Retro Done Right (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, September 28, 2017, 15:27 (2614 days ago)

So my attempt at a Raspberry Pi emulation station was a disaster, and was filled with complicated setup, awful visuals, and horrible input lag.

There have been a few devices out there that let you play ROMs directly on real hardware. I looked into a few, and for SNES I settled on one called SD2SNES.

It was pretty expensive - I paid about $130. Why so much? Well, lots of SNES games used additional chips built into the cartridges, such as the Cx4, DSP-1/2/3/4, and SuperFX. These obviously won't work with ROMs, since the cartridge contained the chip. Software emulators just emulate those chips, but a real SNES would be looking for the real chip.

SD2SNES has a processor inside that mimics these chips, so that you can play such games with just the ROM file. Right now it supports pretty much every chip, except for the SuperFX which is in the works. When new chips are added, you can grab a firmware update to enable support.

And you know what? it works flawlessly. Setup was easy, and it's just like playing the cartridge, because it's all running on real hardware. Correct visuals. No input lag. Perfect. In some ways it's better than playing with the cart; you don't have to swap them out, the save files go to the SD card so you never have to worry about the battery backup draining, you can play ROM hacks, etc.

This is how you do retro.