lolSnes is a SNES emulator for the Nintendo DS. With a compatible flashcart, it can also be used on a DSi or a 3DS in DS-mode.


lolSnes has the following features:

• Mostly complete CPU emulation
• Basic PPU support (mode 1 BGs, sprites, mosaic, master brightness)
• SPC700 emulation (no sound though)
• SRAM with auto-saving
• and even more!


Download lolSnes


Check the Howto/FAQ for information on how to set it up.


You can also check the compatibility list to see if your favorite game will run or not. Not all games will run, but lolSnes is improving and compatiblity will get better with new releases. But due to the DS's limited power, perfect emulation is impossible, and thus games that require extreme accuracy will not run. Generally, if your game doesn't run in ZSNES or Snes9x, it won't run in lolSnes either.


For more informations about lolSnes, see the About page.
Compatibility list opened!
Posted on 12/18/2013 16:07:04 by StapleButter
About fucking time.

I've been busy between real life and lolSnes, so uh, this site went a little neglected in the meantime. But now it's time to fix it.

The compatibility list is finally a thing. Later on there may be an automatic submission interface, but in the meantime, post your submissions in the lolSnes thread.

I'll also do the remaining page (Screenshots) soon.
1 comment (by Jamie Loves Drama) | Log in to post a comment
Long time no update...
Posted on 10/17/2013 10:17:30 by StapleButter
Lots of things have been going on since the last blog post.

First of all, the SNemulDSP experiment is done. It turned out to be successful. I've been able to not only successfully integrate SNemulDS's DSP code, but also improve it a bit. Sound output is finally stable and at the right pitch, and I also added linear interpolation. It doesn't sound as good as the real thing, but it's pretty good already.

Sadly, this tends to come at the expense of performance. I'll probably make interpolation optional, and also give an option to lower the sampling frequency to 24KHz instead of 32KHz. I also don't believe the ARM7 will be able to handle any better interpolation without a dramatic performance hit.


On the graphics side, progress is being made too. More video modes are supported, among which, mode 7. HDMA is still not supported, though.

Mode 7 is implemented in such a way that it is possible to switch to/from it at any time with about no performance hit. This is particularly useful for games that use mode 7 combined with another mode, like SMW's boss rooms.

I've also been fixing bugs with the VRAM mapping handler, fixing several cases of missing or corrupt graphics. For example, Earthbound no longer has those weird stripes in its background, and Super Puyo Puyo now looks alright, or almost.


My next main targets before the 1.1 release will be to fix the issues that plague the ROM cache and make Super Metroid hang, and fix more important PPU bugs. Layer priority comes to mind. I need to redo it properly and get rid of that awful BG3 priority hack.
1 comment (by Nin) | Log in to post a comment
SnemulDSP branch started
Posted on 09/23/2013 22:24:47 by StapleButter
As you may already know, I'm working on lolSnes' sound emulation, and blarg blarg blarg. My DSP code is functional, but not as performant as I'd like it to be.

To be performant enough, it'd have to be rewritten into ASM. So instead, I had another idea: trying to use SNemulDS's DSP code. It works, it doesn't suffer from performance issues (or not as much as my code), it supports more features than my code (namely ADSR), and I have good ideas on how to make it better.

I figured that since my C code will have to be trashed anyway, this may be a good idea. I'd normally write my own code, but sound programming is kinda annoying. Mainly because when the output sounds wrong, it's not always easy to find out what you're doing wrong.


I will be experimenting this idea in a separate branch named SnemulDSP. If it is successful, I'll merge it into the master branch.

There will be no Git builds for the SnemulDSP branch, sadly. The autobuild system only works with one branch.
1 comment (by HolyRomanEmperor) | Log in to post a comment
Git builds available for download!
Posted on 09/07/2013 23:01:45 by StapleButter
I have set up an autobuild system, so that each time a commit is pushed to the lolSnes repo, the last revision is built and made available for download on the Downloads page.

There's also a RSS feed for this, so you can be informed of new Git builds at any time.

Enjoy!
1 comment (by Jamie Loves Drama) | Log in to post a comment
SMAS progress
Posted on 09/03/2013 01:14:30 by StapleButter
I figured that I should get lolSnes to run something else than SMW. Super Mario All-Stars seemed a good candidate to test.

Immediate results were that the game didn't even start. It got stuck while uploading data to the SPC700. The code it uses for that is the same that is used in SMW, and it works fine there, so the problem was likely not inside the routine.

I noticed that the routine was reading its data from uninitialized RAM. Since it was the same data over and over again, it'd keep transferring forever.

I then ran the game in NO$SNS, pointed the memory viewer to where the SPC700 data was, and searched for that data inside the ROM. The data appeared at address 07:FC00 (file offset 0x3FC00). I then added some logging of DMA transfers in lolSnes, and quickly found out what was wrong.

The game did a DMA transfer from 07:FC00 to port $2180. This port can be used for reading and writing to the WRAM, and is useful when transferring data from ROM to WRAM. It was not implemented in lolSnes. After implementing it, the game progressed further.


The Nintendo logo appeared, and then the menu. But, no sound. And trying to go anywhere would freeze the game. This looked like the SPC700 program was crashing. Some debugging revealed that it was calling a function, but the memory space where the function should have been, was empty.

This meant that not all the SPC700 data was being transferred. The size of the data chunk was 0x210F, but the DMA transfer that copied it to WRAM was only 1024 bytes long. Another similar DMA transfer was done to copy the rest of the data, but it was failing.

The address the second transfer copied from, happened to be above the first megabyte of ROM (the SMAS ROM is 2MB). Since lolSnes only caches the first megabyte of ROM into RAM, the DMA was reading from uncached ROM. Logging uncached ROM reads quickly revealed the issue: the file offset values used were wrong. This was a silly mistake in the code that reads the memory mapping table for DMA transfers (the code for regular memory accesses was unaffected).


Once this issue fixed, SMAS gets further. It gets sound, and goes ingame. For now though, you can't control Mario. This is probably due to SMAS using oldstyle joypad IO, which isn't supported in lolSnes.

There's also the graphics corruption almost everywhere. This is due to an unsupported video mode and should be fixed soon.


While I was at it, I came back to SMW, wanting to fix the bug that broke autoscroll in Donut Plains 2 and rendered the level unplayable. I first asked the SMWC community for some technical information about SMW's autoscroll mechanism, figuring it'd be easier to fix the bug if I roughly knew where to look.

I examined the code around the locations the SMWC guys pointed me to. A part of the code was doing a division, I figured that might be what's at fault. Quickly tried making the division result always be zero: the level just didn't scroll at all.

I then logged divisions. The one division that intervened in autoscrolling was always 256 / 7. This didn't look right. The autoscroll parameters aren't fixed. Some debugging in NO$SNS revealed that the 256 there was not right.

The value was being pulled from WRAM (at $0A) and then written to the dividend register. In lolSnes, the value in RAM was correct, but not the dividend value used in the division. The bug was quite stupid: the game was writing the 16bit dividend directly, and 16bit writes to that register were just not handled. After fixing this, the autoscroll worked flawlessly.


Most bugs there are silly mistakes, apparently. Oh well :P
1 comment (by HolyRomanEmperor) | Log in to post a comment
Welcome to lolsnes.net
Posted on 08/23/2013 20:43:37 by StapleButter
This will mostly serve as a devblog for my project lolSnes.

This site is still under construction, so several links are 404 for now. That won't last, though ;)


As for lolSnes, I just got a icon for it, courtesy of Flurry (from GBAtemp):


I'll add it to lolSnes. In the meantime, you'll notice that I made a 16x16 version of it for this site.
2 comments (last by StapleButter) | Log in to post a comment