Tag: snes

Mario Paint Data Overflow Error

There is a subtle flaw in SNES art creation tool Mario Paint. It has 32K of Save RAM, which is not technically enough to save an entire project, normal and animation canvases included. The program uses data compression to get everything to fit, and the compression is good enough that most of the time everything can be squeezed in, but such is the nature of data compression that it is not guaranteed to work on all possible data.

What happens when Mario Paint can’t fit everything into its save file? This:

A comment on the video gives purpose to the numbers the robot displays as it counts down. 100-25 is compressing the image; 25-12 is erasing the save RAM, and 12-0 is copying the data into save RAM.

On Super Mario World’s Score Display

Awesome Mario trivia blog Supper Mario Broth noted on Mastodon that Super Mario World is extremely inefficient in displaying Mario’s score.

There is more information on SWMspeedruns.com, but in brief, SMW stores the player’s score as a 24-bit value as hexadecimal digits, and converts that value to decimal when it’s time to display it. There is no good way to do that that doesn’t involve figuring out the entire arithmetic, but Super Mario World does it particularly slowly: it starts with a copy of the score, then sees if it’s over 1,000,000. If it is, it increases the millions digit of the displayed score by 1, subtracts a million from the work value, then repeats. When it runs out of millions it repeats with the hundred-thousands, and repeats until it finishes with the tens. At least it doesn’t try it with the 1s, seeing as how nothing in the game awards single points!

In a worse-case scenario, with a score of 9,999,990, the code goes through this whole process every frame, consuming up to 8% of the time available for game logic.

What could the game have done to accomplish this better? It could have found out how many of each digit there was once instead of looping and incrementing. It could only figure out the score when the value changes. Or it could save the value as the digits themselves in decimal, just increment them by the right values when its needed, and then copy that figure to the screen. That’s largely what 8-bit games would do.

Even worse, if Luigi is the active character, the game does this twice: it figures out and prints Mario’s score, then it does it again for Luigi’s score, placing it onscreen in the same place.

While printing the score is just one thing the game does each frame, the effect is great enough that complex scores can lag the game, enough that speedrunners take the score into account to avoid it.

This adds to the evidence that Super Mario World development was rushed. It’s already known that a lot of the code in SMW is buggy, allowing for some truly heroic exploits like programming a text editor in SRAM purely by manipulating objects in an early level.

Super Play Magazine’s Top 100 SNES Games

Lists of the best games for various platforms has been a fixture on the internet since it was opened up to the general public. Every big gaming site, those still with us and those gone (R.I.P. Joystiq) feel the urge to make them periodically. After all, they combine several popular article themes: they’re listicles, they’re about video games, and they make definite-seeming yet inherently subjective statements about things that geeks have over-strong opinions about. They’re the ideal hit-getters for pop culture sites really, whether they focus on games or not.

Even in print, these lists weren’t rare things. Super Play Magazine, from the UK, did such a list in April of 1996, which was reproduced in HTML text by the site RVGFanatic in 2010.

Why would such a list interest us now? Well, most of these lists have a strongly US-focused vibe, and the UK had a somewhat different scene than we (me being American) did. So there are a number of very interesting games on the list that generally don’t appear in other places, including a few Japanese ones. And they included SNES Rampart, so I’m automatically kindly disposed to it.

Of particular note, besides Rampart: three Parodius entries, two Micro Machines games, Pop’n Twinbee, Cool Spot, Samurai Spirits, Hebereke’s Popoitto, Spike McFang, SNES Side Pocket, Xandra’s Big Adventure, Pugsley’s Scavanger Hunt, NFL Quarterback, World League Basketball (made by HAL!), The Chaos Engine, Street Racer, Super Smash T.V., Lemmings II: The Tribes (but not Sunsoft’s excellent SNES port of original Lemmings?!), Sensible Soccer, R-Type III, U.N. Squadron, SNES Civilization, Out To Lunch (I hadn’t even heard of this before!), Mickey’s Magical Quest, Cannon Fodder, Plok (the Pickford Bros. rule) and Equinox (also Pickford-made, and also highly underrated).

Super Play Magazine’s Top 100 SNES Video Games (RVGFanantic)

U Can Beat Video Games Tackles Super Metroid

It’s yet another Youtube video post, but the subject is pretty notable, U Can Beat Video Games at last tackling the highlight of the Metroid series, Super Metroid for SNES, in an epic-length episode. Often big games get split up into multiple parts, but this time the whole game is covered at once. These videos can’t be easy to put together, and I appreciate the effort that goes into them!

As usual UCBVG covers the entire game, including all items and known cheats, and alternate endings. If you’ve ever wondered why GDQ players, hosts and audience ever shout “Kill the animals” or “Save the animals,” the ending to this video should fill in the blanks to an acceptable degree.

U Can Beat Video Games: Super Metroid (3 hours 37 minutes)

The Copetti Site: Architectures of Recent Game Consoles

From the site, a diagram of the architecture of the Wii U’s Game Pad

A good old-fashioned website! It’s hope to information on the construction of a wide variety of console platforms! Docs on the NES, the Sega Master System, the PC Engine (a.k.a. Turbografx 16), the Mega Drive (a.k.a. Genesis), Gameboy, SNES, Saturn, Playstation, Virtual Boy (yes), Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, GBA, Gamecube, Xbox, DS, PSP, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii and Wii U.

The Copetti site: Architecture of Consoles

Quick Browser-Based Multiplayer Emulation

NES Party and SNES Party are sites that do a think that would have seemed like magic 10 years ago: they make it easy to pick out NES and SNES games, load them into the browser from the Internet Archive, and not only let you play them yourself but share a room link with another person and enable internet-based multiplayer. It’s all as simple as that.

Well, mostly. When I tried using it, emulation was much faster than normal. The game load screen suggests, if this happen, that you reduce the refresh rate of your display, which seems like kind of a kludgy solution. But on the plus side, snes.party has Rampart!

NES Party and SNES Party

Romhack Thursday: The Legend of Zelda for SNES

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

It’s not easy to find romhacks that measure up to our exacting standards, that strike me in just “that way,” but a conversion of the NES Legend of Zelda, one of the few mainline Zeldas never to have been really remade in any form (unless you count the abandoned Satellaview versions), fits the bill like a duck in well-made dentures.

This screenshot may look nearly exactly like The Legend of Zelda. In fact it is the Legend of Zelda, just converted, nearly exactly, to the SNES.

Link doesn’t wait for the transition to finish to start climbing out of caves.

The question has to be asked: why? I mean, to a degree it is kind of pointless. There’s been nearly exact (although always unofficial) re-implementations of The Original The Legend of Zelda since Zelda Classic (Set Side B). All of Nintendo’s own rereleases, from Virtual Console to Gamecube bonus disks to a stand-alone Game & Watch unit. But recreating it on SNES does have certain uses. First, it fixes a handful of issues with the earlier game, notably it doesn’t have flicker or slowdown. It also uses the L and R buttons to allow for quick inventory cycling without having to go into the subscreen.

The colors are slightly better as well. And the top of the screen display labels the buttons Y and B, instead of B and A.

It speeds up game transitions: it uses the Link to the Past-style iris in and out effects, using the SNES’ display masking feature, instead of the slower curtain closes and opens from the NES version. It allows you to use custom soundtracks via MSU-1 support. Health refills instantly instead of pausing the game for up to 15 seconds while all your hearts load up with red. And the sound is very slightly different: by default the low-health beep is less insistent, there’s an extra sound when you kill an enemy, and the candle sound is a little higher in pitch.

But perhaps the best reason to convert it to the SNES is, SNES emulators are nearly as common as NES emulators. You can play this modestly improves version of LoZ on anything with an SNES emulator, which isn’t something you can say of Zelda Classic.

Yes, I used this hack as an excuse to play completely through the first quest again. And yes, I did it without dying. I still got it.

I’m kind of an outspoken fan of the original LoZ, I still think it’s well worth playing today, although I think you should seek out its manual should you do so. (The opening demo even tells you to look there for details!) You’ll die a lot, it’s true, but there’s little penalty for it except for going back to start or the beginning of a dungeon, and having to go refill your health before you try again. It takes real skill to weave around its fast-moving enemies and projectiles, but it’s doable, and you don’t need speedrun skillz to do it.

It is rather difficult to find it through search. It’s not on romhacking.net. Creator infidelity’s announcement was on Twitter, where he offered only a direct download.

Here’s Wes Fenlon’s post enthusing over the port. And here’s where it can be obtained, although links to previous versions have been disabled, so this one may be too if it receives another update.

Satellablog: New Dumps!

Satellablog is a blog dedicated to preserving content from one of the least-documented portions of Nintendo video game history, that short period in their life where they distributed software via satellite broadcast, over the St. GIGA service.

Bounty Sword, Satellaview version
(Images from Satellablog)

Most of this stuff only exists, maybe, in company archives deep in the halls of Nintendo, and the data from the last broadcasts saved on aging flash memory cartridges held by subscribers. It is believed that all of the dumps that have been made available have come from those cartridges, and Satellaview is dedicated to finding them and making them available.

Elfaria II demo

There are a number of interesting finds in this batch, including lost Dezaemon shooters, a cut-down version of Super Famicom RTS Bounty Sword, a non-playable demo of Elfaria II. But the most surprising thing in the collection is a number of dumps of a Satellaview version of Nintendo’s website circa 1999, one of the last things they made available over Satellaview! I had no idea that the service survived that long!

Satellablog: The biggest batch so far (Part 1)

Super Punch-Out!! Blindfolded Race at GDQx 2019

Watching a lot of speedruns, as I’ve said before, can give you a distorted view of what video game difficulty is actually like. Speedrunning has been a going hobby for well over a decade now. New strategies are worked out and evolve. If they’re good ones, they become a part of everyone’s runs and are further refined. If they’re not good ones they’re discarded. What I’m saying is, the state-of-the-art advances. It doesn’t recede. People keep getting better. TASes are even more optimized than that, and are at this point really a completely different process, more scripting and exploring program function than playing a game in the traditional manner.

There may come a time, eventually, where, confident that runs have been perfected, speedrun becomes less focused-upon. Then after a period, people may come back and try to match the records of old. Or, maybe people will just stop speedrunning games, at least from the NES and SNES era. Many of these games are deep, but they aren’t an inexhaustible resource.

When you watch a speedrun, even one that’s three or four years old, you aren’t watching the effort of one person, but of a chain of people stretching back. Runners watch each other’s attempts and try to improve upon them. There aren’t many secrets.

Watching speedrunners who have played these games hundreds of times may cause you to think that the games are somehow easy. One way some challenge can still be preserved is in attempting challenge runs, like completing a game blindfolded. Like Punch-Out. Finishing Punch-Out blindfolded. That’s something that people do, but it’s still pretty challenging.

And it’s generally considered that Super Punch-Out!! for the SNES is the hardest Punch-Out game to do blindfolded. I’d think that that would be NES Punch-Out, since Tyson at the end is very random and can knock Little Mac down in a single punch throughout the first half of the first round, but the commentators on this video say it’s SNES Punch-Out, and I believe them. In this race, both players take a defeat at one point! That’s not something you often see at GDQ.

If you know what you’re doing Super Punch-Out is a fairly short game. This whole run (a race between two people) takes about 22 minutes from start to end. One nice thing about this race is that it doesn’t become a case, common in speedrun races, where one player jumps into the lead and stays there the entire rest of the race. The lead changes a couple of times, and is up in the air until the last fight.

If you’ve never encountered Super Punch-Out!! before, you might be surprised by how much it differs from the much better-known NES game. NES is very much a game of pattern recognition and exploitation. The SNES version brings back the two arcade games’ power meter, adds a dizzy mechanic that can affect every opponent, and just has a lot more randomness. Not blindfolded it may be a little easier than the NES game, it doesn’t have any opponents like Mike Tyson. But it still has its challenges, as much personality as the 8-bit game, and further, doesn’t lean nearly as hard on ethnic stereotypes, and those are all good things!

NES Maps and SNES Maps

I’ve banged this drum a lot lately it feels like, but I have to reemphasize that the internet is not forever, and as Ryan North has told us lately, even the most popular website in the world is one missed bill from disappearing, probably forever. As this happens more and more often, big and well-funded content hosts like Fandom and Github persist, while smaller, independent information sources tend to fall away, which results in a rich-get-richer feedback loop. Independent sources of accurate information are so important, no matter the subject. It is difficult to fault anyone unwilling to keep content up and updated for a large portion of their lives, but whenever it happens, I appreciate it.

Before the death of Flash, their Zelda map used it to provide an interactive browsing experience that is sadly defunct now. This PNG version is still great, though.

So I’ve been trying to celebrate the best, most long-lived websites out there, and NES Maps, and its sister site SNES Maps, qualifies, going back to around 2006. That’s 17 years! And it’s still there, quietly providing maps of just about any NES game you might want to find information on.

It’s not perfect. Their labeled maps of Castlevania III, I discovered just now, are incomplete, cutting off after Block 5, promising that more is coming soon for who knows how many years. But most other games have complete maps, including a number of Japanese-only title. It’s truly a great resource, and I hope they can figure out a way to keep it going for the long term.

NES Maps and SNES Maps

Romhack Thursday: Race Drivin’ using the SA-1

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Edit the Frog is back, with a new romhack! And this one’s really amazing.

We’ve mentioned before Vitor Vilela’s hacks that retro a SA-1 (“Super Accelerator”) into SNES games that suffered from slowdown. So far he’s done it with five games: Super Mario World, Gradius III (which really needed it), Contra III: The Alien Wars and Super R-Type. The fifth is the most amazing so far: Race Drivin’.

When the original Hard Drivin’ came to arcades it was pretty incredible, the first 3D racing game that didn’t use scanline tricks to display its track, that rendered it using an actual polygonal 3D engine. It used special custom hardware to make its track and physics possible. Race Drivin’ was less revolutionary, but only because the ground had been broken for it.

It was exactly the worst kind of game to be ported to the Super Nintendo’s infamously underpowered hardware, a 16-bit variant of the venerable 6502 running at about 3.5 mHz, just a bit over twice the speed of the NES. Even from the start, the SNES used in-card accelerators and co-processors to help complex games run: even though launch title Pilotwings made heavy use of the SNES’s “mode 7” graphics to display the game world, it still needed a DSP chip to help it with calculation.

https://github.com/VitorVilela7/SA1-Root/tree/master/Race-DrivinRace Drivin’ doesn’t use any accelerator, despite being one of the games most sorely in need of one. Asking a SNES to perform up to the custom mathbox chips in the arcade game was ludicrous, and so SNES Race Drivin’ is looked down upon by many, and probably unjustly: the coding is perfectly all right, it was just asking too much of the system.

Even with a SA-1 you’d think that Race Drivin’ on SNES couldn’t measure up, but Vitor’s hack does quite a respectable job! The SA-1 is essentially a second of the same kind of chip that runs the SNES, with a number of extra features bundled in. It also has some faster memory included on-die, and runs at triple the frame rate. Imagine if this had come out at the time: the SNES game is less than two years older than the arcade version! An SA-1-powered version that matched the arcade so closely back then would have astounded. I see that in a few places on the Super Stunt Track, it drops to 12 FPS instead of the 30 it holds at elsewhere, but it’s still damn slick.

Here is one of Vitor’s side-by-side comparison videos, demonstrating the old version (on the left) and the upgraded hack (on the right):

SA-1 Root: Race Drivin’ (github)

News 2/2/2022: Konami, Link to the Past, Listicles

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

My cell walls are feeling kind of rigid at the moment due to a computer issue that caused me to lose the first draft of this post. All of my witty remarks, lost to the electronic void. You missed out on my entertaining usage of the phrase “odoriferous blorpy.” Truly we are in the worst timeline. It’s all left me feeling kind of cranky, let’s get through it quickly this week.

Ted Litchfield at PC Gamer on a RuneScape player playing a minigame for eight years and turn turning in all his progress at once. RuneScape is an early MMORPG that began in 2001.

Several things to do with Konami, a once-great publisher that’s become pretty hidebound lately:

Dustin Bailey at GamesRadar: fans are working on a PC remake of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. I’m sure this won’t get obliterated by legal threats. They should have gone with the cheeky route taken by The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest. The article mentions that its creators consider the fact that many townsfolk lie to you to be a problem, instead of awesome as it really is.

Charles Harte at Gamespot organ Game Informer says Dead Cells’ upcoming Castlevania-themed DLC is really big.

Also from Charles Harte, Konami is shutting down their recently-released game CRIMESIGHT, not just removing it from the Steam store but even making it unplayable. Great way to reward people giving you money, K. It’s not even a year old yet!:

Tyler Wilde, also from PC Gamer, on a $2,000 game on Steam and what it’s about. Summarized: it costs $2,000 but is short enough that people can finish it within the return period, and it amounts to a screed against women. Blech!

Dean Howell at Neowin: a fan-made decompilation of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past can now be compiled for Windows and (presumably if your device is jailbroken) Switch.

Christ Moyse at Destructoid tells us that Taito’s classic The New Zealand Story is coming to the Arcade Archives series. Gandalf could not be reached at press time for comment.

Two listicles:

Zoey Handley at Destructoid on the 10 best NES soundtracks. The list is Bucky O’Hare, Kirby’s Adventure, Castlevania 3 (Japanese version), Contra, Dr. Mario, Super Mario Bros. 2, Mega Man 2, Castlevania II, Journey to Silius, and… Silver Surfer?

Gavin Lane and the NintendoLife staff on the 50 best SNES games. The list is compiled algorithmically from reader scores, and can change even after publication. At this time, the top ten are, starting from $10: Donkey Kong Country 2, Earthbound, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV, Super Mario RPG, Yoshi’s Island, Final Fantasy III, Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Mario World on top.

Tom Phillips at EuroGamer mentions that the original developers of Goldeneye 007, recently rereleased after 25 years on Switch and Xbox platforms, were a bit miffed that they weren’t asked to participate in the festivities. At the time most of its developers were completely new to the game industry, and they’ve been generally snubbed by its publishers in talking about the new versions. Does feel pretty shabby, Nintendo and Microsoft!

Andrew Liezewski at Gizmodo talks about the graphics in an upcoming Mario 64 hack made by Kaze Emanuar. I’ve followed Kaze’s hacking videos quite a bit (I think one’s been posted on Set Side B before), and the optimizations they’ve made to Mario 64’s engine are amazing, not only eliminating lag but great increasing its frame rate and making it look better to boot.

And, at Kotaku, Isaiah Colbert reports on various things being done to celebrate Final Fantasy VII’s 26th birthday, including official recognition in Japan of “Final Fantasy VII day” and a crossover with Power Wash Simulator. Maybe they can do something about cleaning out all the grunge from Midgar, that city could use a bath.