Well i spent all night on it, but finally figured out how to build snes9x for the nokia 770.

It's still pretty far from done - haven't gotten sound working yet.

But check this out -


That's the welcome screen from the public domain pacman game hosted at zophars doman. Running at 2x doubled (software, not xsp) mode.

And what's that at the bottom? Yes it's not a photoshop. It's 60 fps!!! (edit) That intro page is running smoothly (20+ fps), but the fps display appears to be calculating incorrectly. In particular some other games are poking along at only a few fps. Much testing (tasting) is needed.

Pity Nokia never included some buttons on the right side of the device. I've always felt Nokia overlooked the 770/N800's potential as a gaming platform. The N800 in particular has a lot of blank bezel space on the right side.

So,... Will e.g. super mario run at 20 fps? Also, would it make sense to keep to a bit lower rez and put the four buttons on the left side of the screen?

So far average fps with 2x scaling has been around 8-10 fps.

(edit) Testing with freeware roms from:

http://www.zophar.net/roms.phtml?op=show&type=snes

Columns is playable, of course it doesn't need fast animation.

This looks really great.

It's funny though, how hard it is to emulate - the SNES had a 3.7Mhz CPU if i'm not wrong :P

You're right that the CPU isn't very fast, but SNES emulators have to emulate a system, not just one cpu.

SNES Hardware Specs
CPU Type: 65816 16-bit: 2.68 / 3.58 Mhz
16-bit Picture Processing Unit
MEMORY RAM: 1 Mbit (128 Kbyte)
Video RAM: 0.5 Mbit (64 Kbyte)
Cart Size's: 2 Mbit - 48 Mbit
DISPLAY Max Resolution: 512 x 448 pixels
Colors: 32,768 colors Max Colors at Once: 256
Max Sprite Size: 64 x 64 pixels
Max Sprites: 128 sprites
SOUND Sound Chip: 8-bit Sony SPC700, Sound Channels: 8
FEATURES Mode 7
2 Controller ports

The speed of emulated games is vastly different depending how they make use of the PPU (Picture Processing Unit). In the screenshot above the background to the title screen is scrolling absolutely smoothly (maybe 30+ fps) but other apps that make heavier use of the PPU run 3-5 times slower.

I am really lookin forwrd to this but until the speed increases, it's gonna be another visualboyadvance.

Speed increase is entirely doable. It's probably just the need for people to have incentive to make such performance improvements. I think that ArnimS should make a deb of the snes emulator and patch up a python (or c) front end to it quickly. When I tested it, it was completely playable for the game I tried it on.

OTOH: The dpad in n800 is so bad that you can't use it in any games anyway (no, not even in rpgs, unless you want to have a cramp in your hand in 20 minutes). I do appreciate the fact that Nokia is deliberately trying to focus this thing as a web pad, but come on, as there is a dpad anyway, they might just as well make it a good one.

OTOH: If you have a BT keyboard, playing emus should rock!

Hi konttori,

you're absolutely right about the dpad. As many others have observed it is just not good for extended use or fast input.

I find Snes9x too slow for most games and without sound, It's not enjoyable anyway. There are other SNES emulators from the gp2x world that should be truly playable on 770 and 800, but they are not a simple compile and build.

Any news?

I've recently bought Controllers for my old SNES on Ebay and play Super Mario World all day.
It would be VERY cool to take it with me on my 770.