BeagleSNES For Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, NES, And – Yes – SNES

By far the most common use for the Raspberry Pi is shoving a few dozen emulators on an SD card and calling it a day. Everybody’s got to start somewhere, right? There are other tiny, credit card-sized Linux boards out there, and [Andrew] is bringing the same functionality of the Raspi to the BeagleBone Black and BeagleBoard with BeagleSNES, an emulator for all the sane pre-N64 consoles.

BeagleSNES started as a class project in embedded system design, but the performance of simply porting SNES9X wasn’t very good by default. [Andrew] ended up hacking the bootloader and kernel, profiling the emulator, and slowly over the course of three years of development making this the best emulator possible.

After a few months of development, [Andrew] recently released a new version of BeagleSNES that includes OpenGL ES, native gamepad support through the BeagleBone’s PRU, and support for all the older Nintendo consoles and portables. Video demos below.

18 thoughts on “BeagleSNES For Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, NES, And – Yes – SNES

    1. heh yeah Sardu I remember he got all pissy when mindrape stole his sources through an open smb share he had and posted it online. Stopped development for a little while cause of it then started back up. NESticle was the first real nes emu with decent performance. I remember people actually tried charging for emulators before him too, i think ines was the nes emu and there was an snes emu whos name escapes me now. The author actually had it so that you needed to boot from the disk into its own os as a form of copy protection. Pretty silly looking back.

      I remember running a gameboy emulator on my 386 and getting 2 seconds per frame(not the opposite) HEH and still being amazed. My neighbor Brad had a much beefier pc at the time, maybe a 486 – doubt pentiums where out yet? So I showed him to try and get it running at decent speeds. He was dubious about getting a gameboy cart into his floppy drive so I had to explain what a rom was. ;) He became pretty obsessed with emulation in general and later started a pretty popular site dedicated to it “zophar’s domain” I believe it’s actually still up but he hasn’t been running it for years

  1. “By far the most common use for the Raspberry Pi is shoving a few dozen emulators on an SD card and calling it a day” are you sure? I suspect their most common use is as a media centre or perhaps file server.
    I don’t have any numbers though, just a rough poll of the people I know who use their RasPis…
    Perhaps I should amend my statement, I suspect their most common use is as a dust collector :-)

    1. 1xRPI 2 Media Server (Kodi)
      1XRPI Headless torrent client (Transmission)
      1XRPI B Squeezebox music server (Squeezeplug)
      1xRPI collecting dust
      4xRPI 2 collecting dust

      Media server and torrent client get used everyday. Music server mostly on weekends.

      Hope to use one of the RPI2 for an emulator.

      1. Using Wikipedia to prove your point in a bar bet minus 10. Using reddit to prove your point in any situation minus 4 billion. Come on Brian I’ve read some of your work before you joined hack a day, it was good. Put 10 percent of what I know you are capable of into your hack a day articles. More is not always better, put some effort into your posts. Using a subreddit to prove your point, you should be ashamed.

        1. > Using reddit to prove your point in any situation minus 4 billion.

          I’ve said what I’ve wanted to say about reddit, but if you’re looking for a zeitgeist, you’re not going to find a better place.

          > Come on Brian I’ve read some of your work before you joined hack a day

          No you haven’t.

      2. Going to disagree, the emulators get more attention because non-technically inclined people need more support and have to ask more questions getting it up and running, Also it’s more ‘show-off-worthy’/’I-did-this’ and ends up getting posted more as a result.

  2. I had one running as a media server, one as a media player for the TV, one as a headless Squeezebox player and one to play around. Recently I switched to Banana Pi for the server and Odroid C1 for the media player, so yes, most of them are gathering dust, until I find a new use for them (IoT, maybe).

  3. Awesome work! I would probably consider doing this, except my Beaglebone is running as a general-purpose server. Does most things well, and eats ~3W instead of the 100W my last mini-ITX server used 24/7. Plus, while throwing dog poop into a dumpster, I found a Kickstarter-edition OUYA+controller that runs emulators quite well.

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