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Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

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Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#11

Post by dwattttt »

hollow-moe wrote: post #7
MenhirMike wrote: post #3

I do really like how cartridges on the old systems were essentially equivalent to a PCI Expansion Card in a PC. It was directly connected to the Bus and could do essentially anything. Sadly, that practice ended after the GameBoy Advance, and everything since the Nintendo DS has been purely data storage. This leads to crazy modern enhancements like a Raytracing chip[1], or the MSU1 enhancement chip that is AFAIK not a…

Now I am curious to know how some games could have an IR transmsmitter inside the cartridge like Pokemon Soulsilver, did they plan this specific usecase or a whole channel for limited cartridge expansion components ?

The interface to the gaming system might be strictly data, but you've got power supplied to the cartridge; you can put whatever hardware you can fit inside that cartridge still

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#12

Post by evan_conway »

MenhirMike wrote: post #3

I do really like how cartridges on the old systems were essentially equivalent to a PCI Expansion Card in a PC. It was directly connected to the Bus and could do essentially anything. Sadly, that practice ended after the GameBoy Advance, and everything since the Nintendo DS has been purely data storage. This leads to crazy modern enhancements like a Raytracing chip[1], or the MSU1 enhancement chip that is AFAIK not a…

I'm also glad the article mentioned Street Fighter Alpha 2 and linked a video about the delay fix. The patched version is super fun.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#13

Post by MenhirMike »

hollow-moe wrote: post #7
MenhirMike wrote: post #3

I do really like how cartridges on the old systems were essentially equivalent to a PCI Expansion Card in a PC. It was directly connected to the Bus and could do essentially anything. Sadly, that practice ended after the GameBoy Advance, and everything since the Nintendo DS has been purely data storage. This leads to crazy modern enhancements like a Raytracing chip[1], or the MSU1 enhancement chip that is AFAIK not a…

Now I am curious to know how some games could have an IR transmsmitter inside the cartridge like Pokemon Soulsilver, did they plan this specific usecase or a whole channel for limited cartridge expansion components ?

That's actually a pretty good question. The NTR-031 IR cartridges were used for a few games, and there was also one for Motion Sensors and a TV Antenna.

From what I can see, it looks like even though they can't extend the functionality directly, they do still interface with the system in some way. Perhaps they are more like a device connected to a serial port would be? So far less capable than the full extension cart, but still possible to communicate with through a standardized protocol? (The DS Cartridge slot has 8 data pins rather than the full address/data bus, but seems to have a protocol: http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#dscartridgeprotocol)

So, I need to correct myself, they nerfed it first with the DS, before then switching to being pure flash chips with the 3DS when they switched to XtraROM (which has potential lifespan issues: https://gbatemp.net/threads/nintendo-switch-3ds-cartridge-li...) - and that seems to not allow much custom functionality: https://www.3dbrew.org/wiki/Gamecards#Protocol

(Though if someone with more knowledge can correct me, please do so. I thought that DS/3DS/Switch are pure flash chips, but was wrong at least about the DS)

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#14

Post by VS1999 »

modeless wrote: post #9

I'm wondering why the console CPU wasn't running at 4x the clock rate to begin with, if the cartridges could easily and cheaply include one so much better. I guess that's just how fast CPUs were improving back then. A CPU from just a few years prior was that obsolete. Crazy!

Nintendo likes to sell its consoles at a profit, so they might have just decided that even an extra $10 per console wasn't worth it.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#15

Post by MenhirMike »

evan_conway wrote: post #12
MenhirMike wrote: post #3

I do really like how cartridges on the old systems were essentially equivalent to a PCI Expansion Card in a PC. It was directly connected to the Bus and could do essentially anything. Sadly, that practice ended after the GameBoy Advance, and everything since the Nintendo DS has been purely data storage. This leads to crazy modern enhancements like a Raytracing chip[1], or the MSU1 enhancement chip that is AFAIK not a…

I'm also glad the article mentioned Street Fighter Alpha 2 and linked a video about the delay fix. The patched version is super fun.

Somebody also just recently discovered that Shin Akuma is playable on the SNES version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF2AiG2MN2I

Between this and the SA-1 fixes for Gradius III and Super R-Type, we live in a golden age of improving SNES games :)

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#16

Post by devbent »

MenhirMike wrote: post #4
plugin-baby wrote: post #2

> The author of DOOM for SNES, Randy Linden, did not have access to any documentation about the GSU chip or even DOOM source code. He reverse engineered all of it Technically this is impressive, but why was it necessary?

Some Details on the Doom Wiki ( https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Super_NES ): Randy Linden, the port's sole programmer, initiated the port of Doom for the Super NES on his own initially, as he was fascinated by the game. Since Doom's source code was not yet released at the time, Linden referred to the Unofficial Doom Specs as a means of understanding the game's lump layout in detail. The resources were extracted from the IW…

I was lucky enough to work with Randy for quite a few years at Microsoft.

Incredible developer. He also made the Bleem! PlayStation emulator.

Funny enough none of his coworkers ever bothered to look him up online until after we all stopped working together at which point we all learned we'd been working with programming royalty.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#17

Post by wk_end »

modeless wrote: post #9

I'm wondering why the console CPU wasn't running at 4x the clock rate to begin with, if the cartridges could easily and cheaply include one so much better. I guess that's just how fast CPUs were improving back then. A CPU from just a few years prior was that obsolete. Crazy!

Unlike modern chips with cache hierarchies and the like, the 65816 is designed to run in lock step with the memory it’s accessing. A faster CPU would have necessitated faster RAM in the system and faster ROMs on the carts too. Games were expensive enough as it was, then.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#18

Post by TapamN »

wk_end wrote: post #8

Where do the byte counts for the various games come from? The games came on ROM chips that were, as ROM chip are wont to, sized to powers-of-two. For instance, Super Mario World was shipped on a 512kb ROM - where does 346,330 bytes come from? Are these compressed sizes?

It looks like they're compressed sizes. If I gzip SMW.SMC, I get a 347 KB file. It's very misleading.

There are other issues in there. The writer makes it sound like MVG was the one who discovered that the pause in SFA2 was from loading audio data, when it was already known LONG before his video. https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=70474#p70474

He also seems very confused about the RTC. It's obviously so that the clock keeps going even when the console is off and the cartridge is unplugged, like in the GBC/GBA Pokemon games, but he says something about how it might be because of the NTSC clock drifting? ??? What?

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#19

Post by silisili »

I love any and all research on these systems. It completely blows my mind that something as complex and fun as Mario Kart was only 350KB in size. You can't even get a 'hello world' binary that small for most languages today.

Yeah, it's custom and tuned, but that's a lot of fun packed with at the time 'good graphics' in the size of a single low quality jpeg of today.

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