Joined: 11/15/2012
Posts: 67
Location: Upstate, NY
Hi, I the guy who runs nesmaps.com and snesmaps.com and I have been working on mapping more SNES games recently.
I have worked with you guys in the past about requesting features on the BSNES core for the SNES Emulator in BizHawk. You guys have been of great help. I know it has been many years, but I would like to open a dialogue again and request some more features, changes, fixes to the BSNES core to make mapping games run more smoothly and go quicker.
I have a bunch of questions, but I will start with this... I notice when Copying the screen from the game play window, the Right and Left sides have a one pixel wide black line running down the sides. Is that because that is the way the SNES originally displayed to the screen, or is that a glitch? If it is a glitch, could it be fixed so the black lines are not there and you can see the entire 16 pixels of the tiles on the right and left sides of the screen? If that is a desired feature to have those black lines there because that is what the original hardware did, is there a way either have them removed when using the "Ctrl + C" option so I can capture the complete screen? Or at least have an option to not display those black lines?
The 2nd thing on a similar note, is that the top row of pixels is not displayed in the game screen. It shows an extra row at the bottom. Again I'm not sure if this is done because that is what the original hardware did, but for mapping it is useful to be able to capture all 16 rows of pixels form the tiles on top part of the screen. Would it be possible to have them in there when the "Ctrl+C" is used, or an option to display the top row, and cut off that extra row on the bottom?
Thanks for any help you can provide. If you have any questions or need a better explanation of what I mean let me know.
Most of the maps I make I just do screen grabs from the Graphics Debugger, but in some cases I need to grab from the game screen as well.
The borders in Final Fantasy IV are not an emulator glitch or emulator display decision.
They are intended and deliberately set by the game. The game makes use of the Window hardware registers in the range $2123 to $212F.
I suppose you can debug the game and check where the values are set. One example is $15:C968 where $2126 is set to 0x01 (left border), and 5 bytes later $2127 is set to 0xFE (right border), but there are more places.
Warning: Might glitch to creditsI will finish this ACE soon as possible
(or will I?)
Joined: 11/15/2012
Posts: 67
Location: Upstate, NY
Thanks for looking into the black lines on the left and right, you are correct, as I just checked out Super Mario World, and it is not an issue there. However the missing row on the top and the extra row on the bottom seem to be an issue with all the games. No need to worry about the left and right thing as that was just with the one game, but can the top and bottom issue be fixed?
Joined: 11/15/2012
Posts: 67
Location: Upstate, NY
Another issue I am having is in the "RAM Search" it does not appear to be updating the values live. Is there something I need to do in the settings to get it to do that? In the older version of BizHawk it just automatically kept updating the values live.
The top and bottom offset comes from a console quirk.
Here is a quote from a hardware register page:
Note that many games will set their vertical scroll values to -1 rather than 0.
This is bacause the SNES loads OBJ data for each scanline during the previous
scanline. The very first line, though, wouldn't have any OBJ data loaded! So
the SNES doesn't actually output scanline 0, although it does everything to
render it. These games want the first line of their tilemap to be the first
line output, so they set their VOFS registers in this manner. Note that an
interlace screen needs -2 rather than -1 to properly correct for the missing
line 0 (and an emulator would need to add 2 instead of 1 to account for this).
In other words, if your game doesn't account for this offset, you will miss the first scanline and have an extra one on the bottom.
Warning: Might glitch to creditsI will finish this ACE soon as possible
(or will I?)
Joined: 11/15/2012
Posts: 67
Location: Upstate, NY
Is there a setting somewhere or can one be added, that will let me change vertical scroll values so that it displays properly for games that do that?
Even if this was a setting that could be turned on and off to force it to start where it would draw the top row of pixels. I just need it for capturing the backgrounds. It is ok if it messes up the display of objects (I assume objects refers to Sprites and not the backgrounds?).
