BSNES & Hi-Res GFX Mode

Squishy Tia

I tried to play Seikendensetsu 3 (Secret of Mana 2) today in BSNES 0.6.4, but every single time a text field came up for anything, the screen would flicker black and switch to the SNES's hi-res mode. Normally these transitions are seamless (I know they were in SNES9X, at least the one written by John Stiles), but I can't find any preference or way to keep this from making the game unplayable in BSNES.

I'd prefer to use BSNES because it *is* accurate, but when each battle attack that causes text to appear makes the screen flicker in and out of hi-res mode on a constant basis, the game becomes very unplayable.

Anybody have any suggestions as to how I might alleviate this? Kind of a bummer as this is an awesome game, and I really want to play it now that Blizzard has no more hold on me with WoW (or any game of theirs for that matter).

:)

byuusan

To completely eliminate that, you would need to use a nearest-neighbor 2x scale in software, or set video rendering to point mode in hardware. I don't know if Richard's release has these options or not, but I'm guessing he has at least one of them.

Squishy Tia

Not sure what "point mode" refers to, but I'll try the 2x scale option he has. Most of his options are filters, and only a few are scalers. Anything's worth a try, since I want to enjoy this game, and don't want to have to maintain two separate ROM/SRAM/Savestates folders for BSNES and SNES9x.

Squishy Tia

Welp, I've tried every combination of modes and scalers, but BSNES still flashes black every time the text boxes appear. Even checking the "Prioritise speed over smoothness" box didn't alleviate this one. It would appear, at least for now, that this is one of the few areas where BSNES isn't accurately emulating the hardware, since switching to/from hi-res mode blanks the entire screen for about 1/4th of a second each time it happens. Unfortunately this renders realtime battles in SD3 impossible to play through.

I'll keep investigating on my end to see if there's any way to get around this.

Easy way to see what I mean: Open up the current character's Ring Menu. Close it. Open again. Rinse and repeat. You'll soon see what the effect is.

byuusan

If the entire screen is blanking, then it is likely a bug in Richard's port.

The only thing you should see is the non-textbox area getting a little crisper because the screen goes from 256x224 to 512x224 before being linearly resampled. There's nothing I can do about that except to tell you to always render at 512x448, which is something my port can do.

If you're on Snow Leopard and don't mind installing Qt 4.6.0, you can use my port:
http://bsnes.googlecode.com/files/bsnes_v064r06-snowleopard.tar.bz2

Not as polished, of course.

I would also advise you to e-mail Richard about this. Again, only if the screen goes completely black, because it shouldn't.

Squishy Tia

Yeah, the screen goes black for between 1/8th and 1/4th of a second each time the text box pops up or is changed if it is already up, which happens *constantly* during battle since every effect rendered outside physical attacks pops up the text box. I wish I had a way to record this happening.

Right now, I've decided to use SNES9x for this game and Secret of Mana.

I probably only noticed this now because the last time I played an SOM/SD3 game was back in '03 on 9x. Sadly the .srm filesystem changed since then and that game's save RAM is incompatible with the current 9x, and for some reason BSNES cannot read SNES9x's (even the current one) .srm files. Oh well. I'll let Richard know about the blanking screen issue, but I'm not going to pester him past letting him know. :)

seanstar

Okay... I was pretty sure I'd played and beaten SD3 since the advent of BSNES, and sure enough, that's where all my end-game saves are. I see maybe a frame of black during the switch, and then only maybe 3/4 of the time. What spec machine are you using? I'm on a Core2Duo MBP 2.4GHz... ~2007-ish. I think I found the frame lag on my gamepad more of a nuisance than the flicker.

Squishy Tia

seanstar wrote:

Okay... I was pretty sure I'd played and beaten SD3 since the advent of BSNES, and sure enough, that's where all my end-game saves are. I see maybe a frame of black during the switch, and then only maybe 3/4 of the time. What spec machine are you using? I'm on a Core2Duo MBP 2.4GHz... ~2007-ish. I think I found the frame lag on my gamepad more of a nuisance than the flicker.

Mac Pro 2x 2.66 GHz (1,1 ; 2006 model)
7 GB RAM
Radeon HD3870
1 TB WD Caviar Green HD
60 GB OCZ Summit SSD (Games)

Checking the "Prioritise speed over smoothness" option slightly lessens the screen flashing, but not by much. The FPS counter stays at 60 constantly, even during the very CPU intensive (for the SNES) Mode 7 aerial scenes during SD3. I have the effect set to 1x and the filter to Plain, as I don't like blurring (it gives me a headache).

The gamepad lag in SD3 happens on the real hardware too. It's just so CPU intensive for the SNES that priority goes to the SNES internal components rather than the gamepads. Street Fighter: Hyper Fighting Edition also suffers from this - I had to have an ASCIIPad with its turbo function enabled for all buttons just to get realtime playability on my old SNES. Quite often single button presses in that game went undetected with the stock SNES controllers.

The problem seems to be in how BSNES is handling the change between regular and hi-res mode. SNES9x has no such screen blanking (thus it is what I'm using now to play SD3). It's less accurate obviously, and still suffers from the gamepad lag issue (as would BSNES/real SNES), but not blanking the screen several times in the span of two or three seconds during battle when the text box is activated/changed/updated makes it playable.

The only real a advantage 9x has over BSNES is its savestate UI and flexibility (9 slots is a godsend sometimes). But that was a non-factor in my decision to use it for SD3.

One thing to keep in mind is that when the screen blanking occurs, the battle does continue, so it becomes very very difficult, if not impossible, to position myself for anything useful in realtime.

Edit: Not sure if I mentioned this or not but it happens in Windowed mode as well, so it isn't just a fullscreen issue.