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Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
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Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
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Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#156I'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!
I also wonder why they couldn't provide a second cartridge slot for the enhancements. Sell enhancement carts separately or bundled with some of the games that require it (mostly the first game to feature such enhancement) and then all other developers could consider using them too, without worrying about the cost of their own cart. I imagine this would add to much cost or complexity to the console, making it simpler…
They kind of did that on the Nintendo 64 with the expansion pack for extra RAM: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_64_Expansion_Pak
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Pitfall!" on Atari VCS held 255 entirely different game screens in a 4k cartridge :)
Isn't it more of "Pitfall!" has a set of 255 levels that are procedurally generated and the author spent a ton of time searching for the best seed that would generate the levels we know today. It isn't as if you could have a map editor and adjust the levels or the order of the levels, though you could run the generation procedure to find new levels to your liking. Still an amazing game. In 4k it is astonishing.
David Crane, the creator of Pitfall, explains it all very nicely in a GDC Classic Game Postmortem [1]. I'm linking at the relevant timestamp, but the whole video is pure Atari 2600 goodness. The full Postmortems playlist is quite enjoyable too. I particularly liked the talks about the original Deus Ex, Myst, Loom, Adventure, Marble Madness, Ms. Pac-Man, Paperboy, Lemmings, and more. I find these videos very soothing and nostalgic. Got to rewatch them now...
[1]: https://youtu.be/tfAnxaWiSeE?list=PL2e4mYbwSTbbiX2uwspn0xiYb...
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#158I 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.
"Pitfall!" on Atari VCS held 255 entirely different game screens in a 4k cartridge :)
Take a look at Solaris. Another huge game with 48 sectors and probably the best graphics seen on the 2600, all in a 16k cartridge.
Quite a feat considering how horrifyingly difficult programming the 2600 was. Even the SDK was fairly barebones, basically a VT100 connected to a PDP-11 running RT8 and a 6502 assembler
Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
#159Another 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…
The SNES has a 65C816. That's a 16 bit CPU, not a 6502. It can process more data per clock cycle than the 8-bit 65C02 in the TurboGrafx.
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