> Well i got tired of eleven years of development of my NES emu. So here i go with emudeving for SNES.
If you want to move on, it's a great next step. But I'll warn you that the thrill of working on one's first emulator doesn't come back by doing more systems. The slog is always there a few months in, when you're back to playing bug whack-a-mole. I'm in it right now with the GBA.
> Granted, the NES has a lot of tight timing that must be emulated properly in addition to all of those mappers, I still think many would find the SNES more challenging.
The NES mappers turned out to be really cute. Most are just a dozen lines of code. The "beast" is the MMC5, which is about 1/10th the complexity of the SNES' SA-1, and that's before the memory conflict controller that even I don't dare emulate. (I am sure my complaints on the SA-1 are similarly cute to the Dolphin team emulating the Hollywood GPU, of course.)
However, the SNES decapping and LLE project has greatly reduced the pain of coprocessor emulation. It used to beat each DSP-n chip took around 100-300KiB of code to emulate poorly. Now you can emulate seven of them perfectly with only 20KiB of code (at the cost that nobody ships the firmware with the ROMs, so your users will think less of your emulator for not supporting them out of the box.) Cx4 is down from 200KiB to 20KiB as well. And there's really no point in emulating the ST018 unless you also want to write a GBA emulator. We've fully cracked the compression on the S-DD1 and SPC7110 now. And the S-RTC and OBC1 were always trivial (on par with non-MMC mappers.)
The SuperFX and especially SA-1 are nightmares, though. No getting around that. But unless your goal is to have the #1 SNES emulator, you should just skip them. You lose out on four great games (and a bunch of shitty Japanese golf/fishing/horse games), but you still get 99% of the library working without them.
> As you go up, you start seeing less and less available emulators or attempts at making one.
That is definitely true, but there's something more at play here. Raw difficulty alone doesn't explain there being over 9,000 active NES emulators and one active SNES emulator (with some on life support, and one
pretending to be.)
I think the NES is just special in some regard as being a great first emulator. Infinitely more satisfying than wasting your time on a Chip-8 emulator. If the NES' library were a dud like the SMS, then we'd probably have about 5-10 active NES emulators.
> This is probably why the table at that site assumes a headered ROM.
No, SMWcentral is alone as the last holdout of headered SNES ROMs.
Nobody uses copiers anymore, and new floppies are almost extinct. Flashcarts are infinitely superior, and everything's been dumped. The major ROM set is by far and away No-Intro, which uses .sfc extension and no copier headers. None of the major ROM sites nor ROM torrents use GoodSNES nor NSRT anymore.
SMWC is the exception, and it's entirely because of FuSoYa's Lunar Magic tool. And given that his tool writes special data there, as far as I'm concerned, they're Lunar Magic headers, not copier headers. Copier headers are a thing of the past, much like Genesis ROM interleaving.
I even made a tool that launches Lunar Magic, hooks its Win32 API calls, and simulates there being a header on the files to fool it into working without headers, which some people use. But he won't support the two lines of code it'd take for also loading headerless ROMs. Just like I won't support the inverse for headered ROMs [actually: I do, but unofficially. You can add offset=512 to the manifest's rom line.]
Alcaro put it best: basically, FuSoYa is as stubborn as I am :D