Emulation Names - Part 15

Byuu

David Kirk Ginder, known as Dave, Byuu/Near (Byuu, a character from the SNES game Bahamut Lagoon), was an American who lived in Japan, one of the greatest emulator developers of his time and the most passionate and dedicated fan/developer of the SNES scene. Byuu was born in the United States in 1983. He has been a computer programmer since 1999, and has worked in software engineering since 2006. He has been in the SNES emulation scene since 1997, helping other emulators. In 2001, he contributed to the first version of ZSNES released after the departure of its creator zsKnight.

BSNES (SNES)

MSU-1 Documentation (SNES Chip)

In 2004, he created BSNES (Byuu SNES), known for its precision in emulation and compatibility with 100% of officially released games. In parallel with the emulator, he developed the MSU-1 virtual chip, released in 2007, which gave games the ability to add full-motion videos and CD-quality music, allowing adaptations of SNES games to bring them closer to games similar to those released for Sega's 16-bit CD-ROM console, the Sega CD. This was another turning point in SNES emulation. An interesting fact. The sound emulation of the NEC uPD7720, used in Higan for some SNES games, was used by the late Stephen Hawkins' team to produce a more portable version of the voice program they used. They had a limited version of this emulator. So, they looked for Byuu, and with his code, they were able to complete the rest that was missing for Stephen's emulator, SpeechProse, to work properly. In 2010, he led a fundraising campaign to decompress coprocessors from inside game cartridges to extract their firmware. Firmware is the set of instructions for operating hardware in electronic devices. This made BSNES the first emulator to have 100% game compatibility. Between 2011 and 2012, he added the GB, GBC, GBA and NDS handhelds and the NES to the emulator, all developed by Byuu, with the exception of the NDS.

Higan (Multi-Systems)

After transforming it into a multi-emulator, it changed its name in 2013 to Higan. Over time, Higan emulated consoles from Sega, NEC, Bandai, SNK and others. In 2018, Byuu revived the BSNES project, starting from the 2009 stage, when it had not yet become a multi-emulator, adding only GB and GBC emulation from another emulator. The new BSNES project has parts of an experimental emulation project by Byuu called csnes. Within this new BSNES, Byuu also developed a way to improve video rendering. This allowed DerKoun, a programmer, to change the pixel quality, managing to increase a 256x240 resolution game to 3840x2160, managing to transform the games into HD. This gave rise to the BSNES fork, called BSNES-HD, created in May 2019 for Windows and MacOS, and in June for Linux.

Byuu (Multi-Systems)

In early 2020, Byuu created an emulator with his name, which was the continuation of Higan with the practical front-end of BSNES. His intention was to add new systems to it. Months later, he created Ares, which managed to partially consolidate this idea, adding PC Engine in 2020 and PSX in 2021. His plan was to add Nintendo 64 to the project. From 2021 onwards, other people took care of the project and added the N64, 32X, Neo Geo AES and MVS systems in 2021. BSNES and Higan ended their stories in 2020, but the Higan Team and BSNES Team released continuations of them entitled Higan Nightly and BSNES Nightly from late 2020 to mid/late 2021. These teams were formed by people who worked with Byuu on these projects.

Ares (Multi-Systems)

Byuu's post on Hacker News about 15 years of his work (2019)

In parallel with the development of the BSNES, in the 2000s, Byuu acquired a collection of 725 American SNES game cartridges. His intention was to rip and catalog them all, extracting the data from the ROMs to document them and better emulate them, in addition to scanning their boxes and manuals. Byuu made headlines in 2012 when he sold this American arsenal for approximately R$50,000. At the time, he claimed that he needed the money to buy Japanese and European games for the consoles. Byuu managed to catalog 1,450 games for the console, leaving just over 250 to catalog all the games released for the console in Japan. At the time of the sale, he also stated that all the games worked, 85% of them came with a manual, and that he spent dozens of hours cleaning each tape before selling them. He also said that most of them sold for $36, but that some of them could sell for up to $1,000, given their rarity. In 2019, he was collecting European games for the console, having acquired 540 of them. According to Byuu, he spent around 30 thousand reais on this entire collection with more than 1200 hours of work. 

SNES Cartridges

Byuu

In addition to the importance already described about BSNES, the emulator was also responsible for the birth of the RetroArch multi-emulator. It all started with LibSNES (library, which in computing refers to subprograms used in software development), which is the basis of BSNES, which has an interface called QT that accesses the emulators in question. In 2010, SSNES was born based on this technology, transforming itself into a multi-emulator, and in 2012 it was renamed RetroArch. It had its own library based on LibSNES (called LibRetro), and its interface based on QT, called RetroArch. Later, other SNES emulators, besides SSNES, were born in RetroArch inspired by the BSNES core, such as Beetle BSNES in 2012 (a port of Mednafen's BSNES) and BSNES2014 in 2013. In 2010, BSNES became part of the Mednafen multi-emulator. In 2012, it was time to integrate the BizHawk multi-emulator. The first versions of BSNES used in these multi-emulators were 0.58 in Mednafen and 0.87 in BizHawk. Regarding Bnes, developed within BSNES to run NES from 2011 onwards, it was created alongside Ryphecha, creator of the Mednafen multi-emulator. This specific emulator received a port in the same year for the RetroArch emulator. The work with BSNES made Byuu contribute greatly to the SNES scene.

ZSNES and Snes9x

In 2006, he was once again in the ZSNES project, with corrections and additions, and also in the Snes9x project, in which he remained until 2017, with some corrections and improvements, in addition to adding emulations of the BSNES S-RTC and SPC7110 chips and support for the UPS romhack patch in 2010, the SA-1 chip in 2011, among others. His work is also added to the MESS multi-emulator, such as the emulation of the DSP-2 and OBC-1 chips in 2008, DMA / HDMA manipulation in 2010, and the Seta ST-010 chip in 2011, this one added by Byuu himself to the project.

MAME Docs: Snes, S-RTC, CX4, SPC7110, Seta ST-010, OBC-1 and DSP-2 

In the MAME emulator, he made direct contributions between 2008, 2010 to 2012, 2015 to 2016 and 2019. Among them, the addition of the DSP-2 and OBC-1 chips alongside Fabio Priuli in 2008, updates to the Overload DSP-2 documentation in 2010, the DSP chips, ST-010 and 011 in 2011, the addition of the uPD7725 DSP in 2011, and improvements to the SPC700 sound coprocessor in 2012. Other contributions from BSNES and Byuu to the project came from third parties, such as the CX4 chips (from the SNES9X in BSNES C++ format), SPC7110 and S-RTC by Harmony, and Seta ST-010 by Fábio Priuli, both in 2009. Byuu also updated files for the SNES in the project, such as video file for emulation, screen layer priorities, and valuable technical information for emulating the console as a whole.

Websites Near's Respite, BSNES.Dev, Byuu's Homepage, BBoard (Forum), GitHub and BSNES.org (Continuation of His Work)

Around 2005/2006, practically at the same time as the release of BSNES, Byuu launched the Board or Bboard (Byuu Board) forum, where he documented his tireless reverse engineering adventures, along with his efforts to understand every facet of software development that he could. In 2009, Byuu created two blogs on Blogger, under the name Setsuna. The first (Byuu News), covered all of his projects in the areas of emulation, translations, emulators and game preservation, as well as discussions about hardware preservation through crowdfunding, such as Panteon, opinions on the emulation community, technical aspects of emulator development, new projects, such as Ares, among others. He updated the blog until 2020.

Byuu News and Byuu Archive

The second (Byuu Archive) shared opinions on politics, mental health, and other personal matters. He updated the blog until 2018. Another of his creations is LibCo, a multi-collaborative library that allows a single set of codes to be used by multiple processors at different stages of execution, making it easier, for example, to load ROMs into an emulator. As far as we know, it was created around 2008, and had the help of, among others, Nach, a contributor to SNES projects. He also created other libraries, such as Hiro, for user interface APIs, Ruby for multimedia devices, and Nall for portable models.

BPS and UPS formats

He also created extensions, such as UPS (Unified Patching System) (through his Tsukuyomi software) and BPS (Beat Patching System) (through his Beat software), created in 2008 and 2012 respectively, which applied modification patches to ROMs, with BPS (an evolution of UPS) competing with the classic IPS, which is another of his great creations. UPS was also used in another Byuu software, Upset, created in 2010. Another extension created by Byuu was BML (Byuu Markup Language), used for metadata and documentation of games and systems, used in both BSNES and Higan. He also created several utilities for the SNES, such as debuggers, source code editors, among others. 

Dragon Quest V (English)

Bahamut Lagoon (English)

Outside of the emulation process, Byuu also became known for having translated from Japanese to English the games Dragon Quest V in 2001, Tekkaman Blade in 2004, Der Langrisser in 2012 and Bahamut Lagoon in 2021, this being one of his last works. Byuu committed suicide on June 27, 2021, in the Arakawa neighborhood of Tokyo, Japan. What is known is that he was being harassed on the internet by a forum called Kiwi Farms, which did this to people they considered abnormal. Byuu was autistic, an effeminate/androgynous person, a fan of furry (fictional animal characters with human characteristics), and a hardware nerd. Any of these attributes could be grounds for harassment. In addition, Byuu used psychiatric medication and had a history of childhood abuse and suffered from depression. In recent times, some people on this forum had also started to harass people close to Byuu, even causing him to lose a friendship because of it, which is when he began to be strongly affected. We do not know the rest of the context, only that he committed suicide in an audio call with a friend to the sound of the song Les Voyages De L'âme by the band Alcest, which means The Journey of the Soul.

Game Translation:

Dragon Quest V (2001), Tekkaman Blade (2004), Langrisser (2012), Bahamut Lagoon (2021)

Emulators

BSNES (2004), Higan (2013), Byuu (2020), Ares (2020)

Programs:

Xkas (2004), Tsukuyomi (UPS) (2008), Upset (UPS) (2010), Beat (BPS) (2012), Kaijuu (2012), Bass (2013), Amethyst (2019)

Chips:

MSU-1 (2007)

Extensions/Formats:

UPS (2008), BML (2011), BPS (2012)

Libraries:

LibCo (2008), Hiro (2020), Nall (2012), Ruby (2012)