Farewell
Hopefully he comes back at some point, but he's done more than enough for the cause of emulation - to be honest I can't think of anyone offhand who's done more, not just in his push for emulator accuracy but his preservation efforts as well, and his role in changing the way people think about emulation. I've been following his work for over 15 years, and if this is the end for byuu, it's certainly a well deserved retirement.
For those who don't know who Byuu is, he is a console emulation author best known for BSNES, a SNES emulator. Before he started work on BSNES in 2004, snes emulation was vastly inaccurate. You can look at SNES9X 1.43 or ZSNES 1.40 if you want to see what they were like (assuming they still run). Byuu decided to make an accuracy focused emulator. That itself was very rare back then, as many emu authors concentrated on getting games working, and you ended up with a lot of black boxes, high level code which kind of worked, but the authors didn't know why because they didn't actually know what the original snes was doing to achieve the end result.
Byuu focused on accuracy, and the result at first was a very slow emulator that only those with high end machines could play. Many people who frequented emulator forums back then were used to emulators that would run on toasters, and disdained bsnes and often slung very rude comments Byuu's way. That state of affairs would continue for many years - the emulation scene was a very different place back then (not that he doesn't still get a lot of mud unfairly slung his way).
But Byuu persevered, and had help from some very talented people along the way. He also managed to find someone willing to decap many of the snes chips at a reduced rate (who amusing called himseld "dr decap"), which was a VERY expensive process. It was expensive even with the mates rates, but byuu got the money together (including a lot of his own), got the chips decapped and with that knowledge made bsnes even better.
Today, Bsnes has a compatibility of 100%, with no known bugs over the ENTIRE snes library. For years he has also helped the snes9x devs port improvements back there, which in some ways takes him back full circle to the days he was asking matthew kendora (then snes9x lead developer) questions on the old snes9x boards before he started bsnes.
He has also been a big proponent of preservation, and bought the entire catalogue of the JP and US snes library so he could dump them himself and make sure we had good dumps for every game. Some he'd buy more then once to find revisions of the same game (devs would sometimes reissue a game if there was a particularly nasty bug etc), and work with others to get to dump the EU library.
He's also done various other things, such as cocreate libsnes, which retroarch was based off, and bps, a much safer to use patching standard than ips.
Byuu has also written articles on both emulation accuracy and preservation, and these combined with his own work on both and passionate opinions has helped to move the emulation scene to a point where accuracy and preservation are considered essential.
Last edited:
