Trouble importing SNES ROM with Higan on Mac OS X

emulationmacossnes

This is the first time I've ever tried to use Higan, so I may have missed a few things. Please bear with me.

I have some ROM files for SNES with names like *.rom, *.smc, *.srm and I'd like to play them on my Mac running El Capitan. I've used Nestopia before for NES but see that Higan has continued development, so I thought I'd try it for SNES.

I grabbed the latest v097 source and built it with a simple make command once I unpacked the archive. (No docs + good guess = working higan.app bundle. w00t!)

Higan is fairly inert without games, so I've been trying to figure out how to import. Seems irarus is needed. Okay, another make and I have icarus.app which runs, but won't let me actually select any of the ROM files that I have. I can see them in the Icarus interface, but I can check any of the checkboxes. Okay, maybe this is an OS X thing. So, I grab the Windows x86-64 binary and run that in a VirtualBox, and I'm able to convert a ROM file into a directory containing a single file: program.rom.

When I try to run this using Higan, I get two errors:

  1. The required file Game/manifest.bml is missing
  2. The required file ~/Library/Application Support/higan/Super Famicom.sys/manifest.bml is missing

I solved that second one by copying the Super Famicom.sys directory from the source directory into my ~Library/Application Support/higan directory and now I'm left with a single error. I tried just creating the missing file, but that just gives me no errors and black screen in Higan (with a frame rate of ~60 fps — great!).

I think I've gone about as far as I can without professional help. Does anyone know what I'm missing, here?

Best Answer

Super late answer, but I hope it helps someone at least.

In order to emulate anything on higan you need to get the manifest.bml and the ipl.rom for whatever system you're emulating. You can find those in the git repository here

Just stick those two files in your Super Famicom.sys folder and import your game using icarus. Then you should be good to go!

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