Carving the Super Nintendo Video System

Aug 9th, 2024 How the SNES Graphics System works Last week's article discussed how the Super Nintendo's Video system feeds the TV's CRT. Today I'll summarize what I understand of the hardware generating these graphics. A precious resource is Jonathon Donaldson's schematics of the SNES. If you have a large monitor, I recommend to take a minute and

Aug 9th, 2024 SNES graphics: 186.2ns or bust! The last article discussed the hardware of the Super Nintendo's graphic system. This one describes how these components collaborate to render sprites and backgrounds. Researching this topic was really cool since it allowed me to understand how limitations such as the number of layers in a mode, the depth (bits-per-pixel) of...

April 21, 2024 Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even "enhancement processors". CICThe copy-protection mechanism of the SNES is something I already dig into in my

April 8, 2024 The evolution of the Super Nintendo motherboard Over the impressive lifespan of its 16-bit machine (12 years[1]), Nintendo produced twelve versions of the motherboard. What is noteworthy is how they managed to reduce the number of chips necessary over time. Looking at a summary table may seem like it is a daunting task to make sense of all of...