes. I don't like its frontend, but it's a very good emulator, just much slower (thus requiring high overclock).

OK cool I'll give it a go...

can anyone show me a link to some videos of the most recent verisons of the snes emualtors on gp2x,

cos ive seen alot of gp2x snes videos on youtube and most of the were slow and with no sound,

im yet to see one that is running smoothly.

Squidge SNES and SNES9x

Both have pros and cons, I tend to use overclocked SquidgeSNES as it has more options to play with.