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byuu (Near)

The accuracy advocate

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The programmer known as byuu, and later as Near, began the Super NES emulator bsnes in 2004 to reproduce the console's hardware timing rather than patch games into working. bsnes, renamed higan in 2012, ran the whole commercial SNES library; Near also bought and scanned the library for preservation, raised money to have the console's coprocessors decapped, and made fan translations from Der Langrisser to Bahamut Lagoon. Near died in 2021 after a long campaign of online harassment.

Most Super NES emulators of the early 2000s ran the popular games by adjusting their timing for each one. The programmer who called themselves byuu set out to do the opposite: to copy what the console’s chips did, tick by tick, and let the games follow. The result was bsnes, begun in 2004. It was slow, it needed a far faster computer than its rivals, and it ran games the others could not. Its author, who later took the name Near, spent the next seventeen years on the same idea, and on the cartridges, chips and translations that went with it.

Fast facts

  • Known as: byuu, and later Near.
  • Born: 1983.
  • Died: June 2021, in Japan.
  • Emulators: bsnes (from 2004), renamed higan in 2012 as it grew to cover other consoles; its successor, ares.
  • Preservation: bought, dumped and scanned the Super NES library; organised donations to have the console’s coprocessor chips decapped.
  • Translations: Der Langrisser and Bahamut Lagoon, among others.

Why accuracy

byuu’s first essay on the subject, “The State of Emulation”, appeared in October 2004. The popular emulator ZSNES advertised that it ran “99 percent of commercial ROMs”; byuu’s complaint was that emulators aimed to run the commercial games and no more, and that games which worked could hide wrong behaviour underneath. Patrick Klepek of Vice traced the interest back to a translation. When byuu’s team tested their English version of the Super Famicom strategy role-playing game Der Langrisser on a real console, bugs appeared that the emulators had never shown, because the emulators did not behave like the hardware.

bsnes answered that by simulating each of the console’s processors at the level of its clock. In a 2011 article for Ars Technica, “Accuracy takes power”, byuu counted what that cost. Where ZSNES synchronised the SNES’s chips 903,720 times a second, bsnes did so 92,106,544 times, and needed a processor of 2 to 3GHz to run at full speed. “Although bsnes runs ten times slower than ZSNES, it is literally up to one hundred times more precise.” The article’s examples, from a Speedy Gonzales level that deadlocks on inaccurate emulators to the raster shadow in Air Strike Patrol, are described in the cycle accuracy entry.

The cost was visible outside the SNES scene. In 2005 Retro Gamer asked Richard Bannister, who ported emulators to the Macintosh, which of his conversions he was proudest of. He named the cycle-exact ones, and bsnes most recently: it “only attains full speed on the fastest Macs Apple has produced, but the end result is as accurate as you can get.”

bsnes becomes higan

By the time of Near’s death, news reports described bsnes as the first SNES emulator to run the entire commercial library. Wireframe called it “the first SNES emulator with 100% compatibility”, and Nintendo Life wrote of “100% compatibility with the entire SNES library”. Near’s own claim was narrower. In “Edge of Emulation”, written in January 2020, Near called the timing of individual pixels in the picture processor “the one weak area left in SNES emulation” and wrote that “even higan’s cycle-based PPU renderer is not perfect”.

The emulator changed name as it grew. The last version called bsnes was v091; higan v092 followed in 2012, and later versions added other consoles, from the Game Boy to the Mega Drive. Accuracy sometimes cost users. When higan began storing each game as a folder, with the chip firmware and mapping data beside the program, Near wrote in 2016 that downloads fell “from ~100,000 downloads a release to around ~10,000 per release”, and that “my ultimate goal is preservation; not making the most popular emulator.” bsnes itself continues as a separate, SNES-only emulator that puts speed and features first, and higan’s line carries on as ares, which describes itself as “a descendant of higan and bsnes” and dates its own development to 14 October 2004.

bsnes also spread through other people’s software. In 2010 the first version of what became RetroArch was a small front end for libsnes, a library version of bsnes.

The chips inside the cartridges

Many SNES cartridges carried extra processors, and some of those held programs that could not be read from outside. To emulate them exactly, the chips had to be opened and photographed under a microscope, which cost money. In December 2010 byuu ran a collection to pay for the work, done by a specialist known as Dr. Decapitator. By the end of the month the DSP chips had been paid for and dumped, starting with the DSP-1 that Super Mario Kart and Pilotwings relied on for their mode 7 maths, and by April 2012 every special chip had been dumped and emulated. Near’s 2016 account credited “the help of many donors to fundraise the costs associated with decapping these chips”.

Preserving the library

Near also collected the games themselves. Nintendo Life reported that Near bought complete North American and Japanese SNES collections to make exact copies of each cartridge, and Kotaku that Near “scanned some 1,200 Super Nintendo games, down to their circuit boards”. The European games were the last. In February 2017 a parcel of about $10,000 worth of PAL cartridges went missing in the post on its way from Germany; donations were raised to replace it, and when the parcel turned up in an Atlanta mail recovery centre, Near refunded them and declared the preservation project “undead”.

Translations

Translation came first and lasted longest. Near began translating Square’s 1996 Super Famicom role-playing game Bahamut Lagoon at the age of 15, in 1998, and released the fifth attempt in February 2021. Vice described how far it went: a proportional font to fit more text in each window, the cartridge enlarged from 24 to 64 megabits, and every menu cursor in the game moved so that it sat exactly centred. Wireframe called it “a passion project decades in the making”. See fan translations.

Death

In June 2021 Near posted messages on Twitter describing years of harassment, which had grown much worse through a campaign organised on the Kiwi Farms forum. Near took their own life on 27 June 2021, aged 38. Friends announced the death, and Nintendo Life reported that the police in Japan had confirmed it. Wireframe’s notice called Near “a much-vaunted member of the emulation and homebrew scene”.

Released source code

Near published the emulators’ source code throughout. bsnes is on GitHub under the GNU General Public Licence version 3, maintained by the bsnes-emu project, and ares under the ISC licence. The tools and source used to build the 2021 Bahamut Lagoon translation were published as the Bahamut Lagoon Translation Kit, for other translators and SNES programmers “who want to learn the techniques Near used”; its readme does not state a licence.

Sources

See also

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