Many people have pointed out that the Famicom Disk System's extra sound channel is not properly emulated here, and all of you are correct! I noticed this after recording and tried for several hours to get it working, but ultimately gave up. I'm 100% certain that Animal Crossing is technically capable of handling this sound channel since all the functionality is there in the code, but I'm not sure exactly how to structure the ROMs to load with this sound channel. If you'd like to read about my troubleshooting on this or if you'd like some clues on how to potentially solve this yourself, I made an entire post about it here: hunter-r.com/posts/ac-fds-emulation/
@@CCyoutub Doubutsu no Mori+ actually has both versions of The Legend of Zelda; the cartridge one and the FDS one. In fact, all Japanese versions of Animal Crossing seem to appropriately handle the extra sound channel when playing FDS games. Check the link in the main pinned comment if you're curious on more information.
@@Hunter-R. I was gonna make a joke about not having the sound channel ruining my plans to play the superior version of Castlevania 3 in Animal Crossing, but that's pretty interesting. You have any idea why that's the case?
@@no64256 You chances are actually still ruined, because even in Japan it was a cartridge game, however, unlike the North American and European releases of the game which "ported" the game to the "standard" Nintendo MMC5 chipset, the Japanese release uses a custom chipset developed by Konami themselves called the VR6 that, in addition to preforming functions similar to the MMC5, generates two extra pulse wave sound channels and a sawtooth sound channel.
Making the most accurate in-house emulator for your most iconic console only to put it into one old game as optional minigames and never touch it again is a very Nintendo thing to do
i find it hilarious that the animal crossing gamecube disk is just some absolute unit containing so many seemingly random things like 18 entire NES games, an NES emulator, and a BIOS
@@LilacMonarch well, the gamecube disk is compatible with future consoles. for example, a wii u has a wii emulator built-in, and the wii has a gamecube emulator built in, and the animal crossing gamecube game has an NES emulator built-in, so you can play NES games on a wii u
@@pingableuser No, plus it has nothing to do with emulation. GameCube games run natively on Wii and Wii games run natively on Wii U. GameCube games can run natively on Wii U too, it's just that Nintendo disabled that functionality due to the lack of controller and memory card ports. And you can play NES games on Wii U without Animal Crossing - just install Virtual Console ROMs.
Funfact: Zelda and Metroid where both released for the FDS. Metroid on FDS took advantage of the save feature to save your progress (the cartridge version had a password system while the FDS system had save files.)
You make really concise and accessible videos for someone of your channel size. I hope more people find your channel and you have a big break soon! Keep up the good work!
Ok, uh… I somehow just realized you only have 5 videos at the time I’m writing this and don’t even have 1,000 subscribers yet. (I better subscribe already then, haha!) I sure hope your channel picks up soon with more people seeing them because I’m really enjoying all your videos!
it's actually even MORE crazy if you make a wii u inject of the game, so it'd be a wii u, running a wii, running a gamecube, running a port of an n64 game, running an nes emulator
Hey man I've been binge watching your channel all day. I have got to say, I love your content. Very well organized, edited, and explained. I watch it while I work on programming. Keep it up!!
Ahhh, don't go back to these old videos! I hate them -- they're so bad! But thank you for your support over the last year. It's been fun to watch the channel grow as I get better at narration and editing... 😳
@@Hunter-R. Haha, they are still pretty good! I randomly got it recommended to me.. I enjoy your content a lot even though i've never played any of the animal crossing games, i'd watch you talk about anything related to how games work I think, so if you ever run out of ideas, I'm sure there would be loads of people willing to watch you talk about other games :) I've been subscribed since the 9th of Jan, 2024 (I just checked) which is when you had ~22K subs, insane how much you've grown even this year :)
Good ears! Indeed it doesn’t emulate the sound channel. I noticed this after recording and discussed this on a forum extensively. I tried for several hours to get the sound channel to work, but ultimately couldn’t figure it out. It’s a shame because Animal Crossing does support the extra sound channel, but it doesn’t seem like you’re able to emulate it properly through this process… This annoyed me a lot more than you’d might think and I spent far too long trying to get it to work. If you’re curious about me troubleshooting this process or you have potential ideas on how this can be solved, you can read about it here: hunter-r.com/posts/ac-fds-audio/
It is absolutely criminal how great your videos are. Honestly I’ve never played AC, I literally got Wild World today and played for the first time, but your videos are such great comforts. You’re an amazing creator and you deserve more recognition man
such an underrated channel, this is so cool! please keep making these videos, your channel will get the recognition you deserve in due time. :') I love this kind of content, and your video style is so great
What?! It calls the register of the memory card and looks for roms? That's so freaking cool. AC on the GameCube is such a wonderful game, you can tell the team who worked on it just went wild with thinking of ways to utilize every part of the GameCube inside and out. I mean, the GameCube uses the internal clock, the memory card (for non save purposes), the e-reader, the GBA and probably a bunch more I'm not familiar with.
10:24 : NOt exactly 100%. See, The Famicom had a built-in microphone in its second controller. The first version of The Legend of Zelda used that microphone to kill the polls voice (those creatures with ear that doesn't react to the flute at all!) So the clue given by the old man in that Polls Voice hates loud noises is useless outside of Japan because the NES had no way to emulate your voice. (But Nintendo knew that so they've reprogrammed the Polls Voice so that an arrow could insta-kill them instead. I tried that trick in the FDS version, it did nothing.)
0:35 if you play on the Wii U, it goes through the Wii emulator which goes through the GameCube emulator which goes through the n64 emulator to emulate the nes
You can't play GameCube games on a Wii u without a modded system. The Wii literally just had a GameCube inside it, and this was removed on later versions of the console and the Wii u.
actually its all technily running natively, the wii menu isnt emulated, its actually just the entire wii operating system running on the wiiu, the same thing for the gamecube. when nintendo ported the wii os to the wiiu they never removed the side that handles gamecube, so homebrew for the wii to foward gamecube games can run natively on the wiiu. TLDR the gamecube wii and wiiu al use powerpc architecture and are all built of the one that came before it, so backwards compatibility is handled natively.
This is terrific but I don't think the emulator is emulating the extra sound channel on the FDS so the music is wrong. Too bad they didn't go the extra little bit to do that.
I noticed that too, but I wonder if they just didn't bother too since Clu Clu Land is one of those direct ports from cartridge with few differences. I don't know what games are available in the Japanese version, but if they don't display the BIOS, they can get away with using the cartridge version of Zelda 1. I can't think of other games in the US version that need FDS support other than Metroid and that's often dropped in Japan since no one cares about it. Their loss 💀
This is amazing! Concise explanation, great job. And I can't believe that I'm still finding out stuff like this that's entirely new to me, about a game that I loved so much two decades ago. Wow!
It gets even DEEPER. Using only the system ram of a Gameboy advance you can play emulated NES games obtained from an N64 game on a gamecube disk running on a nintendo wii.
I remember I had my whole basement set up with different nes games and had the blank one next to my TV up stairs. Sometimes I would just play ac to play those games, I loved playing pinball
out of extremely morbid curiosity: did they bother emulating the Famicom's microphone on the second controller if you have the gull to use a GameCube microphone? the answer is almost certainly "ABSOLUTELY NOT" but we wonder if the game will, at any point, try to stop you before it's too late.
I was also curious about this and concluded that the emulator the game uses can handle microphone support if you theoretically force the input to occur. That is, if you modify the game to where every input you press emulates a loud scream coming from an audio input on the second port, the game will appropriately handle it. But, the GameCube microphone (unsurprisingly) does not count as an input for this and there is no other way I know of to get audio input into the GameCube. So, the answer is technically no but not because the emulator can't handle it, but because the input is not mapped correctly. Thank you for the great question!
I've seen people use Pokemon Yellow ACE to beat other games really quick Maybe a similar thing could be done to inject NES roms into an AC save file? Hell, maybe it's possible to make a custom ROM that breaks out of the emulator and loads the secret second debug menu in animal crossing
I have a few ideas for some future videos, and I’ve since uploaded an additional one! I’m unsure if I’ll pursue RUclips actively, but if I find something interesting that nobody else made a decent video for I’ll most likely create something to share it. Regardless, thank you for the kind words!
Out of curiosity I got AC set up in an emulator and tried some demoscene releases. Note: I was using the PAL version of AC High Hopes by aspekt: no sound, messed up layers, doesn't advance past the first screen (NTSC hacked version renders the layers properly and plays the music too, but also hangs on the first screen) Kojiki by wAMMa: Game refuses to load it ("The Memory Card in Slot X couldn't be read" error) HEOHdemo by Shiru: Loads fine, has some graphical glitches probably due to incomplete(?) implementation of the MMC3 mapper
interesting that the famicom disk system’s wavetable sound channel doesn’t seem to work in the AC emulator. maybe Clu Clu Land D didn’t use the wavetable channel for any music (the Zelda theme does, and the channel was missing) and thus they never implemented it
I noticed that when you loaded the FDS version of Zelda, the emulator didn't actually use the FDS module's sound channel. Is that something you'll look into in the future? Either way, this is really cool stuff! It got me thinking about how cool it would be to run the VRC6 enhanced version of Castlevania III
I couldn't help but notice the FDS sound emulation isn't as accurate. I know what the original Zelda FDS intro sounds like. It seems the emulator is missing the extra sound samples. It makes me wonder if they modified the FDS game that was included on the disc.
I’ve replied to a couple comments also mentioning this, and I’ve been working through this since this video released. It’s true that the FDS sound channels aren’t appropriately emulated here, but I’m not entirely sure why. The emulator itself 100% is capable of emulating the sound channels, as it works in the Japanese versions of Animal Crossing and the emulator is the same. But, for some reason, injecting ROMs to be played like this does not appropriately emulate the sound channel. I’ve troubleshooted this for several hours and couldn’t come up with a solid solution. If you’re curious about me banging my head against the wall, you can read about my findings and potential clues here: hunter-r.com/posts/ac-fds-audio/
It would be even funnier if you were playing on a Wii U through Virtual Console injection using Nintendont as a base. So you would virtualize Wii through Wii U, then virtualize GameCube through Wii, then run a port of an N64 game through the GameGube's virtualized hardware that is on the Wii's virtual hardware that is on the Wii U's hardware. Plus the cherry on top, running an NES emulator on an N64 port that is running on a GameCube virtualized hardware that is inside the Wii's virtualized hardware that is running inside a Wii U's hardware (That made me reset my brain for a sec).
awesome video! i have a few questions: - what makes Animal Crossing's NES emulation better than WiiVC and NSO? - are there any tools to inject NES games into an N64 Memory Pak for use in Doubutsu no Mori? - what are the limitations of the emulator? i assume it can't handle games with extra hardware (like the VRC6), or any games with crazy mappers (like Action 52). - what are the limitations of metatags? TCRF says they can replace any part of GameCube RAM -- is there a size limit?
Good questions! 1. The emulator's code was extracted from the files and was mostly tested against NSO / NES Classic on various popular games released in North America. Things like latency, audio quality, etc. in Animal Crossing apparently matched more accurately to a stock NES running on a CRT than those other services. This was admittedly not tested by me, but by nensondubois who seemed to know more about what they're talking about. It's likely NSO has been updated to be better than this one by now, and I think the WiiVC was near on par. 2. I do not currently know of any tools to inject NES games into the N64 Memory Pak. The functionality seems to exist in that game, but to my knowledge nobody has created a tool to structure the ROMs correctly for the Memory Pak. 3. There are limitations with certain games and mappers, as expected. Nintendo handles these now by including special scripts to further emulate for those specific games, but these are absent in Animal Crossing. Examples of limitations include the 7-BIT PCM choking because the timing is not accurate and MMC5 being only partially supported with no EXRAM. 4. The PAT metatag can indeed patch the game and alter the GameCube's RAM. There is a size limit of 2MB I believe, so more than enough for NES games or custom code.
You can use the PAT tags to write something into memory capable of loading from SDGecko, or given AC fitting in GC RAM, you could use AC as an Action Replay for other games.
It has become one of my goals to create a bespoke Animal Crossing save with all my favorite villagers and a large hoard of injected NES games to use as an incredibly specialized NES emulation backend
When you emulate an NES game in the port of an N64 game on the built-in GCN of the emulated Wii in dolphin in a virtual machine on your PC... Remotely, with your Android device and a PS4 controller.
Too bad games like Kirby's Adventure won't save, well, they do but when you exit the games and load them up again in Animal Crossing, the save files are gone. So... Yeah, it's best to play AC on an emulator so you can have Save States function as the save files for the NES games you're playing using the NES console furniture.
Cool video! I would love to see you try to run some more NES games that stress the hardware a bit more. Personally, I'd love to see how it would handle the Pac-Man Championship Edition NES demake, which was included as part of Namco Museum Archives Volume 1. This is a modern NES game released by Namco and it uses a custom sound chip for arcade quality sound. I would love to see how the emulator handles the custom sound chip. I'd also like to see Super Mario Bros. 3mix, a very impressive ROM hack of SMB3 running on it, as a lot of older emulators tend to have issues running it. Finally, I'd like to see if certain bootleg games would work on it too, as I think it could potentially struggle with them. It would be cool to see what happens if you used the "ENGAGE RIDLEY" code in Metroid on this emulator.
Update: I decided to try this myself on real hardware using a modded Wii. Pac-Man CE did not work very well at all, it did not properly emulate the custom soundchip, and there were graphical and gameplay glitches that do not appear when played on a real NES console. Haven't tested any other games yet.
You finished it? Yo! Thank you! I've been trying to find a way to get this working for years! In my experience though, the games do not save. Has this been fixed? If so I'll have to update my converter program. I originally got this to play the NES version of Mother. I noticed pretty quickly that it and Kirby's Adventure never saved. So I kind of gave up, but if this now works. I'll be diving back into this full force! :D
What I did was essentially just allow Famicom Disk System ROMs to be played in .QD formats. I'm not sure how long ago you tried this, but Cuyler's program does have a checkbox you can toggle to seemingly support saving. It's been a couple months since I've looked into this but I do know that Animal Crossing's emulator does support saving since The Legend of Zelda saves. Whether or not it's fully implemented with memory card ROM injection I don't remember, but the option to toggle it exists in the frontend application Cuyler made... so maybe?
@@Hunter-R. Really? I never noticed. When I go to the site it says the last update was from 2019. The last release is from 2018. I am unsure how to compile it if it is in that version.
@@Hunter-R. I've been doing a little research on the side. I remember there being those gameboy items and the pocket pikachu. I did a little looking and there is a "super gameboy" for the NES. I was wondering if it would be at all possible to inject a gameboy rom into the nes rom for that after dumping it. And perhaps script a small bit to make the gameboy item actually function through that. Since it would be calling the same NES emulator just from the inventory. I know it would take a lot of work, but to get a working gameboy emulator on animal crossing would be amazing.
@@LVL58Designs I believe the "Super Game Boy" peripheral you're referring to is for the SNES, not the NES -- so unfortunately emulating that hardware wouldn't be possible in stock Animal Crossing. A few people have gotten Game Boy games to work on the original NES, but it requires the Game Boy BIOS and hardware to basically be mimicked as a cartridge. Animal Crossing does have a feature where you can send your NES games to your Game Boy Advance, but unfortunately I don't think we can legitimately emulate Game Boy in Animal Crossing without severely modifying the game by injecting a Game Boy emulator.
@@Hunter-R. The emulator is more than likely programmed in C. Also why not do the same for the gameboy emulator? I see nothing wrong with trying to put in new features into animal crossing. I'll do what I can to help, though I'm not the best programmer.
you can go even further with nintendont on the wii u the wii u is running nintendont with the built in wii mode which nintendont restores the wiis built in gamecube backwards compatabilty
Awesome video! Subscribed! By the way, what about the GBA link NES ROM and emulator transfer feature? Can it be modified to inject different ROMs to a GBA too?
Phantasy Star Online has ACE as a Service -- when you try to log in, it actually downloads executable GameCube code through the broadband adapter to try to validate your Hunter License, and there's no meaningful check that it's legitimate Sega code -- so one could easily use that for the setup. Assuming one has a BBA.
The NES memory card functionality is actually capable of ACE via the patching functionality, and not only can it be used like one would use an Action Replay, but it can ALSO be used to run outright GC homebrew. There are already implementations that do these things. Also, because Animal Crossing can fit into the GameCube's RAM, it means that you could theoretically use Animal Crossing as an Action Replay. It helps that multi-disc GameCube games were a thing. Basically, you could use Animal Crossing as a homebrew loader or Action Replay. Also, if you're loading homebrew off an SDGecko, if you want some trace of legitimacy, use Doubutsu no Mori e+, which was one of the few GameCube games to use the SD Card adapter (identical to SDGecko. It hooks an SD card up to the memory card lines in SPI mode, which is on SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards, but you need homebrew to reach SDHC and SDXC capacity. By-the-book SDUC cards won't work with SPI anymore, but industrial ones will probably have to keep that mode around to not break existing machinery.) Basically, if you use an official adapter with that game (one intended for it. Japanese Pokemon Channel also has official SD support and it also has the ability to be made to run homebrew in the same manner as Colosseum and XD can via saves) you can thus have "justified" homebrew. Oh also unlike using Japanese Pokemon Channel you have the ability to in essence give yourself the means, though of course you need a memory card. If you're clever, you can run GCMM on a Wii without having to install the HBC, and do so using something like a modified str2hax that won't leave any outward signs. Basically, you can go to great extents to "justifiably" run homebrew using Doubutsu no Mori e+ if you so wish, without actually permanently modifying a system.
Since e+ could save to an SD card, I wonder if putting NES/Famicom games on that SD card would work in e+. "QDS 00A170 0050" sounds like it may just be saving 0x0050 bytes from the location 0x00A170, so I wonder if other FDS games really save properly by just copying that value. Maybe only if they save to the exact same position as Clu Clu Land. Even if not, it shows all that would need to be done is locating the correct save positions for each game.
I jumped out of my seat when you mentioned the possibility of this Animal Crossing emulator being Nintendo's best NES emulator so I went ahead and tested it myself with several games that are known to have issues on both Virtual Console and NSO and I am here to say that the NSO emulator is still better than this. If you're curious I tested the following games. 1. Doraemon: Giga Zombie no Gyakushuu - The game boots but with major graphical issues although technically playable since the text is not corrupted. This game does not boot at all on the Virtual Console emulators. 2. Erika to Satoru no Yume Bouken - The game boots and is fully playable but as expected this emulator lacks any kind of expansion audio emulation. This game uses Namco 163 audio and results in most of the game being dead silent. The game also boots on the NSO emulator but with major graphical issues. 3. Gimmick! - Just like with Erika to Satoru no Yume Bouken the expansion audio in this game is also completely missing, this time it uses Sunsoft 5b audio and this is by far the best game to test how accurate sound emulation is and I can tell you even compared to original hardware that this Animal Crossing emulator does not cut it. The audio is very muffled even compared to Virtual Console and on NSO audio is crystal clear by comparison. I have no idea where the claims of this being as accurate to original hardware came from cause even in that context it doesn't even come close. 4. Metal Slader Glory - This game just straight up crashes the emulator and you will be booted out with the error "The Memory Card in Slot A (or B) couldn't be read.". This game boots on the NSO emulator but with major graphical issues. This game has appeared on Virtual Console in Japan with no issues so I'd imagine by the time it gets added officially it will be supported. 5. Summer Carnival '92 RECCA - This not only crashes the emulator but the entire game. For comparison it works perfectly on 3DS Virtual Console and by injecting it into the NSO emulator it also works perfectly. This is just what I found from my own testing but the impression I get is while this is a very impressive emulator from Nintendo I would not consider it to be one of their best in terms of compatibility. If anything its worse in some areas. I feel like NSO will end up being their best emulator to date since with that one it can be updated overtime with each new update it receives.
Out of curiosity, did you test on console or on Dolphin emulator? Dolphin is pretty poor at handling Animal Crossing’s NES emulator, even in the latest dev version. Without tweaking a bunch of settings, the graphics are almost always messed up and need to be adjusted to work properly, and it is the same with audio in some cases. Either way, it’s my understanding that a lot of the Switch Online emulation actually uses Lua scripts on a game by game basis to appropriately handle each game, but I’m admittedly not entirely sure how it works in the case of the NES one. The claims of accuracy on graphic and audio come mostly from testing and comparing the internal emulator in the game files to the base of NSO/NES Classic. This was also tested against North American NES releases, rather than Japanese-exclusive ones. It’s my understanding the Famicom had better sound handling by default, and the NES emulator may be electing to ignore that. There is a lot of interesting choices with the emulator’s sound in the English release of Animal Crossing when testing Japanese games. You can even see in this video that the FDS sound channel isn’t handled here, but it is handled in the Japanese release. A better test for these specific games may be testing Doubutsu no Mori+/e+‘s emulator since they differ in a few ways. But you are probably correct that it is likely NSO has been updated over time to be far more accurate.
The real question now, which NES games can we get animal crossing to send to a Game Boy Advance via the Advance play feature? My guess is it's as simple as ones under a certain size.
If you could make a quick video guide on how to actually inject regular NES roms on my memory card file (I play on Dolphin emulator) I would be so grateful. I can't figure it out since I have 0 knowledge about python or code or github... just enough to use the emulator and find the memory card save file. Thank you for showing this is possible
A few others have also pointed this out, so I’ll copy/paste that reply here: Indeed it doesn’t emulate the sound channel. I noticed this after recording and discussed this on a forum extensively. I tried for several hours to get the sound channel to work, but ultimately couldn’t figure it out. It’s a shame because Animal Crossing does support the extra sound channel, but it doesn’t seem like you’re able to emulate it properly through this process… This annoyed me a lot more than you’d might think and I spent far too long trying to get it to work. If you’re curious about me troubleshooting this process or you have potential ideas on how this can be solved, you can read about it here: hunter-r.com/posts/ac-fds-audio/
@@Hunter-R.My guess is that you should try putting random values in parts of the chunks that we don't have answers for what they do and see what happens.
Unfortunately when i created a new nes file which was maro bros 3, put it into my memory card folder in dolphin nothing workd it still says looking for software to play. what i did wrong?
So, does the game search for a specific address in the memory card, or can you just inject as many NES/Famicom games onto the card as you want/can, and be able to choose which one to play from within Animal Crossing?
Good question! The game does a search of the entire memory card. Meaning you can inject as many NES/Famicom games as you'd like onto the card. The game even has an appropriate UI list to handle multiple games. If you have multiple games on your memory card, you can select which one you want to play from a dropdown list when you interact with the blank NES.
@@Hunter-R.If i had a coin for every convoluted and cool mechanic that got canned on a Nintendo game... They where just toying with so many cool concepts that they did not even have time to implement existing ones lol
Is memory card size the only thing stopping me from having a bunch of these? Could I load a 1019 card with these and load them? Could I potentially get a link to the revised save generator?
I would assume that the verification process that happens when trying to load the ROM means that this can't be used to say, load something else pretending to be an NES ROM, but instead run arbitrary code?
Is there a limit to how many nes games you could add or could you theoretically add the entire nes library cause that would be sick. Just booting up animal crossing to play some nes in my villagers house
There may be a hard limit, but I know you can at least add nine. Animal Crossing's UI can probably handle "infinite" lists, but I haven't tested it. If so, then the only limiting factor would be how many NES ROMs you can fit on your memory card.
If you had told me that you could hack animal crossing to access the emulator and play any game on it, and that it was the best nes emulator Nintendo has made, I'd have have thought it was super cool, but the fact that they literally put an item in there that can already do all that is so much cooler. I wonder why they would do this.
As far as I know the the NES/FDS emulator and their items appear in every version of the first generation Animal Crossing. So, yes that includes Dōbutsu no Mori, Dōbutsu no Mori+, and Dōbutsu no Mori e+! I believe Cuyler’s injection program also has options to inject into the Japanese GameCube games as well, but not the N64 version. I’m not sure if anybody has tried ROM injection on the N64 JP version. There is some leftover functionality to view Famicom ROMs on the Controller Pak, so it probably can be done if I had to guess.
I don’t think Cuyler has got around to it yet as he’s pretty busy with the decompilation project. There may in fact be a better way to write FDS games, but I haven’t touched it in awhile. I think his repo is PR locked so I had to submit directly to him, but if you’re comfortable downloading the source yourself and recompiling, you can do the same change in the video without too much hassle.
@@Hunter-R. that's refreshing to hear! I know well first- hand how busy one can get, so keeping up with promised changes on a repo/project can take way longer to actually get to. Thanks for confirming it's still on the table though! I know how "hard" it can be for end-users to grasp this kind of stuff.
I have no idea why Nintendo would include an item like this is their game. And the fact that on top of that it is straight up the best nes emulator Nintendo has ever made is crazy. Legitimately feels like a myth i would've believed when I was ten
0:35 Big inception moment. 2:30 I just felt like getting an NES Classic was unnecessary and I didn't want to deal with scalpers. No save states? LAAAAAAAAME!
Many people have pointed out that the Famicom Disk System's extra sound channel is not properly emulated here, and all of you are correct! I noticed this after recording and tried for several hours to get it working, but ultimately gave up. I'm 100% certain that Animal Crossing is technically capable of handling this sound channel since all the functionality is there in the code, but I'm not sure exactly how to structure the ROMs to load with this sound channel.
If you'd like to read about my troubleshooting on this or if you'd like some clues on how to potentially solve this yourself, I made an entire post about it here: hunter-r.com/posts/ac-fds-emulation/
@@CCyoutub Doubutsu no Mori+ actually has both versions of The Legend of Zelda; the cartridge one and the FDS one. In fact, all Japanese versions of Animal Crossing seem to appropriately handle the extra sound channel when playing FDS games. Check the link in the main pinned comment if you're curious on more information.
@@Hunter-R. I was gonna make a joke about not having the sound channel ruining my plans to play the superior version of Castlevania 3 in Animal Crossing, but that's pretty interesting. You have any idea why that's the case?
@@no64256 You chances are actually still ruined, because even in Japan it was a cartridge game, however, unlike the North American and European releases of the game which "ported" the game to the "standard" Nintendo MMC5 chipset, the Japanese release uses a custom chipset developed by Konami themselves called the VR6 that, in addition to preforming functions similar to the MMC5, generates two extra pulse wave sound channels and a sawtooth sound channel.
@@craigtheduck oh, coulda sworn Castlevania 3 was a Disk System game like the first 2
@@no64256 It's not.
Making the most accurate in-house emulator for your most iconic console only to put it into one old game as optional minigames and never touch it again is a very Nintendo thing to do
lol
Ah Nintendo, proud purveyor of ridiculous decisions.
Sure they did use it in Wii??
@@wingiu5695Wii’s virtual console is a different emulator
Flog moment
"Yo what emulator do you use for NES games?"
*"Animal Crossing"*
Underrated comment needs more likes
i find it hilarious that the animal crossing gamecube disk is just some absolute unit containing so many seemingly random things like 18 entire NES games, an NES emulator, and a BIOS
What's even crazier is that it's just a port of an N64 game that had all of that
Quite ambitious in my opinion. Also someone created a means of using an AC disc as a source of FDS BIOS and NES games
@@LilacMonarch well, the gamecube disk is compatible with future consoles. for example, a wii u has a wii emulator built-in, and the wii has a gamecube emulator built in, and the animal crossing gamecube game has an NES emulator built-in, so you can play NES games on a wii u
@@Totally_BonkersI don't think the Wii U allows gamecube games using the Wii emulator
@@pingableuser No, plus it has nothing to do with emulation. GameCube games run natively on Wii and Wii games run natively on Wii U. GameCube games can run natively on Wii U too, it's just that Nintendo disabled that functionality due to the lack of controller and memory card ports. And you can play NES games on Wii U without Animal Crossing - just install Virtual Console ROMs.
Fun fact: the ambient music played on the GameCube's system menu is actually the Famicom Disk System startup theme, slowed waaaaaayyy down.
I recently found this out myself. Super cool detail!
By 19x
Why did i just realize that the background he uses for his videos is just the animal crossing grass texture but it's black
Funfact: Zelda and Metroid where both released for the FDS. Metroid on FDS took advantage of the save feature to save your progress (the cartridge version had a password system while the FDS system had save files.)
You make really concise and accessible videos for someone of your channel size. I hope more people find your channel and you have a big break soon! Keep up the good work!
Ok, uh… I somehow just realized you only have 5 videos at the time I’m writing this and don’t even have 1,000 subscribers yet. (I better subscribe already then, haha!) I sure hope your channel picks up soon with more people seeing them because I’m really enjoying all your videos!
he blew up.
He has 5K subscribers already, jesus.
@@raaymonf Severe Case of Quality content
Source?
he has 7k now
it's actually even MORE crazy if you make a wii u inject of the game, so it'd be
a wii u, running a wii, running a gamecube, running a port of an n64 game, running an nes emulator
something something ninception
and then you used cemu-
@@Kabosu_DogeAnd you use Cemu for Windows on Linux using Wine
@@Kabosu_Doge and next you use virtualbox-
Hey man I've been binge watching your channel all day. I have got to say, I love your content. Very well organized, edited, and explained. I watch it while I work on programming. Keep it up!!
0:05 Hunter with 37 subs, super cute lol! Amazing how much you've grown in a year and a half!
Ahhh, don't go back to these old videos! I hate them -- they're so bad! But thank you for your support over the last year. It's been fun to watch the channel grow as I get better at narration and editing... 😳
@@Hunter-R. Haha, they are still pretty good! I randomly got it recommended to me.. I enjoy your content a lot even though i've never played any of the animal crossing games, i'd watch you talk about anything related to how games work I think, so if you ever run out of ideas, I'm sure there would be loads of people willing to watch you talk about other games :) I've been subscribed since the 9th of Jan, 2024 (I just checked) which is when you had ~22K subs, insane how much you've grown even this year :)
The Disk System's extra sound channel doesn't seem to be emulated as you can hear on the title screen in Zelda.
Good ears! Indeed it doesn’t emulate the sound channel. I noticed this after recording and discussed this on a forum extensively. I tried for several hours to get the sound channel to work, but ultimately couldn’t figure it out. It’s a shame because Animal Crossing does support the extra sound channel, but it doesn’t seem like you’re able to emulate it properly through this process…
This annoyed me a lot more than you’d might think and I spent far too long trying to get it to work.
If you’re curious about me troubleshooting this process or you have potential ideas on how this can be solved, you can read about it here:
hunter-r.com/posts/ac-fds-audio/
@@Hunter-R.the link doesn't seem to work. Did you take the forum down?
@@anjoliebarrios8906 Link should be fixed.
It requires fiddling to enable
It is absolutely criminal how great your videos are. Honestly I’ve never played AC, I literally got Wild World today and played for the first time, but your videos are such great comforts. You’re an amazing creator and you deserve more recognition man
Very high praise. Thank you so much, it means a lot. 😄
such an underrated channel, this is so cool! please keep making these videos, your channel will get the recognition you deserve in due time. :') I love this kind of content, and your video style is so great
What?! It calls the register of the memory card and looks for roms? That's so freaking cool. AC on the GameCube is such a wonderful game, you can tell the team who worked on it just went wild with thinking of ways to utilize every part of the GameCube inside and out.
I mean, the GameCube uses the internal clock, the memory card (for non save purposes), the e-reader, the GBA and probably a bunch more I'm not familiar with.
are u a bot
@@teddy4271 Nope. [Beep Boop]
10:24 : NOt exactly 100%. See, The Famicom had a built-in microphone in its second controller. The first version of The Legend of Zelda used that microphone to kill the polls voice (those creatures with ear that doesn't react to the flute at all!) So the clue given by the old man in that Polls Voice hates loud noises is useless outside of Japan because the NES had no way to emulate your voice. (But Nintendo knew that so they've reprogrammed the Polls Voice so that an arrow could insta-kill them instead. I tried that trick in the FDS version, it did nothing.)
i just binged all your videos and they're actually some of my favorites ive ever watched. definetly subscribing so i dont miss future ones
0:35 if you play on the Wii U, it goes through the Wii emulator which goes through the GameCube emulator which goes through the n64 emulator to emulate the nes
I mean, the wii and gamecube aren't actually emulators
@@malick9549 and animal crossing on gamecube is a port, not an emulated n64 game.
You can't play GameCube games on a Wii u without a modded system. The Wii literally just had a GameCube inside it, and this was removed on later versions of the console and the Wii u.
Can't run a Gamecube disc in a Wii U
actually its all technily running natively, the wii menu isnt emulated, its actually just the entire wii operating system running on the wiiu, the same thing for the gamecube. when nintendo ported the wii os to the wiiu they never removed the side that handles gamecube, so homebrew for the wii to foward gamecube games can run natively on the wiiu.
TLDR the gamecube wii and wiiu al use powerpc architecture and are all built of the one that came before it, so backwards compatibility is handled natively.
This is terrific but I don't think the emulator is emulating the extra sound channel on the FDS so the music is wrong. Too bad they didn't go the extra little bit to do that.
I noticed that too, but I wonder if they just didn't bother too since Clu Clu Land is one of those direct ports from cartridge with few differences. I don't know what games are available in the Japanese version, but if they don't display the BIOS, they can get away with using the cartridge version of Zelda 1. I can't think of other games in the US version that need FDS support other than Metroid and that's often dropped in Japan since no one cares about it. Their loss 💀
Actually I've looked at the code and it even supports the FDS audio's FM modulation feature. Something just isn't enabling it.
I don't know much about computer science so your videos are really interesting. Please keep making them. :)
This is amazing! Concise explanation, great job. And I can't believe that I'm still finding out stuff like this that's entirely new to me, about a game that I loved so much two decades ago. Wow!
A hidden gem of a channel?! Subscribed
It gets even DEEPER. Using only the system ram of a Gameboy advance you can play emulated NES games obtained from an N64 game on a gamecube disk running on a nintendo wii.
Yep, I can do that indeed~
Your videos are excellent! I love technical dives into older games with a lot to tell
This is a pretty decent video. Impressed by the perseverance to figure out the QDS.
I remember I had my whole basement set up with different nes games and had the blank one next to my TV up stairs. Sometimes I would just play ac to play those games, I loved playing pinball
I've just watched your videos and they're really interesting! I hope you do more in the close future!
Cyler hasnt update that program since 2018 so the new update with the famicom disk support gonna be a big update
Your vids are like crack, it's so great to see people so dedicated to the older AC titles.
out of extremely morbid curiosity: did they bother emulating the Famicom's microphone on the second controller if you have the gull to use a GameCube microphone? the answer is almost certainly "ABSOLUTELY NOT" but we wonder if the game will, at any point, try to stop you before it's too late.
I was also curious about this and concluded that the emulator the game uses can handle microphone support if you theoretically force the input to occur. That is, if you modify the game to where every input you press emulates a loud scream coming from an audio input on the second port, the game will appropriately handle it.
But, the GameCube microphone (unsurprisingly) does not count as an input for this and there is no other way I know of to get audio input into the GameCube. So, the answer is technically no but not because the emulator can't handle it, but because the input is not mapped correctly.
Thank you for the great question!
I think the dk bongos have a microphone, right?
@@ThePaperKhan the mic on the bongos maps to a button press
I've seen people use Pokemon Yellow ACE to beat other games really quick
Maybe a similar thing could be done to inject NES roms into an AC save file?
Hell, maybe it's possible to make a custom ROM that breaks out of the emulator and loads the secret second debug menu in animal crossing
Could you maybe make more of these videos? Please?! I need content like this💻🕹️
I have a few ideas for some future videos, and I’ve since uploaded an additional one! I’m unsure if I’ll pursue RUclips actively, but if I find something interesting that nobody else made a decent video for I’ll most likely create something to share it.
Regardless, thank you for the kind words!
I really like your videos. Keep the good work
I love decompilations like this. Really cool and would love to see more :)
You’re like the decino (guy on RUclips that does Doom analysis videos) of Animal Crossing and I love it.
Out of curiosity I got AC set up in an emulator and tried some demoscene releases.
Note: I was using the PAL version of AC
High Hopes by aspekt: no sound, messed up layers, doesn't advance past the first screen
(NTSC hacked version renders the layers properly and plays the music too, but also hangs on the first screen)
Kojiki by wAMMa: Game refuses to load it ("The Memory Card in Slot X couldn't be read" error)
HEOHdemo by Shiru: Loads fine, has some graphical glitches probably due to incomplete(?) implementation of the MMC3 mapper
Love it! Keep up the great work!!
Really good video dude enjoyed it keep on
interesting that the famicom disk system’s wavetable sound channel doesn’t seem to work in the AC emulator. maybe Clu Clu Land D didn’t use the wavetable channel for any music (the Zelda theme does, and the channel was missing) and thus they never implemented it
No it exists it just has to be enabled properly
@@stgigamovement oh cool! i’d love to see a video where it is
So excited to try this!
I noticed that when you loaded the FDS version of Zelda, the emulator didn't actually use the FDS module's sound channel. Is that something you'll look into in the future? Either way, this is really cool stuff! It got me thinking about how cool it would be to run the VRC6 enhanced version of Castlevania III
It just needs to be enabled properly
The animal crossing devs on their way to add the most complicated random shit to the game, just to barley use it
I couldn't help but notice the FDS sound emulation isn't as accurate. I know what the original Zelda FDS intro sounds like. It seems the emulator is missing the extra sound samples. It makes me wonder if they modified the FDS game that was included on the disc.
I’ve replied to a couple comments also mentioning this, and I’ve been working through this since this video released.
It’s true that the FDS sound channels aren’t appropriately emulated here, but I’m not entirely sure why. The emulator itself 100% is capable of emulating the sound channels, as it works in the Japanese versions of Animal Crossing and the emulator is the same. But, for some reason, injecting ROMs to be played like this does not appropriately emulate the sound channel.
I’ve troubleshooted this for several hours and couldn’t come up with a solid solution. If you’re curious about me banging my head against the wall, you can read about my findings and potential clues here:
hunter-r.com/posts/ac-fds-audio/
My guess is that there's something in the header chunks that needs to be changed.
Make more videos like this!!! This is awesome and interesting stuff
It would be even funnier if you were playing on a Wii U through Virtual Console injection using Nintendont as a base. So you would virtualize Wii through Wii U, then virtualize GameCube through Wii, then run a port of an N64 game through the GameGube's virtualized hardware that is on the Wii's virtual hardware that is on the Wii U's hardware. Plus the cherry on top, running an NES emulator on an N64 port that is running on a GameCube virtualized hardware that is inside the Wii's virtualized hardware that is running inside a Wii U's hardware (That made me reset my brain for a sec).
Perhaps I’ll set that all up one day just to make a funny little clip out of it 🤣
awesome video! i have a few questions:
- what makes Animal Crossing's NES emulation better than WiiVC and NSO?
- are there any tools to inject NES games into an N64 Memory Pak for use in Doubutsu no Mori?
- what are the limitations of the emulator? i assume it can't handle games with extra hardware (like the VRC6), or any games with crazy mappers (like Action 52).
- what are the limitations of metatags? TCRF says they can replace any part of GameCube RAM -- is there a size limit?
Good questions!
1. The emulator's code was extracted from the files and was mostly tested against NSO / NES Classic on various popular games released in North America. Things like latency, audio quality, etc. in Animal Crossing apparently matched more accurately to a stock NES running on a CRT than those other services. This was admittedly not tested by me, but by nensondubois who seemed to know more about what they're talking about. It's likely NSO has been updated to be better than this one by now, and I think the WiiVC was near on par.
2. I do not currently know of any tools to inject NES games into the N64 Memory Pak. The functionality seems to exist in that game, but to my knowledge nobody has created a tool to structure the ROMs correctly for the Memory Pak.
3. There are limitations with certain games and mappers, as expected. Nintendo handles these now by including special scripts to further emulate for those specific games, but these are absent in Animal Crossing. Examples of limitations include the 7-BIT PCM choking because the timing is not accurate and MMC5 being only partially supported with no EXRAM.
4. The PAT metatag can indeed patch the game and alter the GameCube's RAM. There is a size limit of 2MB I believe, so more than enough for NES games or custom code.
You can use the PAT tags to write something into memory capable of loading from SDGecko, or given AC fitting in GC RAM, you could use AC as an Action Replay for other games.
It has become one of my goals to create a bespoke Animal Crossing save with all my favorite villagers and a large hoard of injected NES games to use as an incredibly specialized NES emulation backend
When you emulate an NES game in the port of an N64 game on the built-in GCN of the emulated Wii in dolphin in a virtual machine on your PC... Remotely, with your Android device and a PS4 controller.
Too bad games like Kirby's Adventure won't save, well, they do but when you exit the games and load them up again in Animal Crossing, the save files are gone. So... Yeah, it's best to play AC on an emulator so you can have Save States function as the save files for the NES games you're playing using the NES console furniture.
Weird that such a game wouldn't save...but LOZ does?!
Cool video! I would love to see you try to run some more NES games that stress the hardware a bit more. Personally, I'd love to see how it would handle the Pac-Man Championship Edition NES demake, which was included as part of Namco Museum Archives Volume 1. This is a modern NES game released by Namco and it uses a custom sound chip for arcade quality sound. I would love to see how the emulator handles the custom sound chip. I'd also like to see Super Mario Bros. 3mix, a very impressive ROM hack of SMB3 running on it, as a lot of older emulators tend to have issues running it. Finally, I'd like to see if certain bootleg games would work on it too, as I think it could potentially struggle with them. It would be cool to see what happens if you used the "ENGAGE RIDLEY" code in Metroid on this emulator.
Update: I decided to try this myself on real hardware using a modded Wii. Pac-Man CE did not work very well at all, it did not properly emulate the custom soundchip, and there were graphical and gameplay glitches that do not appear when played on a real NES console. Haven't tested any other games yet.
@@mjdxp5688Keep us updated, as I plan to do the same, after my physical copy arrives, since I DO have means of editing my Memory Card's contents now.
Paid NSO and classic edition emulators: what's a 'fog'?
20 year old AC and 5 minute demos on Smash Bros: Emulates physics
Would you ever do a follow up on this video about this discovery allowing the GameCube to run homebrew software?
Patience! ;)
Kind of makes me wonder if Rev A. Action 52's Alfredo & Jigsaw work.
How well does it work with games using memory mappers or enhancement chips (I.e, Japanese ver. of Castlevania III, etc.)
You finished it? Yo! Thank you! I've been trying to find a way to get this working for years!
In my experience though, the games do not save. Has this been fixed? If so I'll have to update my converter program. I originally got this to play the NES version of Mother. I noticed pretty quickly that it and Kirby's Adventure never saved. So I kind of gave up, but if this now works. I'll be diving back into this full force! :D
What I did was essentially just allow Famicom Disk System ROMs to be played in .QD formats. I'm not sure how long ago you tried this, but Cuyler's program does have a checkbox you can toggle to seemingly support saving. It's been a couple months since I've looked into this but I do know that Animal Crossing's emulator does support saving since The Legend of Zelda saves. Whether or not it's fully implemented with memory card ROM injection I don't remember, but the option to toggle it exists in the frontend application Cuyler made... so maybe?
@@Hunter-R. Really? I never noticed. When I go to the site it says the last update was from 2019. The last release is from 2018. I am unsure how to compile it if it is in that version.
@@Hunter-R.
I've been doing a little research on the side. I remember there being those gameboy items and the pocket pikachu.
I did a little looking and there is a "super gameboy" for the NES. I was wondering if it would be at all possible to inject a gameboy rom into the nes rom for that after dumping it. And perhaps script a small bit to make the gameboy item actually function through that. Since it would be calling the same NES emulator just from the inventory.
I know it would take a lot of work, but to get a working gameboy emulator on animal crossing would be amazing.
@@LVL58Designs I believe the "Super Game Boy" peripheral you're referring to is for the SNES, not the NES -- so unfortunately emulating that hardware wouldn't be possible in stock Animal Crossing.
A few people have gotten Game Boy games to work on the original NES, but it requires the Game Boy BIOS and hardware to basically be mimicked as a cartridge.
Animal Crossing does have a feature where you can send your NES games to your Game Boy Advance, but unfortunately I don't think we can legitimately emulate Game Boy in Animal Crossing without severely modifying the game by injecting a Game Boy emulator.
@@Hunter-R. The emulator is more than likely programmed in C. Also why not do the same for the gameboy emulator? I see nothing wrong with trying to put in new features into animal crossing. I'll do what I can to help, though I'm not the best programmer.
I got the Blank NES from Redd for 12,000 bells
you can go even further with nintendont on the wii u
the wii u is running nintendont with the built in wii mode which nintendont restores the wiis built in gamecube backwards compatabilty
9:20
PUYO PUYO MENTIONED
0:35 and THEN you mod your wii u to play GameCube games on an emulated Wii, that the emulated Wii emulates!
I'd love to watch you play NES rom's using Animal Crossing's emulator.
While playing Zelda: The Hyrule Fantasy, I didn't hear what I presume is the FM audio channel playing.
The game even supports the FM mode, it just somehow needs to be enabled properly.
What’s even crazier is running nintendont in the Wii mode of the Wii U and running the nes games through ac GameCube in nentendont
True! Going from Wii U > Wii > GameCube > N64 > NES all in one game is kinda crazy!
2:26 how accurate is this compared to the 3ds and Wii U NES emulator?
So your telling me, I can play the Ttte prototype IN ANIMAL CROSSING?!
Awesome video! Subscribed! By the way, what about the GBA link NES ROM and emulator transfer feature? Can it be modified to inject different ROMs to a GBA too?
Can't wait for somebody to get ACE on Animal Crossing and use it to inject a NES game, kind of like the Triforce% glitch in Ocarina of Time
Phantasy Star Online has ACE as a Service -- when you try to log in, it actually downloads executable GameCube code through the broadband adapter to try to validate your Hunter License, and there's no meaningful check that it's legitimate Sega code -- so one could easily use that for the setup. Assuming one has a BBA.
The NES memory card functionality is actually capable of ACE via the patching functionality, and not only can it be used like one would use an Action Replay, but it can ALSO be used to run outright GC homebrew. There are already implementations that do these things. Also, because Animal Crossing can fit into the GameCube's RAM, it means that you could theoretically use Animal Crossing as an Action Replay. It helps that multi-disc GameCube games were a thing. Basically, you could use Animal Crossing as a homebrew loader or Action Replay. Also, if you're loading homebrew off an SDGecko, if you want some trace of legitimacy, use Doubutsu no Mori e+, which was one of the few GameCube games to use the SD Card adapter (identical to SDGecko. It hooks an SD card up to the memory card lines in SPI mode, which is on SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards, but you need homebrew to reach SDHC and SDXC capacity. By-the-book SDUC cards won't work with SPI anymore, but industrial ones will probably have to keep that mode around to not break existing machinery.) Basically, if you use an official adapter with that game (one intended for it. Japanese Pokemon Channel also has official SD support and it also has the ability to be made to run homebrew in the same manner as Colosseum and XD can via saves) you can thus have "justified" homebrew. Oh also unlike using Japanese Pokemon Channel you have the ability to in essence give yourself the means, though of course you need a memory card. If you're clever, you can run GCMM on a Wii without having to install the HBC, and do so using something like a modified str2hax that won't leave any outward signs. Basically, you can go to great extents to "justifiably" run homebrew using Doubutsu no Mori e+ if you so wish, without actually permanently modifying a system.
Since e+ could save to an SD card, I wonder if putting NES/Famicom games on that SD card would work in e+.
"QDS 00A170 0050" sounds like it may just be saving 0x0050 bytes from the location 0x00A170, so I wonder if other FDS games really save properly by just copying that value. Maybe only if they save to the exact same position as Clu Clu Land.
Even if not, it shows all that would need to be done is locating the correct save positions for each game.
Now I Can Play Grand Dad On My Animal Crossing
Playing a famicom disc system game on a NES emulator in Animal Crossing on a Game Cube emulator on the Wii. How much deeper can it go?
Playing it on a modded Wii U with Nintendon't
How good is Animal Crossing''s mapper support?
Clu Clu land was also released in EU
Hey, Hunter-R. Which is the in game code for obtaining the blank nes item?
I jumped out of my seat when you mentioned the possibility of this Animal Crossing emulator being Nintendo's best NES emulator so I went ahead and tested it myself with several games that are known to have issues on both Virtual Console and NSO and I am here to say that the NSO emulator is still better than this. If you're curious I tested the following games.
1. Doraemon: Giga Zombie no Gyakushuu - The game boots but with major graphical issues although technically playable since the text is not corrupted. This game does not boot at all on the Virtual Console emulators.
2. Erika to Satoru no Yume Bouken - The game boots and is fully playable but as expected this emulator lacks any kind of expansion audio emulation. This game uses Namco 163 audio and results in most of the game being dead silent. The game also boots on the NSO emulator but with major graphical issues.
3. Gimmick! - Just like with Erika to Satoru no Yume Bouken the expansion audio in this game is also completely missing, this time it uses Sunsoft 5b audio and this is by far the best game to test how accurate sound emulation is and I can tell you even compared to original hardware that this Animal Crossing emulator does not cut it. The audio is very muffled even compared to Virtual Console and on NSO audio is crystal clear by comparison. I have no idea where the claims of this being as accurate to original hardware came from cause even in that context it doesn't even come close.
4. Metal Slader Glory - This game just straight up crashes the emulator and you will be booted out with the error "The Memory Card in Slot A (or B) couldn't be read.". This game boots on the NSO emulator but with major graphical issues. This game has appeared on Virtual Console in Japan with no issues so I'd imagine by the time it gets added officially it will be supported.
5. Summer Carnival '92 RECCA - This not only crashes the emulator but the entire game. For comparison it works perfectly on 3DS Virtual Console and by injecting it into the NSO emulator it also works perfectly.
This is just what I found from my own testing but the impression I get is while this is a very impressive emulator from Nintendo I would not consider it to be one of their best in terms of compatibility. If anything its worse in some areas. I feel like NSO will end up being their best emulator to date since with that one it can be updated overtime with each new update it receives.
Out of curiosity, did you test on console or on Dolphin emulator? Dolphin is pretty poor at handling Animal Crossing’s NES emulator, even in the latest dev version. Without tweaking a bunch of settings, the graphics are almost always messed up and need to be adjusted to work properly, and it is the same with audio in some cases.
Either way, it’s my understanding that a lot of the Switch Online emulation actually uses Lua scripts on a game by game basis to appropriately handle each game, but I’m admittedly not entirely sure how it works in the case of the NES one.
The claims of accuracy on graphic and audio come mostly from testing and comparing the internal emulator in the game files to the base of NSO/NES Classic. This was also tested against North American NES releases, rather than Japanese-exclusive ones. It’s my understanding the Famicom had better sound handling by default, and the NES emulator may be electing to ignore that. There is a lot of interesting choices with the emulator’s sound in the English release of Animal Crossing when testing Japanese games. You can even see in this video that the FDS sound channel isn’t handled here, but it is handled in the Japanese release. A better test for these specific games may be testing Doubutsu no Mori+/e+‘s emulator since they differ in a few ways. But you are probably correct that it is likely NSO has been updated over time to be far more accurate.
AC's is basically iNES
Just mind blowing😁
3:23 if there is a single gamecube game that can ACE memory edit, then I consider it fully vanilla
You madlad. Props.
The real question now, which NES games can we get animal crossing to send to a Game Boy Advance via the Advance play feature? My guess is it's as simple as ones under a certain size.
If you could make a quick video guide on how to actually inject regular NES roms on my memory card file (I play on Dolphin emulator) I would be so grateful. I can't figure it out since I have 0 knowledge about python or code or github... just enough to use the emulator and find the memory card save file. Thank you for showing this is possible
Huh, I just noticed from Zelda - there's no FDS expansion audio, so that's weird. Does the emulator not support that?
A few others have also pointed this out, so I’ll copy/paste that reply here:
Indeed it doesn’t emulate the sound channel. I noticed this after recording and discussed this on a forum extensively. I tried for several hours to get the sound channel to work, but ultimately couldn’t figure it out. It’s a shame because Animal Crossing does support the extra sound channel, but it doesn’t seem like you’re able to emulate it properly through this process…
This annoyed me a lot more than you’d might think and I spent far too long trying to get it to work.
If you’re curious about me troubleshooting this process or you have potential ideas on how this can be solved, you can read about it here:
hunter-r.com/posts/ac-fds-audio/
@@Hunter-R. Huh, that's very interesting!
@@Hunter-R.My guess is that you should try putting random values in parts of the chunks that we don't have answers for what they do and see what happens.
Some of these injected ROM have issues. For example, Kirby's Adventure doesn't save. Kinda weird since The Legend of Zelda actually saves fine.
Okay, cool! But how do I covert the famicom roms into the quick disk format?
Unfortunately when i created a new nes file which was maro bros 3, put it into my memory card folder in dolphin nothing workd it still says looking for software to play. what i did wrong?
So, does the game search for a specific address in the memory card, or can you just inject as many NES/Famicom games onto the card as you want/can, and be able to choose which one to play from within Animal Crossing?
Good question! The game does a search of the entire memory card. Meaning you can inject as many NES/Famicom games as you'd like onto the card. The game even has an appropriate UI list to handle multiple games. If you have multiple games on your memory card, you can select which one you want to play from a dropdown list when you interact with the blank NES.
@@Hunter-R.If i had a coin for every convoluted and cool mechanic that got canned on a Nintendo game...
They where just toying with so many cool concepts that they did not even have time to implement existing ones lol
@@rompevuevitos222they even had apparent plans to bring back some FDS contests.
So you can play LJN games, Dr. Jekyll & mr. Hyde, Action 52
Is memory card size the only thing stopping me from having a bunch of these? Could I load a 1019 card with these and load them? Could I potentially get a link to the revised save generator?
You could even use a 2043 (third-party but a possible size)
I would assume that the verification process that happens when trying to load the ROM means that this can't be used to say, load something else pretending to be an NES ROM, but instead run arbitrary code?
Is this compatible with the link cable, like most of the existing NES games? I suppose I could check for myself 😂
Is there a limit to how many nes games you could add or could you theoretically add the entire nes library cause that would be sick. Just booting up animal crossing to play some nes in my villagers house
There may be a hard limit, but I know you can at least add nine. Animal Crossing's UI can probably handle "infinite" lists, but I haven't tested it. If so, then the only limiting factor would be how many NES ROMs you can fit on your memory card.
If you had told me that you could hack animal crossing to access the emulator and play any game on it, and that it was the best nes emulator Nintendo has made, I'd have have thought it was super cool, but the fact that they literally put an item in there that can already do all that is so much cooler. I wonder why they would do this.
This is amazing! Can you share the save file of your city so we can test this faster?
its for the animal crossing memory card it came with a nes game on it iirc
I'm curious if this emulator exists in Dōbutsu no Mori? (Japanese version for N64)
As far as I know the the NES/FDS emulator and their items appear in every version of the first generation Animal Crossing.
So, yes that includes Dōbutsu no Mori, Dōbutsu no Mori+, and Dōbutsu no Mori e+! I believe Cuyler’s injection program also has options to inject into the Japanese GameCube games as well, but not the N64 version.
I’m not sure if anybody has tried ROM injection on the N64 JP version. There is some leftover functionality to view Famicom ROMs on the Controller Pak, so it probably can be done if I had to guess.
Yes, it can be done, and on the iQue Player version too.
So now, with the wireless GameCube memory cards that can use 128gb sd cards, theoretically, you could have an entire NES library in animal crossing?
Absolutely bonkers
Hm, am I blind or has the patch you mentioned not yet been PR'd to the linked repo? I don't see any changes in there this year
I don’t think Cuyler has got around to it yet as he’s pretty busy with the decompilation project. There may in fact be a better way to write FDS games, but I haven’t touched it in awhile. I think his repo is PR locked so I had to submit directly to him, but if you’re comfortable downloading the source yourself and recompiling, you can do the same change in the video without too much hassle.
@@Hunter-R. that's refreshing to hear!
I know well first- hand how busy one can get, so keeping up with promised changes on a repo/project can take way longer to actually get to.
Thanks for confirming it's still on the table though! I know how "hard" it can be for end-users to grasp this kind of stuff.
The expansion audio does not work unfortunately.
I have no idea why Nintendo would include an item like this is their game. And the fact that on top of that it is straight up the best nes emulator Nintendo has ever made is crazy. Legitimately feels like a myth i would've believed when I was ten
0:35 Big inception moment. 2:30 I just felt like getting an NES Classic was unnecessary and I didn't want to deal with scalpers. No save states? LAAAAAAAAME!
very cool