Working on a new article for this week, Mato needed to verify something between the original SNES and SNES mini versions of Kirby Super Star. Not being very knowledgeable of Kirby games, Mato hooked things up so he could play both games side-by-side at the same time…
You should’ve figured out how to use the same input on both games 😛
That would have been relatively easy, assuming they could dump the ROM image from the SNES Mini. Then you just hook up two emulators running different ROMs to the same controller input. I’ve seen it done in tool-assisted speedruns before; there’s one where the runner plays all three SNES Mega Man X games at the same time, and one where the runner plays all three SNES Final Fantasy games at the same time.
Hooking up the same input to two separate devices both running simultaneously is much more difficult and would not only require specialized hardware, it would also probably introduce input lag as the hardware would need to duplicate the signal sent out by the controller.
The problem is that the SNES Mini patches games on the fly, meaning a straight ROM dump won’t equal what the SNES Mini actually runs. That was the problem I faced, which is why I had to play them side-by-side.
I’ve been thinking about getting the Switch version of Ys 8 for just this reason — so I can play the original localization on the PS4 and the new one on the Switch side-by-side and check out absolutely everything that’s changed.