Super Nintendo Entertainment System
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, also known as Super NES or SNES, is a 16-bit video game console released by Nintendo in North America, Europe, and Australia. In Japan it is known as the Super Famicom (スーパーファミコン). In South Korea, it is known as the Super Comboy (슈퍼컴보이). That console was licensed and distributed by Hyundai Electronics.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was Nintendo's second home console, following the Nintendo Entertainment System (often abbreviated to NES, released as the Famicom in Japan). Whereas the earlier system had struggled in Europe and large parts of Asia the SNES proved to be a global success, albeit one that could not match its predecessor's popularity in South East Asia and North America - due in part to increased competition from Sega's Mega Drive console (released in North America as the Genesis). Despite its relatively late start, the SNES became the best selling console of the 16-bit era but only after its competitor Sega had pulled out of the 16-bit market to focus on its 32-bit next generation console
Contents |
History
Even as the original NES/Famicom was at the height of its popularity, several companies were launching their own consoles. In 1987 and 1988 respectively, NEC and Sega launched their contenders, the PC Engine and the Mega Drive, one of the first 16-bit home gaming systems. Although the NES would continue to dominate the video game industry for years to come, Nintendo's hardware was beginning to show its age, and though Nintendo executives initially showed little interest in developing a new system, Sega and NEC's growing market share soon forced Nintendo to reconsider.
Masayuki Uemura, the man responsible for designing the Famicom several years earlier, was put in charge of the design of the console and the Super Famicom was released in Japan on November 21, 1990 for ¥25,000. An instant success, Nintendo's initial shipment of 300,000 units quickly sold out. The system was so popular that it was said to have attracted the attention of the Yakuza, leading to the decision to ship the devices at night in order to avoid robbery. In Japan, the Super Famicom easily outsold its chief rival, the Mega Drive, and Nintendo retained control over approximately 80% of the Japanese console market thanks, in part, to Nintendo's retention of most of its key third party developers from the Famicom, including Capcom, Konami, Tecmo, Square Co., Ltd., Koei and Enix.
Ten months later, in August 13, 1991, Nintendo released the Super Famicom in North America with a new redesigned case as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Initially sold for a price of $200 USD, the North American package included the game Super Mario World. The SNES was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland in April 1992 for £150, with a German release following a few weeks later. The PAL versions of the console looked identical to the Japanese Super Famicom, except for labelling.
Nintendo's Japanese market dominance was not repeated in the American and European markets. By the time of launch the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis had already became firmly entrenched in the US and European marketplace, helped by the lower cost of the Mega Drive/Genesis console and games and Sega's aggressive marketing in North America. In addition many US gamers had come to expect backwards compatibility from console developers (as was the case with the Atari 2600 and 7800), but the SNES was not designed to play NES cartridges.
Rivalry between the two companies produced what is possibly the most notorious console war in history. Nintendo would never achieve market leadership in Europe and did not manage to do so in the US until 1994, Benefiting from Sega pulling out of the market and it’s continued production of SNES and its games well after 32-bit era of gaming had started.
By 1996, the 16-bit era of gaming had ended, and a new generation of consoles, including Nintendo's own Nintendo 64, caused the popularity of the SNES to wane. In October 1997, Nintendo released a redesigned SNES deck in North America for $99 USD (which included the pack-in game Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island). Like the earlier NES 2, the new model was designed to be slimmer and lighter than its predecessor but lacked S-Video and RGB output, and would prove to be among the last major SNES-related releases in America. A similar redesigned Super Famicom Jr. was released in Japan around the same time.
Nintendo of America ceased production of the SNES in 1999. In Japan, the Super Famicom continued to be produced until September 2003. In recent years, many SNES titles have been ported to the handheld Game Boy Advance, which has similar video capabilities. Some video game critics consider the SNES era "the golden age of video games," citing the many groundbreaking games and classics made for the system,[1] whereas others question this romanticism.[2] See video game player for more.
Regional lockout
Nintendo employed several types of regional lockout.
Game cartridges, depending on which market they were released in, were of different shapes. The North American model had a rectangular bottom that had inset grooves which when inserted complemented the console's shape whereas the Japanese and European cartridges had a smoothed curve on the front of the cartridges with no inset grooves. Since the North American console has protruding grooves, the Japanese/European cartridges could not be inserted without the removal of these grooves and North American cartridges being completely rectangular could not fit into the slightly curved opening of the Japanese and European console units.
Additionally, a regional lockout chip within the console and in each cartridge prevented European games being played on Japanese/North American consoles and vice versa despite the fact that European and Japanese Cartridges fit in each other's consoles. The Japanese and North American machines had the same region chip, so once the difference in the shape of the cartridges was overcome, cartridges were interchangeable.
The simplest way to play the Japanese and European cartridges in the North American system was to use a Game Genie cheat device with the small rectangular piece of plastic from its top removed. This not only circumvents the problem of different cartridge shapes but also removes any problem with lockout chips due to the internal design of the Game Genie.
Alternatively, various other adapters or physical modification of the console could overcome regional lockout.
The chip lockout system worked by having hardware in the console act as a lock and the chip inside the cartridge act as the key. Disconnecting pin 4 of the console's lockout chip caused a situation where there were two keys and no locks. This meant that the lockout chips would not operate and could not halt the console. Games towards the end of the console's lifecycle, such as Super Mario RPG could detect this deadlock situation and refuse to run, so it later became common to install a switch that disconnected and connected the lockout chip as required.
PAL consoles often faced another modification. Instead of being re-coded, most PAL games were simply slowed down from 60Hz to 50Hz, resulting in 17% slower gameplay and sound effects. Additionally, PAL's higher resolution was not taken advantage of, and the extra scanlines were blank, creating large black bars that letterboxed the image. This practice was common across all consoles at the time, but created a squashed and out of proportion picture. As most PAL TVs support NTSC and the SNES hardware made such a thing quite simple to add, a switch to select 50 or 60Hz operation was often added.
As an additional form of region lockout, later games would check that the SNES was running at the speed the game was expecting. PAL games would refuse to run on 60Hz machines and vice versa. The solution was to start the game in the native speed and then flick the switch once the region check had succesfully completed.
Peripherals
Throughout the course of its life, a number of peripherals were released which added to the functionality of the SNES. Many of these devices were modelled after earlier add-ons for the NES: the Super Scope was a light gun similar to the NES Zapper (though the Super Scope featured wireless capabilities) and the Super Advantage was an arcade-style joystick with adjustable turbo settings akin to the NES Advantage. Nintendo also released the SNES Mouse in conjunction with its Mario Paint title, and Hudson Soft, under license from Nintendo, released the Super Multitap, a multiplayer adaptor that allowed games to support up to eight players.
One of the most interesting and successful first-party peripherals released for the SNES was the Super Game Boy, an adaptor cartridge allowing games designed for Nintendo's portable Game Boy system to be played on the SNES. The Super Game Boy touted a number of feature enhancements over the Game Boy, including color support (in reality, merely the ability to substitute a different color palette: the games themselves were still limited to four colors) and custom screen borders.
Like the NES before it, the SNES saw its fair share of unlicensed third-party peripherals, including a new version of the Game Genie cheat cartridge designed for use with SNES games and a variety of game copier devices. In general, Nintendo proved to be somewhat more tolerant of unlicensed SNES peripherals than they had been with NES peripherals.
Japan saw the release of the Satellaview, a modem which attached the Super Famicom's expansion port and connected to the St. GIGA satellite radio station. Users of the Satellaview could download gaming news and specially designed games, which were frequently either remakes of or sequels to older Famicom titles, released in instalments. Satellaview signals were broadcast from April 23, 1995 through June 30, 2000.
During the SNES's life, Nintendo contracted with two different companies to develop a CD-ROM-based peripheral for the console. Ultimately, negotiations with both Sony and Philips fell through, and the two companies went on to develop their own consoles based on their initial dealings with Nintendo (the PlayStation and the CD-i respectively), Philips also gaining the right to release a series of CD-i titles based on popular Nintendo franchises.
Screenshots
 Earthworm Jim 2 |
Emulation
Like the NES before it, the SNES has retained interest among its fans even following its decline in the marketplace. It has continued to thrive on the second-hand market and through console emulation. Many gamers discovered the SNES after its decline. The SNES has taken much the same revival path as the NES.
Emulation projects began in 1996 with projects such as "VSMC" and "Super Pasofami," which, despite some important initial gains, did not last long past 1998. During that time, two competing emulation projects--Snes96 and Snes97--merged forming a new initiative entitled Snes9x. In early 1998, SNES enthusiasts began programming a console emulator named ZSNES. From then on, these two emulators have continued to offer the most complete emulation of the system and its various add-on chips like the Super FX Chip.
Nintendo took the same stance against the distribution of SNES ROM image files and emulation as it did with the NES, insisting that they represented flagrant software piracy. Proponents of SNES emulation cite as arguments for their continued distribution: the discontinued production of the SNES, the right of the owner of the respective game to make a personal backup, the frailty of SNES cartridges (even though cartridges are far more durable than optical discs), and the lack of certain foreign imports. Starting in the 128-bit era, both Nintendo and emulation proponents began to have a less active stance on this issue.
Despite Nintendo's attempts to stop the proliferation of such projects, ROM files continue to be available on the Internet. Since the console's discontinuation, second-hand market decline, and rapid growth of the Internet, finding the files has become less of a challenge than it had been with the NES. Most general ROM sites offer files for the SNES.
The SNES was one of the first systems to attract the attention of amateur fan translators: Final Fantasy V was the first major work of fan translation to be completed, in 1997.
The future of fan-driven SNES emulation, however, may be in question due to Nintendo's announcement at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo that the upcoming Revolution console will feature the capability to emulate all of Nintendo's past consoles. Considering this, Nintendo may take a much harder stance against emulation.
From the fans' perspective this may turn out to be a very bad thing; Nintendo's in-house emulators, most famously demonstrated in The Legend of Zelda discs Ocarina of Time Master Quest and Collector's Edition, have proven to be flawed.
While these flaws are minor they are still noticeable by those who have played the original version, so purists are skeptical that playing on the Revolution will give as accurate an experience as the real console, or, even, as good as that of fanmade emulators. However, this time around Nintendo will have much longer to perfect the emulators and can also make bug fixes which they could not with the hard-coded disc versions.
Technical specifications
The design of the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom was unusual for its time. It featured a low-performance CPU supported by very powerful custom chips for sound and video processing. This approach would become common in subsequent video game hardware, but at the time it was new to game developers. As a result early third-party games were of low technical quality. Developers later became accustomed to the system, and were able to take advantage of its full potential. It was the first console capable of applied acoustics in video game audio sold in North America, Europe, and Japan.
- Core
- CPU: Nintendo custom '5A22', believed to be produced by Ricoh; based around a 16-bit CMD/GTE 65c816 (a predecessor of the WDC 65C816) with NES sound 2a03 core. The CPU runs the 65c816-alike core with a variable-speed bus, with bus access times determined by addresses accessed, with possible clock speeds of 1.79, 2.68 and 3.58 MHz (the chip usually ran at 2.68 MHz and seemed to drop to 1.79 MHz when loading from ROM.) It worked at 1.5 MIPS with strictly 16bit arithmetic and a theoretical peak of 1.79 million 16bit adds/second. The SNES/SFC provided the CPU with 128 KB of Work RAM. The CPU also contains other support hardware, including:
- for interfacing with controller ports;
- for generating NMI interrupts on Vblank;
- for generating PSG sound with inclued 2a03 core.
- for generating IRQ interrupts on screen positions;
- DMA unit, supporting two primary modes, general DMA (for block transfers, at a rate of 2.68 MB/second) and Hblank DMA (for transferring small data sets at the end of each scanline, outside of the active display period);
- multiplication and division registers.
- Cartridge Size Specifications: 2 - 32 Mb which ran at two speeds ('SlowROM' and 'FastROM'). Custom address decoders and bankswitching allow larger sizes, eg. 48 Mb for Star Ocean: Fantastic Space Odyssey and Tales of Phantasia
- Sound
- Sound Controller Chip: 8-bit Sony SPC700 CPU for controlling the DSP; running at an effective clock rate around 1.024 MHz.
- Sound RAM: 64 KB shared between SPC700 and S-SMP.
- Memory Cycle Time: 279 Minutes
- Main Sound Chip : Sony S-SMP
- hardware ADPCM decompression,
- 8-channel PCM
- hardware sound effects pitch modulation, echo effect with feedback (for reverberation) with 8-tap FIR filter, and ADSR and 'GAIN' (discretely controlled) volume envelopes.
- Polyphony of 8 notes per voices
- SFx sound chip : Sony\Nintendo S-DSP
- 3-channel PCM
- Low-pass filter for improved quality of low-frequency (bass) tones
- Pulse Code Modulator: 16-Bit ADPCM (if programmer uses 4-bit compressed ADPCM samples, expanded to 16-bit resolution, processed with an additional 4-point Gaussian sound interpolation).
- Note - while not directly related to SNES hardware, the standard extension for SNES audio subsystem state files saved by emulators is .SPC, a format used by SPC players.
- Sound Controller Chip: 8-bit Sony SPC700 CPU for controlling the DSP; running at an effective clock rate around 1.024 MHz.
- Video
- Picture Processor Unit: 16-Bit
- Video RAM: 128 KB
- 64 KB of VRAM for screen maps (for 'background' layers) and tile sets (for backgrounds and objects);
- 64 KB for sprite layers, 512 + 32 bytes of 'OAM' (Object Attribute Memory) for objects; 512 bytes of 'CGRAM' for palette data.
- Palette: 256 entries; 15-Bit color depth (RGB555) for a total of 32,768 colors.
- Maximum colors per layer per scanline: 256.
- Maximum colors on-screen: 4096 without alpha and 32,768 (using color arithmetic for transparency effects).
- Maximum colors per sprite: 128
- Resolution: between 256x224 and 512x448. Most games used 256x224, 320x224, 512x224 pixels since higher resoulutions caused slowdown, flicker, and/or had increased limitations on layers and colors (due to memory bandwidth constraints); the higher resolutions were used for less processor-intensive games, in-game menus, text, and high resolution images.
- Maximum onscreen objects (sprites): 128 (32 per line, up to 34 8x8 tiles per line).
- Maximum number of sprite pixels on one scanline: 256. The renderer was designed such that it would drop the frontmost sprites instead of the rearmost sprites if a scanline exceeded the limit, allowing for creative clipping effects.
- Most common display modes: Pixel-to-pixel text mode 1 (16 colors per tile; 3 scrolling layers) and affine mapped text mode 7 (256 colors per tile; one rotating/scaling layer).
- Enhancement chips
- SuperFX Developed by Argonaut. The Super FX chip is a supplemental RISC CPU for the main SNES CPU. The chip was primarily used to create 3D worlds made by shaded polygons, texture mapping and light source shading. It was used in Star Fox and Stunt Race FX. The SuperFX2, which followed soon after used two SuperFX cores on a single chip each with a speed of 10.5 MHz that worked together in tandem. While the chip most commonly associated with 3D, it was also used to enhance 2D games such as Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Some other carts that the chip can be found in are Doom, Dirt Trax FX, Vortex, and Winter Gold. A number of the games designed to use it were never released, such as Star Fox 2, FX Figher, and an early version of Super Mario 64.
- SA-1 chip 65c816 8/16-bit processor, clocked at 10 MHz. It contains some extra circuits developed by Nintendo, which includes some fast RAM, a memory mapper, DMA, several real-time timers, and the region lockout chip. The SA-1 was a multipurpose chip that could be found in games such as Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Dream Land 3, and Super Mario RPG.
- DSP1 chip The DSP (Digital Signal Processor) chip was created to generate more enhanced Mode 7 rotation and scaling effects using floating-point processing. The chip can be found in Pilot Wings and Super Mario Kart.
- DSP2 chip A more advanced DSP chip developed by Seta that increases the SNES´s speed from 3.58 MHz to 8 MHz. The chip was created for Seta's own F1 Race of Champions.
- SDD1 chip Other than its normal processing and copy protection duties, this chip was primarily a memory compression chip. This allowed games to be bigger than normal by compressing the data. Games that used this chip were Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Star Ocean.
- C4 chip A chip created by Capcom. This chip was used to create enhanced transparency effects such as rain and water. The chip was used in Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3.
- Game controllers
- Controller Response: 16 ms
- 2 seven-pin controller ports in the front of the machine
References
- Mary Bellis. History of Sony Playstation. Retrieved 9 February 2005.
- Mattias Liedholm. The Golden Era. Retrieved 1 February 2005.
- Silent Axis. The Golden era - Just for the nostalgics?. Retrieved 1 February 2005.
- Bayer, Glen. SNES-CD. Retrieved 9 September 2005.
Miscellaneous
Sales figures
Nintendo claims they have sold 49 million Super NES units worldwide. [3]
See also
| Major video game consoles |
| The first home video games |
|---|
| Magnavox Odyssey | Coleco Telstar | Pong |
| Pre-crash 8-bit systems |
| Atari 2600 | Magnavox Odyssey² | SG-1000 | Intellivision | Colecovision | 5200 |
| 8-bit era |
| NES | Master System | 7800 |
| 16-bit era |
| SNES | Mega Drive/Genesis | TG16 | Jaguar |
| 32-bit / 64-bit era |
| Nintendo 64 | PlayStation | Saturn |
| Sixth generation era |
| Dreamcast | GameCube | PS2 | Xbox |
| Seventh generation era |
| PlayStation 3 | Revolution | Xbox 360 |
- Nintendo Systems:
- Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)
- Game Boy (1989)
- Super Nintendo (1991)
- Virtual Boy (1995)
- Nintendo 64 (1996)
- Game Boy Color (1998)
- Game Boy Advance (2001)
- Nintendo GameCube (2001)
- Game Boy Advance SP (2003)
- Nintendo DS (2004)
- Game Boy Micro (2005)
- Nintendo Revolution (2006) Working Title
- 16-bit era
- List of SNES games
- List of Super Famicom games
- Game controller
- ZSNES
External links
- The official Nintendo Corp. homepage
- N-Sider (Nintendo fansite database)
- Sufami Turbo at Gamers Graveyard
- Messiah Entertainment SNES - featuring wireless controllers.
- Chris Yiu's Super Nintendo page - including boxart and how to mod PAL systems to 60Hz.
| Consoles |
|---|
| Color TV Game | NES/Famicom | NES 2 | AV Famicom | SNES/Super Famicom | Virtual Boy | Nintendo 64 | GameCube | Panasonic Q | iQue | Revolution (forthcoming) |
| Handheld (see also: Game Boy line) |
| Game & Watch | Game Boy | Game Boy Color | Game Boy Advance | Game Boy Advance SP | Nintendo DS | Game Boy Micro |
| SNES Accessories |
| SNES Mouse | Multitap | Super Game Boy | Super Scope |
