Sad I cannot play this.

I saw this along with Super Metroid and Earthbound. I was at the shop thinking to buy Fire Emblem Conquest since I loved awakening so much.

I bought Devil summoner and thought I'll buy the rest by loading 100 so I wouldn't have to enter my card info 5 times and to cap me at 100 though it was more thanews I intended.

I couldn't buy it for 30 minutes and I couldn't figure out why. I was having a hard time googling why since I didn't know the problem outside of I can't find the purchase button.

It turns out the snes games only work on the New 3ds which I didn't even know was a thing. The purchase button said 3ds so I was like "yes I have one..." So I bought summoner and then held off on Fire due to how little space I have left. I'll buy the box instead. I basically have 90 left and nothing to buy.

GG for not doing the research. I'll have to buy a memory stick and maybe pick up Donkey Kong and Hyrule legends. =/

I read the system cannot handle snes games...yet I can play smash Bros in 3d. .. damn u nintendo

Bummer. Seems like there's some very bad labelling on the store... But the system not being able to handle snes games is bull****. There were homebrew snes emulators for the DS.


*Edit*
Well... I was totally wrong, pardon my ignorance. Learned something new. :)

That sucks man, but if you're on an original 3DS I'd highly recommend checking out some reviews of hyrule warriors before dropping the cash on it. It runs great on new 3DS but reportedly not so much on old...

If you're a fan of strategy games and looking for stuff to blow some cash on, maybe pick up steamworld heist.

@Gnubberen: Accurately emulating SNES games actually takes a ton of processing power, even moreso than emulating something like gameboy advance, due to the differences in CPU architectures. I guess if Nintendo is going to charge for SNES games they want to be sure they play correctly on hardware that can handle it.

@killacam: Do you have further information? On why that is? Most bloggers seem to regurgitate the following quote from Nintendo:

"As previously announced, New Nintendo 3DS has an improved CPU, which enables Super NES games to run on the system with quality results. The Super NES games also include Perfect-Pixel mode, which allows players to see their games in their original TV resolution and aspect resolution."

That reasoning seems pretty thin. Is a quad core CPU and 128MB more of RAM really holding the OG 3DS back? Or is this just a way for Nintendo to push sales? I tend to think the latter.

@playerprime: Been playing the old 3DS version of Hyrule Warriors Legends a lot since it got released, and I am having a blast. Yes, the framerate is sub 30 for the most part, there are less enemies on screen and the graphics aren't great. But personally I have no problem playing it and enjoying it immensely. Download the demo and play it through, see if you can stomach its faults. It's what I did.

But yeah, was tempted getting a New 3DS to play SNES games myself.

The OG 3ds is not powerful enough to perfectly emulate the games. SNES emulators on the internet take massive shortcuts and do not give a shit about bugs or graphical errors to get to the playing part of the game.

If Nintendo wanted to sell SNES games on it, they would but then they would have to half-ass all ports while charging you money for it.

I still amazes me people don't understand how much it takes to properly emulate systems. So many SNES emulators (I'm looking at you android emulators) use things like frame-skip to force decent SNES emulation. Nintendo would never have that on their system...the OG 3DS simply can't emulate SNES games on top of having all the proper Virtual Console hooks....this was discovered the day the New 3DS released and modders realized they finally had enough fire power to properly run SNES games.

Any further articles/breakdowns on what you guys are talking about? Or is this just anecdotal? I truly would like to know more.

@ballsleon said:

This might be of interest.

A quote from one of the main contribubuters to the SNES homebrew scene.

As one of the contributors to blargSNES, the only reason why it can run many games at 60fps on an o3DS is because it is not only heavily cycle-inaccurate, but it is also using the GPU for hardware rendering. Nintendo is using software-rendering, which is the most accurate, yet, process-intensive method.

Hardware rendering works by rendering each and every map tile and sprite (each split into 8x8 pixels cels, because that's how the SNES works) as a pair of polygons. Each "unique" tile scanned (from left to right, top scanline to bottom of the frame) has to be converted from the SNES's 2/4/8-bitplane form into a 16-bit direct-color, z-order curve format (because the GPU lacks paletted texture support), and stored into a texture cache. Changing of hte palette means any tiles that used the palette in that range has to be reconverted. The lack of paletted textures means that palette effects that show mid-frame can't happen (excludes the "background color). DKC's first level shows this with the trees, though more recent blargSNES builds has the background color gradient working, not the trees. There are other numerous effects that are missing, but we continue looking for alternatives (but RL has been in the way).

In a worst-case scenario for non-hi-res modes, you're looking at around 14.8k polygons per BG per frame when there is scanline alterations being done. Most games use Mode 1, which has 3 BG layers, so a worst-case scenario there would be ~2.66 million polygons per second. Seem like something the 3DS can handle, but take into account that the polygon list has to be generated per frame, which means the list can't reside in VRAM (nor can the texture cache), so it's all running off the main RAM.

Be aware that while we may not care for inaccuracies for free stuff, we do care when it comes to paying for them.

And here's a video of an SNES emulator downclocked (not upticked like most homebrews do it) to what the 3ds cpu runs at:

@taesoawful: @fnrslvr: Exactly what I was looking for, thank you both!

The world of emulation is truly mind-boggling. Hard to wrap your mind around as an outsider to the community. It is still a shame for OG 3DS owners.