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Ask Slashdot: Understanding the SNES?

Posted by timothy on from the when-you-can-snatch-this-pebble-from-my-hand dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As a product of the 90s I grew up loving the classics that kids today know about from Wikipedia and pop-culture references. Games like Super Bomberman, Zelda: A Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country I and III (II was a sellout, come on) are the foundations of my childhood memories. Now, though, as a fourth-year electrical engineering major, I find myself increasingly impressed by the level of technical difficulty embedded in that 16-bit console. I am trying, now, to find a resource that will take me through the technical design of the SNES (memory layout, processor information, cartridge pin layouts/documentation) to get a better understanding of what I naively enjoyed 15 some years ago. I am reaching out to the vast resources available from the minds of the Slashdot community. Any guide/blog series that you know of that walks through some of the technical aspects of the, preferably, SNES (alternatively, NES/Nintendo 64) console would be much appreciated."

5 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. superfamicom.org by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://wiki.superfamicom.org/ has pretty comprehensive technical documentation of the Super NES.

  2. take one apart? by jehan60188 · · Score: 5, Informative

    you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?

  3. Check out Byuu's stuff from BSNES. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://byuu.org/articles/

    Byuu is the guy who wrote bsnes, which is a 100% accurate SNES emulator written specifically to emulate it as close to the hardware layer as possible for the sake of preserving the system.

    1. Re:Check out Byuu's stuff from BSNES. by MtHuurne · · Score: 5, Informative

      Also from Byuu: an article at Ars Technica about accuracy in SNES emulation.

  4. Re:Zophar.net by JDG1980 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Be careful. A lot of that stuff at Zophar's Domain is way out of date. Much of it is based on speculation or trial-and-error emulator testing or is flatly incorrect.