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luigiblood · 2 months ago

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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.

#nintendo switch online #super nintendo #nes #snes #datamine #research

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luigiblood · 2 years ago

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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.

#nintendo switch online #snes #super nintendo #nintendo 64 #nes #secrets #tech #nintendo

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