28 Years Later, Hacker Fixes Rampant Slowdown of SNES' Gradius III (arstechnica.com) 58
Ars Technica's Kyle Orland reports that Brazilian ROM hacker Vitor Vilela has released a ROM patch for the hit arcade game Gradius III, creating a new, slowdown-free version of the game for play on SNES emulators and standard hardware. "In magazine screenshots, the game's huge, colorful sprites were a sight to behold, comparable to the 1989 arcade original," writes Orland. "In action, though, any scene with more than a handful of enemies would slow to a nearly unplayable crawl on the underpowered SNES hardware." From the report: The key to Vilela's efforts is the SA-1 chip, an enhancement co-processor that was found in some late-era SNES cartridges like Super Mario RPG and Kirby Super Star. Besides sporting a faster clock speed than the standard SNES CPU (up to 10.74 Mhz versus 3.58 Mhz for the CPU), SA-1 also opens up faster mathematical functions, improved graphics manipulation, and parallel processing capabilities for SNES programmers.
The result, as is apparent in the comparison videos embedded here, is a version of Gradius III that Vilela says runs two to three times faster than the original. It also keeps its silky smooth frame rate no matter how many detailed, screen-filling sprites clutter the scene. That's even true in the game's notorious, bubble-filled Stage 2, which is transformed from a jittery slide show to an amazing showcase of the SNES' enhanced power. As if that wasn't enough, the patch even slashes the game's loading times, cutting a full 3.25 seconds from the notably slow startup animation. Vilela notes that the lack of slowdown "makes it incredibly super difficult" and even suggests that "some arcade segments of the game do not look RTA (real-time action) viable with SA-1. But we shouldn't underestimate the human capabilities."
The result, as is apparent in the comparison videos embedded here, is a version of Gradius III that Vilela says runs two to three times faster than the original. It also keeps its silky smooth frame rate no matter how many detailed, screen-filling sprites clutter the scene. That's even true in the game's notorious, bubble-filled Stage 2, which is transformed from a jittery slide show to an amazing showcase of the SNES' enhanced power. As if that wasn't enough, the patch even slashes the game's loading times, cutting a full 3.25 seconds from the notably slow startup animation. Vilela notes that the lack of slowdown "makes it incredibly super difficult" and even suggests that "some arcade segments of the game do not look RTA (real-time action) viable with SA-1. But we shouldn't underestimate the human capabilities."
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That's amazing (Score:1)
It's true that such a thing couldn't have been made by Konami at the time (they didn't have the external coprocessor), but it's still amazing regardless. It looks like someone burned it onto a ROM and ran it on hardware (hardware featuring the expansion processor too).
The concern he has about the game being too hard now, I totally get- when that game got busy enough to really slow down, it got WILDLY busy.
What about other games? (Score:5, Interesting)
Like the original Double Dragon's slow downs in all ports?
Difficult back in the days. (Score:2)
the second can be fixed by playing the patched version someone created a few years back that fixes the collision detection to better match what was shown on screen.
That part of the solution would have been much more complicated to perform back in the days of the game.
Later generations of console, like TFA's SNES, had "card copier" that could dump ROMs to floppies or to computer parallel cables. Or load floppies into a built-in RAM or flash. (a bit like modern SD-card cartridge adapter).
If you owned the expensive bit of hardware (though still much cheaper than the official dev kits by the manufacturer), you could indeed play a patched version.
( ^- part of how bootleg v
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There where Atari 2600 piracy devices, but they where pretty meh, you had to buy blank carts and I think I remember them being cheap and not long lasting? Like you can go dig up an old 2600 cart at the dump right now and pop it in and expect it to play,,,
http://atariage.com/forums/top... [atariage.com]
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Raider of the Lost Ark game as well.
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I'm sure the internet does pile up on them, but ET & Raiders of the Lost Ark were both troubled games. I had them both. They may have worked out in today's gaming market were you can ship broken, unplayable trash and release fixes for the following year via DRMed service. Perhaps they were just ahead of their time.
I've been tempted to make the intro song on Raiders into a ring tone. I'd do Spiderman, but my brother thought of it first.
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It's 8K and being rushed was only part of the problem, back when Pacman was made 8K of ROM was still kind of expensive. I know it's laughable now you can go buy 128GB MicroSD cards for like 20 bucks these days... lol But yeah for some reason ROM and RAM back then was way too expensive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.... [jcmit.net] This is for RAM but ROM wasn't too different back then, 1982 is when Pacman came out and 256K of RAM was almost 500 dollars. (yeah 8K is much less and ROM is c
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This is a custom chip for SNES carts, they'd have to make a different spec for each system and alter each game.
At that point you might have more success and less of a wait with overclocking.
https://nobitleftbehind.wordpr... [wordpress.com]
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The Gradius and Salamander series weren't ever very good.
In what way? Millions of players across decades & many platforms disagree.
I had Gradius and Life Force not because they were objectively great but because I wanted a shooter and they were the best things available on a console I owned. But Air Buster beat the living crap out of Gradius, and was available on PC Engine and on Mega Drive (the latter retitled Aero Blasters for international releases.) It was a better game, and it played better. Also on the Mega Drive was Forgotten Worlds, which IMO was one of the best shooters ever made. Too bad the port was missing two of the best l
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Never played them, huh? Both were far more innovative shooters than bland Gradius. Forgotten Worlds received similar review scores as Gradius while Einhander received universally higher scores.
Gynoug is another Gradius-destroying shooter.
The arcade was slow in the first place (Score:2, Interesting)
In magazine screenshots, the game's huge, colorful sprites were a sight to behold, comparable to the 1989 arcade original .... In action, though, any scene with more than a handful of enemies would slow to a nearly unplayable crawl on the underpowered SNES hardware.
Then it was perfectly comparable, because the arcade also suffered from severe slowdown. Check it. [youtube.com]
The Sega Genesis version didn't (Score:2)
Now if you give this to someone (Score:1)
pretending it was the original could it be considered "driving someone to suicide"?
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I kind of miss slow down (Score:2)
SA-1 chip (Score:2)
So let me get this straight. Some SNES carts (10 in total, from what I found) had a processor chip (the SA-1, among others) that allowed for game quality beyond what the console itself could produce. The Gradius III cart did NOT have this chip, however the ROM code was patched as if it did have the chip. I presume emulators can trivially include SA-1 functionality if a flag is set in the ROM config, thus this is useful within emulators.
However, if one could swap out the ROM code in an actual Gradius III
ARM multicores and SNES. (Score:2)
Because a 2GHz octa core ARM chip was never included in any SNES release,
Back *then*, maybe. /. article about "reverse emulation" on NES [slashdot.org] begs to differ.
But in more recent history, the
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However, if one could swap out the ROM code in an actual Gradius III cart, this would not work, since it doesn't have the SA-1.
Right, but you could put the ROM code in a cart which does have the SA-1, and put a Gradius III sticker on it.
SA-1: Not quite (Score:5, Informative)
Some SNES carts (10 in total, from what I found) had a processor chip (the SA-1, among others) that allowed for game quality beyond what the console itself could produce.
Huh, you're seriously underestimating how much widespread enhancement chips [wikipedia.org] were on the SNES. 10 is closer to the number of *different types of chips* available for SNES carts, with many dozens of carts using one of these.
That's the dirty secret about SNES :
probably half of the SNES games you played weren't *actually* *SNES* games, but SA-1 games, Super FX games, etc. that used the SNES as a glorified gamepad-prober + framebuffer and relied on extra chip to do the game.
(Including popular stuff like Yohsi Island, Mario Kart, etc.)
The most obvious example being the Super Game Boy (literally a gameboy inside a SNES cartridge), the most recent example being the "MD adapter" you can find on aliexpress and ebay (literally a Megadrive/Genesis on-a-chip, inside a SNES cartridge. But for cust-cutting reasons, it doesn't leverage the SNES video out but has its own video in a kind of Sega 32x-style)
The practice isn't anything new.
Back in the 8-bit era, most game had to rely on "memory mapper" [smspower.org] to have games larger than the tiny 64kb address space of 8bit CPUs (Z80 and 6502). (The exception being the PC Engine, as it had its own mapper built-in).
Most consoles could also accept external audio source either in cartridge (I've heard Atari used that) or on an extension port. [segaretro.org] (*).
And given how primitive the NES was (didn't even have raster interrupts), it had quite a few extra functionality packed into its mappers [nesdev.com]
SNES being designed that much around the ability to use extra chips isn't that much surprising.
(A few like the PC Engine and the SEGA GameGear could even accept external *Video* input. The SuperGrafx used it (it is literally a PC Engine with a second VDP that can mix its planes and sprites with the main one) and the GameGear Tunner relied on it (it is not DMA-ing the video image into the tile buffer, the tunner *litterally takes over* the display using the digital video input)
BTW: I suspect that's why the first joint project of making a plain CD-ROM drive with Sony for the SNES did fail - you can't (easily) pack extra chips on a CD-ROM.
BTW: it's also why SNES emulation is a bit more complicated, despite being a slower device than the MegaDrive - you need to support the plethora of extra chips, too.
In the specific case of this Gradius III : the SA-1 is almost just a 3x faster 65C816 CPUs.
The patch "solves" the Gradius III slow-down problems simply by running it 3x faster. Brilliant!
I presume emulators can trivially include SA-1 functionality if a flag is set in the ROM config, thus this is useful within emulators.
Most emulator support emulating SA-1, yes. It's indeed straight forward.
However, if one could swap out the ROM code in an actual Gradius III cart, this would not work, since it doesn't have the SA-1.
That is the point were it's a bit more complicated than that:
the use of enhancement chip was *so much pervasive* on SNES, that most ROM-dumper/floppy-backup back then at least tried to do something about it.
Some at least supported a built-in SA-1 (due to the large prevalence, see the first Wikipedia link. Probably because it's very similar to the native 65c816).
Some even supported exchangeable "stem" (I don't how to call it, the bridge between the floppy drive/ram drive and the SNES cart slot) with alternative chips built-in, so other games than SA-1 could be supported. Yet others, according the Youtube reviews, used a piggy back cartridge to not only rely on its copy-protection chips (like your garden variety regio
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The Atari 2600 had the Starpath Supercharger [wikipedia.org].
Cool (Score:1)
Why hasn't Nintendo C&D'd it yet?
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Why hasn't Konami cease-and-desisted it yet?
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Are you trying to tell us why it shouldn't be CD'd, or wouldn't?
The first one doesn't contradict OP.
The second is wrong, "best justice money can buy", "what the fuck is a ROM", "you pirate nerds need to be taught a lesson".