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Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
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Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#252[flagged]
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#253[flagged]
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
I was actually just thinking last night about how something like Fortnite handled emotes. Skins and cosmetics I can understand, but they have 100 players and hundreds of emotes that any player can use at any time. Is it all really just streamed in on demand? Most common preloaded?
Made me ponder a bit.
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
SNES had 3 background layers and color math/transparency, TurboGrafx 16 was stuck with one background layer. SNES also had much better sound capabilities. I'd say TurboGrafx's biggest advantage was that they had a full handheld version of the system available very early on. The Turbo Express crushed the Game Gear and Lynx in terms of power. (The Game Boy still beat all its more-powerful competitors because of its far…
I'd say the Game Boy also won in terms of library of games, and the popular properties owned by Nintendo, such as Super Mario Bros., Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, among many others.
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#256> The copy-protection mechanism of the SNES is something I already dig into in my 10NES article. It works by having two chips talking in lockstep. One chip is in the console, the other in the cart. If the console CIC sees something it does not like, it resets every processor.
It was easily defeated for consumers though (but probably not for game producers/editors)...
Back then we all had a "backup device" for our SNES: a device you'd plug into the SNES and which had a floppy drive. So we'd "backup" all our games on very cheap 3"1/2 floppies. All that was needed for the system to work was to have one original cartdridge, which you'd plug into the copier, and the device would reuse that cartdridge's CIC chip.
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But the TurboGrafx flopped (in the west) and the SNES was a hit world-wide, so I guess they did something right. 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…
I definitely lucked out on my dad being in touch with the technology at the time. I was ready to get a TurboGrafx 16 just for Bonk's Adventure, and I definitely would have missed out over that purchase. The SNES was so popular, that I had many friends that were willing to trade games with me, so we were able to experience new games without the stiff price of having to purchase everything played. One of the things gaming companies made sure to kill off as things turned to fully digital.
I still want to play all of the Splatter House titles, though. I didn't find out about those until I was older, but I've watched plenty of walkthroughs of the various iterations, and it looks like the perfect amount of strategy, gore, and need for proper timing to master.
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-...
On top of this, most emulators allow you to run the game at faster speeds than the original. I haven't encountered a game yet where I wanted to do this, but the fact that it's available just shows how far emulation has come (and the wizardry that is involved in emulating an entire computer system).
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#259Another 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…
Technical specifications rarely have to do with whether or not a console succeeds, as long as they don't affect MSRP too much. Price and game library are typically the most important aspects. Or ease of piracy in some territories.
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
noice but apparently the NES is a lot more limited, in that it wasn't really designed to accept enhancement chips. still absolutely amazing that he can run emulated SNES games on real NES hardware! but the SNES actually had that ability to accept enhancement chips - as seen in the SuperFX and others... I feel that should allow for doing drastically more!
Different set of challenges on the SNES. The NES was a little unusual in that it basically had no video ram. The PPU (the graphics chip) rendered sprites and background tiles straight off of the cartridge at 60fps as if the cartridge was an extension of the CPU's address space. So there are almost no limits to what you could do with expansion hardware, other than the fact that everything would have to ultimately be r…
> The NES was a little unusual in that it basically had no video ram. The PPU (the graphics chip) rendered sprites and background tiles straight off of the cartridge at 60fps as if the cartridge was an extension of the CPU's address space.
Unusual for home consoles, but it was pretty standard for arcade boards. This is why systems like the NeoGeo and the CPS-1/2/3 could handle massive amounts of sprites and animation that home systems couldn't replicate until the Dreamcast.