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Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

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Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#81

Post by hooby »

chpatrick wrote: post #35
hooby wrote: post #34

I wonder what you could do with modern tech, exploiting that ability of having "enhancement chips" in the cartridge. The SuperFX is mentioned to have it's own framebuffer and copy the whole thing over to VRAM. Does that mean, it would technically be possible to put some ridiculously overpowered SoC into an cartridge, and use that to render modern graphics (at SNES resolutions), copying the resulting frames back into…

https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0?si=LArQqOoH2bLtTXCQ

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!

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#82

Post by MisterTea »

Since these carts pull out the CPU bus I would like to know if anyone ever did anything unusual with a classic gaming console. Like controlling motors for a robot or wiring in an FPGA to add functionality like Ethernet/USB, running a terminal emulator, trying to write an OS, etc.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#83

Post by RetroTechie »

eru wrote: post #38
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.

You are just getting old. People used to have the same reaction to games that filled up an entire CD (or even multiple).

> You are just getting old.

I am! But even then, imho sizes should correlate to the detail (graphics / sound), complexity & vastness of virtual worlds embodied in a game.

Not the ease with which developers can fill up the available space.

Yes these are related. But some kind of 1:1 correspondence was lost ages ago.

Optimizing for size, to squeeze out every last byte possible: who still does this in 2024?

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#84

Post by cduzz »

wazoox wrote: post #73
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.

"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.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#87

Post by ISL »

whaleofatw2022 wrote: post #79
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…

Out Of This World is a case of SlowROM/FastROM where the dev was not allowed to use FastROM. Iirc they claimed it saved a whopping 50 cents a cartridge to use slowrom in that case.

I don't know how much the publisher made in revenue from each cartridge. $0.50 might have been 5% of revenue?

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#88

Post by JohnBooty »

bluedino wrote: post #55
Dwedit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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 title screens and cinematics were often compressed. Anime/comic art styles lend themselves really well to RLE compression because you have lots of consecutive pixels of the same color. And, obviously, these can be fairly static images that don't need to be updated 60 times a second.

Definitely an outlier, but: the title screen of Secret of Mana was actually a JPG that took around a minute (!!) to decompress. The music and scrolling text are cleverly designed to mask this: https://manaredux.com/lore/how-was-the-incredible-title-scre...

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#89

Post by bdw5204 »

rahen wrote: post #46
Dwedit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#90

Post by amlib »

modeless wrote: post #9

I'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 to just bundle the chips in a single cart anyway.

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