Nintendo Switch Online subscription includes an "official" SNES emulator. How does it compare to BSNES, and would a decompilation of the emulator help with resolving the PPU issues?
Nintendo's emulators are usually equivalent to what the state of the art was 15-20 years ago. They have plenty of bugs, usually fixed with duct tape and game specific hacks. They are designed to run the set of games they sell and nothing else -- once you get out of what the QA team has explicitly tested, it's not uncommon to find unemulated or badly emulated hardware features.
Also, when you think about it, if a game behaves differently when run in an emulator, as part of an emulator-and-ROM bundled software product released by Nintendo... then that behavior is just how that particular release of the game has been canonically chosen to behave. Any bugs in the emulation of a Virtual Console title, or a SNES Classic title, or a SNES Online title, are just "how that version of the game is." Much like any typos in a particular printing of a book are "just how that release of the book is." They're now part of the authorial intent of that release; part of the text. If you later ported that game, you'd seek to be bug-for-bug compatible with the bugs introduced by that emulator, because those bugs are what Nintendo released, and so those bugs are now, in part, what it means to play that game.
Or, to put that another way: there's no real difference between a bug introduced by wrapping a game in an imperfect emulator, and a bug introduced during recompilation/porting/remastering of the game. Either way, you now have a new "variant" of the game with its own bugs, but one which is also a canonical, supported release of the game.
Interestingly, sometimes—because of one of these slight variances—the fastest [and so preferred] version of a game to speedrun, is a Nintendo-sanctioned emulated (e.g. Virtual Console) release of the game. It says something important, I think, that these releases of the game aren't automatically shunned by the speedrunning community, the way that runs of the game under an arbitrary emulator on someone's PC would be; but rather are just treated as their own separate category-set, in the same way the speedrunning community differentiates different region releases, or version releases, or port/remaster releases.
> Interestingly, sometimes—because of one of these slight variances—the fastest [and so preferred] version of a game to speedrun, is a Nintendo-sanctioned emulated (e.g. Virtual Console) release of the game.
Not that that necessarily has anything to do with bugs. Some VC games simply have reduced lag when a lot is loaded, because they throw somewhat more power at the game than the original console could.
One more interesting difference, that you'll see with N64 games specifically (e.g. VC Paper Mario on the Wii) is that the original console will hard-lock in places where the VC version will just keep on truckin' (presumably because it has access to more memory, or the emulator just discards crazy out-of-bounds writes, or because the emulator treats open-bus address reads differently. Something like that.)
Anyway, that means that there are glitches that can be used save time on the VC version, which in some sense don't exist at all on the original version of the game, because they're gated behind a fault that the original hardware can't get past.
I don’t agree. Canonical status is bestowed by the artist/author, not the publisher, and certainly not a republisher. If Lord of the Rings is republished with page 527 arbitrarily missing, that omission doesn’t become canon.
Yes but if there was a second edition released by Tolkien, that would be canon. There could have been changes in page 527, such as Sam and Frodo run away to start a domestic life together, and it would be official. It would also cause quite a stirring and fracture the community. You see smaller scale scandals of the same variety everytime nintendo rereleases a poorly emulated title. Copyright needs to be fixed.
Canon is whatever your heart (or in the case of roms, the speedrunning community) declares it to be. I'd previously be arguing for authorial intent, but JK Rowling ruined it for everyone.
I agree that the community decides on what is canon. However, I don't think anything can become canon. Fanfiction will always be splintered from canon until it gets adopted and published by the IP owners. So, "Goat Simulator" speedruns will always be performed on a version released by Coffee Stain Studios, or whoever owns the game in the future. You could rip up the source code, mod the game, whatever, and do speedruns. If it's popular then it's a new category, but it won't be a "Goat Simulator" speedrun, it will be a "Goat Simulator++" speedrun. What official version of the game the community decides to use for the "Goat Simulator" category can be contentious, as the developer could have a range of releases that change things significantly. Just look at half life 2. The most popular category is the release version of the game because you can fly around at mach 1.
Maybe if you're just a fan, sure. But there is a very strong and explicit meaning to "the canonical work" when you're doing archival/conservatorial work. There's what the artist created (as seen through the lens of how it was first released/shown, which certainly might involve a publisher or curator—thus the concept of a "director's cut"); and then there's what previous middle-men (curators, other conservators, republishers who acquired the rights after the creator's death, etc.) tacked on after that initial release.
You'll see the effect of this in gaming in the forms of e.g.:
• The https://www.no-intro.org project, whose goal is to curate a database of hashes of "canonical ROMs" (i.e. ones that are don't have demoscene "intro" greetz; but also which don't have the extra headers that some copiers add; and, obviously, which aren't bad dumps.)
• The policies of some emulators (e.g. MAME, Higan) to replace, whenever possible, High-Level Emulation code that "works perfectly" (i.e. matches console output on every frame for every known software title!) with Low-Level Emulation, which requires a BIOS/firmware dump of a chip to run. The goal in these types of fixes isn't to run existing games, but rather to make the emulator match the behavior of the hardware for running even novel or previously undiscovered games, such that it can be a useful tool in future conservation efforts, when the original hardware is long gone.
• The file-formats of some emulators (again: MAME, Higan) which keep individually-dumped coprocessor ROMs as separate files in a software title's archive file/folder, each with their own metadata; rather than inventing custom merged-binary file-formats for each system. This both allows future archivists to easily re-verify that individual dumps are correct; to replace bad dumps with better ones without invalidating the hashes for other ROMs that make up the same software title; and, in theory, this provides a (coincidentally machine-executable) schematic of the software-title-as-hardware-system, which could be used to reconstruct it wholesale in a future where all existing hardware was lost.
• The transition from the archivists at Archive.org preferring to see Apple II disk images in raw bit-dump (DSK) file-format, to wanting them as flux-trace (https://applesaucefdc.com/woz/) files, which in turn means that copy-protected games can now be preserved in their original, copy-protected state, rather than first needing to be cracked.
I don't understand this reply—it doesn't disagree with anything I said. If Tolkien publishes intentional changes, they are some form of canon, even if it's of the "Han shot first" variety. Tolkien changing the words on page 527 is new canon.
If the publisher modifies the work particularly in a manner devoid of creative intent—such as unintentionally omitting page 527—the modification cannot possibly be considered canonical. Imperfections in an emulator are not the work of the original author and they're certainly not any form of artistic intent.
I think the parent is applying Death of the Author here, implying that what we should make of a work is separate from whatever the author is. After all, Takashi Tezuka doesn't provide any commentary on what Goombas are; although English-speaking manual writers might.
While all of Nintendo's official emulators are afaik made internally, it's interesting to note that Sony used an existing open source emulator (PCSX ReARMed) for their Playstation Classic.
> While all of Nintendo's official emulators are afaik made internally
I believe the consensus is that the NES classics on GBA were done using an open source emulator. The emulator itself was liberally licensed and I think someone asked the author's thoughts and they were 'ya, that's half the purpose of the license. i don't care'
