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Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

My favorite modification to its software would be some controller button combination shortcut to the reset button. Having to reach to the actual device to switch games is so annoying.

Surely Nintendo could have come up with a combination that was not used in any of the included 30 games? For a company that was so focused on user experience early on, they really dropped the ball with that button design, btw. Start, Select and a primary action button ("A")? Anyway, that mishap meant there was room for a rescue now in 2016, to use some unused combination of those peculiar buttons to do the reset. But alas, no.

Other nice things to have that would hopefully be doable:

- putting the game manuals on the actual device for viewing on the TV

- the audio is a bit harsh; it sounds like it needs some filtering, maybe just some dead simple high-pass (edit: err, low-pass) filter would do it

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> - the audio is a bit harsh; it sounds like it needs some filtering, maybe just some dead simple high-pass filter would do it

Could you clarify what was meant by harsh?

The HDMI PHY[1] differentially encodes either I2S or S/PDIF (from SoC). This is a lossless digital-to-digital translation, which suggests that audio being a bit harsh is either a consequence of precise emulation of the NES APU[2] or something wonky with the speakers you're using.

I made the assumption that by harsh you meant dissonant sounds of a relatively high audio frequency, which would make sense given how the 2A03 APU synthesizes audio, but wouldn't make sense if you're suggesting that a dead simple high-pass filter would resolve the issue.

[1] http://www.epmi.com.tw/sayapro03.php?id=78

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricoh_2A03

I bailed out halfway into my CS/EE university program (to start working in software instead) a very long time ago in part so I wouldn't have to finish the signal theory/processing course, so please bear with me.

"I made the assumption that by harsh you meant dissonant sounds of a relatively high audio frequency"

Yes, that's what I'm hearing. Here is a comparison video where you can listen to the difference between the original NES (via an ADC, presumably) and the NES Classic Mini:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9EyI3mVhi4

Anyway, to me it sounds that by just filtering away some high frequencies you would get a better approximation of the original.

Edit: Oh wait, I see what I did; I mixed up high-pass filter with low-pass filter (again). Doh. I do maintain that whoever named them made a mistake.

A sibilance filter would be fairly easy to make, I built a headphone amp board with a sibilance filter circuit in it many years back.

Is that something that can be cheaply done in software (with low latency - like less than 50 ms)?

An IIR low-pass filter can be implemented with a delay measured in tens of microseconds.

With regard to naming of high-pass/low-pass filters, it might help to think of the opposite names (low-cut/high-cut). Pass is the opposite of cut/reject.

I have no idea as I'm not a programmer, I'm pretty much a hardware/EE guy. When I built mine it was less than 50 cents in discrete components and can definitely be done with SMT components to save space. I don't see why not though; I can get some pretty precise filtering using LADSPA plugins in software mixing apps.

Ahh, makes sense now. The emulator sounds like it does an outstanding job of functionally reproducing the APU, but clearly doesn't capture the analog LPF contributions of the original architecture[1] (2nd and 4th pages apply).

An improvement to the NES Classic will necessarily have to come in software as a DSP LPF either within the emulator application or at the OS level (someone mentioned seeing alsa during boot??). Nevertheless, a passive analog hack is definitely not going to be applicable.

[1] http://www.freeinfosociety.com/electronics/schemview.php?id=...

Oh come on, do tell us what NES emulator you made? :)

What makes you think that I've developed my own emulator?

Not that the assumption was incorrect...

The incredibly intricate understanding of the NES sound?

"alsa-lib-1.0.29.tar.bz2" is part of the OSS compliance download package they released.

(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12938817)

Nice link! Not only the high end is too crisp, the low end sounds "fatter" too.

That guy's Youtube channel appears to be full of wonderful things, I just noticed:

https://www.youtube.com/user/KM65536/videos

>I do maintain that whoever named them made a mistake.

Nah, they're named fine, you're just doing the incorrect mental-shortcut that I used to do: because there's 'low' and 'filter', you're ignoring 'pass'. The lows or the highs (respectively) pass-through the filter.

If you plug in a Wii Classic Controller, you can use the home button on it to get back to the menu without having to get up.

Call me evil, but I don't want to reward them for a failure on their part :).

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