Reviving Mesen-S?

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SNESPlayer
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Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by SNESPlayer »

Hi! Recently I've installed and played with Mesen-S, which has been working wonderfully on my machine so far and I do genuinely enjoy its company. However, I am bit saddened to learn that its progress has been archived and discontinued back in mid-2020 so I'm asking to see if there's any fork of it that is maintained or if anyone is interested in such an endeavor?

I also enjoy the company of bsnes-plus which is updated but I prefer some of the features Mesen-S has in particular, which accommodates both developers and casual players at the same time with a nice user interface. And I think it has potential to be greater still than it is now (Mesen-S, that is).

Sadly I don't have much when it comes to technical chops about programming or a deep understanding of the SNES underlying architecture outside of the fundamental basics. I can only really do bug reports and add documentation help when it comes to the emulator itself. So it does needs someone familiar with the codebase in order for it to be further maintained, I'll assist in whatever way I can currently do though.

Have a good day/evening/night wherever you are!
- SNESPlayer
secondsun
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by secondsun »

Nova has a fork that they've added some patches to, but it isn't anything official. If there's serious interest in reviving it, I think that we might want to bring Sour in and see if we can set up a working group that manages the project, organizes work, etc. so it doesn't fall on one person to keep up.
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Nikku4211
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by Nikku4211 »

secondsun wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 8:19 am If there's serious interest in reviving it, I think that we might want to bring Sour in and see if we can set up a working group that manages the project, organizes work, etc. so it doesn't fall on one person to keep up.
No way that's going to happen. If I recall correctly, Sour stopped developing Mesen-S because he was sick of all the work maintaining emulators required.

Because of that, I doubt we'll be able to get him to do said work again, even as part of a team, and even if there's interest in using a hypothetical updated version of Mesen-S.
SNESPlayer wrote: Wed Dec 08, 2021 11:29 pm I also enjoy the company of bsnes-plus which is updated but I prefer some of the features Mesen-S has in particular, which accommodates both developers and casual players at the same time with a nice user interface. And I think it has potential to be greater still than it is now (Mesen-S, that is).

Sadly I don't have much when it comes to technical chops about programming or a deep understanding of the SNES underlying architecture outside of the fundamental basics. I can only really do bug reports and add documentation help when it comes to the emulator itself. So it does needs someone familiar with the codebase in order for it to be further maintained, I'll assist in whatever way I can currently do though.
Why not have people add Mesen-S-like features into BSNES-plus with its better emulation? Unless it's impossible to tweak Mesen-S' extra features to work with the way emulation works in BSNES-plus.

Or is BSNES-plus still based on an old version of BSNES with no emulation improvements since then?
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Banshaku
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by Banshaku »

Nikku4211 wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 3:55 pm No way that's going to happen. If I recall correctly, Sour stopped developing Mesen-S because he was sick of all the work maintaining emulators required.
Well, he's been actually working on something but he's not talking about it publicly. As to when it will be available that's up to him when he's ready for it. So for now don't get your hopes up but know that some improvement may be available in the future.

As for mixing the mesen-s ui with bsnes, that would be quite a task. The front-end is done in C# so you need to learn that first, learn the bsnes code base and adapt everything for it. By the time you understand how the front-end work you may have been able to rewrite the whole thing anyway.
Revenant
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by Revenant »

Nikku4211 wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 3:55 pm Or is BSNES-plus still based on an old version of BSNES with no emulation improvements since then?
Never was. Backporting emulation improvements has been a goal for the entire history of the project.
secondsun
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by secondsun »

Nikku4211 wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 3:55 pm
secondsun wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 8:19 am If there's serious interest in reviving it, I think that we might want to bring Sour in and see if we can set up a working group that manages the project, organizes work, etc. so it doesn't fall on one person to keep up.
No way that's going to happen. If I recall correctly, Sour stopped developing Mesen-S because he was sick of all the work maintaining emulators required.


I wasn't proposing they work on it, I was proposing we get permission to set up a group like Dolphin has using the Mesen-S name and get commit access to the repos. That way we have someone managing the work, people working on things, organization around updates, feature requests, etc.

They've done the hard part : accurate SNES emulation. Making it work better on other Operating Systems, fixing bugs in developer tools, and making it more powerful for developers and homebrewers is a much easier sell for people wanting to start in the emu space.
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NovaSquirrel
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by NovaSquirrel »

My fork adds the history viewer and watch window from Mesen, and there's some minor emulation improvements (I think the unused DMA register per channel was unimplemented? And there was a sprite bug), along with changes to make it able to save the configuration on Linux. But it's not a project I'm actively maintaining (and I don't know the codebase very well), I'm just looking at pull requests and making changes when I run into things I need for homebrew development.
SNESPlayer
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by SNESPlayer »

Banshaku wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 5:50 pm
Nikku4211 wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 3:55 pm No way that's going to happen. If I recall correctly, Sour stopped developing Mesen-S because he was sick of all the work maintaining emulators required.
Well, he's been actually working on something but he's not talking about it publicly. As to when it will be available that's up to him when he's ready for it. So for now don't get your hopes up but know that some improvement may be available in the future.

As for mixing the mesen-s ui with bsnes, that would be quite a task. The front-end is done in C# so you need to learn that first, learn the bsnes code base and adapt everything for it. By the time you understand how the front-end work you may have been able to rewrite the whole thing anyway.
Oh hey! You were mentioning something about him working on something that has yet to be announced. Where did you originally hear that from? Or just rumors?

Also, you'd be right with the Mesen-S UI and BSNES. It'd require a total rewrite because you'd have to construct and make widget and options menus on Qt (bsnes-plus) which were taken from a C# codebase that includes Mono. It wouldn't be straightforward.
NovaSquirrel wrote: Sat Dec 11, 2021 1:06 am My fork adds the history viewer and watch window from Mesen, and there's some minor emulation improvements (I think the unused DMA register per channel was unimplemented? And there was a sprite bug), along with changes to make it able to save the configuration on Linux. But it's not a project I'm actively maintaining (and I don't know the codebase very well), I'm just looking at pull requests and making changes when I run into things I need for homebrew development.
Also hi! I tried your fork and it is working fine on me so far. Thanks for giving some life to Mesen-S! You said you're not actively maintaining the project because you're lacking familiarity with the codebase. Are there any parts that confuse you or something? Not sure how much I can help here but I did manage to compile your fork safely so maybe I could tell you a few things or two from what my terminal says at least.
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NovaSquirrel
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by NovaSquirrel »

SNESPlayer wrote: Sun Dec 12, 2021 11:27 pm Oh hey! You were mentioning something about him working on something that has yet to be announced. Where did you originally hear that from? Or just rumors?
Sour had been posting screenshots and progress on Discord but I don't think he's posted anything since July. It was a rewrite of the UI in https://avaloniaui.net/ instead of Windows Forms.
SNESPlayer wrote: Sun Dec 12, 2021 11:27 pm You said you're not actively maintaining the project because you're lacking familiarity with the codebase.
That's part of it - it's mostly just it not being as high a priority as other things I want to do. But if I end up needing more debugging features that are worth the time investment (like the history viewer definitely was) I will probably try to add them.
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Banshaku
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by Banshaku »

SNESPlayer wrote: Sun Dec 12, 2021 11:27 pm
Oh hey! You were mentioning something about him working on something that has yet to be announced. Where did you originally hear that from? Or just rumors?
I was talking to him in DM when things cooled down a little bit and this is when he talked about that subject. It's been a while already and wasn't aware of the talk on discord (too much messages on discord for me to follow with my current schedule ^-^;;).

I'm sure when the time will come he will talk more about it.
SNESPlayer
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Re: Reviving Mesen-S?

Post by SNESPlayer »

NovaSquirrel wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 6:11 pm
SNESPlayer wrote: Sun Dec 12, 2021 11:27 pm Oh hey! You were mentioning something about him working on something that has yet to be announced. Where did you originally hear that from? Or just rumors?
Sour had been posting screenshots and progress on Discord but I don't think he's posted anything since July. It was a rewrite of the UI in https://avaloniaui.net/ instead of Windows Forms.
SNESPlayer wrote: Sun Dec 12, 2021 11:27 pm You said you're not actively maintaining the project because you're lacking familiarity with the codebase.
That's part of it - it's mostly just it not being as high a priority as other things I want to do. But if I end up needing more debugging features that are worth the time investment (like the history viewer definitely was) I will probably try to add them.
Ah well, if you need help I can provide some. For testing the emulators and the like but still I'm so happy that he is having some bigger plans, can't wait to see where they lead to! AvaloniaUI is such an interesting choice, is probably the best UI toolkit for C#-based development. There is also another UI library being worked on by Microsoft but that one is more limited (only macOS, Windows and Android to my knowledge), though it could be expanded as well. We'll see how it advances but I'm glad the project has something to look forward to at some point.

Banshaku wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 7:06 pm
SNESPlayer wrote: Sun Dec 12, 2021 11:27 pm
Oh hey! You were mentioning something about him working on something that has yet to be announced. Where did you originally hear that from? Or just rumors?
I was talking to him in DM when things cooled down a little bit and this is when he talked about that subject. It's been a while already and wasn't aware of the talk on discord (too much messages on discord for me to follow with my current schedule ^-^;;).

I'm sure when the time will come he will talk more about it.
Much like what I said on the post above in reply to Nova. I'm happy that there is still hope and interesting things coming out for the emulator space. I'll be on the lookout when such an event happens! Thanks for answering y'all. Made me happy that Mesen still has potential to go on.
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