Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that I'm curious about: How easy / hard is it to use the same NES game with higher resolution / color graphics, and sample-based sound?

Are there any emulators out there that let you swap in higher resolution assets so a game can be freshened without a complete port?

View on HN

You might like 3dSen, which came out several years ago. It does some pretty crazy stuff, converting NES games into essentially 3D voxel environments.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147940/3dSen_PC

whoa, that's cool. I didn't know about this. Thanks for sharing!

Mesen has texture packs. Don't know about sound, you'd have to reverse each game's sound driver first. https://vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Famicom/NES_Sound_Dri...

I would not think so, at least not in a meaningful way. That would require to edit the cartridge data thus the ROM, as all sprite data was contained within the cartridge. Sample based sound is impossible natively, as NES and older game consoles don't work with digital data but synthesizers. You could perhaps synthesize the music to WAV files and then enchance it. But then again, NES and thus its emulators have no way of playing digitized audio!

The NES in particular is probably not too difficult to upscale, because the graphics data is stored on its own ROM chip (sometimes RAM) in a well structured layout. SMB1 just uses a ROM chip containing many tile graphics which the CPU code addresses by tile index. It would be really easy for an emulator to use the same tile indices to address any arbitrary set of tiles loaded from a PNG. Some games use RAM, which makes it harder as you'd have to index the PNG by hash or something.

Compute motion vectors, faux depth, and add DLLS5 to it maybe? Could be pretty cool, or pretty horrific. Only one way to find out :)

Consoles like the NES are tile based: They work by placing tiles are particular coordinates on the screen, with a particular pallet.

My theory is that the emulator could swap in a higher resolution tile without needing to port the game.

> Sample based sound is impossible natively, as NES and older game consoles don't work with digital data

The NES supports PCM audio. It was notably implemented wrong in the title screen of Double Dribble and fixed with a patch that produces clearer audio after bit reversal into the correct encoding for the hardware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jli0RGpuZDg

It does work with channels that produce pulse waves yes, but what I meant is that you can't supply samples of a wave and expect it to play it. The sound is still analog.

No. It has a Delta Modulation Channel that plays back differential pulse-code modulation samples. It is not the same as a waveform generator. Moreover, every sampled audio system with an analog output generates analog signals so that isn't a differentiator.

The DMC is typically used for instruments that are hard to reproduce well with the other generators. Double Dribble is using the DMC for the speech, not some clever setup of the waveform generators.

How would that work for hit detection algorithms in the code?

The code still sees the original RAM.

Idk about swapping assets but zsnes used to have a range of video filters that could improve the experience on a modern screen quite a bit.

Edit: For SNES, not NES, my bad.

Yeah, its upscaler is nicer than the Switch and the mini SNES.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com