I've been trying to run the various ROM dumps of this game on several higan builds and various bsnes builds (0.91, 0.88, 0.87 & 0.80) over three days with no luck. I was able to find the
old bsnes builds
here which also has other tools. Version 0.3 of snespurify and higan 0.92 can be found
here. I haven't been able to boot up this game nor its translated variants in these emulators at all! And I've given up. In many cases there's just a black screen when this game presumably booted up. But on one of those days I'd tried my Mednafen build 0.9.38.5 (Latest version on the website currently is 0.9.38.7) with the mednaffe frontend (I tried the MedGUI frontend last year but it's got a badly broken GUI). The mednaffe looks basic but is nice and powerful and does provide most of the same graphical enhancement solutions that can be found in the Snes9x build. And this game and its translated patch WORKED just fine on it! The Mednafen emulator is very good for a range of consoles and forks off an old bsnes build plus the team's own improvements for SNES emulation.
And this emulator does NOT need you to first do the silly auto-creation of folders with multiple data files that byuu asks of you to do with the snes/purify and icarus tools for the bsnes and higan emulators respectively! It just boots up the SFC/SNES games by themselves! It's alright!
Even this old
info page warned that bsnes at least has only limited support for the BS-X games but this game can boot up on my Snes9x and Mednafen builds no problems!
The purify tools on the bsnes builds (the 0.87 one crashes on my modern Win 7 64-bit system) aren't very good at finding any ROM files, although v1 on bsnes 0.80 seems to be better at scanning for and seeing them all and choosing one or a few to convert into multiple-file folders (eg. upgrading .smc files into .sfc or .sfc into .bs. Though neither bsnes nor higan can find the .bs files, weird.). The higan builds have this 'icarus' tool, which is like an improved version of snespurify and is probably better at tracking down and converting some ROM files into new bootable folders. But no luck for this BS-X game.
Many users in the past have had problems trying to purify the ROMs and/or booting them up in bsnes/higan as can be seen in
many of these various forum threads. Also
one more thread where many dumbfounded users have pointed out many usability problems just as I've found too. Really strange for byuu to insist on forcing you to create these multiple folders (why two instead of one for a ROM, for instance?!) and why the emulators can in most cases only boot up from these 'folder structures' INSTEAD of the actual game data files. Good grief, weird! So unlike basically every other emulator I've ever used (though I haven't bothered with MAME). Why doesn't he just have his emus build these data folders with just the save and misc files, not a copy of the game data file while you boot up a new game ROM? The problem is that many users will be turned off by them and thus don't help him much with improving the very problematic user design principles of his emulators. Therefore his emulators are in this 'investment/development death spiral' cycle (common term for the auto manufacturing industry) which can cause them to 'devolve' to be horrible to use coz not many people use it nor reach him for help or offer tips to improve it! byuu is very hard to reach and I don't want to register on his board so...
Retroarch, which uses the higan core, may be good but I don't like it because of: 1) large install size, 2) incredibly clunky, cumbersome and overarching settings/config menus - WORSE than Sony's XMB menu on the PS3/PS4 which is easier to make out and move across, 3) hard to remember/see whether certain settings are default or not and which parts of the settings some 'reset to default' options may impact on, 4) There's NO control config menus for ANY relevant emulator cores as far as I can see (!), this thing is controllable ONLY with the keyboard key presses or your gamepad button presses (for TV setups) - no MOUSE usage at all (!) - so slow! Absolutely hate it. I want to forget about it! Openemu is similar to it but for the Mac PCs. Bizhawk is OK with accurate emulator cores but there's no graphical enhancement options, too few settings for the console emulations and it's just way too much focused on TAS (Tool-Assisted Speedrun?) video recording, so I don't like it at all.
But I've tested the bsnes again with two normal SNES games as well as on higan (although the latter or both I'd recommend to use the related tools to 'purify' the ROMs into new bootable folders) and they worked. So for normal SNES/SFC (excepting the BS-X and maybe Sufami Turbo games) I'd recommend any user to try these emus for perfect accuracy and the Snes9x for good compatibility with a large set of enhanced 'THX' magic
.
So Taskforce, I think you should add a statement on the notepad for this game and any future complicated format game to the effect of: "If you're having difficulty/issues with using bsnes/higan to boot up and run a BS-X or any complicated SFC game like [insert this game title] then Mednafen with a good frontend is the recommended alternative solution for high accuracy and easy loading of said games."