101–110 of 275 posts
I wonder what you could do with modern tech, exploiting that ability of having "enhancement chips" in the cartridge. The SuperFX is mentioned to have it's own framebuffer and copy the whole thing over to VRAM. Does that mean, it would technically be possible to put some ridiculously overpowered SoC into an cartridge, and use that to render modern graphics (at SNES resolutions), copying the resulting frames back into…
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Well, we have to account for the fact that modern system simply don't require that much optimization and compression. Working with stricter limits meant that dev teams had to get creative and minimize file size, while nowadays a single game update can be around 20 GB.
> nowadays a single game update can be around 20 GB Irrespective of the abundance of storage we now enjoy, and even though I could rationally understand the reasons, this will always make me raise an eyebrow or sigh.
The amount of technology and number and size of assets in a game now is just insane, it is in no way at all comparable to the garage projects for 8bit consoles.
Remember, games used to have to be ported - they were so locked into their particular platform/hardware that porting a game was essentially a total rewrite every single time. Nowadays we can write once, run on every single platform with just hooks into platform specific libs swapped out.
Modern day developers aren't stupid; we're just all used to our current environments, but I would bet that if we all needed to, we could just as easily jump back in to writing everything in asm and custom tailoring it for a particular CPU/hardware. But then modern games would be impossible to actually get finished.
Another detail not mentioned here is that even carts which didn't contain enhancement chips had different levels of performance - the SNES CPU nominally ran at 3.58mhz, but it would only actually run at that speed with a "FastROM" cart inserted. Nintendo also offered publishers a "SlowROM" cart format, which was cheaper, but would downclock the CPU to just 2.68mhz. There is a community of modders developing patches t…
Always confused me why the SNES was so paltry with its speed when the competitor TurboGrafx-16 usually ran at 7MHz, and also had a 6502-family CPU that required similar memory timing. But the TurboGrafx flopped (in the west) and the SNES was a hit world-wide, so I guess they did something right.
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…
There is also this entirely crazy "NES reverse emulation"[1] Here someone replaces the cartridge with a modern computer and then... weird things start happening. Such as using a NES to present effectively a powerpoint presentation about humor. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0
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It's still quite impressive to fit such a lengthy and fun game into 508KB without any procedural generation, just tight assembly and clever use of bitmaps. This is programming art.
This is largely a lost art because of several bad paradigms that have become very popular in recent years, making software exponentially worse in the process. In the old days, it was common and NES games were even smaller than SNES games because the graphics were much less complex. I believe Super Mario Bros 3, which many people still insist was better than Super Mario World, actually fit into 32KB.
Another detail not mentioned here is that even carts which didn't contain enhancement chips had different levels of performance - the SNES CPU nominally ran at 3.58mhz, but it would only actually run at that speed with a "FastROM" cart inserted. Nintendo also offered publishers a "SlowROM" cart format, which was cheaper, but would downclock the CPU to just 2.68mhz. There is a community of modders developing patches t…
The thing that blows my mind about the SNES is that even its onboard RAM can't be accessed at the nominal 3.58MHz clock; the system slows down for that. Always confused me why the SNES was so paltry with its speed when the competitor TurboGrafx-16 usually ran at 7MHz, and also had a 6502-family CPU that required similar memory timing. But the TurboGrafx flopped (in the west) and the SNES was a hit world-wide, so I gu…
Still have all my old consoles including the Turbo Graphics 16 and SNES. It was all about the software. Mind you this was during a time when games were $50 each which today is something like $100. If you wanted to sample a game you hoped a friend had it so you could borrow or the local video store had it to rent. If not it was a crap shoot and game review magazines were a staple.
TG16 had nothing to compete. I only remember the popular side-scrollers like Bonks Adventure or Splatter House. The rest were "weird" games no one was interested in. We had about 7 or 8 games before we gave up on it. I had I think one other friend who had one who also gave up on it with just a few titles.
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Out Of This World is a case of SlowROM/FastROM where the dev was not allowed to use FastROM. Iirc they claimed it saved a whopping 50 cents a cartridge to use slowrom in that case.
I don't know how much the publisher made in revenue from each cartridge. $0.50 might have been 5% of revenue?
I hope developers still love to blog details with article mode like this, rather than vlogging it on YouTube. A lot of detail packed into a few kilobytes only. "Super Mario World" is still the masterpiece game ever. It has amazing characters, sprites, and stages packed into only 360 KB.
Terranigma is right up there as well for me; Super Mario World is probably number 3 in my book.
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Was there any hardware reason for this, or was this just nintendo making gamers' lifes worse by gouging their customers?
The ROM chips were literally lower specced / worse tolerances, and thus cheaper. FastROM chips were guaranteed (by the manufacturers) to yield stable results in under 120ns, versus 200 for SlowROM.
> 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?