0010_RetroArch SNES cores - slacknk/slackretro GitHub Wiki

Difference between SNES-cores for RetroArch?

Beetle bsnes is a fork of mednafen-snes, which is itself a super-old fork of bsnes (~v060). It’s just there as a side effect of porting/forking mednafen for its other cores. I would prefer to offer their new “faust” core instead, since it’s at least its own new thing but it also is semi-broken because it’s new and undeveloped.

3x bsnes is self-explanatory. The mercury cores are almost identical except we added back in the option to use special chip HLE (because, for example, Mega Man X2/3 requires an overclocked i7 to reach full speed with cx4 LLE) and made some small speed optimizations at the expense of code readability (it results in ~10% speedup, IIRC). We would drop the mainline bsnes cores in favor of the very similar “mercury” cores except a vocal segment of bsnes users are either under the erroneous impression that the mercury changes make it less accurate at default settings (you have to explicitly enable 2 core options to switch to the less accurate special chip HLE).

bsnes c++98 is a special fork from around v085 that’s been backported to work with older compilers. Many platforms we support are stuck with super-old compilers that don’t support the whiz-bang latest c++ features that byuu likes to use in bsnes mainline. I agree that this one doesn’t need to be in the online updater but it is, so whatever.

Snes9x with no date is the up-to-date mainline core that has upstream integration (i.e., the “official” snes9x). The date-stamped forks are snapshots from the year their code is based on. Snes9x has gotten slower over time as its accuracy has improved, such that many of the weaker platforms we support can’t run mainline at full speed, so we have older forks that provide more favorable performance thresholds at the cost of accuracy. The various MAME and FBA cores follow the same convention.