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.
![[image]](http://bombingtheuniverse.net/images/sd2snes.jpg)
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.
Is there an easy way to hook a SNES up to a modern TV? And have it not look like garbage?
Retro Done Right
by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, September 28, 2017, 16:41 (2614 days ago) @ cheapLEY
Is there an easy way to hook a SNES up to a modern TV? And have it not look like garbage?
It can be okay if you have good upscaling and a display with good static contrast.
Scaling algorithms built into TVs are usually terrible for vintage pixel art. Some people resort to external scalers, such as the XRGB-3 or Framemeister, although these are specialty devices and not particularly cheap.
You want a display which can have deep blacks and clean areas of brightness. Displays which have brightness-emitting color elements are really good at this, such as plasmas, OLED, and the CRTs that vintage games were designed for. LEDs have more trouble since they rely on backlights that tend to have poor granularity and lots of light bleed, although the push around HDR video signaling has been leading to improvement.
If you're not extremely space-constrained, it's probably easier and much cheaper to just pick up an old CRT IMO.
Retro Done Right
by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, September 28, 2017, 16:43 (2614 days ago) @ cheapLEY
Is there an easy way to hook a SNES up to a modern TV? And have it not look like garbage?
No. There are expensive scanline converters made for this sort of thing though. Your best bet is to find a cheap used CRT of decent size.
Retro Done Right
by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, September 28, 2017, 16:49 (2614 days ago) @ Cody Miller
SD2SNES has a processor inside that mimics these chips
It's not a processor, it's an FPGA. Basically a giant array of interconnected blocks that can be configured as arbitrary logic gates. Programmable hardware.
It's not running a program that mimics a chip, so much as becoming the chip.
Retro Done Right
by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, September 28, 2017, 16:53 (2614 days ago) @ uberfoop
SD2SNES has a processor inside that mimics these chips
It's not a processor, it's an FPGA. Basically a giant array of interconnected blocks that can be configured as arbitrary logic gates. Programmable hardware.It's not running a program that mimics a chip, so much as becoming the chip.
So even better.