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Ask Slashdot: Understanding the SNES?
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."
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
The SNES uses custom chips for most of its functionality. Unless he has access to decapping facilities, taking one apart will provide only limited information.
Because of things like this. Sometimes it's good to have a current, real-time discussion with a range of knowledgable people, rather than searching the entire fucking WWW and figuring out for yourself who got what right and wrong.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
Unfortunately, EE is not like ME. What happens in an electrical circuit is almost always invisible to the naked eye. Monitoring high-speed digital signals takes special (expensive) test equipment, which even a university lab might not have lying around for open use. Even figuring out a schematic can be hard if you're dealing with multi-layer circuit boards and custom integrated circuits. The ICs in a SNES are all surface mount, which means even more specialized equipment and skill to remove them with no easy way to work with them afterward. Do a Google Image search for "SNES mainboard" and you'll see what I mean.
Also, simply being a fourth-year student doesn't necessarily qualify him to reverse engineer a console. Digital electronic systems are orders of magnitude more complex than mechanical ones, and EE coursework tends to focus more on theory than practice. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that going solo is probably not the best idea for his first foray.
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