I thought translators translated games to bring games to a wider audience. I can understand why some people want a completely accurate emulator, its a very intresting thing and perserves the originals so for years to come when the original games are long gone we can still enjoy them the way they originally were.
But yes this form of emulation IS interchangeable with gaming. I am sorry but its true are you emulating ANYTHING that is not in some way or form a game or about a game? And are you releasing these things for the gamers out there as a whole or only for the romhacking community? I think you want everyone to enjoy them.

And I am sorry but the majority of people playing your translations are not playing them on copiers, heck not even "A lot" do.
In the end playing them on real hardware, while a very good thing ends up just geting a "Wow spiffy" from about 80 to 90% of people out there.
If texture packs and audio packs are a way to get translations out a lot faster (A few months compared to say a few freakin years) I am all for it because then more people can enjoy these games which I think was the point in the first place in translation hacking.
Also note you hate it when people sell your translations on ebay on real hardware(Which I am against entirely by the way) but you strive so hard to make it so you can play them on real hardware... Thats food for thought there.

Technically couldn't we make an emulation overlay text in a text screen using screen packs? I heard something about this over in the pj64 screen pack forum but no idea how that convo turned out.

Ah OK. Chalk that up to rumor on my part.

OK, I think the original poster got their answer (and then some).  Without all the feelings/opinions/etc. getting in the way, yes, it sounds like it would be possible (however unlikely it may be that it will ever happen, or what you may think it will do to the emulation community, the planets' alignments, etc.).

In respect for the poster's request for their topic, if you wish to carry on the debate, please take it elsewhere.  :police:

One thing I would hope for, if this does happen, that people will come to their senses and use the superior (and free) Ogg Vorbis instead of mp3.

Obviously people who have never attempted to write their own PC games before
Even NPC movement and collision detection can get really tricky, yet sounds so simple on paper.


Sounds insane
Unfortunately, the expansion port is not very useful. It only has access to the B bus ($2100-$21ff), so it can't control anything but those registers. So you absolutely need an SNES cartridge that connects to the device on the expansion port, ala the BS-X, and here is where you'd put all of the power of your setup at. Stick a high end processor in that cart, and it can be used by all CD-based software. So you'd want a bridge to read and cache the CD data, extra RAM, and a system BIOS here. You'd only want the CD unit to read data from the disk, and possibly to stream redbook audio to those audio out pins.

Now, you may be able to boot off of that expansion port if the system recognizes there's no cart and the S-CPU deadlocks, but the S-PPU resets itself. It's hard to say if that's possible. If it is, then your program could theoretically run with only B-bus access (that is, assuming you have v/hsync pins on that expansion port ... I don't recall if those are there or not). You'd have to have a new controller port though, and you'd be completely wasting the S-CPU [processing power, IRQs, NMIs, DMA, HDMA, etc] and 128k WRAM. Something I doubt Nintendo would have done. The reset vector is read from $00ff?? (sorry, I never remember these off the top of my head), so by just using the expansion port, you'd have a hell of a time trying to execute your code. Let alone the fact that you have only a 256-byte bus ...

So why does the expansion port exist at all? Well, it could use $2184-$21ff for new registers to access internal hardware of the expansion unit, and here a lot of additional power could be added. Like streaming CD audio registers, and really high-end coprocessors like a souped up DSP-n or Cx4 (nearly any special chip besides SFX or SA-1 would work great here). You could also add tons of RAM by using something like $2180 so that you don't need the huge address bus to use it. Basically, you can add a lot of chips that wouldn't be practical to put in a cart, and you can access them directly from the SNES unit, without having to go through your passthru cable from the cartridge to do it (which may or may not have bad latencies, especially with the CD data already on that wire). It's basically a convenient way for the SNES S-CPU to talk to the expansion port unit directly.


Hah, yeah it would be nice. I won't touch ogg because of all the car CD players for sale in my city, none supported it. Why? I guess they like paying patent royalties, who knows. But I won't use it, because it means I can't play my music off the USB port unless I transcode.


o.O
Well, I certainly wasn't expecting such a humble response after being such a jerk about that ... especially since it was really me who was out of place. I guess that shows who's more mature. Thank you.
You have my apologies again though, you just hit one of my pet peeves that I really need to work on :/

Amen Brother. When I made my Mario clone a few years ago, it took me a long time to match the physics and collision detection of SMB3, and as much tweaking as I did, I still didn't match it 100%. I found newfound respect for refined gameplay and how difficult it actually is to achieve. It's not to hard to throw any old heap that works together, but it's very challenging to refine that heap into a game people would actually want to play! you got it right. On paper, it's pretty easy. When you do it, it's a challenge. If it were easy as it is on paper, I'm sure we wouldn't have such a bitchy community when it comes to reviewing and criticizing games! The fact is, it's hard to get the formula right and even many professionals fail often.