SNES-Station
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SNES Station is a Super Nintendo emulator for the PlayStation 2.
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[edit] History
Development of SNES-Station was started sometime in 2001 by "Hiryu." His website was updated almost monthly for 2 years, and during that time 3 versions were released to the public. The latest version, WIP 0.2.3 was released January 24, 2004. Eventually updates slowed to a halt, and now the website hasn't been updated in 4 years; however, the official forum at gamebase.ca is still fairly active proving that many Homebrew users are still using SNES-Station.
[edit] Status
No word has been heard of Hiryu by the public for 2 years, and some have even come to believe he is dead; however, administrators on gamebase.ca claim to know Hiryu, and have stated that he is indeed alive, and that the only reason he has not updated is that he has a personal life and may have lost interest in SNES-Station. They have also stated that Hiryu is working on a new version of SNES-Station which will be released later, along with the source code.
These statements were made a few months ago though, and with the release of the PS3 past, many have little hope in the revival of SNES-Station.
[edit] Compatibility
SNES-Station is a complete conversion of snes9x for the PS2. It is stated on the website that it is based on snes9x v1.37c and should run any games that version runs with a few exceptions. This statement has held fairly true, as SNES-Station can run most SNES roms at 90 to 100 percent of the speed of the original hardware.
[edit] Bugs
Since the latest release of SNES-Station is a work-in-progress, there are some quirks to the software. For one, it has problems reading Roms unless the application is loaded from an ELF Launching program known as MCLoader. SNES-Station also has no support for USB or HDD, although unofficial patches have been released. (See Unofficial Development below)
[edit] Using SNES-Station
To run SNES-Station one must have either a modchipped PS2, HDAdvance version 3.0 CD-R backup disk plus have the SNES-Station disk encoded so that it resembles an original PS2 backup disk, or one that has been enabled using the PS2 Independence Exploit, and then first run MCLoader.
Contrary to the information provided above, SNES-Station can also be run without the use of a modchip, by means of Swap Discs. The disc is created, containing the Roms of choice and the program itself. When the disc is inserted, the user replaces the Swap Disc with the SNES Disc, and boots from that, and from then on, the Roms are loaded into memory, making it so that the user has the ability to remove the disc while a game is running, and still play it thoroughly, although the disc will need to be replaced before loading back into SNES-Station's menu. Swap Magic 3 Discs were used to test this situation. A common issue of using these discs with SNES-Station is that the disc will eventually freeze up after running in the PS2 for a while, and will force the user to re-load the discs.
Since SwapMagic V3.6 it has been possible to bypass the need for making a disc. The user needs a USB key/Pen drive and to create the folder SWAPMAGIC (case sensitive) then rename the SNESStation elf file to SWAPMAGIC.elf. Upon booting the PS2 Swapmagic sees this folder on the USB drive and boots the SWAPMAGIC.elf file thus starting SNES Station. Roms can be put in a folder on the USB key .
file required is snes_emu_hdd.elf and swapmagic cd/dvd v3.6
[edit] Unofficial Development
A patch has been written for SNES-Station, which can add USB and HDD support for Roms, however it has reportedly made SNES-Station very unstable. The patched version also makes MCLoader unnecessary. The version of snes_emu_hdd.elf dated 25/08/2006 is stable.
