[General Topics] Menneisyys:
I’m very often asked about what emulator should be used under Windows Mobile to run Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) (a.k.a. Super Famicom / Super Comboy), a hugely successful home game console of the early nineties.

One of the reasons for this is the abundance of the current emulators. See for example the SNES section on Michu’s famous EmuPage - it lists seven titles and, with some (for example, the n0p port) of them, even additional ones. Another reason for this was the shortage of dependable, comparative information available:

there are no real up-to-date articles with REAL-WORLD compatibility information and really dependable and reliable comparison; for example, the only SNES-emulations-specific roundup of available emulators I could find, PDAGameGuide's Top SNES Emulator Downloads Guide For Your Pocket PC, is heavily outdated, only discusses two (very old and, today, in no way recommended) emulators and doesn't at all dive into subtleties like emulating sound or on-screen controls.

there are a lot of plain bad information floating around (for example, some people’s praising the absolutely useless Snes9xPPC (by pdafan) or Snes9xJ4u)

and even the above-linked WikiPedia article linking in the oldest and least capable SNES emulator version (the original port made by Scott Ramsby)

Finally, the Nominations Manager for Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine’s Best Software Awards 2007, the guy responsible for nominations and (initially) deciding what should be nominated and what not, should show the entire Windows Mobile community he really knows what he does, doesn’t he? ;-)

Why should you bother?

It’s simple: if you’re into Japanese RPG’s like the early Final Fantasy series, Zelda, Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid and similar titles (there are a LOT of them), your best (and, in most of the cases, only) bet is SNES emulation to be able to play these titles.

Of course, there are some very good arcade / platformer games for the platform; for example, Firepower 2000, Donkey Kong Country or the Mega Man and R-Type series. In addition, you will want to check out for example the SNES implementation of the Super Mario series (there are several fan-created, free, public domain additions and fan versions like THESE)– after all, it’s free (if you own the original SNES cartridge), and high-quality – in general, much better (because of the higher quality) than the GameBoy Color / Advance versions. However, let's not forget NeoGeo emulation may offer even better arcade-quality platformer games (for example, Metal Slug) - that is, for REALLY nice action / platformer games, you may want to check out even stronger, but still properly emulated consoles / arcade machines like the NeoGeo.

What about the speed?

While many (see for example THIS PG thread) say low-resolution QVGA devices will ALWAYS be faster to emulate SNES than VGA, this is not necessarily the case. For example, the HTC Wizard runs ALL emulators REALLY slow even when overclocked to 273 MHz (and not using the touch screen – that is, it’s not the well-known 2.8” HTC bug that is slowing down the emulation). For example, some HP iPAQ hx2490 users (another QVGA model) have also reported the same. It should also be stressed that there aren’t that big differences between VGA devices than some people state.

For example, I have four VGA devices:

HTC Universal

WM5 (ROM version 2.01) HP iPAQ hx4700

WM2003SE Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 720 (without Picard’s GAPI hack)

WM5 (ROM version A12) Dell Axim x51v

All of them runs the test games (for example, Mario Kart) definitely faster (with n0p’s latest emulator version) than my HTC Wizard overclocked to 273 MHz (and not touching the touch screen), and, at least with the Pocket Loox 720 and the x51v, even faster than my 400 MHz HP iPAQ 2210 running WM2003. Yes, even the HTC Universal, which, in general, is pretty useless for action games / emulators.

This all means don’t believe people that state VGA (high-resolution) devices are bound to be useless and QVGA models bound to be great. That’s an oversimplification and, in most cases, not at all true.

Sound issues

Unfortunately, sound emulation is, in general, much worse with SNES than with CPS-1/2, Sega Genesis or even the, hardware-wise, much more advanced NeoGeo. When emulating the latter, if your device doesn’t have the necessary “juice”, all you will get is choppy sound (with only some games; for example, the Metal Slug series on NeoGeo. The vast majority of games will run with excellent sound – even NeoGeo ones).

With SNES emulation, the situation is much worse. While some games (for example, Super Ghouls and Ghosts) are reported not to have this issue, other games (for example, Final Fantasy II) will always exhibit absolutely messed-up music (see for example mrfalcon’s post in this PG thread).

If you still want sound emulation, make absolutely sure you disable automatic frame skipping and set frame skips to a wired-in value of 1 instead of the default 5. Then, after enabling sound (and sound synching as can be seen in here (note that you may also want to enable stereo mode if you uses headphones / external stereo speakers; just switch it off if you find it further decreasing the emulation speed. I didn’t; therefore, I’ve left it as stereo. You may also want to play with the other parameters)), the sound / music will become far more consistent and enjoyable.

The frame drop option “1” tells the emulator to drop (not render) every other frame. That is, the, by default, frame rate of 60 will be forced to become 30. This will help a lot in almost every respect, even at an expense of some (almost invisible) jerkiness increase.