Silhouette - The secret SNES Emulator developed by Nintendo | MVG

[Music] we recently covered the early days of super nes emulation in 1997 and the war between developers on who would have the fastest and most accurate super nes emulation experience on pcs at the time and if you missed that episode i will leave a link in the description below but these were all created by hobbyist developers that began learning the inner workings of the super nes documenting their findings and transforming those into code to ultimately emulate super nintendo games but one emulator stood out from the rest and that was snes 9x this was originally developed by gary henderson and jeremy coote who teamed up after working on their own individual emulator releases snes96 and snes97 by the end of 1997 most of the dust had settled with senior simulation and snes9x and zeesness emerged as the most popular ones that offered the best performance and compatibility while newer emulators had started to appear including the excellent sneeze by developer savory snacks that continued on from the work and discoveries from the community on january the 1st 1998 right as the new year had arrived a mysterious snes emulator appeared in the wild that was shrouded in mystery and its story remains fascinating to this day its name was silhouette silhouette was not credited to any specific person it was leaked to the internet anonymously and it only ran on max via earlier 68 000 macintoshes or later power pc models when installed it was accompanied with a rather large readme file silhouette as it turns out is a product of nintendo and this was an internally developed emulator with the initial goal of helping developers make super nes games in later with the idea of selling it as a retail product sounds too far-fetched well according to the readme file which goes into much detail about this emulator it was an idea that some of the nintendo bosses were considering launching the emulator then and the accompanying document was clearly leaked to the public by the author of the emulator itself and the backstory is fascinating according to the document the emulator was initially code named mirage and was provided to complement super nes development environments you see the earlier super famicom titles from japan initially would begin development in around 1988. and would be quite difficult to develop as the original titles were coded on an apple 2gs and debugged and tested on development hardware why the apple 2gs and not an ibm pc well the apple 2gs shares the exact same cpu as the super nes the 16 bit 65816 the 2gs then would offer a stable development platform for early super famicom development but there would be a problem the 2gs at the time was underpowered and there was no internal hard drives all work was handled on floppy disks and the development environment on the 2gs was considered painful developers hated it and according to the document many continued to write 6502 and use the old nes development environments choosing to ignore the 16-bit advantages of the 65816 in order to complete the project without losing their sanity nintendo responded and offered a much improved development environment for the super famicom and the mirage project was born the emulator was extremely primitive in the beginning only offering pages of debug and did not display graphics but it was something developers would use mirage to debug code then push bills to the super famicom for real testing over time it became more and more mature and integrated into development kit workflow mirage would start to run games with more graphical effects and developers used mirage and took their time to debug their games against it now the next part of the story is how mirage became silhouette according to the anonymous leaker in 1996 a high-level executive who will remain anonymous at nintendo came to the rare labs one day and saw a coder working on his game using mirage by now computer hardware had advanced to allow mirage to run at playable speeds on this guy's average desktop hardware suddenly the potential struck him super nintendo games on household pcs obviously there's a market it's hard to imagine that nintendo would be interested in selling an emulator that ran on a platform that they had no control over such as a desktop macintosh but it was also right at the time of the nintendo 64 and overall those sales weren't great for that machine so perhaps nintendo was considering all their options according to the document silhouette was a client friendly version of mirage in an attempt to broaden nintendo's market to pc owners especially those who like the super nes it would be a subset of the emulator with only the ability to play games and speed would be its main focus i decided to take a look at it myself and i tested silhouette out on my powerpc system here now this is running under sheepshaper a powerpc macintosh emulator for windows running os9 because i don't have real mac hardware to test this out on there are a few things to note the archive comes with two version one in english and one in japanese and of course the accompanying readme file the core features are identical the user interface is extremely simple just load your rom and play on your mac and as far as i know only keyboards are supported once you've played your rom then it leaves a icon on the desktop where you can simply double click back and load into that game directly with silhouette it's pretty simple and easy to use now what's interesting is for an emulator that leaked on the first day of 1998 the results are quite impressive perhaps as we would expect from an internally developed nintendo emulator while it's hard to measure speed since again i'm running under emulation one area of the emulation that is quite apparent is the transparency effects and these are overall quite advanced developers really struggle with transparency effects in the early days of super nes simulation and it's clear that silhouette is one step above compatibility overall is at a high level now it doesn't support any custom chip based games but all the ones that i tested from konami and first party nintendo games like super mario world super metroid donkey kong country and axelay all loaded fine with minimal slowdown here and there and some graphical issues but overall for 1998 it's head and shoulders above the competition as we know silhouette would never make it to stores during this time nintendo of america was undergoing layoffs and reorganizations and according to the document much of the blame was being placed on nintendo 64 sales which weren't doing very well especially when compared to the sony playstation the author then goes on to say the high level executive who brainstormed silhouette lost his job in the red tape after that it was only a matter of time before the word came down from noj to axe the silhouette project still unfinished that ended my career at nintendo since silhouette had been my only major project at nintendo for several months and i had nothing to do after the project was gone i packed my bags and made sure to get a copy of silhouette on zipdisk before taking off i'm pretty sure that silhouette is dead at nintendo in fact i wouldn't be surprised if they denied that it ever existed at this point due to the facts behind this program's development and the confidential nature of silhouette my colleague and i choose to release silhouette only under anonymity the author and the program were never heard from again there was no updates and the emulator only ever had one public release but question still remained was it truly internal nintendo work and who was the anonymous developer now this is where we do a little bit of digging and i want to stress i believe that i've discovered findings that provide strong evidence to suggest that silhouette may be an elaborate hoax but as always please draw your own thoughts and conclusions first of all when i ran super metroid under silhouette on the attract screen you can clearly see these white random garbage pixels in the background tiles and as soon as i saw this i immediately remembered something going back to the original xbox homebrew days of my very first port of snes9x and you can clearly see the exact same garbage pixels in the background tiles now this is not a coincidence if you look closely the incorrect pixels are a one-to-one match of what you see in silhouette so what are we led to believe here well in my opinion silhouette is actually some type of iteration of snes9x which if you recall was the combination of snes96 and snes97 and was developed by gary henderson and jeremy coote for reference snes 9x became open source about a year after silhouette's leak before that it remained as close source the pixel glitching bug was the result of alias pointers and aggressive compiler optimization when using the c version of the tile drawing routines later versions of snes9x switched to assembly based tile drawing but the c version was used for portability and it stands to reason that on a power pc based macintosh it would have the same issue and when i ported snes9x to the ogx box i ended up using the c version of the tile drawer and as you can see the ogx box has the exact same issue this simply cannot be coincidence i also decompiled the binary to get a closer look at it and two things that stand out many of these function calls are identical to the snes9x ones and even after performing a search for the text string snes in the binary you can see it returns snes96 it's in my opinion that silhouette is an iteration of snes 96 or 9x and the anonymous developer is gary henderson so then is silhouette just an elaborate cover story to bring a mysterious new emulator out or did silhouette actually even exist at nintendo and was nintendo really planning to market this for pc owners the answer to that is we will probably never know while it's absolutely true that nintendo have used emulators for internal development for example insata on the nintendo ds was an internally developed emulator for ds development nintendo using an iteration of snes9x seems a little hard to imagine internal development teams like nintendo europe r d or an internal japanese team would likely be the teams that were involved but the story of mirage and how it became silhouette is quite specific and it does make sense given the difficulty in the early days to develop games for the super famicom so i will leave it up to you the viewer to decide what you think let me know in the comments below if you believe the story of silhouette and i'll leave a link in the description below to both the emulator that you can try out for yourself as well as the accompanying documentation now of course you can only run this on a power pc or 68 000 base mac and as always if you enjoyed this episode don't forget to put a like on it and i'll catch you guys in the next video bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 325,179

Rating: 4.9510179 out of 5

Keywords: snes, super nintendo, nintendo, nes, emulator, snes emulator, silhouette, official emulator, devkit, mvg, snes9x, snes96, snes97, mac, power pc, modern vintage gamer, emulation, real or hoax, zsnes, 1998

Id: wAfPGAOGbpo

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DonLeoRaphMike]

Bleh. I remember when this first appeared on the scene. A brand new SNES emu sounded exciting, and I even had access to a Mac to play it on. Turned out it ran exactly like SNES9x, just with some minor tweaks. It had the same menu bar (albeit with half the options in them stripped out), and even changed video modes the exact same way the Mac SNES9x did.

IIRC Silhouette appeared during SNES9x's "hibernation". The team had approached Nintendo about potentially licensing SNES9x for selling games on PC, but Nintendo got back to them with a contract that said "we the devs of SNES9x agree to be sued for every penny we have". Out of fear of reprisal, they went quiet for a while, during which Silhouette came around. As MVG noted it had transparency, which SNES9x did not at that time. That led to people believing the story until it sunk in how fake the rest of the story seemed.

That bit about the anonymous Nintendo exec having the idea to sell the games on PC sounds exactly like an emulation enthusiast's fan-fiction. Also, no Nintendo employee would write "NoJ". It was always "NCL".

Amusing how in all the years since there have been no more leaks or corroborations of this thing's existence within Nintendo. Definitely a fake.

[u/ploguidic3]

I only ever played Super Metroid on some old as hell SNES9x release, I thought those white pixels were supposed to be there! Like it was rain or something.

[u/Clbull]

Plausible story but I'm siding with MVG on the theory that it's a very elaborate hoax. Could very easily have been a repackaged version of SNES96 or SNES9x based on the evidence he's provided.

I think Nintendo would have rushed to push out improved development tools over developing a full-blown emulator. Having them dip their toes into emulation during the 90's would have seemed far too progressive for them. Also, why would Mirage/Silhouette have seen any kind of development during the N64 days when the SNES was basically dead?

That being said, I am honestly very surprised that Nintendo haven't gone multiplatform in some way like Sega, or at least turned to PC development like Microsoft and Sony have.

Imagine Nintendo releasing Virtual Console games on Steam, Android, iOS or the Epic Games Store under a unified app (like with the Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics release.) Officially sold roms are then packaged as DLC. They would make an absolute fucking mint off of re-releasing their games on a long term & stable platform.