Bug 206399

Summary:	snes9x: no sound, no fullscreen -> replace it with zsnes?
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.3	Reporter:	Forgotten User --EoyBps8f <forgotten_--EoyBps8f>
Component:	Other	Assignee:	Holger Macht <hmacht>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Minor
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Alpha 1
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Forgotten User --EoyBps8f 2006-09-17 23:26:31 UTC

I installed snes9x and do not get any sound, since it tries to use /dev/dsp. There is no config I found to change the sound-device.

zsnes supports sound without any problems or modifications.

in the readme for snes9x I read that if I wanted fullscreen-mode I had to start it as root. While I do not think that running this as root is an option, I tried and it failed.

zsnes has no trouble to display the games at 1280x1024 fullscreen, without running as root.

It is not up to me whether it is wort putting some effort into snes9x in order to fix the above issues, or whether it might be more sensible to replace the package by zsnes for 10.2.

I even found a repo for it at:
http://bored.homelinux.net/suse/10.1/i686/

Comment 1 Holger Macht 2006-09-20 17:56:31 UTC

You don't have /dev/dsp, right? I have it and because of that sound works for me.

Nevertheless, it would be a meaningful to take zsnes into account. Not sure if snes9x should be dropped then, they could coexist.

Comment 2 Forgotten User --EoyBps8f 2006-09-20 18:19:38 UTC

I have a AC97 chip on my motherboard, pretty common I guess. /dev/dsp is missing, apparently the soundcard is in /dev/snd...

There are a few more issues with snes9x:

- It does not auto-detect the joystick but one has to manually change /dev/js0 to /dev/input/js0.
- For me it did not remember the changed Joystick device.
- It is not possible to assign gamepad-buttons to the keyboard, so if a gamepad only has 4 keys it is not possible to use it.

Since I could not test fullscreen, which IMHO is one of the most important issues, I am not sure whether with snes9x it is as simple as with zsnes to switch between fullscreen and window. In zsnes you just hit ESC and click on the maximise-button.

The only thing that is not so nice about zsnes is that its file-list is not expandable, i.e. you cannot see the end of very long filenames.

The reason why I mentioned the drop was that I read in the wiki, that zsnes was moved out of the wishlist because snes9x was already present and no need to duplicate it.

In the meantime I also discovered the zsnes package from the build service. ;)

Comment 3 Holger Macht 2006-09-29 07:44:09 UTC

Will think about adding zsnes to the distro when I find some time.

Comment 4 Holger Macht 2006-11-15 12:21:15 UTC

Unfortunatelly the replacement won't make it into 10.2 because of lack of time. I will do it for 10.3, though. Sorry.

Comment 8 Holger Macht 2007-11-27 13:32:16 UTC

Both snes9x and zsnes are available in the build service, so I do not see the real need for packaging it for the distribution anymore. I will file a drop request for snes9x in our internal autobuild, though.