Silhouette - The secret SNES Emulator developed by Nintendo ? | MVG

Silhouette is said to be an official Super Famicom (SNES) emulator developed by Nintendo for easy testing and debugging for 1st party devs. In this episode we take a closer look at the emulator and uncover why I believe that this may not be true.
► Support the Channel - / modernvintagegamer
► patpend.net/articles/ar/sil10...
► archive.org/details/silhouett...
Social Media Links :
► Facebook : / modernvintagegamer
► Twitter : / modernvintageg
► IG: / modernvintagegamer
► BandCamp : modernvintagegamer.bandcamp.com/
#Silhouette #SNES #Emulator

[@squelchedotter]

I stopped believing this the second that I read the "I was one of the two developers working on this". It would have been absolutely trivial for Nintendo to find out who did this at that point and nobody putting themselves at risk of a lawsuit would say that.

[@freddiejohnson6137]

Exactly it wouldn't be anonymous to Nintendo who leaked this emulator if only two people were working on it. Even if they passed it onto someone else to release it online they would know who stole the code to begin with. Just because you are anonymous on the Internet doesn't mean those who hired you in the first place would suddenly be confused who you are.

[@jamesb.6177]

👏🏻👏🏻😄👌🏻

[@kemy6775]

Exactly. You wouldn’t be anonymous if you actually stated your position and how you left the company. It would single you out immediately.

[@youkofoxy]

There's also the question that Nintendo may not have pursued due it making it official.

[@jasonblalock4429]

Although - and I'm just playing devil's advocate here - if Nintendo simply wanted to disown the project and pretend it never existed, they wouldn't take public action. To go after the emulators' developers in court would confirm everything they said, which would ultimately be quite embarrassing for Nintendo. And Nintendo cares a lot about saving face. (But, to be clear, I'm pretty swayed by MVG's arguments that it's just a Snes9x port of some flavor.)

[@greatestcait]

What an incredible idea, making an emulator officially available after the end of a consoles life. God that would be incredible.

[@DailyCorvid]

Lawyers said no ... that's why we never get any official emulators, sadly. Hope this changes though in future, they should be legally compelled! Lawyers advise Nintendo not to give away their products for free, nor to license them to others in case they devalue the brand. Thinking that is about 20 years behind the technology...

[@indeepjable]

Wait Really? Lawyers Are Preventing A Company From Making An Emulator For Their Own Console?

[@livinlicious]

Its very unlikely that Nintendo will ever do that. Maybe other devs, that are more in touch with the Community. But Nintendo is so out of touch, they have only their way. Its kind of always the same especially with Japanese Devs and Companies. They cant be flexible. A company like Naughty Dog, or Acclaim back in the 90s might have done it, because they were enthusiasts themselves. Even often used Pirating Dev Kits because official Kits were to expensive.

[@alfo2804]

@@DailyCorvid It's nothing to do with lawyers at all. If a company makes an official emulator - even if they charge for it - they will lose money. Even when people are using games that they paid for and ripped themselves, the company still loses money because that's potentially a game that they could have sold again digitally. They'd also be losing the ability to market backwards compatibility as a selling point of their next console.

[@faustianblur1798]

Unless they're selling it bundled with ROMs (hello Sega Classics) they'd just be encouraging users to rip games previously protected by their proprietary hardware As most of those games belong to third party publishers you can bet their next console would be lucky to get any kind of support.

[@sundhaug92]

10:56 "GameGenieToRaw" a Nintendo internal emulator probably wouldn't have GameGenie support

[@jamesb.6177]

Yuuuuup that’s pretty compelling evidence right there.

[@nagsterthegangster3548]

I noticed the same thing in the decoding. Thought that was odd. lol

[@enigma776]

Unless Nintendo ripped off Snes9x for their own project, been known to do that too.

[@dasdaza]

I mean idk I've seen stranger things from internal companies, emulators were common at this time, although extremely rare, whenever a developer repo leaks for Nintendo systems they will usually have an emulator, although usually a 3rd party one, but Nintendo had to be aware of game genie, game genie is actually really useful for debugging games as it is effectively just a memory editor that is designed specifically for easy consumer use, also I feel like a lot of developers, not really Nintendo but other developers would often code in stuff specifically for a game genie in order to build more attention on their game, this obviously would quickly evolve into a much simpler in game cheat menu

[@nagsterthegangster3548]

@@enigma776 Good point. To my limited knowledge, there's no legal ramifications for them using someones non-licensed emulation coding (coding that emulates THEIR products) for their own purposes on a product that never reached shelves. If the project was deemed detrimental overall to sales then when the company axed it, it may have been something like 90% complete, so a certain dev may have thought that their work shouldn't go to waste? I'm not sure if its directly ripping off to use someone elses program or assets as a base, and interject your own assets to make a fully working program... At least then you would be fixing/breaking things 1 by 1 rather than starting from the ground up.... Even if Silouette was an alpha version just so they could recompile, test and slowly interject their own equivalent coding in place of Snes9x's in time for market, where is the line on "ripping off"? The real difference I guess is, did they just essentially add one line of code and re-name the files? Or did they actually develop their own version of the coding to re-create a similar product, using different methods. So I guess it comes down to: "How much of the code is identical?" Your comment just provoked that thought in my head and I thought I would share. Wishing you all the best! I'm pullin for ya!

[@JPlokford]

I worked on SNES dev back in 1990. We had an offical dev kit built & provided by Sony (not Nintendo). It used an emulator but it was hardware (ICE) housed in massive white box. It also used a Sony NEWS Unix box instead of a dev PC. I don't believe there was any official software emulator for developers back then. Certainly not that I saw. The Sony dev kit was soon replaced with our own system (Software Creations in Manchester UK) - so I don't think we ever saw/used a devkit from Nintendo themselves although I'm sure they existed.

[@LeUberTroll]

Did you work on Spiderman & Venom? I really enjoyed that in my early emulation days

[@staticfanatic]

holy shit, it's john pickford!

[@JPlokford]

@@LeUberTroll As a coder/designer I wrote Equinox. Later as a producer/designer I worked on Max Carnage.

[@aidansan514]

@@JPlokford equinox was cool flashbacks now lol

[@DVRC]

What those Sony NEWS workstations were like to use? Were the Motorola 68k or the MIPS ones?

[@rafaelluciano5596]

I'm not buying this backstory. Largely because they refer to the Japanese arm of NOJ. This is pretty out of character for anyone doing internal work. The Japanese parent company is usually internally referred to as NCL.

[@Trimint123]

That's a fairly good point there.

[@alexjohnward]

Yep always NCL, I worked there at the time.

[@EmApex]

It's possible they went with NOJ instead of NCL because most people just don't know what NCL is. I've never heard of it before reading this so I'd assume it was written like that for simplification reasons, but obviously nobody can say for sure unless either Nintendo confirm this was an internal project or the "leaker" comes forward (though it does seem very likely it's not legit)

[@fellowearthling1632]

@@alexjohnward Did you make Silhouette?

[@alexjohnward]

@@fellowearthling1632 no, if it was a Nintendo project I never saw it.

[@martinantelo7086]

This stinks as a "My uncle worked at Nintendo" on an emulator level.

[@T3sl4]

The first thing that struck me about the readme is: there's a readme? Second: it's pages long? This isn't a "leak", this is an unusually technical brand of fanfic. Whether someone had a beef with Nintendo or just wanted to write something that sounded juicy, who knows. Least, that's what it seems to me.

[@XmorganlamiaX]

Something that stuck out to me from the History file is the multiple uses of "NoJ" to refer to Nintendo's Japanese side, something that it's never been officially abbreviated to. Although the American branch uses NoA and and the European branch uses NoE, the Japanese part of the company has always used their original name - Nintendo Co. Ltd., and always commonly abbreviates it internally and publicly as NCL. Surely if it was made by someone at Nintendo, they would say NCL rather than an incorrect abbreviation that they think it would be to match NoA & NoE... 🤔

[@ScooterinAB]

Something that stuck out to me was that the History file was written in English. Aside from the naming convention issue, anything developed my Nintendo likely would have been done in Japan, and as of 2021, Japan is still utter trash at dealing with English and the outside world. Some random short term dev wouldn't have been able to write that history.

[@joemamr710]

True but this wasn’t an internal document. This was written as an emulator readme with history for the general public by a leaker after he already quit Nintendo. It’s clearly fake, it’s clearly written by the original creators of snes9x or a close friend who had early access to the source code, as Nintendo would not have access to snes9x source code at the time. But the abbreviations are not the smoking gun. Of the readme was written by a Nintendo employee or for Nintendo, it would be. But it was allegedly written by a former Nintendo employee and for the general public.

[@ezioauditore7636]

@@ScooterinAB Actually, there are a number of English employees working at Nintendo Japan, at least in recent decades. They don't even need to know Japanese.

[@PandaXs1]

lol I was gonna leave this sort of comment, glad I'm not the only one who noticed this.

[@Neonsilver13]

If it really was an Nintendo project, then whoever leaked it could probably sued for quite a bit and the details in the readme file are probably enough to identify the person that leaked it. So I doubt it's real.

[@jasonisjasondoes]

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they denied that it ever existed at this point“... convenient.

[@MrMario2011]

WOW, the sleuthing near the end was amazing. Great insight and investigation on this 😁

[@johneymute]

Well if this marage story about the “official snes emulator” became just nothing more then a fake to cover up the fact that it become just a bsnes emulator, it will driving me insane.

[@Lownamebrand]

Thank you for helping set up my sd2vita mrmario!

[@stevenbenson9976]

I wouldn't necessarily put it beyond Nintendo to have a dev just lift someone else's emulator and then retool it (they did this with roms) but the noj reference doesn't make sense. The lack of a euro port doesn't make sense. The story itself could just be a lie by a dev from Nintendo who wanted to not mention how he got it and why he released it... But we will never know. I can't think someone independent would port this to Mac and then do nothing with it ever again

[@VideoGamer945]

love your videos dude

[@thechevyreverend]

@MrMario2011 you helped me jailbreak my PS3 around Christmas time a few years ago. Never got to thank you, but that was an awesome way to spend my Christmas, deeply appreciate you!!!

[@supabass4003]

The way the emulator spawned a clickable copy of the Metroid rom after running it reminded me of using SNES9X on MacOS9, I thought straight away that there was something up with that.

[@Humbird00]

That might just be the file type being associated with the program. When I used the Mac version of SNES9x I think it kept the roms where they were, but maybe it also had an option to create aliases on the desktop? It's been so long that I don't remember anymore.

[@jessefisher1809]

That happens with every app and file combo on mac os 9

[@jessefisher1809]

@@Humbird00 You are right.. its done by the OS.

[@dingdongbells3314]

2:04 "Nintendo 64 has not been the blockbuster that was hoped for in the US market" Well, the commercial success can be debated, but the legacy it left was so earth shattering that I still recall my best friend having and actively playing his N64 well into PS2 era, even with having a gamecube

[@giantwomanarchive787]

this was common, Toys R Us still had a SNES aisle in like 2000, and rental stores still had NES games in 2004.

[@me67galaxylife]

if the nintendo 64 is earth shattering than the PS2 is universe shattering lmao

[@zamiyaFlow]

did you get paid by nintendo to post this?

[@Cooe.]

​@@me67galaxylifePS2 was a MASSIVE sales success but had extremely little impact on the trajectory of gaming. Name a major long-lived defining feature that the PS2 introduced.... There aren't any. N64 otoh was absolutely stuffed with RADICAL innovations for the gaming industry from the analog stick to its cutting edge hardware 3D acceleration able for the first time to make proper stable 3D worlds (no affine texture warping making everything wiggle & warble ala PlayStation or Saturn).

[@me67galaxylife]

@@Cooe. I can name one : being able to read movie disks. Big selling point too. But i'm not even going to count that, because i don't need to; if we say it didn't have any defining features, it is still the best selling console by a very long margin, (thus influencing the trajectory of gaming unfortunately for you) even though it doesn't have any amazing groundbreaking feature. I guess it was apparently so good on its own that it crushed the competition without needing any. But it's true that the N64 was packed with some *radical* innovation like the shitty analog stick (that they didn't invent as well) that everyone except nintendo shill hates, or its cutting edge 3D accelration that allowed games to look slightly better. And surely the console wasn't limited by like, i don't know, cartridges ? I mean come on it's a joke, why would they stick to usi-Oh wait.

[@Jaspa42]

Another quality delve, much appreciated.

[@fungusTM]

Thanks!

[@americancitizen1885]

Interesting. Great video. Can you imagine having access to all these NES and SNES games library 30 years ago while being a kid and a teenager! It would’ve been unreal. Now as an adult I have two Nvidia Shield Pro loaded with pretty much every old school classic systems games available. It’s surreal. Love it.

[@dazrael5658]

Wildcards existed back then so it was a reality. What I find crazy nowadays is putting entire game libraries onto a tiny micro SD.

[@fallingwater]

I found it far more insane to have access to all of arcadedom. Never was a big console player, but I sunk a lot of coins into those machines, and to have them all freely available has been the ultimate nostalgia trip.

[@arjovenzia]

I Kinda did. The internet was a *very* new thing in my world in '97, heaps of people had snes, n one kid whos dad was a gamer had a 64. but ever a geek, my dads work had an internet connection, and I somehow stumbled upon zsnes and romsites. pretty much everyone had the platformers, mario n metroid etc, but RPG's really weren't a thing here. I had Chronotrigger and Final fantasy, Japanese fighting games, all sorts of stuff that my mates had never even imagined. and that I played them on the PC??? (AMD dx4-100 for the record). still, getting them was still an ordeal. blag a trip to work with dad, commandeer his PC, download at a couple of Kb/s, archive it across a few disks, unpack, tweak some settings if it needed, write a batch script to make it easy to run. Was heaps of fun. I actually kinda feel having **all** of the games right there reduces the engagement, you can just drop to the next one if the first minute isnt fun. if it takes hours to obtain, your gonna play that damn thing, even if you cant read the text. I guess the same if you have to pay heaps for the cart, but I was 12, n couldnt afford the console let alone games. I suppose thats cos I put all my pocket money into my PC. HA! OG PC GAMER MASTER RACE! The best Christmas present I got that year was a hand-me-down 1.6GB HDD from my uncle who had upgraded. I think I was running 360mb n 480mb discs at that time. Im NEVER gonna fill that! BOSH win95, MP3's (id borrow CD's n rip the best songs, playing one used 80% CPU, ripping was set it up and go to bed). this machine im typing on has about 7 TB. and the most goto gaming I do on it? MAME. but its got an arcade stick and light gun, 4k movies, and a screen as big as my arms. tell the 12yo me that and He'll call bullshit.

[@grey5626]

@@dazrael5658 True. The first time I encountered a Multi Game Doctor was when I was in middle school, and the kid who had it was my age. A LOT of ROM dumps, cracks, trainers and demos were written by minors, not adults.

[@killerbee2562]

I have everdrives for several Nintendo consoles. Every game for the systems on one cartridge. That would have blown kid me's mind.

[@ChrisB_Crisps]

Thank you so much for covering SNES topics like this I didn't have an idea this existed. I think is great that you make this content in a way that is entertaining and easy to digest and accessible to anyone that can reach youtube. I have a lot of fun watching your recent SNES related videos. Thanks to you I am getting to know so much about things that I didn't know it existed. I also like the effort that you put to add links in the description.

[@Naamex]

Amazing video as always! One thing to note... Nowadays there are plenty of official Nintendo Emulators. For example, the ones found on NES/SNES Online on Switch, the ones made for the NES/SNES Classic, and the ones found on Wii and Wii U to play N64, NES and SNES

[@ordinosaurs]

It could have been a provocation by someone in the know of such a project, hastily packaging Snes9x as fake "Silhouette" in order to have the real deal come out of the woods by triggering an incensed insider source. As the operation failed, there was no point anymore so the whole thing petered out.

[@pleasedontwatchthese9593]

I have wondered if its the other way around. And that snes9x actually got ahead because they had access to this internal emulator source code.

[@kargaroc386]

@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 The idea of Snes9X being some secret N-made emulator that they pushed out sounds preposterous.

[@joemamr710]

He is saying that perhaps a Nintendo employee leaked portions of a Nintendo developed emulator to the snes9x team that they then integrated into the existing snes9x project. Possible, but probably not the case.

[@QuentinMatthysBoeckmansYJ]

Can believe you found all this by yourself just with the hint that some glitch look like something you saw before ! Amazing work.

[@MrReese]

I love these stories, thanks for sharing! Even the names were so fitting, Mirage and Silhouette!

[@user-wj9xq7ig2v]

These videos are the perfect balance of entertainment and technical information. You've presented at a level I can understand which isn't an easy task 😊

[@TalynWuff]

There was a final fantasy 2/4 or 3/6 players guide (for the PSX Anthology/Chronology releases) or pages somewhere, printed strategy-guide style, where I saw a few panes of screenshots that had the Snes9X menu bar in the shot. Really wish I could find that book again. Might help further commercial emulation hypothesis.

[@Humbird00]

That wouldn't surprise me. Taking screenshots from an emulator would be a LOT easier than pointing a film camera at a CRT television and taking a picture. Taking photos like that was common practice during the 90's but it was a huge pain.

[@spartonberry]

@@Humbird00 If this was the PS1 days, there were absolutely fairly cheap TV capture cards that surely would've worked for taking screenshots. (usually bad for gaming since they were surely designed for 30fps of standard video rather than 60hz game consoles usually used, but would've probably been good enough for screenshots, especially for a Final Fantasy game.)

[@mattquaine5173]

MVG is a class act

[@segafrog]

🎵🎶 ''i want my m-v-gggggggggggggggggggg'' 🎶🎵 🎸

[@mattquaine5173]

M V Djent. Rip and tear intensifies 🎸

[@joshbimthedoctor]

Yep, British class for sure

[@terrencecoccoli524]

Sure is. When I see him on a stream with someone like rgt85, I have to shake my head. And usually rgt is doing way more talking.

[@mattquaine5173]

@@terrencecoccoli524 I like listening to rgt even when he's wrong cuz then it's a just funny.

[@goswami7275]

I wanna say that I appreciate the work you put in making these videos. Very interesting!

[@marcgoesblindgaming2076]

Another great video, I feel like I learned something new every time you put one out

[@ProtoMario]

I remember playing ZSNES on an older DOS machine at my friends house, and thinking how amazing it was!

[@brpadington]

It was amazing time. Seemed like every day some crazy new emulator or update would release. I religiously checked Dave's classics to see what was released that day.

[@Bobbias]

I was on win95 back then, but I still love Zsnes, and still prefer it to snes9x for PC emulation of the SNES.

[@Humbird00]

I used to bring a floppy disk into high school with Zsnes and a compressed copy of Zelda Link to the Past on it. You could actually fit BOTH on a single disk!

[@Humbird00]

I also remember me and a friend messing around with an old 486 with no hard drive. We would boot from a DOS disk, set up a RAM disk, and then gradually copy a large 4MB SNES rom over to the RAM disk as a segmented ZIP archive from multiple floppies, combine those together into a single file on the RAM disk, and then run that large game using Zsnes.

[@Stratelier]

I remember ZSNES too ... ended up using it mainly for the fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3.

[@alexsudati]

The whole video all I could think is about Treasure's Silhouette Mirage game for the Sega Saturn (then ported to Playstation). I love that game, I always hoped for a sequel.

[@yo_fbi_agent]

Thank you for all your research and work you put into these very informative videos. Much appreciated!

[@psylencecy]

Me: wow that's some cool rain effect MVG: "garbage white pixels"

[@Butter-Milk]

Same.

[@Dong_Harvey]

Hilariously, he might not be using the term Garbage in a pejorative sense, its just useless/nonsense data,.. Though of course he had to deal with this issue personally, so maybe he does hate them

[@zombie_pigdragon]

@@Dong_Harvey Given his technical experience, it is certainly the case he means it as in "nonsense", not said pejorative sense. Garbage data is a common term for corrupted or otherwise unusable data like that.

[@Dong_Harvey]

@@zombie_pigdragon I've had an argument with in-house Dev teams that customer/clients shouldn't be encountering garbage text in the input forms of HTML based websites... They countered that they were offended by my use of the word 'garbage'

[@MetalHeartGunner]

Garbage is a term used in development to refer to data that is being displayed or taken by a function that is not supposed to be taken, usually data that remains in memory from previous functions and wasn't properly initialized so when another function runs and uses that memory space, if it wasn't initialized or set properly then the code would run using that instead of the proper data and in turn causing glitches, imagine having to display an A but instead the memory address that has that data has a Z stored in it instead from some other previous executionl then your software would display a Z or if the data in it was a different type then you'd get a glitched character, very common stuff in c and c++ since it doesn't have any native ways to clean up memory so garbage data is always there to mess up your results. He wasn't talking about the rain effect but the white pixels and lines on background layers like the ground and walls, it isn't as noticeable in that part but at indoor areas it becomes more apparent since it is all over the walls.

[@pixelatedpigeon4617]

Fascinating stuff, love your deep dives on emulators.

[@andr0zzsenpai]

There is actually a game developed by Treasure for the PS1 called "Silhouette Mirage". Coincidence? lol

[@ultimateman55]

Yeah I was waiting to hear that the developer who made the emulator and left Nintendo went on to work for Treasure. The video went in a totally different direction than what I expected.

[@mrnuage]

Coïncidence. If the author of this emulator (or fake story) used "Mirage" and then "Silhouette", it is because these 2 words belong to the same lexical field. It's a common approach used for naming conputer programs, may it be in professional companies or open source groups. To give you some examples: -All the iterations of the Debian Linux distribution are named after Toy Story characters. -All Apple OS from OS 10.0 Until recently were named after felines name. -Android iterations, for their part, use pastries. -Even Sega, for some times, decided to name their systems after planets, starting with Saturn. So, about Silouhette and Mirage, it looks like its about things we can barely see. A mirage is an optical illusion you see because of the heat while a silouhette is the shape of something or someone which you can only see the outline. If a playstation game later used these 2 words as a title, it's not because of that weird unknown story, it's just because these 2 words have something in common in their meanings.

[@timothykirby4406]

That was the first thing I thought too.

[@zynidian]

It was originally a Sega Saturn game that got ported to the PlayStation

[@grey5626]

@@zynidian Correct. It was also released on the SEGA Saturn in Japan, a year before this emulator went public. So, pretty clear that whoever compiled SNES9x on a mac and claimed it as their own work, was at least a fan of that Treasure game. Everything else reads like speculation, lies and deception.

[@Roge9]

This was interesting. As always, thanks for the content MVG!

[@Ultimateman]

Awesome & interesting content youve got here! Just subbed. Keep up the good work, much appreciated!

[@alinepiroutek8932]

0:57 lol that interface. My dad gave me a CD with this emulator and roms when I was 3 years old in 1998

[@thepirategamerboy12]

I'm pretty sure one time I saw making of footage for Super Mario World and you could see the code was written on PC-98s. I would have thought that using Apple IIgs' to aid development of SNES games would be mainly for Western devs, since I don't think those machines were ever sold in Japan.

[@MassiveRican]

Quickly becoming one of my favorite channels I’m subscribed too. Excellent content. Thanks MVG.

[@VK2FVAX]

Loved the function call analysis. Really says a lot on the origins.

[@paulgraves1392]

Given the wild and woolly days of SNES coding. It would not surprise me if Gary Henderson was a SNES developer who decided to code SNES9x and Sillouette as part of a development tool chain, or an alias for someone who did so.

[@Bobbias]

Yes, that's what I was thinking too. Is Gary Henderson around to ask about this? I'd imagine so many years later if it was something like that he might be willing to confirm/deny this theory...

[@methamphetamelon]

Gary has been absent from SNES emulation since before Snes9x became open source.

[@paulgraves1392]

​@@methamphetamelon I did some digging around during a lunch break and found there's a bit of story to this which I think I ends a lot of credibility to MVGs theory. So Listen up- *MVG as well*: Gary left Snes9x at the end of Oct 1997 following a fallout with MrGrim after MrGrim *allegedly* leaked the Snes9x source code to the ZSNES team. Citing this along with pressure from Nintendo, Gary resigned from the project. Where this starts to line up: According to various forum posts from those who knew him, Gary said he planned to continue working his own private forks of Snes9x Silhouette was released at the beginning of January 1998, approximately 2 months after Gary resigned, and as MVG points out - contains a number of similarities/issues that were specific to the Snes9x codebase at the time. Very likely the answer is: Gary Henderson coded Silhouette on his own time and published it in 1998 as anonymous as a **** **u to both ZSNES and Nintendo.

[@russellsheridan3957]

That Gary released it with a fake story closed source, makes sense - to maintain closed source for his work as a 'fork'. It could also be that the story is true and Gary is the employee, and wasn't intelligent enough to see how easily he'd be identified if it was a major concern. It being one of two people gives plausible deniability anyway.

[@paulgraves1392]

@@matthewlawton9241 Most developers for 16 bit era consoles and earlier had to know ASM which meant having a thorough understanding of the consoles architecture, knowing the registers on the CPU, PPU etc to program the hardware directly. Such knowledge would've come in handy when working out how to emulate the hardware and translate calls so they can be understood by a different architecture.

[@TheMagicQsGaming]

glad to see another video, cheers!

[@jamesb.6177]

Some excellent investigative work there MVG 👌🏻👏🏻

[@KAGE-lz4zg]

I love your channel and the fact that you have a good musical taste - by almost always putting Nero's songs in the background. Also, they are going to release a new album, have you heard of it?

[@Macko_z_Bogdanca]

Amazing video as always "Learn to code and write games on snes" would be very nice 👀

[@buraisu1605]

On top of everything else, I find the Apple IIGS part of the story hard to believe. Based on existing footage of NCL's development offices (like kzbin.info/www/bejne/iKvRfaWDZ69rl6c), they used Sony NEWS workstations to develop SFC games, even early ones like Pilotwings.

[@rey-o]

Fascinating research here. I love stuff like this. Back in the day I used emulators but never gave much thought re. who made them, now I can appreciate all the work that went into them.

[@Lownamebrand]

As always thank you MVG, your knowledge and expertise is always appreciated on Mondays!

[@simr1277]

Nintendo would sue itself before ever admitting to any sort of emulation publicly

[@TylerFurrison]

Here I thought you would talk about the SNES emulation for Wii, N3DS, and Switch, but this is a lot more interesting

[@NewportBox100s]

Another fascinating emulation history video! Thank you, MVG.

[@robalarcon]

never heard of this emulator before, great video as always!

[@BruceNIvy]

2 developers worked on the emulator... Nintendo: I wonder who it could be 😂

[@TheDudeWithNoName]

Damn you're a beast of a developer, i don't think many people would've remembered or recognized what you did, great video as always!

[@jamesb.6177]

@@stevejohnnicholls This is laughably untrue. He never claimed to make Shantae. Only that he helped to port it to switch. He also credited the rest of the team that worked with him at Bethesda. You’re just wrong.

[@jamesb.6177]

@@stevejohnnicholls he also never said he developed the xbox emulators. He literally says he ported them in the video. What universe are you living in?

[@TooBokoo]

In fairness, some of his titles are rather misleading/clickbait until you actually watch the video. "I was the developer for Shantae for Switch" or "I made this" with a Quake logo. LOL! I don't really give a shlt. Title your videos whatever you want, but the titles are sus until you watch the whole videos.

[@DailyCorvid]

*MVG has activated the brain genie code for +999 intelligence* MVG : releases new video for us. 👏👏👏👏👏 Man is a genius.

[@armyofninjas9055]

Excellent video. Such a great channel.

[@LucasLealDev]

You are an absolute legend my man. If you ever come to Brazil, please tell us on twitter and let me send you a good Cachaça from where I live to your hotel. Great vid as always, and also very well edited.

[@hugo-garcia]

silhouette mirage was a PS1 game, never knew was a emulator too

[@bleachie]

I have both an iBook G3 and G4 that can run OS9. You can have them if you want to do a comparison on real hardware.

[@visage123456]

Interesting! I vaguely remember using this in the 90's. I also remember that the mac version of Snes9X had a very nice UI for things like gamestates compared to the PC-version.

[@KTDFox]

The whole "Silhouette" and "Mirage" names had me thinking of the Saturn and PS1 platformer, which was definitely released before "Silhouette" leaked. The main character of Silhouette Mirage has two "sides" to them made up of the enemies different aspects. SNES9x being a mix of SNES96 and SNES97 kinda makes this look like a really geeky reference, and the people doing emulator development back then were definitely that geeky. No way this was an internal Nintendo tool.

[@chowdown]

Even listening to you narrate the story about Silhouette, it almost sounded like a CreepyPasta to me (just without the Creepy). I even said that out loud. Then you mentioned the possibility of it being a hoax, and I was like, "...yep". Your explanation of why you thought so near the end went a little over my head, but you're the expert in these matters, so I'm inclined to believe MVG.

[@hoppers1337]

Exactly what i need on a Morning!

[@supertyty0449]

Monday Mornings with MVG is always a treat

[@luckyspray]

Always amazing bro, the best 🙌🏻💥

[@cbjammin13]

Really great nostalgia trip with emulation and history on this vid.

[@chem525]

My takeaway: If your boss asks you to write an emulator for a dead console then you'll likely be shitcanned in 6 months.

[@AntonioCardenasT]

The snes was still quite alive in japan at the time, final Nintendo developed game was a fire emblem in like 2000

[@mrnuage]

@@AntonioCardenasT Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 was released in 1999, it waa the penultimate official SNES game. I know there is a last one but I forgot the name.

[@AntonioCardenasT]

@@mrnuage i thought it was in january 2000, and there's metal slader glory afterwards.

[@spartonberry]

@@AntonioCardenasT 1999 for the download version (you buy a rewriteable "Nintendo Power" cart in Japan, and then you buy the ROM in a kiosk), 2000 for the standard retail packaged copy (which Nintendo themselves calls the "ROM version")

[@beau-urns]

This man is is like the CSI of console emulation. Jeez, I loved this

[@crf80fdarkdays]

"The archive come with two version" ~ MGV 2021. Love the vid btw mate, about to pick me up a snes with fuzzy audio and genuine controller in 2 days for 35 AUD.

[@Rad9-O-2]

Great info once again. Never even knew this existed. On another note, who the hell thumbs down a video like this??? 🤨

[@wolf_hg]

Very interesting, I do remember reading about this way back in the day. Been thinking about it from time to time lately but could never remember what it was! The rumored official SNES emulator, I'm now leaning towards it being a hoax as well.

[@RakunSenpai]

I doubt that Nintendo would sell PC ports of their games. The founders of Id Software tried to pitch a PC port of The Super Mario Bros, which was turned down.

[@shinsource]

Yup, then Id went on to make Commander Keen.

[@LonelySpaceDetective]

I don't disagree, but to be fair the id pitch was quite a few years ago.

[@lookitskazzy]

@@LonelySpaceDetective Decades later, and Nintendo's stance on PCs and ports to other platforms has not changed. This is absolutely a hoax.

[@user-tx7gr7fg9b]

An informative and interesting video, Thank you! I will definitely subscribe to your channel.

[@ryanprentice]

Great video! This stuff is really entertaining to me.

[@djp1234]

Can't believe Nintendo would rather have their games pirated than sell them.

[@vherostar]

Nintendo used public emulators for the snes mini. If they had their own, for me they wouldn't have done so and worked on silhouette only.

[@PScoopYT]

Are you sure it was a public emulator? Pretty sure it was made by NERD (Nintendo European R&D) and not something publicly available.

[@AndrewO83]

I loved how the music fit the mystery vibe. I was quite engrossed!

[@Ali-gv1yw]

Thanks for digging in this

[@ButtProsecutor]

Do you think the truth can be a combination of the two theories at all? I can easily see a dev team just breaking down existing emulators to save themselves on work time in certain areas in a internal development environment, maybe someone snagged some of Gary Henderson's code at Nintendo and just built around it as a start or something, since at least from a legal standpoint I'm sure they could get away with using that code. Or do you think that situation is extremely unluckily? Great vid as always dude!

[@JaredConnell]

But it was closed source so how would they have gotten that code?

[@stitchfinger7678]

@@JaredConnell Right, unless this was literally done by the creator(s) of the emulator, its impossible at that time.

[@thomasandrews9355]

Tools like ghidra and ida were not really a thing yet. If they decompiled it, probably wouldn't have had the function names. Also converting assembly wouldn't be faster. Probably 100x slower due to lack of symbol

[@grk70s]

it's not jus performance and compatibility that's important. the user interface is just as important, which a lot of emulator authors seem to miss.

[@koekje00005]

Most emulator devs, or even devs in general don't care about the UI. UI design and programming has always been a pain in the ass and it's usually tedious. Most devs that do low-level stuff like emulators or Linux stuff also aren't interested in that field. That's why so many open-source programs suffer from "programmer UI" :P

[@xehP]

you can download gui plugins for a lot of emulators, I don't think ui is that important personally. just go through the config on windows shell and notepad.

[@LoPhatKao]

@@koekje00005 wish i could like your comment multiple times xD fully guilty of having programmer ui in stuff i've wrote

[@pleasedontwatchthese9593]

For a long time what emulator worked the best mattered the most. I used many command line emulators because it was the only thing that worked for me 20 years ago.

[@BIGGIEDEVIL]

One of my favorite channels love the info In these videos

[@tyzerro]

zSNES was my first foray into emulation period back in like 2001-2003ish maybe and I loved it!

[@antonpreacher2900]

I choose to believe the Silhouette story. Not because it makes sense, but because the world is shit right now and I need a little mystique to keep going :)

[@gblargg]

It's like the Polybius story, more fun to suspend doubt when watching.

[@CarbonRollerCaco]

I have too big of a heart to lie to myself like that.

[@sommor001]

The whole thing is a mixed bag, certain times companies "rip-off" emulators to use for their own purpose. The Snes9X was closed source at that time, but it's possible that Nintendo and the developers did a deal behind closed doors. The transparency effect for the time was good, but we will never know if Nintendo was involved. Since Nintendo had some pretty big leaks the past years and no mention of silhouette or its other name gives me trouble believing it. We will for 99.99999% never know the true story.

[@pleasedontwatchthese9593]

I wonder also if they Nintendo part is fake but the emulator was made by a company that made licenses 3d party games.

[@DragonProtector]

Ya

[@brpadington]

@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 that would make more sense. Third party devs would have a clear motive to sell something like this. They would also have a benefit to using an emulator internally to save money on dev kits.

[@Tall_Order]

I love seeing that Mac OS 9 Desktop. I still have an old iBook G3 with that.

[@Cetega]

Fascinating stuff, good sir!

[@MegaManNeo]

Meanwhile, SEGA partners with nVidia to release hardware that lets you play Saturn games on PC and Sony hunts down emulator devs. Crazy stuff there, hearing this story blew my mind up until you mentioned it might just be another snes96 fork. Still I think this would have sold like hot cakes if Nintendo would have stick to it, they would clearly have find a way to copy-protect their ports properly.

[@twentysixhundred7813]

Sega hired Steve Snake who created the Kega Fusion emulator to port their games to PC. Sega is alot more relaxed about emulation than the others. Rather than fight them they just hire, which is the way it should be.

[@MegaManNeo]

@@twentysixhundred7813 Not the worst outcome, quite the opposite actually and now I too remember why development on K-Fusion stopped. We received a commercial MegaDrive emulator that works with VR headsets if so desired and we are allowed to play the ROMs stored on Steam's servers even outside the scope of this product, which is pretty neat. Also, unchanged Sonic3 & Knuckles is part of this ROM cluster.

[@g_wizard9866]

Isn't it possible that Mirage/Silhouette was developed first, then updated/patched to become the snes9x so it would run on a windows PC? Then the OG developer released Silhouette just because they could? Great story though, I think we'd all like to know more about the history and development.

[@arjovenzia]

I doubt it. I believe a lot of the conundrum of early snes emulation was getting the hardware setup correct. if mirage was first, they'd just ask the engineering dept n get full legit specs, and so be pretty close to perfect emulation, they'd have that hard won data from the beginning. there would be no need for reverse engineering or cut'n'try development. it would be nigh perfect out of the box. slow maybe, but would be bit-accurate. which if your were developing for hardware, would be what you want.

[@SNESKegaGamer]

I got an old iMac G3 that needs some work. Definitely worth putting this on it once I get it going. I love the days of early emulation.

[@Muzer0]

I do love your ordering of the things that tipped you off: * I found a super specific bug that only a person who's worked closely on this emulator would have noticed * I disassembled it and noticed several functions with the same names * It has the string "snes96" in it That's like saying "I analysed the fragments of DNA left on the victim's body where he'd been grabbed and discovered the identity of the killer. Oh, and it happened to match up with the name on the signed confession left on the victim's body."

[@Tigrou7777]

Plot twist : Nintendo mirage/Silhouette source code get leaked in early 90's and was used for making XSnes9X.

[@MarioChamuty]

I was thinking about this from the other side. Perhaps the devs that worked on the mirage / silhouette at start of the project needed something taht worked at least a little bit, so they grabbed the first working iteration of community emulation project and simply started building on top of it. That's the way a lot of developers work. Why invent a wheel when you can take a working hexagonal shape and simply modify it to work as a wheel. Especially if you are running out of time / only working on something as a tool to make your life easier.

[@thomasandrews9355]

@@MarioChamuty what source code? While it's possible, I think we all want more than this is. There's probably even more in the binary to give away who made it.

[@MarioChamuty]

@@thomasandrews9355 dunno, i wasn't interested in snes emulation back then so I don't know how snes95/96/9x was distributed do i dont know whether the code was publicly avaliable or not. It was just an idea :) WOuld be interesting for MVG to disect the binary a little more to look for clues to figure out the author of the binary.

[@davkdavk]

Pardon my ignorance, but has anyone attempted emulating the system at a hardware level? Developing a SNES whole SoC would be cool. (Including all the SuperFX stuff)

[@PeterBraymusic]

There's a core for the SNES on the MiSTer FPGA and the Super NT by Analogue, both of which might be what you're looking for/

[@patrickcoco6205]

Yes. The 2 major ones are the Analogue SuperNT, a commercial project; and the open source SNES core for the MISTer FPGA project.

[@romulino]

I'm petty sure Nintendo did that at some point. But if you mean fpgas, that was also done. The snes from analog is amazing, that a look at that. Almost sure the mister also does it.

[@damustermann]

The Analogue Super-Nt is a FPGA emulating the whole SNES system, but pretty expensive. I´m pretty sure there are more out there.

[@haraldhimmel5687]

@@romulino Yeah if going that route MISTer is probably the better choice. Not to mention that the original console is still pretty affordable.

[@BirdsOfGlass]

I remember thinking that my bobcat PC with the turbo button was the problem back then when trying to get snes emulators to work. Turns out I was right. Great video.

[@Mr_Top_Hat_Jones]

Fascinating, as usual.

[@XavierZara]

6:43 I can't wait for the launch of Super Metroid: Donkey Kong Country

[@NosferatuRatio]

MVG is an MVP

[@irairairuuhhh]

Wow, I had no idea that early SNES Development Kits were Apple II GS’s. Reminds me of how Microsoft used PowerMac G5’s as early Xenon Alpha Devkits.

[@MaxOakland]

I love looking at the old Macintosh interface. It's so cute looking

[@edwin8808]

Not even John Spoilerman from DF retro can make so nice videos!

[@mikeuk666]

DF is on another level kid

[@edwin8808]

@@mikeuk666 I am talking about df retro 😉

[@UJCammy]

I've never really understood this story just because I can't hear "Silhouette" and "Mirage" without thinking of Silhouette Mirage on the Saturn, unless Treasure named that game after some pre-existing thing. It seems strange that Nintendo would coincidentally name an emulator two separate words that happened to form the title of a game on a competing system.

[@Valientlink]

Ran this very well on my eggshell imac running OS8. Sometimes the white border around it would be black, almost always it was white though, wasn't really sure why. The sound would also randomly be less skippy sometimes, but even when skippy it was very good at the time. Performance overall was just as good as for you

[@ClearComplexity]

I still program on an original IIGS Woz edition for fun at least a few times a week. I love the IIGS, but then again it was my first computer around kindergarten age (5 or so) that I learned how to read in order to learn basic with, then eventually Assembly and C. I built a Win98 machine a couple years later (IIGS was old when I got it, but it was fully loaded with the best accelerator and expansion cars you would want) and had a 486 machine with Dos/3.1 too, but the IIGS was/is special for me.

[@HeyRusse]

No wonder that Nintendo did this, because mybe company’s didn’t wanted to invest in devkits, it would be theoretically be cheaper than more expensive hardware.

[@CorporalDanLives]

Actually, Nintendo made a ton of money selling devkits (to my company, anyway). They were these giant steel cases from Intelligent Systems and they took forever to burn the roms! I hated those things, And we wound up using bootleg Chinese hardware when Nintendo wasn't looking.

[@StarmanDX]

To be completely honest, I would think that Nintendo wouldn't care about hardware costs to developers. Like a way to gatekeep- if you don't have the money to make games for their platform, too bad. You aren't making games for their platform. I seriously doubt they'd create an emulator for developers to use without also making them buy a bunch of dev hardware, even if it wasn't needed.

[@chengong388]

Wasn't there a story about the SMB emulation you can buy on Wii store being a pirated rip from torrent sites? Don't reinvent the wheel right?

[@rashira9610]

It was not downloaded from the internet in any way. Probably anyway. The current understanding of the situation is that The man who created the iNES emulator and the file format it used went to work for nintendo to help implement virtual console. Naturally he would have used what he knows from back then as a base. Hence why it seems as if they just ripped a rom of their own game from the internet.

[@ederbarrero5585]

@@rashira9610 Hell, in one of the leaked documents there's a developer made text guide in which he explains how to convert the internal rom formats Nintendo uses to store roms into the community formats in order to test their own internal stash with community made emulators!

[@ImJCyo]

I remember using zsnes back in the day and it was the greatest damn thing for me. When they finally got c4 chip emulation and I could play MMX 1-3 (2 and 3 requires this chip) and I couldn't have been happier.

[@camhcom]

1:17 "a mysterious SNES emulator... that was shrouded in mystery"