Slashdot Mirror
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."
Especially interesting is the special circuitry that eliminated the need to blow air into the cartridges that plagued the original NES.
The need to blow air into cartridges on the original NES was a result of DRM.
No, seriously.
The NES console contained a chip called the CIC, which had to perform a handshake with a corresponding CIC on the cartridge, or else the system wouldn't boot (and you'd get that blinking red power LED). The purpose of this was to ensure that no one could manufacture NES cartridges without the approval of Nintendo of America. Unfortunately, it also made the boot process far more finicky; even the slightest amount of dirt would cause the handshake to fail and the system to repeatedly reset. (The fact that Nintendo used a weird ZIF-style connector rather than a standard card edge connector didn't help, either. This was done because they didn't want the NES to look like a standard game console, which had a bad reputation after the 1983 crash.)
The default key binding for fullscreen is F11. You're right that it's not a 'true' fullscreen, which I don't do because mode setting changes take forever and only reliably work on Windows. That and they break the UI (you can't display windows, menubars, etc anymore.) However, Vsync works just fine so long as you turn off the garbage Windows compositor (it does not move the Vsync time like OS X, so using it basically guarantees tearing as the compositor and D3D/OGL app fight for who blits first.)