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Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#51

Post by goosedragons »

Mizza wrote: post #40

Really specific question, but can anybody explain what looks like a bodge resistor on the Star Fox cart (on the missing 74HCT04 chip in the bottom right)? Everything else is SMD, so it looks to me like they realized some mistake after production and had to manually fix every cart. Or maybe this is just a scan of a hacked/prototype cart.

I just opened my Japanese Starfox cart. It must be a later revision because it's a half height board with the 4 chips covered in black epoxy. It still has that resistor, although I'm not sure if it's connecting the same traces because the board is completely different.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#52

Post by c0wb0yc0d3r »

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.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#53

Post by throwawee »

johnwalkr wrote: post #50
MenhirMike wrote: post #3

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…

Street fighter localization is wacky. Why would they swap the same names for different characters?

Widely believed to be because Mike Bison was a little too on-the-nose for a heavyweight boxer and the shuffle was the easiest way to make a last minute change.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#54

Post by pansa2 »

throwawee wrote: post #53
johnwalkr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Street fighter localization is wacky. Why would they swap the same names for different characters?

Widely believed to be because Mike Bison was a little too on-the-nose for a heavyweight boxer and the shuffle was the easiest way to make a last minute change.

I also read that Capcom USA felt the name “Vega” was too “weak” for the dictator.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#55

Post by bluedino »

Dwedit wrote: post #25
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.

The file sizes given by the site are wrong. Super Mario World is 512KB, or 508KB if you discard the padding at the end. Only compressing it to ZIP format gives you a file size around 360KB.

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/

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#56

Post by numpad0 »

goosedragons wrote: post #48
MenhirMike wrote: post #3

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…

That's not entirely true. A few DS carts at least had IR receivers (e.g. Pokemon HeartGold). I think Learn with Pokémon: Typing Adventure adds Bluetooth through the card as well. So there was some limited capability to add features, not quite as exciting as extra CPUs but it's not like any GBA did anything super exciting there either.

It's like the difference between slotting ROM into DDR5 slot[1] vs SATA port. You can still add features by means of fake disk I/O, but that isn't the same as directly interfacing with the CPU bus.

1: perhaps more perfect analogy will be socketing ROM as its own chiplet if that ever made sense

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#57

Post by LocutusOfBorges »

goosedragons wrote: post #48
MenhirMike wrote: post #3

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…

That's not entirely true. A few DS carts at least had IR receivers (e.g. Pokemon HeartGold). I think Learn with Pokémon: Typing Adventure adds Bluetooth through the card as well. So there was some limited capability to add features, not quite as exciting as extra CPUs but it's not like any GBA did anything super exciting there either.

> not quite as exciting as extra CPUs

Not that it was an official licensed product, but for what it's worth, there was a DS flashcart that bundled a significantly faster CPU than the DS's own - the SuperCard DSTWO [1]. The extra CPU (Ingenic Jz4740, MIPS) was primarily used for GBA emulation on DS/DSi systems without the need for a GBA slot passthrough flashcart, as was otherwise required - though there was a quite successful homebrew scene around it at the time as well, up to and including stuff like a (proof of concept) port of a PS1 emulator [2].

It was a surprisingly impressive device! The only downsides, as I recall, were the increased battery drain and the fact that the DS Slot-1 bus was only fast enough to allow streaming video output from the cartridge to the system's displays at ~45FPS, irrespective of the rate that the emulator was actually running at internally.

[1] https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/SuperCard_DSTWO [2] https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-play-ps1-games-on-your-ds...

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#58

Post by LocalH »

MenhirMike wrote: post #3

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…

I'm pretty sure modern SNES flashcarts can do MSU1. The MiSTer FPGA can also support the MSU1.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#59

Post by hnlmorg »

masklinn wrote: post #47
hnlmorg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was basically true for all 16 and 8bit era consoles

It would probably be more precise to say that it was true for cart-based consoles: likely due to backwards compatibility with the GB port Nintendo supported enhancement carts until the DS (though by then it’d become very uncommon). And the N64 technically supported cart enhancements though only a small handful of japanese games used it ( Morita Shogi 64 had a modem and rj11 adapter in the cart… and RCEs so you can us…

Indeed. And well put too

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#60

Post by unleaded »

goosedragons wrote: post #48
MenhirMike wrote: post #3

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…

That's not entirely true. A few DS carts at least had IR receivers (e.g. Pokemon HeartGold). I think Learn with Pokémon: Typing Adventure adds Bluetooth through the card as well. So there was some limited capability to add features, not quite as exciting as extra CPUs but it's not like any GBA did anything super exciting there either.

There are some that use the GBA slot for expansion too. The DS browser uses it for a memory expansion, and there's a Guitar Hero game that uses it for some extra buttons. When you boot the console with one inserted in Manual Mode it calls it a "DS Option Pak", and there's a lot more than i thought https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/DS_Option_Pak
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