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Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
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Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#192[dead]
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#193[flagged]
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Interesting. Having not looked at all yet. Wonder if the emulators out there take this fact into account.
SNES emulation is extremely accurate at this point - any modern/reasonably competent emulator handles this correctly. Shoutout to Near (RIP) here - they wrote an article on Ars which documents how we've reached this point.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-...
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#195[flagged]
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#196[flagged]
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did they not compress the assets like they did in other games, like M.C. Kids? https://games.greggman.com/game/programming_m_c__kids/
As the linked article notes, some of the special on-cart chips were mainly used for data decompression, like the SPC7110. So on those games, definitely compressed assets! But... I'd love to know how often assets were compressed on "normal" carts without special chips. Decompressing assets on the fly during gameplay action seems like it would be quite a challenge for the SNES' CPU. My understanding is that images on t…
From what I've seen, on average, with many exceptions, most games will lightly compress most data. Tile graphics and layouts only need to be decompressed whenever a scene/level/map is loaded. Games aren't doing streaming audio or anything, so song data can be decompressed and uploaded to the sound processor before a level starts too.
Likewise, text needs to be decompressed once immediately before it's displayed, so games will usually compress that - it's quick enough to decompress a few hundred bytes while the text box loads.
The only thing that I've seen that's usually stored uncompressed is sprite animation data - particularly for player characters with lots of different animations. There's not enough VRAM to load all of it at once, so it needs to be streamed in, and in that case the CPU often just doesn't have the muscle.
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#198[flagged]
> It's wild that the Super 3D Noah's Ark unlicensed game didn't have its own CIC chip and required plugging an official cartridge on top to pass the copy protection check. Goes to show the lengths publishers had to go to bypass Nintendo's strict licensing. I wonder how many other unlicensed carts used similar CIC workarounds.
Super 3D Noah's Ark is the only game that seems to have survived to modern times, but I remember there were quite a few more. Nintendo wasn't happy about the religious-themed games but knew it would be extremely bad press to go after the developers, so they strong-armed the major retailers instead. I used to see the games developed by Wisdom Tree in Christmas stores, book stores, and small regional retailers.
In non-western countries, there were pirated games that used the same "piggyback" technique to avoid the CIC, but this was less common since PCBs were pretty expensive to manufacture in smallish quantities at the time. Console game piracy didn't _really_ take off until CDs became the dominant format. Arcade game piracy actually had a pretty robust underground market, though.
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#199[dead]
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#200[flagged]