luigiblood

[luigiblood]

Really disappointed about F-Zero GP Legend on GBA NSO

Today, as of the writing of this post, saw the addition of F-Zero GP Legend & F-Zero Climax on GBA NSO, two great games, and one of them finally officially available worldwide, even if untranslated.

Putting aside the annoyance that F-Zero Climax is untranslated, on which I still think Nintendo should seriously consider translating some of their retro titles, I want to talk about a real disappointment surrounding F-Zero GP Legend.

The hype before release

Before the release of the GBA NSO update, Nintendo's japanese blog showed that F-Zero GP Legend would actually have for the first time the inclusion of the 20 e-Reader courses, expert ghost data and machines. The Wii U Virtual Console release did not have those, and that's genuinely cool of them!

The original American and European releases of GP Legend actually included the e-Reader machines as unlockables, after they probably knew that e-Reader was just out of the question, however, they never included any of the Ghost Data, or the 20 extra courses (the equivalent of 4 cups in this game).

But for some reason, the American and European NSO releases of the game does not include the e-Reader content. You can probably excuse this as like, the game simply didn't have any support for them and therefore they couldn't hack them for it, but... that's just kind of bullshit actually.

How much effort did they make?

Guy Perfect, who you might be familiar with their recent work of BS F-Zero Deluxe, which is a hack of F-Zero that includes all courses and machines from the original game and the Satellaview BS F-Zero Grand Prix 1 & 2.

He made a few years before the e+ Complete patch for all versions of F-Zero GP Legend:

This patch includes all e-Reader content, all 20 courses and all ghost data for all versions of the game, and unlocked machines for the japanese version.

Why do I mention this? Because this patch was possible because all versions of the game, including the American and European versions still had functional e-Reader support, it's just inaccessible.

Now, I want to say this, Nintendo's modification of the japanese version of the game is still pretty well done, just like the patch I've linked, Nintendo did a similar thing in a different way, where they actually managed to include all 20 e-Reader courses in the same menu, bypassing the limitation of 5 courses, a limitation caused by the limited save space as, yes, the cards actually included the custom course data in them, no unlocks.

This might have required as much effort as Super Mario Advance 4's e-Reader levels which also bypassed similar limitations.

After asking Guy Perfect about the work that was done towards the American and European versions of his patch, it turns out Nintendo didn't need to do that much more to do it on them, porting the modifications from the japanese version would actually not require that much effort, because the e-Reader code is still just there, fully functional, and could just be enabled relatively simply.

To say it simply: Nintendo already did the work for the modifications to add e-Reader content to the game and it would have needed basically almost nothing else on top to make it work on the American and European versions.

The fan patch is not actually doing a lot of code changes to all the versions, proof that it is really not doing that much to add these courses, and that's just sad.

The European could need maybe some translations, but as it is, it doesn't even need any significant work, like, just translating "Card e-Reader+ Cup" is all that's essentially needed, and even then, they could have left it as is and you would just see it in English regardless of the language, it would have still worked and no one would probably bat an eye...

It's just disappointing, you know, this was so close, not much work was needed, it's not like I'm asking the impossible here, the work is already there and could be ported very very easily to the other versions.

This is not an outcome I can easily accept, I can accept a lot of technical reasons for not doing things at times, but not this one.

In the meantime, I guess either use the e+ Complete patch, or just use the japanese GBA NSO app if you really want to play those legally.

[luigiblood]

F-Zero 99 - 1 Year Anniversary and the Future

F-Zero 99 is the best thing that happened to Nintendo Switch Online.

I'm not gonna say it any other way, it's been a bit more than a year, and I have 153 hours. This game is top 2 of my most played games (just under Splatoon 3 which has 253 hours).

I was one of the people who was down for this idea since the moment Pyoro teased it and when Nintendo announced it in the September 2023 Nintendo Direct.

This game received 6 content updates since its debut, and most of them are major updates, and as of October 2024, the latest update was 1.5.0, with the addition of the Ace League, making it the first time that Nintendo has ever rereleased Satellaview content in any way, worldwide.

I gotta be honest here, this game keeps on giving, Nintendo Software Technology, the team behind this game, not Arika anymore, is doing a great job.

I'm gonna talk about how I felt about this game, but also a bit of an history of datamining, about the game's future, but spoiler: I don't think this game will die anytime soon.

Happy One Year Anniversary to F-Zero 99!

Oh, and, to everyone saying this game is pissing on F-Zero's legacy as I've definitely seen a few: Go f**k yourself.

Online Quality

To anyone who loves to mock the online quality of Nintendo, you cannot do it to this game, or even any of the games of the "99" series. If you have online problems, the problem is on your side. 100%.

Either your connection's terrible in which case I cannot do anything for you, but most of the problems that I had with the game, it was all solved with either a fix of my internet connection setup (cables, Wi-Fi setup, etc), or by rebooting the Switch system entirely, this is most likely what you need to do the most.

It's not entirely perfect of course, but for the entire year of its existence, I have legit no serious complaints to make to the game.

Datamining The Future

Now... let's go over what we originally datamined at first.

I'm not gonna go over what was clearly experimental content such as a 3D Mute City I map or other things like that.

Extra Modes

We found code and references to 2 modes that have yet to be added to the game since launch:

Arcade Mode It is believed to work similar to old arcade racing games, where you have a limited time, and you go through Time Gates (also datamined) to add more time to your counter to let you either finish the course, or run out of time and rank out.

Survival Mode We found some references to it for the schedule file, but also what is feeling like to be a circle plane. I speculate it to maybe work like a battle royale where the playable place reduces in size, but it's hard to fully understand how it works at this point in time.

I have no idea when these modes would be added, if ever, actually, it's still subject to interpretation.

Extra Courses

We also found references to 4 placeholder course files:

Sulfur Swamp

Volcania

Fungus Swamp

Forest

Three of them uses recolored Mute City I and a custom but clearly placeholder background. But the inclusion of Forest placeholder was definitely an odd one.

It was actually hard to say what it could have been, but Forest is actually the name of a course in BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 on Satellaview, and more to that, it's the name of a course that we never actually had recovered until the recent BS F-Zero Deluxe hack that used tons of tools in an attempt to reproduce them. We still don't have the original data yet, though. The bounty for that is still up, by the way.

I did definitely get my chances to suspect that maybe, NST was looking into Satellaview tracks, alongside brand new tracks, but maybe that Forest was just also a placeholder name.

But considering the inclusion of Ace League now, I doubt it is a coincidence. Especially when they bothered to have pretty creative names for the others, Forest just sticks out from the rest for being a pretty generic word, an argument that I had already used back then.

But I also noticed something odd, though, on this one I will DEFINITELY give an update if they ever fix this, but the Ace League's best machine ranks are not saved in the stats. This is odd, I don't know if it's a bug, or if it's actually voluntary... because IF it is, then I think the Ace League will change in the future to include the rest of the Satellaview tracks alongside a new Joker (?) League.

UPDATE from October 16th: F-Zero 99 1.5.1 update just released, and they did fix this so I was just doing copium. Not that I didn't expect it, it was a very shaky thing.

In one of the updates, before the inclusion of Secret Tracks, we had seen what was named Death Wind I Remix, which was the Death Wind I + White Land fusion. It's not unlikely that in the future, we will receive what would be called Remix tracks, for possibly entire leagues, but we might need to wait a while before we get those.

Incoming Event?

As NST is definitely aware of datamining attempts, they have been actually pretty busy scrubbing every unused files related to future content especially.

But then they missed a file in the latest 1.5.0 update that added Ace League:

It seems they are looking into doing a Mario VS Donkey Kong Festival Event in the future, including a Mini Mario League, and 4 Star Rivals called Mario, Mini Mario, Donkey Kong and Toad.

There's not much else to it, as it is just text. This text was not localized in most languages from English.

If I had to guess though, I don't rule out that this event might happen for the anniversary of the Mario VS Donkey Kong remake in February 2025. Mario VS Donkey Kong was also the baby of NST, ever since the first of the series on GBA, so it might just be meant to be a fun thing they wanted to do.

I would expect the Mini Mario League to contain either brand new or modified existing tracks to a newer style related to Mario VS Donkey Kong, new music, possibly new machines, and, definitely to me, new emotes to unlock. I expect that to be a limited time event like the others, though what you unlock will definitely stay to your workshop, like previous events, and possibly Training mode if there's indeed new courses to play that they care enough to let us play after the event.

I wouldn't be surprised if we have to collect Mini Marios or something like that, but either way, it seems NST is trying to be a little more daring to F-Zero 99 and possibly follow the footsteps of Tetris 99's themes.

Depending on the situation of the Ace League machine stats, I might have to update this post if I really somehow went too far with my suspicions. (UPDATE: Yes I went too far, they fixed the bug with 1.5.1.)

I do expect more updates related to Ace League for sure, as I do think we'll get Classic versions of the Ace League tracks, and possibly Mirror versions too.

...but oh my god though there's freaking Satellaview tracks in F-Zero 99 omg omg omg we just need the 5 left now

[luigiblood]

Something is going on with Retro NSO

I figured this stuff should be part of a post because I think it's an interesting thing to talk about.

As of the last few updates, I started to notice some changes to the NES and SNES emulators specifically, particularly related to emulation of accessories.

NES Four Score

If you don't know what the NES Four Score is, it's an accessory that allows you to play the NES up to 4 players.

I had actually never really datamined the NES emulator that much but at one point I randomly decided to give it a real shot for the July 2024 update (version 6.9.0).

Then I got actually surprised to notice code for playing using the Four Score, so I eventually went versions back, and found out it was a recent addition of 6.6.0, back in September 2023.

However, it is a little weird, it doesn't seem to be really accurate (to be more exact it only implements one ID for the second controller port, if you know, you know), but it seems functional. In fact in the 6.5.0 update (June 2023), it seemed to have been actually forced on all games, for some reason.

I couldn't notice any code regarding the NES Zapper or any other accessories however, but something that kind of gets me is that I don't notice any code for the Hori 4 Players Adaptor, which is like the Four Score but for the japanese Famicom, and it has some differences on a technical level.

My suspicion is that this was worked on when they were looking into Rare Studio titles, and R.C. Pro Am 2 is definitely a game that uses it. That said, there is one game on NES NSO already that supports the Four Score, but you cannot use it: It's Downtown Nekketsu March Super-Awesome Field Day!, which is kind of a sports games with various sports. (For some reason Nintendo is not using the newly localized ROM and that's a shame.)

SNES Super MultiTap

This is not new, this was part of the SNES emulator's code the entire time since launch, but considering we just talked about the Four Score for NES, I figured it it would also be a good time to talk a little bit about it, and bring you up to speed.

On SNES, there is the Super MultiTap that can let you play up to 5 players on the same system (it plugs into the second controller port, where you can plug 4 controllers on that, plus the first controller on the first controller port on the system).

There are actually 6 games that can use the Super MultiTap on SNES NSO as of right now, but you cannot play more than 2 players currently, BUT I confirm that it actually does emulate the accessory regardless, just that the application does not let you go past 2 players, but the games do recognize that the device is plugged.

Those games are Super Puyo Puyo 2 (actually available since SNES NSO launch!), Natsume Championship Wrestling, Amazing Hebereke, Kunio-kun no Dodgeball da yo Zen'in Shūgō!, Smash Tennis, and The Peace Keepers.

I figured it would be worth mentioning, because I don't think the addition of Four Score to the NES emulator is just an experiment, it might be possible that SNES NSO might get a major update too regarding the ability to play up to 4 or 5 players for a limited amount of games in the future... especially because of...

SNES Mouse

Like the Super Multitap, the SNES NSO emulator actually contained code to emulate the SNES Mouse the entire time since launch. However, there has been a new development as of today.

I already talked about this in one of my posts, but I'll just do a roundup of what we datamined in the past: Initially, the SNES emulator checked for specific game identification to enable the SNES Mouse emulation, and looked for 3 specific games.

We don't know what those games are, but considering the limited amount of games, I believe it is reasonable to assume they were limited to games on SNES that only worked with the SNES Mouse and nothing else, in which case, we can assume the following games:

Mario Paint

Mario & Wario

The problem however... those are the only SNES games that released that requires the SNES Mouse to play. You'd wonder what could be the 3rd game that could be best played with a Mouse, but I have a list of what could be it:

Mario Paint (PAL version)

Sound Fantasy

For a few reasons however, I don't believe the PAL version of Mario Paint would be likely, and it leaves the unreleased Nintendo game Sound Fantasy as the other option, we know it was actually completed, and it required the SNES Mouse to play. I won't delve too much on that game, but think of it as a mix of Mario Paint and Electroplankton on DS together, but back in 1994.

In later updates, they removed code that refers to the game identification and relied on game metadata instead. That was done fairly quickly in its life even.

That would have been the end of it if it wasn't for today's SNES NSO update (3.10.0), where a major rework of SNES Mouse emulation was done:

They added the ability to emulate the SNES Mouse on both controller ports, it used to be only on the first controller port.

Internally they can now do input replays of SNES Mouse devices.

There's code for configuring the behavior of the SNES Mouse between either Original, or something else.

This is actually rather interesting, this was added in the emulator between February and August 2024, so this is a legit recent development.

The mention of the SNES Mouse behavior configuration is also interesting, because it means they're looking into ways to support the SNES Mouse in different, possibly more accessible ways than using a USB Mouse.

The fact that they can also emulate the SNES Mouse on both controller ports is also potential evidence that they're looking further into other games than just SNES Mouse only titles, as some games did use the mouse on the second port instead, while leaving the first SNES controller plugged.

To this day, I haven't seen any code for the Super Scope just yet, or the Satellaview for that matter, unfortunately.

Conclusion

Just as a bit of a tl;dr for people who don't like reading:

They secretly added support last year for the NES Four Score to allow 4 player multiplayer, but isn't used yet.

They secretly had SNES Super Multitap support since day one to allow 5 player multiplayer, but isn't used yet.

They secretly had SNES Mouse support since day one, but today (18 September 2024) they released an update that reworked it significantly.

The developers seems to be busy adding or reworking accessories as of the last year. I gotta be honest, I find this a little suspect. We might be going onto something major soon that reworks the NES and SNES applications for multiplayer and more.

I hope so much that would be sooner rather than later.

...also, please, add localized ROMs to NES and SNES NSO. There's no reason not to have them.

[luigiblood]

Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Review)

I finished Emio. It's definitely a Famicom Detective Club game, through and through, for the good and the bad. If anything the 18+ is almost a red herring on what you might think the game is like if you never played those remakes.

The 18+ rating is definitely warranted, but it's almost unfair how it might make you think the game is very mature when it's still very light hearted but serious when it needs to be. If you are sensitive though, there are definitely moments you will definitely feel bad about.

I dunno however if the story is better than The Girl Who Stands Behind, to me. It's still good, and there are definitely good ideas in there. It's very good at giving you the clues to figure out what's going on before the end. Maybe a little too good, but maybe that's on me.

However, you really need to be caring about stories and characters, because else you wouldn't really enjoy it, and you need to be methodic in the menuing because it's just that, after all. If you're a sucker for sad stories though, this gives you that. It's a mood killer for sure.

I did notice the game can be different depending on how you play it, but I need to look further about that, but I'm not really in the mood to look at let's plays of that to see how different it can get.

If you didn't play the remakes, or at least The Girl Who Stands Behind, I highly suggest you should. Nintendo should seriously take the time to localize those games in more languages.

By the way; yes, the music is very good.

I just got reminded how Emio was sometimes summed up as a "horror game" because of the teaser, but it is definitely not that.

For some though, the teaser was definitely felt like a betrayal, but it makes for a good teaser in a roundabout way to convey the base urban legend.

[luigiblood]

Why Nintendo 64 - Nintendo Switch Online is shit

I have been very critical of Nintendo 64 - Nintendo Switch Online since the beginning, not only the very noticeably broken graphics emulation was certainly a case that everyone understood, but it did certainly make me completely avoid the Expansion Pack subscription entirely for a year because that was genuinely shit in 2021.

Now how is it in 2024? Well, it's not that much better. They did fix a lot of problems during that time for sure, and that's something that we do need to acknowledge to do at least something resembling fair criticism.

Current context

That one Dark Link room in Ocarina of Time was fully fixed, as the fog and even transparency emulation was just outright broken, somehow worse than its Wii U Virtual Console counterpart (which was already not very good), it also affected other games like Super Mario 64 where the fog was actually not correct, but oddly enough, it's not as much of a problem in Super Mario 3D All-Stars, and I'm not entirely sure what happened between that and Nintendo Switch Online for it to have such a massive emulation downgrade.

I've done some analysis of the software, though not a ton because I don't have that much time to waste reverse engineering emulators. Through that, I found out that iQue was responsible for the Nintendo 64 emulator on Wii U and Switch, because of the emulator framework, named "TRL," being 100% identical to their NES and GBC emulator for 3DS, confirmed to be iQue through leaked source code among other things, and the debug menu is seen on Wii U if you have more than one game ROM in the folder, and it's just like the 3DS one.

The Wii U Virtual Console N64 emulator was already seen as worse than its Wii VC counterpart, mainly due to the dark filter, but that thing has nothing to do with the emulation quality it was providing, aside from apparently some additional slight input lag on top of the already massive input lag which I find mindboggling, the graphics emulation was already considered worse than on Wii, a lot of issues that people saw on NSO were already on Wii U VC, which turned into a massive mess of complaints because, yeah, it turns out the Wii U was just not successful, but the Switch is, making obvious complaints very much more important.

The Dark Link room just happened to be using a bunch of graphical features at once which made it very noticeable when they don't work as intended. When I discussed this with other people, I couldn't help but feel terrible at the answer I get: "It's good enough."

This response annoys me to no end, but in truth, yes, the games are playable, nowadays graphically you probably wouldn't tell the difference from the real N64 with an untrained eye, and in fact, so am I at times too. But the problem is that it now becomes an actual history rewrite of how the game actually was, and you could still say that you would prefer the N64 games now than before with better framerates, better resolution, all that.

Better performance is always better?

Now this is still more of an opinion piece so here's my opinion about better framerate and better resolution: It's fucking misguided. Doing better framerate and better resolution works a lot better for games after that generation than the 32-bit and 64-bit era of the mid 90s to 2000, because the graphics looks a lot better for it and the standards are closer to the current era that we're in.

For N64 however, simply running the game better does not work as well as it should most of the time, and, frankly, seeing big polygons in 720p does not work as well as it should for most games. 2D games especially suffer from this and get some really weird filtering that just bothers me, especially in games like Yoshi's Story and Harvest Moon 64, where the emulator seemingly can't decide whether the graphics should be almost pixel perfect, or become vaseline.

Speaking of vaseline, where's the anti-aliasing? The N64 is very much known for its blurry anti-aliasing! While I'm pretty much immune to aliasing myself, I can still see it's not really respecting the original N64 very well about that, and it only deepens one of the biggest history rewrite of the N64 nowadays, where most people is more likely to look at badly emulated footage of a N64 game than seeing the game running on the original system, and this really bothers me that when you have every single other system on the service to care about this to the point of having a CRT screen filter, and even outright and pretty faithful reproductions of the Game Boy series' screens, N64 is the only one that forces you to play in its uglier HD resolution with no actual option to play games in their original resolution with some CRT filter or not, and that is just a real evidence of a lack of care to me compared to the rest of the systems.

When it comes to better framerates however, as much as I love that (Pilotwings 64 on NSO is actually one of the few experiences I can recommend on it), a lot of the games' speed are tied to the framerate, potentially making games harder than they should due to its speed being more accounted for the actual system, and sometimes, causing actual desync problems that iQue had to implement ways to manually slow the framerate down in specific moments of games just to account for it, but this only works for games that can run faster than intended. A lot of games sometimes have their framerate completely capped and doesn't run any faster.

But emulating the N64 lag is genuinely complex, and it's a problem that's not fully solved to this day even on unofficial N64 emulation, because there's way too many factors to take into account that it would probably take too much performance to figure out where it should take more time to process or not, so, on this one, I have a bit of sympathy about that as a developer, but it is still possible to roughly approximate that, even if the result can be weird; but I don't seem to notice any legit attempts about that.

Besides, a lot of people would be annoyed about the N64 lag and bad framerates, but to me if you want better framerates, in my opinion, it would be done differently, and unofficial emulation absolutely can deal with it in ways that isn't intrusive to the game's performance: If you played the N64Recomp PC port of Majora's Mask, you would know this, as RT64, the new graphics plugin powering this port (and hopefully emulators soon), actually handles interpolation between frames, allowing better framerate without sacrificing the game's performance to be better or worse than intended, and it makes for some real impressive results while still being relatively low in cost. For me this seems like a potential avenue to attempt to ease in comfort with N64 games.

Is N64 emulation really that hard?

…frankly, if you asked me this question 10 years ago, I would have said yes, at least to my understanding back then, but also now. But if you ask me this same question now, the answer is no, mainly because of brand new standards that actually makes a huge difference in how to handle N64 emulation in current systems, even through unofficial emulation.

I know it's very easy to mock unofficial N64 emulation as relatively hard to play, and this I would agree with, but this problem is purely user faced now. The old problem of unofficial N64 emulation was mainly that not many people were doing work on it and their time is just not infinite, but that is very much changing nowadays.

The Nintendo 64 is actually a well understood system, additional research are still being done, but for the most part, we can understand the N64 to a decent degree. The actual bottleneck of N64 emulation was actually how to emulate it on current systems, when we were stuck to older graphics API standards like OpenGL and DirectX 9.

However, a shakeup happened since with Vulkan and DirectX 12, allowing deeper GPU control. This, is actually one of the most important events of computing that actually unlocked bigger N64 emulation potential and finally get rid of problems that plagued N64 graphics emulation and it started with an adaptation of THE most accurate N64 graphics plugin as Parallel-RDP, and its extremely good, but its pretty much asking on performance and requires a decent GPU (no need for the latest stuff though).

Unfortunately, not much happened since on that field, due to as I said before, a lack of developers, but now RT64 exists, and is made to be extremely performant, and especially made to be accurate without relying on any game specific code for it, which is extremely impressive and shows a lot of potential for the future, while providing tons of new features that allows enhancements like frame interpolation and more. RT64 was fully enabled because of Vulkan and DirectX 12, else it would simply not exist!

Now why did I talk about this stuff that's seemingly unrelated to NSO? Well remember that Majora's Mask PC port I talked about earlier that uses RT64? I saw that thing running on Nintendo Switch, seemingly perfectly fine, with enhancements as well.

This makes me look at N64 NSO differently, and with even more criticism than before. Instead of making good graphics emulation through Vulkan, they seemingly instead just ported the graphics emulation from Wii U VC's GX2 API to Vulkan. That isn't without effort, but it is quite frankly lazy, and means that whatever they're doing, they're not using the technology at their disposal to the fullest, especially since Vulkan is a standard that applies to pretty much every current GPU under the sun now, whatever the work is done here, it would likely work on the long term, especially the next systems after the Switch. Why Nintendo did not allow that is just sad, and a waste of time. RT64 was done by mostly a single developer, and while it took many years to be developed, these years could have been reduced a lot more if it was handled by a team fully dedicated to this, with possibly even more cutting edge to it. The ingredients are there, but the recipe was just botched.

Genuine trust issues with the quality

But aside from all this stuff I just talked about, if you didn't understand much of it, hopefully this part should help you understand other issues that I have with N64 NSO.

Remember that the first version of N64 NSO was graphically buggy, and while they did fix that over time, new games sometimes were outright buggy and possibly game breaking:

When they added Paper Mario to the service, while the game did actually receive some improvements over the Wii U VC emulator, the game, somehow, was more prone to crashes. If you game over with Watt as a partner, the emulator crashes, and you lose your progress. If you have the curiosity of hitting trees with your hammer, one of them in the snow town actually crashes the game too! Thankfully both were fixed, but you still needed to wait months! If you had no idea why crashes could be caused as Nintendo just never warns about that stuff, that is genuinely inconvenient.

When they added Kirby 64; the western version actually had a game breaking bug that makes you softlocked if you get hit in a particular way underwater. That is genuinely a terrible bug that could affect just about anybody playing the game. Thankfully, they fixed it the next week, but that REALLY shouldn't have happened to begin with!

There's also the smaller problems like Yoshi's Story's boss, Inviso, where the point of the boss is to be invisible. Except he's very visible at all times making the point of the boss moot and any respect to the original game gone. For some fucking reason, they took more than a year to finally fix it, and that's just a huge shame.

There's also how Jet Force Gemini had a worse widescreen mode and somehow thought it was good for release, thankfully fixed 2 months after, but you still had to wait 2 months!

And then F-Zero X still has genuine framerate problems to this day where the game just runs worse over time. That game is known to run a perfect 60 FPS on the original system, so there's no excuse here.

I could also mention Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, but just look up Graslu's videos on them, he has done a full comparison, showing what's wrong with them with enough detail.

For these, I just mentioned the glaring issues plaguing several games, but a lot of times these issues just comes on their addition to the service, and then only gets fixed months later; and for me, that's an actual disrespect to the player. I understand the developer is doing their best here, but frankly, what that looks like to me is a legit constant: they visibly seems just scrambling to get games to work to a "good enough" state. I am NOT accusing iQue of this, however I accuse Nintendo to not have taken any measures to stop having these kinds of problems to begin with.

To speak better of iQue, they seem to be good at reverse engineering, as they do patch games to fix issues, or sometimes just modifications like anti-epilepsy measures or other kinds of hacks.

The controls

I had some really bad things to say about the controls, but it got partially invalidated when I played Perfect Dark on the service to see how bad it got. I think I simply overthought about it.

Now I have an opinion about the controls of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark that will not please people: They're… fine. The default controls I mean. I know people have some real aversion to FPS that doesn't use a double stick, but frankly I dare say those controls didn't age as badly as you'd think. Some people say it's best played on a N64 controller but I don't agree about that, it's also okay on a regular Switch Pro Controller.

Turok however, oh boy, the default controls can be a double stick FPS… except it's reversed. That's where the ability to remap controls would be very useful here, or possibly just one moment where better forced control setups would be actually nice here.

Or how Pokémon Stadium has minigames that uses actually both the D-pad and the Stick, it could be great if the right Stick acted like the N64 Stick at that moment on a Pro Controller instead of the C Buttons!

Instead, I sometimes get told it is an excuse to get the (frankly expensive) N64 controller. Fuck no. I should not be forced to buy that, and I actually dislike using that controller, and I played tons of N64 games through emulation with different controls without having serious issues either, so for me, this isn't an excuse. Wii U VC also provided button remapping!

The forced use of ZL as the N64 Z button, and L for N64 L button for every game, also bothered me. I know they care about consistency, but then, I got actually curious to check how they handled Z and L on Wii and Wii U VC… and holy shit. They handled it right from the start. On Wii they actually just used the L button for the N64 Z button! But, the N64 B and A buttons do correspond to the B and A buttons on the current controllers regardless. Though, on that one, for most games, it's not as much of a bother, but if you're playing games like, let's say Wave Race 64 or F-Zero X, this is particularly worse.

F-Zero X has the use of strafing left and right, so I'll let you imagine how worse that sounds if you use ZL and R. NOT ZR, that's for C Buttons macros on the face buttons. It feels horrible and unintuitive, but also there's how the B and A buttons on N64 are vertical, and you just use your thumb on both buttons, making it easy to boost or to soften bounces on waves in Wave Race 64, which is a pretty darn important thing to understand, but instead you have to handle it on horizontal B and A buttons, making it a slight bit more annoying to your thumb, physically speaking. It just feels unintuitive and actually bad for your thumb, frankly.

It's where I wish games would actually make either ZR or R buttons to be swapped depending on the title, to be the R button and C button macro, and also offer an option to rotate the face buttons so that B and A would be placed on Y and B instead, corresponding more to the actual feeling of the N64 controller.

Sin & Punishment is oddly enough the only game of the bunch that comes with slightly custom controls, more adapted to the game, and I'm sorta glad that they bothered.

Just to go back to the N64 stick emulation, I also wish the sensitivity of it was managed better on current controllers. It really seems like when some games run faster than intended, added with the fact the stick isn't reproduced faithfully, some games are a lot harder to play, especially with Joy Cons if that's your only and basic options, where for example, turning the camera is way faster and you just keep wanting to reposition all the time.

Missing features

Man, imagine emulating the Controller Pak for the ability to save in games that only uses it instead of battery backed save memory in the cartridge, but then, literally never use it, ever.

Well that's what happened to Wii U VC and N64 NSO. iQue has actually emulated it, but for some reason, they never use it, and I just do not understand why, especially in games where the Rumble Pak isn't supported.

Speaking of the Rumble Pak, it is emulated, but there's one thing I just do not understand: Why isn't there code to automatically swap the Controller Pak and Rumble Pak? They have the best ways to actually handle this in ways that is pretty transparent and unobtrusive, but somehow, they don't bother with it, and it's just very strange. I know the N64 games are weird about it, but some outright allow to swap them, sometimes they even bother to remove the No Controller Pak message in Winback, but in other games they don't even bother removing the Rumble Pak swap message. It's just inconsistent and weird.

We don't have Transfer Pak emulation unfortunately, but that one, I can partially understand, it's definitely a bit messy, but it would still have been cool to play Mario Tennis and Mario Golf with your GBC characters and to level them up on the N64 games. Instead, in Mario Tennis GBC, you actually get the Transfer Pak content unlocked from the start, which is still pretty cool of Nintendo to care, and a mere reminder that they do care about these details in other apps. But in Mario Tennis on N64 NSO, the Transfer Pak courts are yet to be unlocked.

Then there's the wish to see 64DD emulated, which they initially did some work towards that back on Wii U VC, but then simply never touched in years, and then removed the code after I noticed they tried to support the fanmade cartridge ports of them. It's probably just for testing though, I don't really care that they do it like that, but I would think it's particularly crass had they used them officially on the app. This has yet to be seen again, so I don't have my hopes up. Here's hoping the Nintendo Museum made them care though, considering Doshin The Giant 64DD actually showed up there.

The future

I think I pretty much said what I wanted to say the most in one place. It might have been a little hard to read, but I really wanted to make my points very clear.

When I look at N64 NSO vs the rest of the service, I just cannot help but see how worse it is in general, I have genuine trust issues as it is very badly managed as games get added but then doesn't run properly, only to get resolved, if it does, only months later. It just makes me want to put off for later any time I wanna play a N64 game on that service, and I really want to love that service, I want to recommend y'all the biggest N64 library so far that Nintendo has given us that surpasses both Virtual Console libraries on Wii and Wii U, but I just can't.

Unfortunately, I don't see the future to be that bright. I see no reason to believe Nintendo has done any big efforts to allow a better N64 emulator, and of course, Nintendo has never really addressed complaints, and I partially blame the "good enough" feeling. When I read ArsTechnica to make an article just to complain about the borders after the N64 NSO ordeal, it just makes me feel like no matter what, this bigger complaint of mine across all of N64 NSO just cannot be seen seriously. It's a much bigger problem than borders (though, I agree, they should allow more, including pitch black borders).

I don't see any reason for Nintendo to read this either, but that's my full impressions of N64 NSO so far. Nintendo 64 NSO is just shit, and disrespectful to the legacy of the N64.

I outright accuse it to force people to buy a N64 controller just to play it correctly, which definitely worked as it definitely was out of stock several times, but if that's truly what they aimed for, then it's an app that doesn't know what audience it wants. If it aimed to be played by casuals, they'll be put off by the controls. If they aimed for the hardcore, they'll find problems, no matter what.

And it really cannot be helped when the emulator is clearly designed for the developers to manually fix problems per game instead of having a better emulator overall.

[luigiblood]

An interesting view of Retro NSO Patents

So a bunch of patents from Nintendo recently got published and got my attention: They are related to the retro Nintendo Switch Online service and how it works and it brings a bit of an interesting view of it, with features that are DEFINITELY not inside the apps as of now.

As I went through them, I decided to also go back a little bit to earlier ones.

Just in case, for every reader:

At no point this describes the future of NSO! Let that be clear!!

Unlike most people who reports on patents, I actually will LINK the original patents.

US11003312B2 - NSO User Interface

You can find this patent here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11003312B2/en

This seems to be among the earliest ones, it's from 2018, right before the launch of NES NSO that happened in September 2018.

This is an exact description of how the NSO UI works, where each image (or box arts, as they are usually used) are scaled roughly equivalent to each row so it always fits perfectly.

They had planned initially for details to be basically on the box art, thankfully they changed that completely for a full window in the final version.

They also had Special versions / Extra versions also nailed down already at that time, which are just games with preloaded save states, which the patent does explain. And the whole NEW thing where a new game is packaged like a gift and you just open them as you select them, that's already in the final app as well.

But here's something cursed:

This is a full vertical version of the user interface, which we've never seen so far.

US20240165505A1 - GB/GBA Multiplayer

This patent can be found here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240165505A1/en

This existed since late 2022 in Japan, but got a US version the next year, then published this year.

This patent explains how multiplayer works for GB and GBA NSO, as in emulating multiplayer between different linked systems, whether through LAN or online.

It gets complicated to read, but it's really about different ways to handle emulation of multiplayer, from one way where each player run their own emulator on their systems, to what I believe to be actually used: Running up to 4 emulators on each player's systems at the same time and keeping them synchronized through each player's input, but only display one of them corresponding to each player.

I believe this last way is used because all data sent through link cable is expected to be instant, you cannot delay this data, because this is asking for constant lag, but emulating all consoles on each player's system does solve this problem.

There also some quick algorithms in there about how to handle connections, disconnections and so on, but at this point it's not too interesting to explain because it works just like the apps.

US20240181342A1 - NSO User Interface (Save System)

This patent can be found here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240181342A1/en

It's dated just like the previous one, actually.

It might sound like the first one, but this one is more than meets the eye. Some articles talked about this as like, new Switch OS UI which is just bullshit (hi GameRant), or as GameCube NSO (wtf are you smoking to think of that straight up), but this one is actually about saves!

This image is actually having the main game on the left side, and everything to its right are all save states! You can see 2 saves for the first game, and 5 saves for the second game, it even has two rows for a single game which never happens on NSO apps. Of course, each save are just essentially having a screenshot of when the save state was taken at that moment.

This can very well be an alternative way of things, as I think this looks quite a bit cumbersome in how much space it uses.

But what's interesting is the Auto Save feature, which is not a feature of retro NSO currently. It is explained that the auto save can be enabled or not, and can happen anytime, including within a repeated time interval. This would be very nice in case of crashes.

And then, the elephant in the room: Yes, this looks like you could do more than 4 saves, with a peek of the suspension menu with a way to scroll through saves, the first option being to create a new save, without necessarily having to choose a numbered save state ID.

US20240173627A1 - Mission Play Mode

This patent can be found here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240173627A1/en

Now, this one is really sad because this shows an actual mission mode for retro NSO apps with objectives and rewards!

This has a new mode included called Mission Play, and you are provided with a mission that you can enter.

In this case it's about hitting enemies, keeping a count for a mission, but also even keeping a count of every single player in a region, and then the world!

This is really cool! I really think they should be doing this, but it seems Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition might do it instead.

That said, this being planned for retro NSO systems is definitely not entirely news for me, because I had noticed a long time ago that the SNES NSO emulator definitely kept track of specific game information as you play, it wasn't necessarily sent anywhere, but they were thinking about it, for several SNES games.

Funnily enough, these are real examples of detections for Super Mario Advance 2 specifically. This is pretty much how the memory and code looks like for the game.

I want to insist though: These are patents, these are for ideas, so this patent might have been publicly published because of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, but through experience, most of the time, as much as they describe stuff for illustrative purposes, it is usually describe a real example that was in development at one point or another.

Again, though: At no point this describes the future of NSO! Let that be clear!

But it gives us a view of what Nintendo and NERD had in mind for development. And, at least, I actually give links unlike a few who loves to tease bullshit through those.

[luigiblood]

I'm going to semi-retire from the game preservation scene.

This is by no means a decision that I took on a whim. I am genuinely sad that it came to be this way, I've been involved in this stuff for a genuinely long time, I've seen many things, met many great people, also the bad and stupid dramas, which shouldn't really be discounted either, even though this was not the kind of thing that affected my decision.

I have no regrets on how I handled my job and I wouldn't have it any other way. But I just don't have the heart anymore. For roughly a year as I'm typing this, I started to seriously resent any attempt at public releases and contextual research.

This kinda sucks for how I want things to be treated with respect. I blame myself for giving myself too much responsibility and was not able to successfully pass down some of it to other people. This definitely did not help as it took a toll mentally speaking. But despite trying to change this, I found out how I just stopped caring about details, and just wanted to move on. I gave myself a little more time to ponder about it, and my final decision is that, yeah: I need to quit, I really don't have the heart anymore for it.

That doesn't mean I want to stop everything though, there are still things I need to do, and still have interests with, like with Satellaview and 64DD, but I want to gradually move away, and eventually pass the baton to people who still has the fuel. But I don't intend to disappear.

I still have a burning passion for the obscure parts of Nintendo, that's not changing any time soon, but the work I've been doing really just felt like a chore, and it was a job I've been doing for years.

I've been involved with Satellaview since around 2008/2009 with my Hello World SNES homebrew adapted for BS-X. The technical knowledge of the Satellaview was just very limited. I've started then a project to at least reveal how the satellite signal worked, and I got it working (then nocash did even further work that shouldn't be discounted, but he's really just too fast at this). It was my first reverse engineering project, and it was very formative, and shaped my knowledge of computer science like never before. I've then worked on emulation and preservation, managing quite a few dumps of Satellaview content.

Then in December 2014 I've had my first version of the 64DD Disk Dumper, done with help from the N64 scene people, on December 31st, all commercial 64DD titles were dumped, then I worked on 64DD emulation for a bunch of emulators, based on the works of Happy_ from MAME, and eventually was able to write my very own emulation code from scratch and higher accuracy than before on Ares. This year will be 10 year anniversary of my 64DD Disk Dumper.

So I've been doing this stuff for like, 15 years at this point, and now... Aside from the fact that I haven't been as into it as I used to, I also got older. I'm at an age where I'm sorta thinking if I want to do other things with my life, but in that case, other things have to be put on the wayside, to an extent.

I can't say what I will bring in the future, I have tons of ideas, and besides, I'm still gonna be behind a few game preservation works here and there, but my involvement will be limited from now on.

Also, Nintendo: Don't think I'm done datamining your NSO apps lol You still have so much shit that we don't have and I'm not gonna give up on having hints.

[luigiblood]

Game Ownership

In sort of a response to the Ubisoft director of subscriptions where he said that we need to get more confortable not owning games...

Well, reading that interview from GamesIndustry.biz, turns out he never really said that. It's more of an observation of the gaming subscription services, and comparing different views. It's actually a pretty interesting read.

But the negative response to the more clickbait part where the gamers went very much against this from the get go was something that particularly striked me as how I really just didn't feel like I was part of those who responded like this.

I do not care about owning games that much. I may be a owner of retro consoles, games, and about 50 Switch physical games, but the reasons ranges from passion to just practical and economical.

Taking the example of the Switch, what currently makes me attached to physical games are more of how it's usually cheaper in my country (like, first party games day one tend to be 25% off brand new), and the practicality when you live in a household with 2 Switch systems, it's just easier to share the games that way with your family. If I could just buy digitally with the same advantages, I'd just do that.

This view on game ownership has mostly to do with my past of a guy who pirated games and movies like crazy before we got a little more comfortable paying for stuff. But this past also comes with a deeper importance on the presence of data locally. Cloud gaming is something I hate on passionately if the industry keeps going on that as a means to play games exclusively. It would be the kind of thing that would make my heart broken about modern gaming as a whole, but thankfully we're not even close to there, and I suspect we'll never be.

But I could also not need to pay for the games, I don't really see a lack of ownership as a problem on its own. The only thing that matters is if it's practical or not, and that's the part that feels like it tends to be skipped when explained. That's how it went about movies and music.

That practicality is critical, and that is the part that's the most in danger. The big reason why is how companies can decide on a whim what is accessible to suit their needs. That WILL be completely in the process of enshittification due to how companies have to keep growing until it makes no more sense. You don't even need to look very far to understand this, video streaming services are already very good at doing absolutely this, but I also dare say the Game Pass and PlayStation Plus are on a similar boat to a different extent, though.

One of the recent examples of how bad shit is HBO Max's removal of a huge amount of content just for a massive tax write down. There is financial incentive to fuck us all, and I consider the future to do absolutely that in the long term for gaming.

That kind of thing SUCKS. That is what we're actually scared of as a consumer. I hate seeing art being considered as a throwaway product.

I even saw a french article that was so complacent with this and kept saying complete bullshit things like "oh if they remove that game from the service, just take it as an opportunity to play another one" just, fuck off. That's not how I see this kind of service.

I love Nintendo Switch Online, despite a lot of its flaws, and hate on Virtual Console's overall legacy personally. I'm all for ways to allow discoverability and pick the curiosity of people. That's the kind of shit that I love in having some ease of access to catalogs, despite not owning them.

Wasn't it the dream to just access to everything with less money though? Don't tell me otherwise because I wouldn't believe you. I do think there's something nice in this kind of service, but we also need to figure how to keep companies from the inevitable enshittification that will ensue on the constant need for growth beyond any reasonable sense.

[luigiblood]

Some thoughts about Nintendo Switch Online retro games since last time

This is essentially going to be not much of a post but I guess I could talk about a few things about its future since with all the updates that we got since last time.

We'll talk about UI code, Pokémon, NES, Fire Emblem and N64.

UI code upgrade

Literally the next day since my last post about it, on March 16th, Nintendo added new NES, SNES and GB titles. Under the hood, they did do a massive change to the user interface programming, bringing pretty much every NSO app to the latest user interface codebase that GB and GBA NSO had.

That said it brings absolutely no visible changes, NERD has just made sure to bring everything up-to-date. This is just more stable and probably easier to program and manage UI code.

Pokémon Stadium 1 & 2

On April 12th, Nintendo released Pokémon Stadium to NSO + Expansion Pack, and with no Transfer Pak support.

Of course, what did I even expect since there's no old mainline Pokémon titles yet (if ever?).

My opinion about Pokémon on NSO is that it will get stuck to only spinoffs. My worst case realistic scenario (aside from no rerelease) is Pokémon Company selling the old gens at $15 piecemeal (yes, $5 more than on 3DS Virtual Console).

Personally I expect Pokémon Company to be very strict about Pokémon management, and those games are highly abusable with glitches, honestly and are kind of region locked, too to some extent especially between japanese and international players, but they still bothered to rerelease them and supporting them with a way to transfer your Pokémons out of the games. It's also abusable if you supported the Transfer Pak in Pokémon Stadium titles since they also work like extra boxes for your Pokémons and those support save states, which was explicitly removed out of the 3DS Virtual Console release...

They did also release Pokémon Stadium 2 this week, also without Transfer Pak support.

I did look at the emulator really quick and did find that they added new functions for Lua script hacking for the games, and it does kinda look like they rebuilt the entire thing from a new version at least.

I'll speak more about N64 emulation later.

Mystery Tower

Fast forwarding a bit, on June 6th, Nintendo added more NES, SNES and GB titles. One of them was Mystery Tower by Namco.

This bothered me, because I knew what this game was, but the title did absolutely not sound right. Turns out this title is actually brand new, they had this title in their collection, the original title was "BABEL" which is interesting since this means it is a first case of title change hacks on NSO. That said I did eventually find out that Japan also had a title change to "The Tower of Babel", which was also done in collections, but also the Wii U Virtual Console release!

Anyway please try this puzzle game, just keep in mind the direction and how you can turn around stuff based on how you face it.

Fire Emblem

On June 23rd, Nintendo released Fire Emblem for the GBA NSO app. But Japan also had Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, the actual first GBA Fire Emblem title, as we only started to get these games since the second GBA title.

I'll refer to them as FE6 (The Binding Blade) and FE7 (Fire Emblem) from now on.

This update was interesting for a couple reasons.

It just so happens that the japanese version of FE7 can link to FE6's completed save files to unlock a couple things in the game.

So now, when you go into multiplayer, after the first player selects FE7, the second player is allowed to select either FE7, or FE6 for "Link Cleared Save Data" (official english text). Another player can simply share their save files to another player.

This also means that the GBA app now has the ability to load different games for each player depending on the choice of the first player who serves as the host.

(This screenshot is me messing around with the functionality.)

However this is not the only noteworthy thing to happen, because it wouldn't feel fair for a single player to not being able to transfer their own FE6 saves to FE7. Well, they did actually implement a hack for single player too!

They actually reimplemented the linking process inside the emulator just to avoid emulating a second GBA for it, and it would seamlessly transfer the save data just fine.

If you're wondering about what it unlocks, a quick read made me figure out that it skips Lyn's story, and add new scenes to the epilogue and other small additions as well. Those new epilogue scenes are available in the US version by default, but not in the EU versions for some reason. They can also be accessed in the JP version without a save transfer by finishing the game 9 to 11 times (what the heck).

This functionality working as it is really cool, honestly, and it makes a process less painful to do like it was back then, and it did make me feel confident in the transfer of data between games like with Golden Sun & Golden Sun: The Lost Age or the Zelda Oracle games... speaking of...

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons

Those two games ended up randomly coming at the end of July this year. They are known for being two parts of a fuller story if you link each of them from whatever order you start them with.

And that's where my disappointment came in to remind me of the terrible reality that is Nintendo Switch Online.

It is doable for two players to share their save files to each other through multiplayer, but if you wanna do the games yourself on your own in single player, you'll have to input the password you get from the other game.

That is kinda sad considering it's the first player who selects the save file from the other player, it could have been very easy to setup in a way that's easy to use without needing to implement any specific user interface, but that didn't quite happen.

I hope they'll bother for Golden Sun considering the tiers of password this game can have with Golden Sun: The Lost Age, but I am starting to think if the game does offer a way to transfer without needing any additional work, they wouldn't do it. In the case of Fire Emblem, this way of save transfer was the only way to do it.

I did not mention much about this, but Oracle of Ages/Seasons are also known for having exclusive content if you play those games on a Game Boy Advance. After looking into it though, it does not seem like we're missing much, but it's kinda sad that they're not really in their most definitive way to play them.

Pokémon Trading Card Game

Two weeks after those last two games, Pokémon Trading Card Game and Pokémon Stadium 2 were released.

The cool thing about this game, is that they emulated the infrared communications.

At least, Card Pop does work, for sure, which does require emulation of the IR communcation... or does it?

Upon a quick inspection of the emulator code, I found out that the emulator does indeed patch the game ROM's functions, and thanks to the disassembled Pokémon Trading Card Game offering me a lot of information, I found out that they absolutely don't emulate the IR communications at all and outright replace the IR functions to point to a invalid 0xDD opcode (opcodes are small commands that CPU executes)... which probably points to a function in the emulator to specifically manage this. Ain't that funny? In any case though, they do at least let all IR communications work just fine, and that's what matters.

(For the nerds who wants to look this up, the emulator keeps SHA1 hashes of the ROM you can easily search for, then points to a struct of 100 bytes original to compare, 100 bytes to patch, address, size, and something else I don't get.)

I ended up looking this up as someone pointed me to this video:

It turns out in the original game, one of the cards, the Phantom Venusaur, is impossible to obtain due to a mistake in the calculations of the odds, on which this video explains very well in detail.

This is the reason that motivated me to look at how the emulator might patch the game, and see if they fixed this issue: They did not fix this problem, I see no patch for any of the relevant code for this.

So, NERD, if you're reading this, look at 06:5D92, you can definitely fix this in one way or another.

N64 emulation

So... the Pokémon Stadium 2 release at least updated the emulator in some way, because they added new functions for the Lua scripting for N64 game hacks, and some of the UI engine stuff got shuffled around.

Then I tried some of the games, to see if some things got fixed:

F-Zero X did NOT get its framerate drop fixed.

Goldeneye's Dam level has texture tiling fixed. Interesting.

Since I noticed this last thing, it was pointed to Graslu00 who knows the game in and out and already compared the emulation of the game on NSO and Xbox... to a disappointing degree.

Here's his thread about the fixes... or rather the lack of: https://twitter.com/Graslu00/status/1688994099477528576

The update did also some additional fixes to Pokémon Stadium 1, though I don't really know much about it other than it relates to rendering and soft reset in some way.

Unfortunately the N64 emulator is still not up to snuff, but I think the most annoying thing is still the controls. The default controls suck, let us change them in the emulator, per game! Offer also better stick emulation!

It still pains me to rely on the Switch OS remap feature, it's not good for this, it messes too much with some of the macros, it sucks!

It annoys me when I see the text "Change Control Method" in the emulator files too, you guys clearly thought about it! Why isn't it a feature after months with nothing?

Future releases

There's still a couple N64 games left that were explicitly announced for 2023, such as 1080° Snowboarding, Excitebike 64 and Mario Party 3.

That said Japan also had plans for release of Harvest Moon 64 (which I see no reason why we can't get it now that Harvest Moon SNES got released since), but also Goldeneye 007, on which Japan has it on the highest age rating (CERO Z).

Considering how the plans are going and how lazy everything is (sorry devs, I'm sure you guys know already, but most of the results of this just don't impress me and don't fill me with confidence aside from GB/GBA somehow), I just think N64 NSO will randomly get a 18+ rating and put every N64 game under parental control bullshit out of nowhere with no warning for Japan.

Also, where's the alternate languages for NES and SNES games?

[luigiblood]

An interpretation of the Dolphin on Steam situation.

As a reminder, Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator, had announced a release of a Steam version using features from Steam like cloud save, Steam Deck native support and all.

A couple of days ago, Dolphin's Steam page was pulled down, then Dolphin's official blog mentioned a DMCA takedown, and PC Gamer reported on it, quoting the DMCA. Then we all went a bit crazy over this, then Delroth, a former Dolphin member, talked in a bit more detail, and debunked a misunderstanding.

You can still read this from Delroth here: https://mastodon.delroth.net/@delroth/110440301402516214

EDIT: Delroth has made one more very interesting post on Reddit about encryption keys in emulators here: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/140b7x5/are_dolphin_devs_special_in_bundling_decryption/

All in all, the situation was misinterpreted from all sides, and to sum it up, according to Delroth: Valve asked Nintendo about this, and Nintendo said they don't want this, and quoted the DMCA's set of laws. In fact, not only Delroth says this, a lawyer contacted by PC Gamer essentially says the same thing in the updated report here.

One more preface: I am NOT a lawyer, legal text is very hard to fully grasp, this is only my own interpretation of the situation, what I am about to say may be VERY VERY WRONG. Got it?

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a copyright law from 1998. It is made of several titles and acts. The first title contains the anti-circumvention part which we'll get to later. The second title contains the takedown process part.

DMCA Takedown

I'll get to the second title first:

To sum it up, this is the part where you can do a copyright infringement claim, a "notice and takedown" process. This process also includes the ability of a counterclaim.

NONE OF THIS HAPPENED ON DOLPHIN ON STEAM. Nintendo did not use this process. They just told Valve a reason, and it was Valve's decision alone that got the emulator removed, and they notified Dolphin of the reason.

I won't really debate much on this, it's not really interesting.

"Anti-circumvention"

Now, the anti-circumvention part, the meaty part. There's a lot of legal text, but I will translate to the best of my abilities to you, don't worry.

This is the part where I feel the least comfortable about, and again, this is an interpretation, but let's start again from that quote that I had (from PC Gamer, by the way):

the Dolphin emulator operates by incorporating these cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime. Thus, use of the Dolphin emulator unlawfully 'circumvent[s] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under' the Copyright Act.

The thing is... I only said that indeed, the Wii Common Key, required to decrypt everything, is included in Dolphin's source code. It's... not necessarily the problematic point of this, as I tried to read more into it, and I will go back to the Lockpick_RCM actual DMCA takedown.

Lockpick_RCM is a Switch tool that gets a set of keys from your Switch console and puts them into an easy to read file that could be used in conjunction with other Switch tools. They're required to decrypt pretty much everything about the Switch, from games to other packages.

The use of Lockpick with a modified Nintendo Switch console allows users to bypass Nintendo’s Technological Measures for video games

A thing you read a lot is "Technological Measures"... turns out this has a bit of a definition in 17 U.S.C. §1201... or rather, in that text itself, here's the very first thing you can read:

17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

The wording "circumvent a technological measure" happens to have a definition tied to it:

17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

It's a somewhat precise definition, actually, and purely relying on it... this makes pretty much everything Wii, 3DS, Wii U and Switch a very dangerous situation.

The "technological measure" also has a definition:

17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(3)(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Basically it just means a DRM (Digital Rights Management) process of sorts.

A lot of people loves to talk about the previous lawsuits on emulators, but note that I never mentioned the emulation being the issue here. Nintendo is NOT arguing, on a legal level anyway, that emulators are illegal by being one, their communication team does by stifling innovation in their public arguments.

According to 17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(3)(A), just having encryption is enough to consider that they're protected, and just decrypting is already illegal... this affects a lot more than you think, it's not just Dolphin at this point, it seems we misunderstood a lot of things about the DMCA.

To sum it up more bluntly: I don't feel like the encryption key is the main argument, it's actually about what you do with it that they argue against.

So even if Dolphin removed the Wii Common Key, if they still include the decryption process, even if you provided the key yourself from your own system, EVEN your own Wii dumps, the argument here implies that since you're still decrypting the Wii dump data, this last part is argued to be illegal. This ain't right.

Now apply this to everything else, even if you decrypted the game beforehand so that Dolphin doesn't even decrypt anything, the problem would be moved to the dumper or the decrypter tool doing it. This applies to a lot of systems.

Considering the definition I showed earlier, this seems hard to argue against, however, notice that I never said anything as fact, and insisted that it is Nintendo's argument, legally speaking, I believe this is an important distinction to make.

Exceptions?

The law also explicitly defines exceptions to this, but please read carefully, because this is where I start to really interpret from here:

In 17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(1)(B), my understanding is that when the protection itself prevents legitimate use, then you are allowed to break it. That said, and this is important: The later subparagraphs defines these paragraphs as something that CANNOT BE USED AS A DEFENSE. This is only there to shield the Library of Congress from any attack, and to allow them to research the various impacts that the protection does and determine rules. Their ruling is also explicitly not allowed to be used as a defense in the text.

After reading a lot of this, I only found one thing that, very honestly, I find quite unclear. Subsection (f) about Reverse Engineering, is particularly showing how much they're not well versed in computer science.

17 U.S.C. §1201 (f) basically says if you're trying to understand how the program works, you are allowed to circumvent the protection, under the idea that you're doing analysis, or...

17 U.S.C. §1201 (f)(2) for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.

In the case of infringement, I believe this is about copyright in general, as the law suggests this does not affect copyright laws in any way.

So what is interoperability... well let's take the definition from there:

17 U.S.C. §1201 (f)(4) For purposes of this subsection, the term “interoperability” means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.

So we're talking about the ability for a program to exchange information with the work, in this case, a game for example.

...what is this? Programs exchange information all the time. That's even the basis of a computer. Maybe there are other definitions, but frankly I can't be bothered to read even more legalese right now.

With just this, and not taking into account anything else, I feel like this allows emulators to work, they don't really modify the game, they try to run it within a sandbox, where a lot of information is exchanged to make sure the program runs as intended.

Oddly enough this would still make the ability to run those games on a modded Switch still illegal though, while emulators could be allowed to do this.

But make no mistake: This is not a legally tested argument. I need to repeat: This is an interpretation. Lawsuits literally work with lawyers interpreting information and the laws, and argue. The whole idea of laws being unclear is not necessarily a fault, it's specifically why lawyers exist.

Why now? And what now?

Honestly, as much as Nintendo argued, for the time being, they have not shown any intention to take down Dolphin as a whole. They could just argue as a scare tactic to prevent Dolphin to reach an even more mainstream status. I doubt Nintendo didn't know about Dolphin for that long.

Until I see an actual DMCA takedown, or worse against Dolphin itself, I'm going to assume Dolphin will stay up for a long time.

Removing the Wii Common Key from Dolphin will not change the situation, as it is the whole decryption process that the argument is about.

Whether Citra, Cemu, Yuzu and Ryujinx could have included the keys or not, the argument would still be the same here.

TL;DR of the complicated part

About the takedown itself:

Valve asked Nintendo about Dolphin on Steam, and they argued that Dolphin is illegal because it decrypts Wii games, and Valve, on their own accord, took down Dolphin from Steam from this. (Note: GameCube does not use encryption and cannot be impacted by this.)

An actual lawyer also takes this as a warning from Nintendo to Valve according to PC Gamer.

About the argument that Nintendo used against Dolphin:

Encryption Keys are NOT the main point of contention, because...

The encryption itself, as a whole, is argued by Nintendo to be a protection measure.

This means that decrypting the game outside of the intended way by the copyright owner (Nintendo, on a Nintendo Switch) is argued to be illegal by default.

The law, as in how I interpret it, goes in that sense, but for some reason you are allowed to make an additional program that can "interoperate" with the protected works in question and explicitly is allowed to break the protection. This is a vague part, and could be used in defense of Dolphin, potentially.

The final answer can only be answered in a courtroom.

[luigiblood]

Everything datamined about GB/A NSO so far.

So I spoke recently of a datamine I made from the GBA NSO 1.1.0 update that added Metroid Fusion, and due to my lack of communication skills, I did not really put all of the information that should be known, so let's talk about it a bit better, and while I'm at it, talk about Link Cable support in general in those apps.

Link cable is already working!

First of all, Link cable support is already there and fully working for both GB and GBA NSO. That's how multiplayer (both local and online) works for all the games, they did not hack the games to add online support, instead it's just a smart way of doing it:

The link cable is a way to exchange data in an instant over the wire between at least two Game Boys. The problem is that this data is fully expected to be received by the systems in an instant, there's no way to introduce lag here, meaning if you actually send link cable data over the network (even wireless local), things can go sour really quick and slow down emulation because it really needs this data to go on.

To make multiplayer work better, they most likely resorted to emulating all the players' GB/As on every Switch. As in like, if you play with 4 players online on GBA NSO, all 4 players's Switch would have 4 GBAs being emulated at the same time, all synced beforehand with each player's data to ensure that everything stays, well, in sync, and only manages the player's controller inputs. You just don't see the 3 other players' GBA but they're there. This allows much more stable online (as in giving more latency when needed without lagging behind).

So when I see people getting surprised that Pokémon exchanges worked when other people modded the apps to include different games, it's just that the link cable emulation already worked, it's literally required for multiplayer to begin with, it does not do anything special or different than other games' use of the link cable!

Link cable instructions!

Most people definitely don't notice this (because you guys don't like to check menus!), but when you play multiplayer (local or online), when you press ZL+ZR, you can see this menu.

The middle option, "Starting Linked Play" is where the instructions are, and they are very detailed, on every aspect, from Multiplayer to maybe other features such as Ghost Data exchange for Mario Kart Super Circuit. This feature was available since launch for both GB and GBA NSO!

For GBA, if you are not the first player, you can even press - to go in Single Pak mode and actually play games as if you were playing without the cartridge! The instructions even change if you do this!

I think this is a really cool feature, and very detailed.

Datamine time.

Now that we're on the same page in terms of features, let's talk about everything I found for these apps when I looked into them.

One of the first things I noticed is how the game database file works.

Every game (on both GB and GBA NSO) keeps track of which game they're compatible with in terms of link cable support. Currently, every game either just lists itself, or include "SinglePak" to mean that they're games that can work with the Single-Pak multiplayer mode where only one player can have the cartridge, while the others can actually play multiplayer without needing the cartridge, since they do actually support this in GBA NSO it is definitely important keep track of.

This can get interesting once the compatible titles start to include different games, such as, as I recently found...

Metroid Fusion's compatibility with Metroid: Zero Mission.

Within the japanese app of GBA NSO, in the 1.1.0 update that includes the addition of Metroid Fusion, these 3 screenshots, in this order, are included and are named accordingly for the use of the link cable functionality instructions. Now, there's no instructions to be found here, only these screenshots which are clearly left over.

If I had to guess the instructions, the first screenshot might be the GBA logo screen where you might have to press Start + Select to enable the Multi boot mode so that Metroid: Zero Mission can send over a program over the link cable.

The second screenshot tells you to access the option menu in Metroid: Zero Mission, and select the "Metroid Fusion Link" option (as it is named in the english version), and then proceed as instructed...

And the third screenshot shows a successful link where the option becomes "Metroid Fusion Gallery".

These are instructions from the Metroid Fusion side, hence why they are included alongside Metroid Fusion, but I bet Metroid: Zero Mission might get similar instructions as well.

It is definitely obvious that Metroid: Zero Mission would eventually be part of the library, for me it's just a given, I doubt that it would be soon however.

What I find interesting with this is how they're seriously considering link cable features for games... even for games where the only bonus is just a gallery and literally nothing else. And I dunno about you, but that is honestly interesting.

This are for link cable instructions for a single player game. What about the link cable features between Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age, where you can transfer cleared save data between them, such as characters' names, levels, Djinns, stats, items, and so on. You could transfer them with a password... except you have three types of passwords that can transfer more or less things... between 16 characters long... to a whopping 260 characters long! I don't know about you, but it would be great if you didn't have to do this and just use the link cable feature to start with, don't you think?

Also, The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Ages and Seasons has a feature where if you link one to the other, the plot would be actually connected, like, this is a real feature where actual story changes do happen if you do it. You don't need to do the games in a specific order either. You could also input a password, but doing via link cable could be also faster. If they allow you to do this on your own, it can be legit nice. (And it can get even better if they hack the games to enable GBA Mode... while keeping the GBC colors intact.)

This is the kind of thing I'm excited to see when I do these kinds of finds, this kind of detail that I appreciate in terms of features that I do think are worth it, because I consider if you could do that back then on real hardware... then you should be able to do it with emulation now.

[luigiblood]

The oddities of Nintendo Switch Online retro service

I've talked about a lot of things about this service, on Twitter, on Tumblr, but also a lot on Discord, but I have been thinking about a post where I could put all the accumulated information that I've gotten over the years through datamining and leaks.

Here's a post about all the little things that you may not know about the retro service of Nintendo Switch Online.

Identifiers and Stats

One of the most obvious parts of datamining these apps is that each game have a unique identifier rather than just being a game name.

On NES Switch Online, they use identifiers identical to the NES Mini ROMs, which are usually like CLV-P-H***J or CLV-P-N***E for Japanese and English, usually. On SNES, they use now an identifier like this S-****_j or S-****_e and other consoles follow suit.

The thing about these identifiers is that they have an order, they all usually follow each other. But in all the apps, there are always gaps, and those gaps can tell a huge story.

Currently as of February 2nd 2023, there are 66 Famicom games, 63 NES games, 53 Super Famicom games, and 55 Super Nintendo games on the service on all regions. If you start counting the gaps, it seems that internally, they have 185 NES titles and 174 SNES titles MINIMUM. This is a pretty huge difference.

Thanks to a leaked build of NES Switch Online from last year, we can figure out some of those missing titles, involving mostly Capcom and Konami, which are unlikely to release on the service as most of them were rereleased through collections before, though it hasn't necessarily stopped them.

That said, if you remember, we had done a similar research with Nintendo 64 and Genesis titles at launch, which the press have definitely talked about, where we found out there were potentially 38 N64 titles and 52 Genesis titles running internally at minimum, but Nintendo has actually done us dataminers a bit of a response: All IDs on N64 and Genesis are now randomized since the first updates, which means we cannot do this kind of research anymore.

That said the updates to NES and SNES apps have not done this change, they probably decided it wasn't worth it. But all that to say that Nintendo is definitely taking notice of our datamining (and won't be the last time) and won't necessarily hesitate to throw us for a loop.

The secrets of NES Switch Online 2.0.0 update

Now I'm definitely going way back in December 2018, 4 months after the debut of the full Nintendo Switch Online service after a year delay (do you actually remember that?).

In January 2019, people started to take notice of SNES game descriptions within the language files, hinting SNES Switch Online coming in the near future, and the potential games coming.

To this day, all the games except two released on the service: We're missing The Legend of the Mystical Ninja and Contra III: The Alien Wars.

The other thing that was noticed is what's called an enumeration of emulator types:

EMULATOR_TYPE_CANOE = 0 EMULATOR_TYPE_KACHIKACHI = 1 EMULATOR_TYPE_HIYOKO = 2 EMULATOR_TYPE_COUNT = 3

Canoe is the name of the SNES emulator since SNES Mini, Kachikachi is the name of the NES emulator since NES Mini, Hiyoko was, at the time, unknown, but turned out to be the Game Boy (Color) emulator, and Count is most likely a counter, to say there are 3 different emulator types, it's a programming standard.

What most people ignored at the time is that the app also included a function called getEmulatorTypeFromCode, which would return the Emulator Type based on the identifiers I talked about earlier.

Once I took notice of this and checking other code making use of it, I figured out something huge, and after talking to an actual reliable insider who also confirmed it (don't get used to this), my conclusion: They had originally developed a multi-emulator app, which would have included all games from NES, SNES and GB in one single app.

Now you may wonder why this didn't pan out, I don't have the exact reason but I can have some educated guesses: Aside from the accidental reveal of SNES emulator on Switch which I think is not that huge, I think the seperation of systems is probably because of the developers wanting to compatimentalize the development instead of having to test a huge app every time they wanted to update it to avoid potential huge regressions.

I think it's not necessarily a bad reason, as a developer I also take importance of the ease of development VS user experience, and I do think this decision is not really a bad thing overall, making a multi emulator can be extremely hard and you could deal with problems because of decisions taken extremely early on.

The secrets of SNES Switch Online

The SNES emulator derived from the Wii U Virtual Console by NERD has a bunch of secrets that you may not know about... such as the currently unused SNES Mouse emulation.

Once you start checking around the code about how to enable the SNES Mouse emulation, you find out two things:

It can be enabled using metadata within the custom ROM format.

It was able to be force enabled using specific internal emulator Game IDs.

The most interesting part of the Game IDs is that only 3 Game IDs specifically forced the SNES Mouse to be emulated: 0x11A0, 0x11A2 and 0x11A3. If we just keep ourselves to SNES titles that could only work with the SNES Mouse... we could think of only two, actually. Most of the SNES games that supports the mouse can also just work with the controller.

We can only think of Mario Paint and Mario & Wario as SNES titles that only works with SNES Mouse, but also both are first titles, so in terms of rights, there's no issues here.

The problem is like, what's the third title? And that's where we can have a lot of ideas here.

The thing about those emulator Game IDs is that they don't correspond to the Switch Online IDs, they correspond to IDs that have been populated since the Wii, but especially Wii U Virtual Console, but we don't exactly know when NERD took over the emulator from Intelligent Systems. It is currently impossible to tell for sure.

So we can only think of the following:

The third title is actually the PAL version of Mario Paint, when they used to seperate game versions in different IDs.

The third title is Sound Fantasy, the unreleased but confirmed to be completed third SNES Mouse first party game.

Or it is a game that Nintendo decided it was better to play with a mouse rather than the controller, but I don't think it's likely.

Unfortunately I don't know for certain.

One other thing about the SNES Switch Online service, you may have noticed that some of the games currently on the service can actually be played up to 4 players at the same time... at least outside of it since the emulator locks you up to 2 players maximum.

If you thought that they did not emulate the Multitap, you'd be wrong. In fact, the games in question all contain metadata saying up to 4 players, unlike what the menus might tell you, and they all technically emulate the SNES Multitap, but the user interface can only allow you 2 players, so it's sorta funny that the second player is technically plugged to the multitap from an emulation standpoint.

Funny.

The secrets of N64 Switch Online

This part has some plot twists to it, but in fact I should rather say the secrets of the N64 Wii U Virtual Console emulator, as most of these things were brought over from this.

Unlike what most people might tell you, NERD has not much to do with the N64 emulation, it was developed by iQue. If you wonder what's my evidence, the debug menu between the NES/GB VC emulator for 3DS (which is confirmed done by iQue because the source code of it leaked in 2020), and the N64 VC emulator for Wii U are pretty much the same.

I may as well mention the biggest secret of all which had a plot twist later: The N64 emulator used to have unfinished 64DD emulation code in it, since Wii U.

I do insist on unfinished because it was nowhere near enough to boot a single 64DD game, but they for some reason included a Sim City 64 configuration file on Wii U at one point, probably for initial testing.

When the emulator was ported to Switch with improvements such as Vulkan graphics rendering on Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Nintendo 64 Switch Online app, a bunch of the 64DD emulation code stayed as is, in the same unfinished state.

However something funny happened in between, the emulator had code to recognize the fanmade 64DD cartridge ports, and those are definitely fanmade, and they must have looked at other emulation code for it, and most likely, code that I even wrote myself as I did add support for these in emulators before. Note that at that point, the code to boot those games were not seemingly present, or maybe I missed it.

So I would like to assume iQue had still wanted to make 64DD games working, but wanted to test on easier to emulate versions of the games. That said, I did mention this on Twitter... and then they removed every single line of code involving 64DD in the 1.2.0 update build in January 2022. It was probably not literally removed, just not compiled as it is still a good skeleton code for it. I am definitely convinced that I'm being looked at.

When it comes to other stuff in the emulator... well did you know that the Controller Pak, the memory cartridge that you put inside the controller's slot to save in a bunch of games, is actually fully emulated since Wii U?

It is very annoying that they had something like this working, but couldn't figure out to swap between both that and the Rumble Pak for games that could make use of both.

If you wonder about the Transfer Pak, the Wii U has a bit of it, but it's just turning the hardware ON and OFF, and this code has stayed as is on Switch. I know Emily Rogers has mentioned there were experiments and I believe her, but unfortunately, the code must be in a seperate branch and not put in place in N64 Switch Online builds.

If you tell me "oh they didn't plan Pokémon transfers for Pokémon Stadium," please look at the japanese Direct about it and you'll find a widely different sentence that does not actually rule out support for this, stating that "Pokémons cannot be transferred from the Game Boy." I dunno about you, but that's a statement that makes it vague because they could just mean the actual real Game Boy.

Now I'm not really dumb, as Nintendo has showed that Switch Online is mostly low budget and does the bare minimum, but there are things that shows a bit more attention to things...

When it comes to new things that weren't in the emulator on Wii U, they actually emulated the Real Time Clock chip from Animal Crossing's N64 original version. This code actually isn't in Super Mario 3D All-Stars, this must be a fairly new addition, and since there's only one game using it, it is fair to assume Animal Crossing is actually in a working state in the emulator.

When Mario Golf was added to the service, the Lua script dedicated for it is... a bit odd. It includes code for asynchronous netplay, where each player would take control of the game in turns in an attempt to optimize the netplay and reduce lag. This code is fully unused, there's not even the functions that it uses in the emulator yet.

This could also be additional evidence towards my theory that the NSO apps would see a refresh including user experience to some extent, but this stuff was added since April 2022, so whatever they are doing, it's certainly in private and has been in the works for almost a year now.

This post... is a bit long already, and there are still a bunch of other little secrets to uncover, but I think I covered the most technical ones so far, I hope this post is mostly clear about these secrets. Feel free to give me feedback.

[luigiblood]

GoldenEye 007 & The Future of Nintendo Switch Online

I wanna talk a little bit about the rerelease of GoldenEye 007, the little context and also something I noticed during my research.

GoldenEye 007 has finally got rereleased on January 27th 2023 on both the Nintendo Switch Online service, Xbox Game Pass and as a digital Rare Replay update.

See more after the break.

Emulation quality

Both the Switch and Xbox versions are confirmed emulated and not based at all from the leaked XBLA version, which I'm probably certain will never see a release ever, possibly due to the rights holders which are... very messy if I rely on the copyright info: FIVE. Nintendo, Rare Studio (Microsoft), Danjaq LLC, MGM and Sony Music Publishing.

Welcome to rights hell.

The emulation of it is... kinda complicated because it is mostly fine, like it is playable for certain, if you play it I think it is sort of reasonable. Both versions have 16:9 support (which by the way, was part of the original version on N64) and are 30 FPS with some framerate dips.

The Xbox version has tons of hacks to just change the controls, copyright info, and upscaling (up to 4K!) which honestly, is the imperfect part, with the slight but very visible texture warping and seams, which while Code Mystics claims it is technically accurate to the N64, and I do actually believe them about that, I don't know if we can really talk about accuracy the moment you just upscale the graphics way beyond what the original console could do.

Personally this problem would definitely bother me a lot, but from what I can see the Xbox version is still emulating fine.

The Switch Online version has not many hacks, they do exist, but not really a lot, the graphics emulation is slightly worse than Xbox with mostly too much fog than intended, repeated textures that shouldn't repeat as much, but it makes up for not having the texture warping issue in the slightest, only having less visible seams at times, as it is also upscaled in HD.

Just to talk about the specifics of the Switch version as I datamined it: The base ROM is different, and was modified to remove the face textures for Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. This is actually kinda the first time they hacked a base ROM like this before, especially only for parts that are fully unused, they really wanted to make sure it's not there.

I also noticed tons of texture replacements that seem to be related to explosions, maybe muzzle flashes as well.

The major thing that people will talk about are the controls, which by result of the Nintendo Switch Online service being more about playing the original games as is, which I do respect personally, in fact let me say this: the default control scheme is dated but it's fine to play, but there's one thing that I really dislike: The stick sensitivity is way too high. I think this makes it almost unplayable in certain aspects, because current sticks are definitely not like the N64 sticks which I think are way more precise due to their inner workings and form factor, it does not adapt 1:1 to newer sticks.

So when you just wanna use the aiming mode in Goldeneye, it's way harder to aim properly than on an N64 controller. It's doable, but it's harder.

The online, exclusive to Switch due to the N64 emulator already supporting it, I couldn't try it but after seeing footage it is very sad that it still can't handle online with players from two different regions when on PC it is not as much of a problem.

If you ask me which version is emulated better, I'd say Xbox at first glance, but both versions are totally playable, good enough but imperfect. Code Mystics' work for their N64 emulator is I think respectable, and iQue's work on the N64 emulator for Switch is also much better than we originally anticipated with the trailers and other official footage.

And yes I mentioned iQue and not NERD because their official involvement with Nintendo 64 NSO seems to be purely on the UI integration, possibly a bit more, but the major developer is iQue.

A lot of the disappointment I noticed are on the fact that 360 XBLA port is not used in any way, and it is certainly a bummer when that version showed promise.

N64 Switch Online Issues

But I also do hear a lot of complaints about the controls, but I think it's more of a quality of life debate, I think it's playable except for the stick sensitivity on Switch. But everyone does point out the need for a way to remap controls. Instead we just use the Switch OS controller remap feature in an attempt to fit our needs, which, personally, is only a bandaid and is not a real fix.

Personally one of the most annoying thing is the fact that B and A are horizontal instead of vertical just like the original N64 controller.

WHY IS THIS NOT A FEATURE YET?

I also hate how the ZL is always Z, and the L button is always L, when most games' L button equivalent is Z since we put our left hand on the stick part.

iQue and NERD really needs to implement control remapping, PER GAME, or possibly ways to register presets per game or something, it getting urgent.

...what's the deal Japan? (Theory)

Now, if you're in Japan, you might have noticed GoldenEye 007 hasn't rereleased on Switch there yet...

Nintendo's website says that the game would be released in other regions on the 27th, as planned, but the game would be out in Japan only later in 2023, while mentioning the game's rating: CERO: Z.

This is kind of important, because this is the highest rating. Japan have strict laws about this, and you can't let kids access this game easily.

Aside from the very weird rating, this means a lot, this means Nintendo has to do something about Parental Controls about this game, there's two ways they could deal with this:

Either they just make a 18+ N64 NSO app with the game, rated 18+ instead of Teen or 16+ like in other regions.

Or they do add some parental controls check inside the app, preventing access in a dynamic way per account.

The thing is, I've seen how the application manages the game library user interface: it's very flexible in what it can show/hide, just see how it manages European games or the case of region locking, applied in Korea to hide Magical Drop2 (SNES) and F-Zero X (N64).

For me, this seems like the kind of thing that could have been implemented easily in a few months? Though I'm speaking as someone who hasn't been in a big company managing these things in some way.

The funniest part is still how the apps can access the Parental Controls OS service the entire time.

So my theory is the following: I expect a sort of refresh of the NSO retro apps in the near future, downgrading the NSO retro app age rating to a minimum, instead putting every single age rating info for each game individually, trusting the parental controls to provide information to the app to hide games that shouldn't be played by the user.

I can see the possible logic of implementing this fully for every possible age rating from Nintendo, because while you're at it, you could just as well manage it for the entire library of games, which, currently, is almost 200 different titles in total.

And this, I can see this taking time to do, because you'd need info from every single rating boards in every region, which all games have been assumed 16+/Teen just because the app is that way. I can see some logistics required and could potentially take months to make sure everything is all right.

Now I don't know if they could see this as an opportunity to refresh the UI in a way, possibly even adding new features (like custom controls, please), and maybe this is the reason why Game Boy Color NSO hasn't launched yet, I could see this as a reason to just have feature parity everywhere as a saner base.

I don't know if I'm being reasonable on my theory, but I feel like it'd make sense? We'll see how it goes, really.

[luigiblood]

The Launch Details of the 64DD

This was originally published on 64dd.org on October 15th, 2021.

There’s a lot of confusion about the release and price of the 64DD and what was the Randnet service about, so it’s time to talk about that, because it is more interesting than you think.

More info after the break.

Original Plans

Nintendo had announced the 64DD in 1995, the Nintendo 64 hadn’t even come out yet that they already announced the addon for it. The purpose was to bring higher capacity and big rewritable storage, as well as making it expandable through cartridges (such as the Modem Cassette and Capture Cassette for exemple).

The 64DD was properly introduced in 1997 alongside games, with a slated release for summer 1997 in Japan and a pricing between $100 and $199. Miyamoto himself even estimates the price to be $120. This might be about what the 64DD would cost on its own in retail stores. However this isn’t how it ended up to be.

Randnet

In around June 1999, in the wake of the launch of the 64DD, Recruit and Nintendo would establish their second joint company called RandnetDD Co., Ltd., the first one was Marigul Management, which would provide financing for game companies.

RandnetDD would handle all marketing and sales of the 64DD including software, management and provider of the Randnet service, which would be internet access, email, online game networks including matchmaking, as well as a content provider for newspapers, music, and more. This would mean that RandnetDD’s sole existence is for the 64DD and its service, making the 64DD bound to RandnetDD and one wouldn’t sell without the other as part of their plans.

Later on, RandnetDD announced their plans for the Randnet service membership to start in December 1999, for the first year, for 2500 yen (~$23) per month, you would rent-to-own the Randnet Starter Kit, comprised of the 64DD itself, an Expansion Pak, the Modem Cassette and Cable, and Randnet Disk (would be sent later), as well as a selection of titles, and of course, access to the Randnet service. For 3300 yen (~$30) per month, you could rent all of the above but also have a Clear Black Nintendo 64 unit. A 12-month flat rate plan was introduced later for 30000 yen (~$290) and 39600 yen (~$380) (including Clear Black Nintendo 64 unit).

All years after the first would cost 1500 yen (~$14) per month, and all hardware and software ownership would be transferred to the member from that point. RandnetDD actually states that very clearly. Of course, any dialup access fees aren’t included here, but they did set up a nationwide phone number in Tokyo with a 50 yen ($0.46) per minute flat rate, although other phone numbers were available with different fees depending on the distance or time of day.

The membership application form could be managed within select stores, in call centers, and by fax, and was limited up to 100000 members. This wouldn’t be as going as they hoped.

The Reality

So to make it clear, the 64DD has never been this expensive, the subscription plan included the price of everything you would get from Randnet, it would have been a constant stream of software that you would own, and services. RandnetDD wanted to be innovative, and essentially you could have owned every 64DD game, and they really tried to be competitive.

Every single consumer 64DD title and device released so far were only for Randnet members, I have looked for alternatives but there’s only evidence of 64DDs only being sold through Randnet.

Unfortunately for Randnet, the 64DD was released after the Dreamcast had come out worldwide, and mere months after launch, the Playstation 2 would make its debut in Japan. For me it just seems impossible to beat the next gen hardware with this, especially when the project codenamed Dolphin was already talked about, to be released in 2001 as the GameCube.

I’d say the closest comparison to the 64DD’s launch that I can make is the PlayDate, where you buy the hardware but also an entire season of games.

Sources: https://www.ign.com/articles/1997/07/26/64dd-to-sell-for-120 https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/release/1997-99/990611a.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000226213125/http://www.randnetdd.co.jp:80/apply/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000419022955/http://www.randnetdd.co.jp/tempo.html https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/02/10/everything-about-the-64dd https://www.ign.com/articles/1999/12/16/ign64s-ultimate-64dd-faq https://www.ign.com/articles/1999/12/17/64dd-goes-retail

[luigiblood]

This makes me grin so much <3

Order up! @luigiblood commissioned me to draw their sona, Yakumono, in Puyo style!

[luigiblood]

No, Nintendo using a flashcart is not surprising.

This is a follow up to the previous post about the leaked official GB/GBA Switch Emulators. Click here to read it if you haven't.

By any means, as far as my knowledge goes, Nintendo using an EZ-Flash is the least of my concern as an "evidence" of the GBA emulator being fake. That just needs to be said.

Nintendo has used standards made by outsiders like unofficial emulator developers, pirates and homebrewers for literal decades, some of it can even be dated back to the the Nintendo 64, when the original japanese version of Animal Crossing was released, with a NES emulator included inside.

What the developers are doing VS what the lawyers are saying, there tends to be hypocrisy from the company, and I feel it's safe to say this is pretty much the entire industry in a nutshell.

I'll try to explain, pretty much everything emulation and retro that Nintendo used from outside that I know of.

iNES Header

I'll take this time to debunk this once and for all: No, Nintendo did not sell downloaded ROMs back to you on Virtual Console.

You have probably heard the story that Nintendo uses iNES headers, from a GDC conference about emulation and using this as evidence that Nintendo uses downloaded ROMs to sell back to you.

Nowadays, especially after the gigaleaks of 2020, we can safely say this is not really true. However, Nintendo DID use a standard made by outside emulator developers, but you'll see there's quite the logical explanation about it.

But I need to explain what a iNES header is, and I'll try to simplify terms. A NES cartridge is basically comprised of two seperate parts:

Program ROM: Contains the game's code

Character ROM: Contains the game's graphics

The NES accesses both of these seperately and simultaneously, and then, to make bigger NES games, a chip that we call a "mapper" handles access of both seperately in a way that the NES understands, while providing a way to handle bigger sized ROMs. This is really oversimplified, but for the sake of this post, think that for different needs, there are different mapper chips that aren't necessarily compatible.

The problem is that if you just dump the ROMs from the cartridge, there is genuinely no way to tell what the cartridge is made of from the data you got.

This is where iNES comes into play. iNES is a NES emulator released in 1996, developed by Marat Fayzullin, it is still receiving updates to this very day. This developer had to solve the problem of knowing what kind of NES cartridge information we can get from ROM files, and so he devised what we call the "iNES header", which acts as a description of the cartridge, and to include both the Program and Character ROMs in one single ROM file for convenience.

The header acts as what we could call metadata, which includes specific cartridge information, including the type of mapper chip used. This is really important information because else, emulators don't know what kind of NES cartridge it is supposed to emulate.

Yet, you could find ROMs in this exact format inside Animal Crossing, Virtual Console, even the NES Mini and Nintendo Switch Online! What gives?

Well it all harkens back to the N64 era. At one point, Nintendo hired a japanese developer who contributed to iNES's code, specifically the sound emulation. This person is called Tomohiro Kawase, and you may hear about this person a lot when you dig into the retro side of Nintendo.

Tomohiro Kawase, with help from Hideaki Shimizu, developed the official NES emulator for the Nintendo 64 and many other systems as well. He also used the iNES ROM format while developing it. Why? Couldn't they just make their own standard? Honestly, it might just be because it was handy to use, the standard was considered good enough already. You shouldn't necessarily expect developers to be as strict as lawyers are.

Think of it that way, there's a double standard: The developer standard and the lawyer standard. They don't necessarily mesh. You'd be also surprised how developers can also be very lazy and do things without much thought just because it works fine.

The person has also proven to be familiar with dumping ROMs, which the gigaleak has showed very well, but the gigaleak also got us seperated Program and Character ROM files for pretty much every single NES and Famicom titles, no iNES header to be seen.

A common argument that I saw was that the file is identical to what you find online, which is not really evidence because I could just dump the game myself, and if I do my diligent work, I would most likely input the exact same cartridge information in the iNES header by hand, resulting in an identical file. You can have an identical file from two completely different sources, or more, even.

But what the evidence brings is that, yes, Nintendo has used a standard made by unofficial emulator developers, possibly because of hiring someone who worked on iNES in the past.

The gigaleak also brought the source code of the NES emulator for Nintendo 64, as well as the full source code of the 3DS NES and Game Boy Virtual Console emulators. It also provided a tool specifically made to automate the build of NES ROMs with iNES header from the PRG and CHR ROM files.

For some reason, the 3DS Virtual Console emulator actually comes with a different header standard (and honestly better, even?), it is called "TNES", which was literally never used again, the Wii U, NES Mini and NES Switch Online still relies on the iNES header format to this day.

So I just want to repeat again: I am confident Nintendo did not sell downloaded pirate ROMs to you in the slightest, there is zero evidence pointing towards that, and clearly Nintendo is one of the kings of archival. However…

Did they download ROMs anyway?

The same may not be said if they didn't download pirate ROMs at all, however.

That one might get people talking, but please read the entire thing first, because this is very nuanced.

One of the final leaks (so far, that is) of the gigaleaks was brought in 2021, were basically a huge backup of emails from around 2005 and 2006. A lot of them are about the planning of the Wii, but also the development and planning of Virtual Console, in pretty big detail, even.

This is where we learned that the SNES Wii Virtual Console emulator was originally developed by a single person at Nintendo in Japan, Paul Donnelly, who then (forcibly by an unexpected event) passed the torch to Intelligent Systems, who was already making the new NES emulator at the time. He also trained them to handle SNES ROM hacking for the sound emulation, which at the time, was bypassing Sony's SNES Audio system for patent reasons, and needed every SNES ROM to be hacked for this.

Anyone can check this if they want, but when you check the executable of the SNES Wii VC emulator, you might find a list of SNES games that are seemingly supported, a lot can have Wii VC Title IDs even, but a lot can also come with lotcheck SNES ROM filenames as well.

The email attachments also include E3 builds of the Virtual Console emulators. So I checked the E3 SNES Virtual Console build… imagine my surprise when I found a bunch of filenames that are definitely lotcheck, but mixed with a lot of filenames really reminiscent of GoodSNES ROM filenames you can find in a lot of ROM sites…

It looks like a lot of downloaded SNES ROMs were used during development of the SNES Virtual Console emulator, especially before the E3 showcase. Does this mean Nintendo could have sold SNES ROMs on Virtual Console?

Well… all evidence in the emails still points to No, they didn't. We can clearly notice a lot of emails asking for specific lotcheck ROMs, including for games that were downloaded, which suggests that when it's about the public use, they're genuinely hellbent on using ROMs sourced from themselves.

But I did notice a lot of paperwork involved just for getting one archived ROM from Nintendo, EVEN from within Nintendo, so I can imagine developers not really wanting to wait and skip parts to be efficient.

But this doesn't really explain how official emulator developers still have a complete lotcheck ROM fullset if I judge from the gigaleak… it's a bit hard to have a complete answer, but all evidence still points to Nintendo caring to use officially sourced ROMs on the public side even when the files are literally identical anyway…

Famicom Disk System Disk Format

Nintendo is a bit weirder when it comes to Famicom Disk System emulation, their FDS disk file format is actually different from what we use on unofficial emulators. So why do I even mention this?

Well you can use this as evidence that formats used are really just whatever developers feel like using; but I do want to mention some things about the gigaleak that still shows us that Nintendo is well aware of the outside FDS disk format.

In late 2020, the gigaleak brought us a complete set of master disk dumps originating from Nintendo themselves done in early 2007, including photos of every single master disk. We know they are new dumps they made themselves, because the original master disk of The Legend of Zelda is actually corrupted. This has resulted in every japanese Zelda 1 rerelease to not have the final revision of the game.

In 2016, they actually took the time to use a Famicom Disk Writer Soft Pak, a cartridge containing the final version of The Legend of Zelda, meant for use for the rewritable kiosk, because if you didn't know, you could buy Famicom Disk System disks, and actually rewrite them with different games. This is kinda ecological, and this wouldn't be the only service that does this.

Take a guess who dumped the Soft Pak? Tomohiro Kawase, who was tasked by his higher ups to do it.

Now that was just a bit of trivia for y'all, but there's something else in the leaked contents: A converter called "rdafds.exe". This effectively converts between Nintendo's FDS File format and the unofficial FDS file format recognized by unofficial emulators and viceversa. This is honestly pretty practical even. The readme even suggests the use of PC emulators for testing.

And in fact… we have caught them in the act for using PC emulators before…

WarioWare: Smooth Moves shenanigans

If you don't know, then I assume you're a bit confused why I'm talking about this game.

I'll cut to the chase, WarioWare: Smooth Moves is co-developed by Intelligent Systems and Nintendo, and is pretty known for referencing a lot of Nintendo's history, more than Nintendo themselves sometimes.

One of the microgames we'll talk about is the Punch-Out!! microgame. It's seemingly just Punch-Out, right? Well when we take the background image on its own, there's a little bit of a surprise…

Well that looks like an emulator on PC to me, not only that but we can actually tell which emulator it is! It seems to be VirtuaNES emulating Punch-Out, edited to remove sprites in the foreground. Well that's kinda interesting, isn't it?

Did they look at other N64 emulators..?

The Wii U Nintendo 64 Virtual Console emulator was developed by iQue from scratch, using the same framework they made for the 3DS Virtual Console. For Super Mario 3D All-Stars on the Switch, all evidence seems to point towards iQue pursuing development of the same emulator, itself supporting even more features especially for real-time hacking.

To my assumption, the emulator was passed to NERD and then became what's known as Hovercraft for the Nintendo 64 Nintendo Switch Online service, as a lot of code from iQue's framework has definitely disappeared. (This may be inaccurate according to NERD's own post on their website.)

Here's a bit of off-topic trivia for you about the emulator's features: Ever since the Wii U, the emulator supported the Controller Pak save emulation but never used it, has unfinished 64DD emulation code, and also contains skeleton code for Transfer Pak support (nothing that would work beyond turning the thing on and off).

A lot of this code stayed on the Switch pretty much as is. But what took my attention was a little bit of completely useless code inside the N64 emulator in Super Mario 3D All-Stars.

Inside, there's a function about recognizing the N64 game's CIC chip protection bootcode (you don't need to know more), and it recognizes quite a few more than necessary. It recognizes the CIC 8303 chip which is the japanese retail 64DD CIC chip.

But then it recognizes the CIC 5167 (0x142F in hexadecimal) chip. Wait… That's not an official bootcode. That's the 64DD Cartridge Port bootcode! For more context, these are completely fanmade ports of 64DD titles into a cartridge ROM format by Zoinkity, compatible with flashcarts, how come this is recognized by an official emulator?!

Not to mention but the 5167 identification number is technically useless, and actually a sort of info that's kinda left relatively obscure, you'd really need to look far to find it… except inside open source N64 emulator code.

The thing about this, is that I feel personally involved. I am the one who added support for this specific bootcode in Project64 and mupen64plus, and included the 5167 information too. So I kinda feel humbled a little bit that iQue may have possibly looked at code that I wrote in other emulators.

Now, the emulator only recognized the bootcode, but actually doesn't have anything programmed to actually make use of it, so it would recognize and then do not much of anything beyond that.

Eventually, possibly after I talked about it on Twitter, all of the 64DD related code were removed including the 5167 CIC reference, in an update of the N64 Nintendo Switch Online application.

Hagi, the GameCube Emulator

The final very quick blow. Hagi is the GameCube emulator written by NERD and was used for the emulation of Super Mario Sunshine and the port of Super Mario Galaxy in Super Mario 3D All-Stars.

This one is very quick to talk about, because I'll just mention that the emulator makes mention of unofficial features inside it: The USB Gecko, and Gecko Patches.

The USB Gecko is a device used for debugging code and code hacking on the GameCube and the Wii, it plugs into the GameCard Memory Card slot and plugs into the PC via USB.

Gecko Patches are nothing more than the equivalent of Action Replay & GameShark codes by homebrewers.

Both things are completely unofficial, and yet, Nintendo developers doesn't have problems using those. Ain't that interesting?

So obviously, things are always more complicated than just "Nintendo is against the use of flashcarts and unofficial applications" but yet it is fine when their own developers use it, and I'd like to say, it has always been like this. Call it hypocrisy if you prefer, but for me the use of flashcarts inside Nintendo to help emulator development is nothing new.

There's your post about Nintendo using unofficial stuff ever since the moment they started emulating things.

Addendum Edit: I actually don't care that much that Nintendo uses unofficial stuff for development, it's not a big deal to me; but for other people, it is. And chances are, for those who think it is a big deal, they're not developers.

[luigiblood]

What's the deal with the GB/GBA Emulator Leak?

On April 18th 2022 on 4chan's /vp/ board, 3 links have been posted:

0100d870045b6000_dev.nsp: A NSP file containing a NES Nintendo Switch Online build.

hiyoko_unsorted.7z: Various builds of a Game Boy / Color Emulator for the Switch in seperated NCA files.

01008bf00a1c8000.nsp: A NSP file containing a Game Boy Advance Emulator for the Switch.

No additional context has been given other than four screenshots of the GBA emulator.

All of the files are signed for Switch development kits, meaning that they have to be resigned to work on a retail unit.

All of these things were developed by NERD (Nintendo European Research & Development), responsible for many things, but are more recently known for their emulation work since the Nintendo DS Virtual Console emulator on Wii U.

I'll try to explain what each of these things are seperately, and why I think they are legitimate.

NES Nintendo Switch Online

The first link in the post links to a build of NES Nintendo Switch Online app dated October 4th 2019. This would be a month since the release of SNES Nintendo Switch Online, and when the monthly updates of additional NES games would have stopped.

It contains all of the games in order of Switch release until August 21st, 2019, then continues with the games that would be released on December 12th and later, and quite a few that have yet to be released, if ever.

Noteworthy unreleased games include the entirety of the Mega Man series, each including their own Special Versions, Castlevania 1 & 2, Adventure Island, Galaga, Pac Man, Kung Fu, Lode Runner, Tetris, and a few more.

All of them are playable, some even including multi language descriptions. There isn't that much more to say about it, it is really just the usual user interface, but with more games.

Technically, anyone can add more games to this, people have done this before. All of these games have unique identifications too, someone could just take the information we have of these IDs, and somewhat appear legitimate if you include nice scans of box arts.

However this would mean someone took the time to write unique descriptions in multiple languages, too, and when you include the rest of the leaked files, there's I think more reasons for its legitimacy.

Hiyoko - GB/C Emulator

Hiyoko is a name that we have seen since the NES Nintendo Switch Online 2.0.0 update, dated December 2018. It had accidental inclusion of SNES game descriptions, which news sites have also covered at the time. Other people have also noticed a couple names as well, part of an emulator type enumeration which I will list:

EMULATOR_TYPE_CANOE

EMULATOR_TYPE_KACHIKACHI

EMULATOR_TYPE_HIYOKO

EMULATOR_TYPE_COUNT

Canoe is known since the SNES Classic Mini as the SNES emulator, Kachikachi is also known since the NES Classic Mini as the NES emulator. Then there's the mention of Hiyoko, and Count.

Count is nothing more than for keeping count of how many emulator types there are, this is pretty standard practice, we can safely say this is not the name of an emulator.

But Hiyoko was an emulator name we haven't heard of before, and lots of speculation arose on what it could be, if it was a Game Boy emulator, a Nintendo 64 emulator, and so on.

Eventually the N64 Nintendo Switch Online app would exist, and takes on the name "Hovercraft". Then we also had rumors of a Game Boy NSO service coming from several reliable people, which could have suggested that Hiyoko could be the GB/C emulator. Turns out that was it.

The archive contains 15 different title IDs, for a total of 23 builds of Hiyoko, each a different standlone app including its own ROM. Only the following games were used:

Super Mario Land

Tetris

Qix

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX

Most of the builds are just optimized builds, and 3 of them are debug builds including pretty much every information necessary for debugging, which also gives us precious information about its development. Those debug builds can't seem to be used at the moment because of a corrupted SDK file? There's also a bunch of weirdness to the files, many Meta and Program NCAs, but an odd amount of Control NCA files…

The version of one of them seems to be v0.0.20190306.dev. When pulling out the third value, the code specifically seperates 2019 03 06, so there's our potential build date here.

So this Game Boy Color emulator has quite a lot of features, and I will try to be clear about them:

Emulates different types of Game Boy screens, like the original Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, and Game Boy Color, including the screen ghosting effect.

Emulates the Game Boy Advance's GBC Mode, which certain GBC games can detect and unlock features.

Emulates MBC7 partially, the Memory Bank Controller famously used for Kirby Tilt 'n Tumble. The GBC emulator on 3DS Virtual Console would not even boot this game. The tilt sensor and the save is not emulated, but the base code is solid for more.

Supports emulating two Game Boy / Color systems locally with link cable support, enabling local multiplayer on the same system.

Supports rollback with prediction multiplayer netplay.

Supports asymmetric netplay. (I don't know exactly what that means.)

What this essentially means is that NERD seems to be making a pretty robust emulator, the builds we have are a bit buggy, but shows real potential for a better emulator than previously made. The naming also suggests this emulator was made from scratch.

The debug build shows a lot of the way it is programmed, and I have very little doubt in my mind that this is real, this does not correspond to any emulator you could find online.

While I could only try on Yuzu, the Nintendo Switch emulator, which means I won't necessarily have the best performance to play, the emulator seems really legit at first glance.

Sloop - GBA Emulator

Sloop is an odd one. The naming would definitely confuse most people who doesn't know it is a real english word for a type of boat (It did for me). This isn't the only emulator from NERD with this kind of name, I think Canoe, the SNES emulator and Hovercraft, the N64 emulator. Both of them are actually based on other emulators, specifically the Wii U Virtual Console ones which came from other developers than NERD.

The emulator contains a menu made with Dear ImGui, an open source IMGUI library, and used as industry standard for quick debug menu implementations. The menu is seperated into several groups:

Single-player games (1P)

Multi-player scenarios (2P)

ROM patches (monitor bugs)

Image Filters

Selected features

Accuracy testing samples

Clearly, this is meant to be a showcase of features, possibly to higher ups for judging or a proposal of sorts. It supports the following features:

Gamma Change: Lowers the gamma of the screen to alleviate the very bright colors intended for the original GBA screen with no backlight.

LCD Persistence Emulation: Emulates the slight ghosting of the GBA screen, some games actually uses this for certain effects like transparency or anti-aliasing.

ROM Patching.

Supports rewind.

Supports emulating two Game Boy Advance systems locally with link cable support.

Supports netplay with random matchmaking.

The menu shows many ways to make use of these features, the link cable ones are pretty interesting as they show regular multiplayer for a couple games, Trade with Pokémon Pinball, Single Pak Multiplayer exemple so you can play with other players who don't have the cartridge, Golden Sun Clear Save import into Golden Sun The Lost Age.

The ROM patches are mostly the anti-epilepsy kind with less blinking and flashing.

Image Filters shows off the LCD Persistence emulation and Color gamma comparisons with specific games.

Accuracy testing samples includes Nintendo's own test (AGS Aging Test), but also a bunch of open source ones to guarentee accuracy testing. The regular Nintendo test is also a very good test for accuracy in general, and turns out that Sloop actually passes all of the tests except one, which not many emulators can actually do.

Selected features shows features like replays, save importation, the ability to record with rewind supported (TAS?), and the most controversial of all, exporting a save state to the EZ Flash format; Nintendo has been very vocal against flashcarts public, but the developers don't seem to be against using them.

After all, using old development kits with different standards nowadays, can be very annoying and cumbersome. Some would doubt the legitimacy of this because of the mention of illegal flashcarts that Nintendo fought against in public.

I think the emulator's uniqueness is essentially what makes it potentially legit anyway: We haven't yet found any references to other emulators, even the AGS Aging Test results are fairly unique to the emulator.

Inside the emulator files, we find somehow a Git repository with quite a bit of logs from a NERD employee and a Panasonic Vietnam employee for some reason, just for menu, ROM files, save files, etc, the most recent being August 19th, 2020, so this might be our build date, or at least the closest to that.

It is something that can be faked, but god would it require a lot of time for little payoff, honestly?

Conclusion

The thing about this leak, it is very weird that we randomly get builds of official emulators that are dated 2019 and 2020 only now. It makes me question who the heck leaked this.

Because of these build dates, it is not really possible to extrapolate to a potential nearby release regarding those, as they're quite dated by now, and may have changed a lot since in terms of features and stability.

We can't really use this as evidence of those systems and games coming to Nintendo Switch Online in the near future as a result, so I'd just suggest to treat these builds as an exemple of what Nintendo has internally, without any goals in mind. It is not new by Nintendo's standards to keep stuff under wraps until they really need it, unfortunately.

Personally though, due to the uniqueness of the GB/C and GBA emulators, if it was a fake, then someone took a lot of time, and also a lot of knowledge, just to fake us. There's a lot of believable fakes sometimes, but this isn't a fake made with good use of art tools, this is a real thing with serious development put into them. I think all of these builds are legitimate.