The Hearts of the Super Nintendo

https://fabiensanglard.net/snes_hearts/index.html

by todsacerdoti • 2 years ago

218 56 2 years ago

I think the link to "nocash" is broken. It should go to: https://problemkaputt.de/fullsnes.htm#snestimingoscillators

Keyframe7• 2 years ago

one of the proudest accomplishments I've done is that over the years I've managed to collect all of SNES PAL games, what is considered a full set. (I augmented it with some select NTSC and SFC games as well). What's interesting is the world in those cartridges and how they extend the main console. We don't get to see that in gaming hardware anymore.

sunnybeetroot2• 2 years ago

That is impressive, any chance you’ve documented your journey and collection anywhere? I’d love to learn more.

masklinn• 2 years ago

I believe it was also done for higan (bsnes) in order to support enhancement chipped games: the enhancement chips had to be collected, decapped, and decoded in order to correctly (= fully accurately, rather than approximately via hacks to try and fit observations) run the game dumps. I think at least part of the process was documented at the time.

I don't know if all the enhancement chips were collected and decoded, as IIRC a pair of them are literally used for a single japanese-only game.

Although for IP reasons the enhancement chip firmwares can't be distributed with higan, so you have to "dump them yourself".

Keyframe7• 2 years ago

not documentation you'd like.. I can only had a sheet, at first excel and then google sheets, which I made to make it easy for me to track it all. I did travel a lot due to business etc and over time it all fell into place. Here's what they look like stored now, waiting for a move soon and for a more permanent setting: https://twitter.com/Keyframe/status/1550975562742644736?t=0N...

I'm also close to finishing N64 and maybe halfway there for NES (which I have no illusions on completing ever).

bena2• 2 years ago

That was the neat thing about cartridge based game consoles, each game was essentially a new piece of hardware.

I think the Game Boy Advance was the last mainstream PCB cartridge game console. The GameCube had moved to discs, Sony and Microsoft never made a cartridge based system, and Sega was on their third such system with the Dreamcast.

But I don't think the GBA or N64 really did things like the SNES or NES did with regards to cartridge hardware. I think by that time, the core hardware was way more powerful than anything that could be attached.

Keyframe7• 2 years ago

what we have today on switch is essentially memory card, before it was an interface to the bus. You could do anything. It doesn't even have to be performance oriented (or features like sound chips). One example is Boktai for GBA which had a light sensor on it so that actual daylight played into the gameplay, etc.

I know hardware homogeneity across platforms brought peace upon gamedevs who are stressed out as-is, but I think we lost something major along the way.

philistine3• 2 years ago

Neat fact about GBA cartridges. At its start, cartridges used watch batteries to keep save games, but by the end of the console, they had moved to Flash memory.

krajzeg• 2 years ago

The GBA still had some cartridges with enhancement hardware, though a lot less focused on overcoming CPU/memory limitations than on the previous consoles.

My favorite is WarioWare: Twisted [1] including a gyro sensor (+ a rumble pack) to enable gameplay based on turning the whole GBA around. But there were also add-on real time clocks (Pokemon), light sensors, and other things.

It also had the Nintendo e-Reader [2], which technically connected to the cartridge port and loaded like a cartridge, but was its own unique piece of weirdness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarioWare:_Twisted!

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_e-Reader

ThatPlayer• 2 years ago

I remember there being a DS flashcart that had an additional CPU. Probably more towards the end of the DS's life.

vouaobrasil• 2 years ago

It's surprising how much could be done with the SNES, considering how ancient it is by today's standards. The only downside of it was that the cartridges developed some small problems as time went on.

Gracana• 2 years ago

The Starfox PCB has a bunch of traces going off the board, I'm guessing that's for a program & test harness used during manufacturing? I've never seen that done before. Was that a common practice back in the day? Nowadays we would put pads on the board and use a bed of nails to do that.

bluedino2• 2 years ago

A Starfox cartridge was used to make a homebrew devkit for SNES Doom

The development was challenging for a few reasons, notably there were no development systems for the SuperFX chip at the time. I wrote a complete set of tools - assembler, linker and debugger - before I could even start on the game itself.

The development hardware was a hacked-up Star Fox cartridge (because it included the SuperFX chip) and a modified pair of game controllers that were plugged into both SNES ports and connected to the Amiga's parllel port. A serial protocol was used to communicate between the two for downloading code, setting breakpoints, inspecting memory, etc

https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/

rightbyte• 2 years ago

It is really asstonishing how dev hostile those game consoles were. Like, "we know how to do it but invent it yourself".

Nintendo could have released sane sdk:s and not make every dev studio figure out what works. Like, maybe share a toy version of the source of Super Mario and Zelda or whatever to show how an engine is made.

The games would surely have been prettier as a result.

Karliss• 2 years ago

You can sometimes see a similar approach in somewhat recent (~last 10 years) microcontroller devboards. Many of Nucleo devboards for STM32 microcontrollers, and some Cypress PSoC devboards (CY8CKIT) consist of two halves. One containing the main MCU (the one devboard demonstrates), and other half containing programmer/debugger. Idea is that you can use it as is out of the box for running basic example programs, or you can break it in half thus obtaining a cheap programmer + devboard which has a slightly more convenient format for embedding in product prototype.

Similar thing but reversed roles with ChipWhisperer-lite (platform for experimenting with side channel power analysis and glitching attacks). There you have the main board which connects to PC and performs the IO for attack and example target (victim) board.

But all of that is for R&D purpose only, not for use in manufacturing of final products.

I looked up the images for Starfox PCB it looks weird. Can't imagine it ever being practical in production just for programming. Did they just shipped devboards to customers? In the images I saw the area near PCB edge where traces stop looked very smooth and somewhat recessed compared to broken tabs that were connecting PCB to bigger panel. As if that area was cut by router instead of being broken off. Maybe they just kept the production PCB design (almost) identical to devboards, to save the work designing two different PCBs and reduce the chance of any issues caused by differences between devboards and production PCBs.

hbn4• 2 years ago

Nitpicking but it's rare I get to use my trove of useless knowledge about Mega Man -- I'm guessing the games being referenced at the end and final PCB image are actually Mega Man X2 and X3. I tried to follow the snescentral link cited as the image source but the page isn't working for me (edit: the site is up, it was a me issue)

I was confused at first because Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3 are NES games, not SNES!

epiccoleman• 2 years ago

Mega Man X2 is one of my favorite games of all time. We had a local video store where you could rent a game for a buck a night, and we would always rent them on Saturdays (since the store was closed on Sunday, you got a free day!).

X2 was probably the most frequently rented game, and when that video store finally closed, they sold off all the games for $5 a piece. That X2 cartridge is a prized possession that my brother now has in a little display case with a bunch of other retro gaming memorabilia.

I actually just did a playthrough of the Mega Man X series (well, 1-3, I didn't bother with the post-SNES ones) and I think X2 holds up really well, definitely in contention for the best in the series.

hbn4• 2 years ago

I also happened to play through some of the X games recently! I went up to X4.

X1 was my first Mega Man game ever and got me into the series. My childhood friend owned a copy and we weren't able to get very far as kids but we liked to play it anyway. It's still my favorite of the X series! I didn't play the other X games until years later. Back in 2015 a guy in my city was selling a complete collection of all the SNES Mega Man releases, albeit in Japanese (so, the SFC versions). A North American SNES can play Japanese games if you rip a couple of plastic tabs out of the cartridge slot, and Mega Man games aren't too dialogue heavy so I was fine playing them in Japanese.

If you haven't played beyond the SNES games, I'd recommend giving X4 a shot. I didn't play it until Mega Man X Legacy Collection released, but it's actually very good. Beyond that... X5 the quality drops off quite a bit, X6 is straight up bad, X7 is also very bad and features a horrible attempt at transitioning the series to 3D. X8 I only played through once but was a bit of a return to form. But yeah, the X series isn't known for consistent quality.

driscoll42• 2 years ago

Yup, the SHVC-2DCON-01 was only used by Mega Man X2, the direct link worked for me: https://snescentral.com/pcbboards.php?chip=SHVC-2DC0N-01 , though X3 used a different board, the SHVC-1DC0N-01 (https://snescentral.com/pcbboards.php?chip=SHVC-1DC0N-01

hbn4• 2 years ago

Ah, I figured maybe the site was down but just checked on another device and it worked. Must be the corporate firewall

fabiensanglard2• 2 years ago

Thank you for pointing out the mistake, I have fixed it now :) !

belthesar• 2 years ago

The ceramic resonator described in this post has been a source of much consternation with the tool-assisted speedrun community. One of the goals of that community has been console-verification of TAS movies, to validate that the runs aren't taking advantage of emulator quirks. If you've ever seen TASbot perform at a GamesDoneQuick event, that's exactly what console verification is doing.

The ceramic resonators degrade in accuracy over time (as cited in the article), which leads to non-deterministic performance of the APU, and since the entire console's timings are all linked together, this leads to non-deterministic execution of game code.

As a tool-assisted speedrun is essentially a timeline of inputs, there's no logic to account for system execution, and as such, hardware determinism is a requirement. Since an accurate emulator, barring hiccups in the underlying runtime environment, gives us a deterministic runtime environment, this works great. However, it's lead to some weird and awkward behavior when trying to console verify TAS movies on these >30 year old SNES consoles.

Replacing these ceramic resonators to repair these consoles has had mixed success, but there are folks that are successfully doing it, thus keeping these legendary consoles alive, and bringing their timings back into spec.

NobodyNada• 2 years ago

it's lead to some weird and awkward behavior when trying to console verify TAS movies on these >30 year old SNES consoles.

For an example of this, look at this Super Metroid run from SGDQ 2018: https://youtu.be/T_oDcRKzoHI?t=3m17s

This particular game pauses and waits for the sound engine to “catch up” during door transitions, and the amount of time this takes is nondeterministic due to ceramic oscillators. But the game’s pseudo-RNG continues to cycle in the background during this waiting period, so the nondeterminism impacts gameplay elements such as the steam jets in the timestamped room. That meant that to play back the TAS on a real console, the authors (sniq and total) had to come up with a “polyglot” sequence of inputs that could make it through the room with any possible steam pattern.

achr2• 2 years ago

Later SNES games also used a timing check for region locking to identify PAL vs NTSC clock frequencies. The mod I did, nearly three decades ago, was to add a toggle switch with a second crystal that would change the clock frequency and allow the PAL game to be played on an NTSC system. Wait a few seconds while the game booted up and then switch back and enjoy the unreleased in North America "Terranigma".

fabiensanglard2• 2 years ago

Maybe a silly question but why enforce region lock at the developers/publisher level?

Wouldn't allowing the game to run on more machines result in more sales? Or would the import market and currency exchange rate too much of a hazard?

porkbeer• 2 years ago

Different regions had different pricing. This prevents a game being resold in another market. It also tends to cut down on counterfieting.

progbits• 2 years ago

Getting DVD players without region locks used to be a thing to get cheaper movies imported from abroad. (Briefly, from what I recall. Bootleg discs got much cheaper and easily available)

The Hearts of the Super Nintendo

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