Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#121

Post by VS1999 » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 6:37 PM UTC

fennecfoxy wrote: post #102

HeckFeck wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As a millennial who has done both embedded and web it doesn't make me sigh at all and usually I find people with that line of thought are just being elitist. 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/hardwa…

This is peak hackernews right here. No, modern developers couldn't just "easily jump back into writing everything in asm". More importantly, no one was talking about writing everything in assembly, he was complaining about 20 GB of bloat getting dumped on everyone who buys a game.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#122

Post by mmaniac » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 6:52 PM UTC

GaggiX wrote: post #63

jsheard wrote: post #61

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 article does mention LoRom and HiRom, I imagine you're talking about the same thing.

They're related but not the same. This wiki page explains LoROM and HiROM; FastROM is explained by this sentence.

> Different address ranges are accessed at different speeds, and the speed of the ROM at banks $80-$FF may be changed with register $420D.

https://snes.nesdev.org/wiki/Memory_map

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#123

Post by rahen » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 7:34 PM UTC

bdw5204 wrote: post #89

rahen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of curiosity, could you cite a few of those paradigms? I wholeheartedly agree, by the way.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#124

Post by nicole_express » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 7:44 PM UTC

c0wb0yc0d3r wrote: post #52

solarized wrote: post #5

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.

> hope developers still love to blog details with article mode like this, rather than vlogging it on YouTube. I think the driving force behind this for many is it's much harder to steal video content. With text bits can scrape it change a few words and reuse it on an SEO ad site.

I've definitely noticed as a blogger many sites are so brazen stealing content that they'll even hotlink to my images, so I can find their copying in my server logs. Very annoying.