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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."

10 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?

    1. Re:take one apart? by JDG1980 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:take one apart? by AdamHaun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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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  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.

    2. Re:Check out Byuu's stuff from BSNES. by byuu · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.)

  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.

  5. Re:The Ultimate Resource for SNES Development by sootman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  6. Re:It's a great design by JDG1980 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.)