http://board.byuu.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=650&p=14296#p14296

To summarize: It seems BSNES is getting hardware-accurate enough that it's not running the BS Zelda Restoration Project hack. Apparently someone thought this was bad enough to try to post in the BSNES forum about.

(EDIT: I've given this a bit of a more scrutinized test.

Basically, on the "Restoration Project" hack, the problems start when you enter the cave - and a different sound effect plays from what's supposed to (The "Low Health Warning" in place of stair-climbing). I don't know whether this is a sound code problem or some other code "interefereing" or what, but... yeah. From there, it gets worse (More sound effects are wrong, music will stop...), and will eventually crash.

This also happens with "LinCalibur" and "Third Quest".

The problem doesn't happen on Mottzilla's hack (of course.), proper sound effects play and there's no sign of crashing.

Good thing there's always ZSNES then, uh? ;)

...and this is why ROMs shouldn't be modified to such a degree that they actually stop working on real hardware/hardware-accurate emulators.

If I recall right, ZSNES aimed to have "hardware accuracy" in the next update - if that were the case, the ROM would be broken on that as well.

Who says you have to use the next release? :lol:

Besides future-proofing? Several reasons.

Once even a mainstream emulator like ZNSES has sufficient hardware accuracy to break these hacks I'd strongly suggest fixing the "official" ROMs to work on real hardware/hardware-accurate emulators. The pages already specify the best emulators to use, so that would just need to be tweaked a little.

(This'll probably sound more ranty and bossy than intended. Apologies in advance.)

Well, casual downloaders are going to want to play the game on their emulator of choice (which current trends set to be shifting towards BSNES in the future); when ZSNES does the eventual update, would you really reasonably be expecting people to try to fetch out an outdated version? Remember, I spent months looking for the "SNES9Xpp XE" fork for one or two Satellaview games. Normal people don't do this.

I'm not intending to be putting any pressure on this, for a few reasons (Because Mottzilla's RH hack is already present, because it wouldn't really be "urgent" until ZSNES updates or BSNES overshadows it completely, and because I don't intend to make it sound like I want to force Con out of retirement for the 10th time). Just that the "use a different emulator" answer, to me, well, isn't much an answer at all.

Also, consider that the casuals are gonna complain to the emulator devvers -first-. (this complaint was originally sent to -byuu-, who currently is not directly associated with us in any way. My posts in the thread were partly meant to deter possible 'uneducated complaints')
I'll be honest - if I start getting the idea that byuu is getting harassed because of this, I'd probably feel guilty.

Anyway, I also talked a bit to Mottzilla about it; he still says it's likely to be a problem with the save menu (Roto's save menu, yes? IIRC it has no actual documentation whatsoever), even though the problems seem to happen after the save menu rather than during it. I'm honestly rather confused about this.

Bwuh?

Well, casual downloaders can either download an old version fo the emulator or fix the game themselves.
Which do you figure is most likely to be the case? ;)

Uh... yes?
They are getting to play these games for free. The little effort of downloading an emulator that makes them work seems more than acceptable to me. Especially since the emulator can be downloaded from the files page.

That's good because it ain't happening.
Con has done his share of work and then some. Me? I wouldn't know where to begin.
If anyody else wants to deal with this, awesome!
But don't look at us ;)

We can't feel guilty for rude stupid people being stupid and rude.
We have already made a great service to the community by making these games complete and playable.

Yeah, that save menu has always been troublesome.

I can see easily our perspectives on this are quite a bit different.

I've been wanting to try to hack SNES myself for a while, but I seem to get stuck on even the simplest things. I'm hoping Callis's SNES Development Wiki comes to be helpful there;

http://wiki.superfamicom.org/snes/show/HomePage

Well, like I said, I'd love it if someone managed to pull it off (especially since we could get the games to play on an actual SNES), just don't expect the staff (me and Con, essentially) to do it.

All good emulators strive to have increasingly accurate emulation, and this includes long-running projects like SNES9x and ZSNES. Real games will run more accurately--although not necessarily in a way a player would notice--and game-specific code will give way to proper emulation of the underlying functionality. Players wanting the most faithful experience will upgrade their emulators over time even if the visible differences are slight.

An inevitable side-effect of increased accuracy is that hacks that fail on real hardware will fail on hardware-accurate emulators as well, and the authors will refuse to add support for these problematic games because it contradicts their goal. A time will come when few or no emulators will be able to run such hacks.

As you say there's no way to do anything about this right now, but if the new ZSNES is indeed incompatible you should definitely consider hardware-compatible ROMs to be a very desirable thing for site to have in the future--regardless of who actually makes this possible--and for them to become the "official" versions once that time comes.

Of course if we do get hacks that make the games as complete as we've made them and real hardware compatible too then those will be the official versions.

But as I said, it seems more likely that we'll continue offering the ones we've got and old versions of different emulators.

Naturally, I would be delighted if someone like Mottzilla went and proved me wrong on this ;)

You know, I suddenly had a dumb thought.

Isn't it theoretically possible to do a small test with all the suspected-to-be-the-issue code disabled? I mean, I guess it'd be really difficult to disable the save menu from Restoration Project due to how many times the game enforces going back to it, but as a theoretical, Third Quest/Fourth Quest could be as playable as Mottzilla's RH hack...

Right now, I'm wishing I knew how to read a debugger.

Just a little topic bump;

http://board.byuu.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=650&start=15

when byuu posted that, I was actually sorta confused as first (thought it was about Mottzilla's hack) but apparently it's about the other hacks here. Can someone explain to me Mutli/Div registers and such, and how it may relate to Roto's hacks?

And asking a bit of info on what to do in such a circumstance to other folks;

Are ALL hacks/IPSpatches ever made for every SNES game, stuff that's incompatible on real hardware?

Not as such, but the problem is that many aren't tested with real hardware. Additionally, many were done specifically to "fix" an incompatible game so that it will work on emulators, a process which is very likely to break compatibility with real hardware.

bsnes has been my preferred emulator of choice for some years now. It's getting so close to hardware-exact that if a hack rom doesn't work on it, I won't play it. Basically, if you take Duke's point of view, then the hacked rom should say "ZSNES Only" or some such comment in the title. Hacks need to work on real hardware to be less dependent on some inaccurate emulator of the past, or they themselves become obsolete.

For the record, I have a decent computer and bsnes plays flawlessly on my system. I get perfect sound and perfect frame rate on BS Zelda (I'm using bsnes_v058). As computers get more and more powerful for the average user, there simply wont be a need for any other emulator besides bsnes. ZSNES has waited far too long for the mythical update that never happens. I'm sorry but the ship has sailed on that emulator.

Man, am I slow. I haven't seen FireBrandX on the forums in a while and then when he pops up I'm delayed by ROM dumps and such.

Anyway, how's things been going?

As for the thing about patches and real hardware, it tends to be an interesting experiment to check which games run on hardware. Usually whether a hack works on real hardware depends on what the hack does, the experience of the hackers, and the hacker's own sense of reverence to the hardware - for example, more or less any hacking/translation project I've seen byuu involved in would work on real hardware. With the rise of the Powerpak and hardware-based testers being more common, even "amateur-ish" ROM hacking scenes like Super Mario World Central are making pushes to make future projects more hardware-compatible.

True, there are some beginners, but many hacks are quite impressive. For example, the current collaborative project looks quite promising!

I didn't knew they were making real-hardware tests though, that's good to know. Do you happen to have a link to the discussion thread?

Don't really recall if there any threads - I tend to hang around the IRC communities on caffienet more. I've seen the discussions come up a few times.