Dingoo A320 Review - SNES Emulation
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System is one of my all time favorite systems. I remember getting mine for Christmas a year after its launch along with a copy of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It quickly became one of my most cherished consoles. This being said, I've had quite a collection of SNES ROMs laying around to try out!
ROM Management
I decided to only load ROMs that were in English for now, to the ROM count is around 800~900. I placed them in alphabetical folders under Games\SNES.
Emulation
Much is to be said on SNES emulation on the Dingoo A320. On one hand, it DOES load almost every game (excluding those with special chips, which I will touch on in a bit,) but it also has teh buggiest frame skip I've ever dealt with in an emulator. First off, I grabbed Super Mario World. it's a game that most SNES users are familiar enough with and one that I've played more recently on my SNES at home. I was a bit disappointed. First off, I left the frame skip option on AUTO and turned the volume up to 90%. Then I let the intro play. The music sounded too fast at times and too slow at others. The sound effects sounded horrible and the game was dropping frames like crazy! I played through about half of level one and went straight to the frame skip option. After setting it to skip only one frame, I played through the rest of the level. The game was no longer skipping, but it felt slightly too sluggish. On level 2 I set the frame skip to 2. Now the speed was fine, but the game felt slightly "jerky."
This is how most of the SNES ROMs went. First, try with AUTO, then 1, then 2. Anything more than 2 made the game so jerky that it was no longer enjoyable. For the most part, games like F-Zero, Tecmo's Secret of the Stars, Gradius III, and R-Type III ran great on AUTO or 1. Also, Earthbound ran well on 2 without giving me a headache. Some games, however, such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Final Fantasy II/IV , and Final Fantasy III/VI had issues that were almost unforgivable. With The Legend of Zelda, the rain at the beginning made me rip my headphones off due to the loud screeching noise it made (which, by the way, completely turned the music off.) Also, there were graphical glitches when changing rooms and sometimes the tiles on the floor would turn solid black. For both Final Fantasy games the sound was not emulated well and the games were riddled with graphical glitches. This goes for Chrono Trigger too.
One last note on frame skipping on the Dingoo. What ever you set the setting to on one game carries over to the next. So if you set Super Mario World to 2 and then jump to Super Metroid, it will still be set to 2, meaning you have to go in to the options on each game every time you switch a game and set it to where you think it needs to be. This is how ALL the Dingoo emulators are, but most of the time you will leave the setting alone in the other emulators.
On top of the overall bugs listed above, no special chips are emulated. Meaning, no Super FX chip for games like Star Fox. No DSP chips for games like Megaman X2 and X3. Games like Super Mario RPG are also out of the question. Secret of Mana and the translated Seiken Densetsu have font issues rendering them unplayable. There are several other games that will not play list here, for those interested.
Overall, the SNES emulation is poor, which is disappointing for those who remember and love the system. On a side note, for those running Dingux (a port of Linux that can be dual booted with the original Dingoo OS,) there is a version of SNES9x that plays most of these games (with the exception of the special chip games,) at better speeds and with better sound. It's well worth a look in to Dingux for those who don't mind taking extra time to set up their Dingoos! I'll be covering more on Dingux in the future...
Links:
List of recommended Fram Skip options
Non-Playable games on the Dingoo A320









