Відео

No, no games used multiple enhancement chips. Yes, the Mega Drive did have a chip that was basically their equivalent of the Super FX called the SVP chip, but it was only used in one game (Virtua Racing).

Yeah, this was the very first video I did for my channel when I was new to video editing and had a crappy webcam microphone. My newer videos are much better.

Fun fact, the first prototype was actually called Nintendo PlayStation and worked with SNES controllers. The PS is the sucessor of the SNES, so to speak. Even the PS controller was modeled after the SNES' one, and it's still quite the same with todays controllers button layout. They just got thumbsticks and additional shoulder buttons. It's safe to say, the SNES had a huge influence on the whole evolution of video gaming systems.

It provides a faster CPU and more RAM, allowing games to run faster and smoother. It doesn't really provide any kind of obvious visual effects, but if those games were running on the base hardware, they would be noticeably slower.

Mario kart used an fx chip? I thought that was raw mode7

@@paulbunyangonewild7596 Super Mario Kart used a DSP chip, I even mentioned this in the video :)

@@paulbunyangonewild7596 Point was that not _every_ enhancement chip required adding extra pins to the cartridge connector.

I actually did almost add some footage of it but thought I already had enough racing game examples. But yeah it was unique to use the DSP-4 chip.

@@WhitePointerGaming Im a bit biased since TG3000 was one of my favorite SNES games lol.

I would suspect a bit plane format might take up less space, being easier to compress continuous regions of color.

Nah, these chips were indeed expensive, however if you ordered 1 million they were probably 10 or less dollars a piece. Perhaps cheaper.

I believe some modders have managed to hack the game to run at the faster speed.

It does indeed have fewer pin outs. They were able to shrink the package by not connecting to all the chip functions that weren't being used in Yoshi's Island.

@@ostiariusalpha This seems to be it.

Boosted the clock speed and provided more RAM, so the game was able to run faster and smoother.

@@WhitePointerGaming so, the game's main RAM and CPU is the SA chip? And the SNES CPU?

If the SNES CPU operates it interrupts the SA-1, so using it for additional performance would be inadvisable. The SA-1 is extremely similar to the SNES system, with it including the same CPU. The differences are massive in performance as it runs at a faster speed (10.74 MHz vs 3.58 MHz), includes 2KB of internal RAM, ROM access is now 16-bit instead of the SNES 8-bit, ROM can be up to 8MB, ROM can run at faster speeds, it can have up to 256KB of RAM, a DMA controller, plus some other features. The original SNES system was so slow that it needed an enhancement chip in a game 30 days after it launched in Japan. So no need to use the SNES CPU or RAM.

It was actually the opposite, the original Mario chip was actually clocked at 21MHz, the same as the others, but it was halved by an internal clock speed divider. The revisions that followed it removed this divider so the chip ran at full speed.

@@WhitePointerGaming Why'd they slow it down on the first revision?

@@MaxOakland No idea, I'm guessing there was some kind of technical limitation at the time.

Most of these chips were developed a number of years after the system's launch, so they couldn't have been installed in the console as they didn't exist yet :)

The SNES would have costed more than twice the original price. That way it couldn´t have competed with the Megadrive or PC Engine that have been released several years earlier.

There were some initial ideas to both use a faster CPU and even include something like the FX chip in the base SNES, but I think Nintendo thought it made more sense at the time to save any upfront cost on the price of each console, both to produce and almost certainly sell too, and they decided it would be better to vary game prices instead based on what was in the cart, be it more memory, SlowROM or FastROM, or a coprocessor, etc. At the time and relative to the time, I think they made the right decision. Although, decades down the line, I think it obviously would have been very cool for the modern indie/homebrew scene if every base SNES console had a faster CPU and the likes of an FX chip in it as standard. But that's just what ifs really.

Yeah, why did the SNES run at a mere 5 MHz when pcEngine ran at 7. It should have been 10 MHz from the start. The sound DSP is far more powerful. Who needs 4 background layers? For the registers AB XYZ I propose to store a zero flag for each byte and make them 32 bit. The address lines are skewed by one so that we read the zero flag of the next byte. The ADC starts with the lowest byte and only advances to the next if carry is set or that zero flag. Zero flag is set when higher (the read) flag and the result is zero. LDA usually loads bytes for small counters. Even addresses are only 24 bit, but 24 is so odd. So let’s have 32.

They did the right thing doing it on a Ala carte game by game basis to keep the entry point for the system cheap. Sega and NEC tried add ons

I guess it’s just a size thing, just like the port of resident evil 2 on the n64, the game itself it’s far from being demanding on the hardware but it’s praised for the fact that the content of 2 cds are inside one cartridge

Back in the days, when emulators still didn´t emulate the SDD1 decompression, the only way to play SFA2 on emulator was to use some "graphics packs" with the decompressed assets. I think the decompressed data took 12 or 16Mbytes in total.

Not really sure about that. The Mega Drive port of Super Street Fighter II was the biggest commercial release at the time, coming in at 40 megabits or 5 megabytes, and despite the bigger size compared to the SNES port (which was 32 megabits/4 megabytes), it didn't look as good and it suffered big time with the sound quality. Without some kind of similar compression chip, I really doubt the Mega Drive could handle a similar quality port of Alpha 2, even with a larger ROM size.

Yeah, I expect with a large enough ROM that it would have been possible to run this game without a chip on SNES. It would have taken some time and effort, but I think possible. I mean, I've seen the early Earthquake vs Earthquake demo created by Maxwel for SNES, and it shows the system can certainly be pushed even further than most people realise. It's just a matter of if the largest size of ROM possible at the time would have been big enough I guess.

​​@@WhitePointerGamingin the 16-bit days the snes was Capcom's lead platform. The MD never got the same care that snes got period. By the time SFA2 was out the Saturn already had the best home version of the game...so there was no money or need in back porting to the MD although if given higher priority could of been a fine port.

I wonder what happened there. The previous SF games didn´t have that problem, or at least not so obvious.

Yeah, I think someone fixed this in modern times, but I can't check personally to see what it's like because there's apparently only an MSU1 version of the game and not just a regular version I can run on my SNES Mini without taking up all the memory.

@@jsr734 They used a horribly slow method of copying sample data into the sound chip.

@@jsr734 The previous SF games do have this problem. In SF2 Turbo and Super SF2, the music will stop at the end of every round and the game will freeze to load in the announcer voice "You Win" "and the SNES exclusive "crowd noise" to mask the silence caused by the missing music. In Super SF2, the audio RAM situation was so acute that Capcom removed the "Round 1, Fight!" voices at the start of each round to avoid the load pauses we ended up getting in Street Fighter Alpha 2 when they decided to bring it back.

I thought it was because the SNES can't do anything else while uploading to ARAM. You can tell it to play a sound effect or switch a song without a hiccup.

It seems it was part of Nintendo´s strategy to lower the production cost of cartridges. Remember that back in those days, rom chips with higher capacity were expensive, so to offer a cost reduced option with SlowROM to developers was a good business strategy. And, even at SlowROM speed the SNES was still faster than the NES.

@@jsr734 Yeah, I'm sure that was the business decision behind it. But I think Nintendo itself was also the cause of SNES games being slightly more expensive in general compared to other systems of the era [excluding Neo Geo], probably taking a bigger cut than the competition at the time, and I think they ultimately could have removed the SlowROM carts and sold the FastROM games at the same price as the competition and helped everyone more in that way. I honestly think that would have been a better decision there, for developers/publishers, end consumers, and the SNES' first impression with those early games that has stuck with some people who don't know any better ever since.

What is FastROM and SlowROM and how does it slow games down?

@@MaxOakland Back in the day developers could chose to user either cheaper SlowROM cartridges or more expensive FastROM cartridges for their games, and the difference was that the SlowROM cartridges artificially throttled the SNES' CPU to run at 2.68 MHz, which is a pretty significant 30% CPU speed reduction from the normal 5.68 MHz there. Many early SNES games used SlowROM cartridges so publishers could pinch a few pennies, especially all the well known shmup games (Gradius III, Super R-Type, Axelay, Parodius Da!, Super Aleste, Thunder Spirits, etc), and it's one of the main reasons why those games suffered sometimes minor and sometimes major slowdown. Certain bad actors today will try to lie and say it's just because the SNES is just "slow", but the reality is that slowdown is not some inherent limitation of the console that is unavoidable, and most of these games have now been patched with FastROM versions by some awesome ROM hackers in modern times, such that they now run far better and smoother with that single change. But interestingly, even with SlowROM [and on coprocessors in the carts] some SNES games still run brilliantly regardless, like Super Smash TV, Super Turrican, Super Aleste, Wild Guns, F-Zero, Turtles in Time, Rendering Ranger R2, etc. Hope that explains things for you.