The SNES is a legendary console, of that there can be absolutely no doubt. However, it did have one considerable weakness when compared to its main rival, the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis: the clock speed of its CPU.
The Ricoh 5A22 which powers the console runs at 3.58 MHz, while Sega's 16-bit system has a Motorola 68000 running at 7.6 MHz (even the 8-bit TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine has a faster CPU than the SNES, with its custom Hudson Soft HuC6280 CPU running at 7.6 MHz).
The end result of this? Many early SNES title exhibit crippling levels of slowdown because the CPU simply cannot keep up with the on-screen action. Nintendo dealt with this shortcoming by introducing chips which could be included in cartridges to take some of the processing tasks away from the console's CPU, one of which was the SA-1 chip, also known as the "Super Accelerator 1". This chip contains its own processor which runs at 10.74 MHz and boasts other improvements such as faster RAM and memory mapping capabilities.
What in the blazes does this have to do with developments in 2021? Well, remember when we reported back in 2019 that Gradius III, one of the earliest SNES shooters and one utterly plagued by slowdown, had been patched to take advantage of the benefits of SA-1 chip? Well, the man responsible for that hack, Brazilan coder Vitor Vilela, has since released SA-1 patches for Contra III and Super Mario World. Over Christmas, Vilela added another hack to this collection: Super R-Type. He also released a 'FastROM' hack for Super Castlevania IV around the same time, which is the first step towards a full SA-1 update.
All of these games are relatively early releases in the SNES library, primarily because they came too soon in the console's lifespan to benefit from the power of the SA-1 chip (or the Super FX chip, which was even more powerful and would be put to excellent use in games such as Star Fox, Stunt Race FX and Yoshi's Island). All of these games can be played via emulation, but they also work on original hardware, assuming you have access to a compatible flash cartridge.
There are plans to perform the same trick with titles like Axelay and U.N. Squadron. However, this hack can't bring every SNES game back from the brink; Vilela reports that Race Drivin', an early attempt to create 3D visuals on the system, would require a complete coding overhaul to speed things up. This clearly isn't a silver bullet that can fix all of the SNES' slowdown problems.
Developing these patches is a time-consuming process (the Super R-Type hack took over 70 hours to complete) so if you'd like to support Vilela's work, you should consider backing his Patreon. You can download Vilela's currently-available hacks here.
Comments 32
It's pretty great that he's able to do this. Stuff like this is fascinating.
Axelay would be so much better if tweaked.
@Lordplops Axelay has been on the 'to do' list from the start.
And here I thought this would be an article about consoles getting yellow over time 😂
There are some games I want fixes for and there are some games (Gradius III, Axelay) where the slowdown is the only thing that lets me beat them!!!
I can see Gradius III or Super R-Type (or other shooters) benefiting from a speed-up hack.
But did Super Mario World REALLY need one? (yes, I watching the ROM hacking forum as people were talking about FastROM hacks and still wondering if these people weren't putting a lot of time into fixing a small problem)
I noticed slowdown in SMW as a kid, but it didn't bother me, since you know, Mario never was meant to be Sonic the Hedgehog or anything.
I also don't recall very much slowdown getting in the way of enjoying Castlevania IV.
Crazy that they were putting faster processors on a cart than the system itself had. SNES games flew into the 70 dollar range at one point and I'm guessing companies having to add stuff like this really contributed.
I find it really interesting just how slow these CPUs were running. for context a "modern" CPU (I will use the ryzen 5 3600 because I feel like it so the info I share if for that CPU) has a base clock (or core clock. same thing) of 3.6GHz. one GHz (gigahertz) is 1,000MHz. these CPUs (the ones on the SNES and Genesis and others) were running at under 15MHz. I think it is pretty interesting how far tech has come over the years
I already have a few of these improved games running on my SNES Classic Edition (Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts, Contra III, Gradius III, etc), and they are just sooo good with the slowdown fixed.
Nintendo really should implement this as an official optional feature in future versions of the SNES Classic Edition imo. And the developers of these games should also release them again on official SNES cartridges with the slowdown fixed too imo, maybe as some kind of collectors editions. I think enough collectors and core fans would buy them to more than justify the effort and cost involved in making this happen.
Also, imagine if Nintendo or some hacker could actually update the original Star Fox to run on modern TVs and have basically zero slowdown, run at 60 fps, be output in HD and with no obvious pop-in, much like M2 did with the recent re-release of Virtua Racing on Switch. Now that would just be utterly amazing as far as I'm concerned, and maybe finally show a whole of people once and for all that the underlying game there [with the tech-based and hardware limitation issues of the time fixed] is still in fact the best version of Star Fox in the series to date.
The slowdown in a lot of early games was also an issue of the ROM speed, as alluded to by the mention in the article of fastROM hacks, further limiting the speed of the CPU. After seeing the Gradius SA-1 hack, I discovered the fastROM hack for Super Ghouls and Ghosts. It made such a huge difference. It transformed a game I could not stand into one I actually enjoyed quite a bit. I found the slowdown in that game to be excessive and detrimental, so it was refreshing to see it reduced and the game felt so much better as a result in my view. Nintendo made a lot of baffling decisions with the Super Famicom that limited what it could do.
This is pretty cool but emulators can already overclock and MiSTer already can remove all slowdown like this as well.
Looking at Vitor Vilela's patreon, I'm concerned about their "Hyper Supporter" tier which promises "access to a package of all my speedup ROM hacks together into a compressed file. ... without having to search, download and patch each one."
That would be distributing copyrighted material. This is why ROM hacks are always distributed as patches, the patches are legal as they don't contain the copyrighted code.
Am I wrong to think MHz are only really comparable between the same processors?
@TryToBeHopeful
That's correct. A processor's performance is reliant upon the architecture, and the frequency is just the number of cycles per second.
A processor with a superior architecture could run at a lower frequency and still out-perform the operational capacity of an older processor.
With the NES and SNES, increasing the frequency of the main processor would be like increasing the speed on a record player; the game will play faster as opposed to performing better.
I wonder how Stunt Race FX looks when running actually decent?
Why did Nintendo choose a slower processor for the SNES anyway?
I have an SA-1 gradius 3 cartridge, runs lovely but a lot harder. Would of been great if nintendo released a snes pro back in the day with faster cpu with super fx chip built in. Hey I can dream:) regardless still my favourite console ever. And Axelay is my favourite snes shooter, and super Macross.
@Axelay71 The Phillips version of the SNES CD add-on was planned to have a 32-bit processor (around 21 MHz) and extra RAM, which would have been nice, but obviously would have only benefited CD games. It's weird to think about what that would have been like.
@DoomPlague yes I know mate, originally the deal was with Sony but nintendo pulled out went to Phillips and more a less did the same. Yes even now I think how amazing that would of been. Maybe Nintendo regret it as well, I doubt Sony would be where they are now if that CD snes would of been a reality.
@DrDaisy I can only speculate, but my best guess is that they were really focused on games like Super Mario and Kirby. These 2D platformers were their bread and butter at the time. The SNES was really good at making colorful, pretty graphics, and the types of games Nintendo published as first party games didn't really suffer from the low clock speed. However, the 3rd party publishers (who Nintendo was well known for not giving much consideration to) really struggled to get their 2D shooters and sports games running well. Nintendo may have looked at it as, "Well, that's their problem, we're doing just fine with our platformers." But that flaw really kept Sega alive because at the time I was in college and most people I knew (the late teens, early 20's male demographic) were buying Sega Genesis specifically for sports games.
The slowdown is part of the charm! Never bothered me
@DrDaisy I think the slow CPU was probably a cost issue. They were generally expensive. Nintendo likely wasn't willing to take a loss or as big of a loss on hardware as their competitors were. Perhaps they felt they didn't have to do that because they were the market leader when the Super Famicom was in development.
@DrDaisy I've heard that it was because they thought they would need a slower processor in order for the snes to be backwards compatible. But then they found out they weren't able to get the backwards compatibility to work and still sell the system at the price they wanted. By that time it was too late in development to go with a faster processor and so they were stuck with the slower one. That is what I recall. I don't have a source for that. If anyone does, or has more information on it I would love to hear it.
@DoomPlague I'm no hardware engineer, not do I have special insight into any of the Sony or Phillips designs, but I'll bet that a cartridge game could be programmed to take advantage of the cd add on. I know with the Genesis that cartridges such as Pier Solar are able to access the Sega CD to add red book audio and there were enhanced versions of CD games that took advantage of 32X hardware.
@Axelay71 I think they should have done something like Codemasters' Aladdin Deck Enhancer but has the various special chips built in. That way they they wouldn't have to install an expensive chip in each copy. They could just release a new model every couple years. It would have lowered the cost per game and lowered the risk for developers that wanted to make games that required special chips.
@SuperRetro64 great idea mate, that's what I loved about that era with cartridge though. Extra chips to enhance. Nowadays the consoles are completely locked. Unless mid cycle upgrades.
@RupeeClock I remember playing DOS games with 'turbo' switched on or off on a 386. Good times.
Comparing the MHz or GHz speed of one processor over another means nothing. People have been doing this for as long as I can remember and it's silly. There are 1GHz processors out today that will run circles around 3GHz processors of the past. Besides that, consoles have supporting chips that take the load off the CPU. Saying that one console is "faster" than another based solely on the clock speed of it's CPU is a mistake.
@SuperRetro64 The main guts of the upgraded hardware (coprocessors, ram, etc) were planned to be in a cartridge plugged into the top of the SNES. Good for CD upgrades in the future but not so much for carts. Some old EGM scans with specs are here. Fascinating stuff imo. https://www.resetera.com/threads/snes-cd-rom-thread-nintendo-sony-philips-16-bit-32-bit-versions.49597/
@TryToBeHopeful
The CPU in the SNES is not a bad processor and is really more efficient than the 68K. It has a 24 bit address bus and variable DMA which is what Nintendo wanted in addition to the emulation mode for NES roms. Yes clock cycles can matter but there are many other things to consider especially when the SNEs handled graphics better but was crippled in some games because developers could not get the data transfer hacks used by Nintendo to move fast enough.
@sdelfin
They planned the Addition of Chips in the Cartridge from the Beginning, also to expand the Console (Slot on the Buttom).
So "smaller" Games could benefit from cheaper Cartridges, a bigger Player Base (Console cheaper = more Customers) and bigger Projects could buy the Enhancment Chips.
@Azuris that's definitely true that they planned the additional chips, and even some early games had them. You're definitely right on that. Whether it was a good idea to rely so heavily on that is debatable as is whether they should have chosen a faster CPU. It's hard to say without knowing the cost differences at the time. As was mentioned in the article and in other comments, the slow performance of some games could have been from other issues like slower ROM and even the system's data bus among other things. As we can see, later games without chips didn't have as much slowdown as early games.
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