Emulation-Talk

[Andi]

1

So the thing is ... the concept of widescreen SNES games really can work. It's just going to need ROM hackers to create lots of tricky patches for games.



Essentially, hackers would have to patch the games to fill in the tilemaps off the edges of the screen, and drive sprites previously 'offscreen'. A small amount of emulator-only features could also be added to facilitate things, that the ROM hackers could then use.

This can never really work as a generic feature. Not even with per-game settings databases, as each game has many different modes (eg level select versus title screen versus in-game.) It would require a ROM hack per game, and probably 1-3 months of work per game at that.

But let me put it this way: if someone is actually willing to do this ROM hacking work, even just for Zelda 3 alone, I will merge DerKoun's BG widescreen support to bsnes official, and add any simple hardware extensions that would benefit this.

And if we do this, I would bundle the widescreen patches for each game in with bsnes releases. There'd be an option to use widescreen mode, and when enabled, compatible games would automatically switch to them.

So if someone out there wants to make widescreen SNES games a reality, I'll support you and we'll make it all official. Don't let it seem like me not merging the feature as it is now is an unwillingness to consider this. I just want to see it polished in at least one game first.

Source: https://twitter.com/byuu_san/status/1128762927031283713