All SNES enhancement chips and what they did | White_Pointer Gaming

[@Dwedit]

The "Load Times" in street fighter alpha 2 turned out to be related to buggy sound code, not the graphics decompression.

[@jsr734]

I wonder what happened there. The previous SF games didn´t have that problem, or at least not so obvious.

[@inceptional]

Yeah, I think someone fixed this in modern times, but I can't check personally to see what it's like because there's apparently only an MSU1 version of the game and not just a regular version I can run on my SNES Mini without taking up all the memory.

[@budgetcoinhunter]

@@jsr734 They used a horribly slow method of copying sample data into the sound chip.

[@Tempora158]

@@jsr734 The previous SF games do have this problem. In SF2 Turbo and Super SF2, the music will stop at the end of every round and the game will freeze to load in the announcer voice "You Win" "and the SNES exclusive "crowd noise" to mask the silence caused by the missing music. In Super SF2, the audio RAM situation was so acute that Capcom removed the "Round 1, Fight!" voices at the start of each round to avoid the load pauses we ended up getting in Street Fighter Alpha 2 when they decided to bring it back.

[@IntegerOfDoom]

I thought it was because the SNES can't do anything else while uploading to ARAM. You can tell it to play a sound effect or switch a song without a hiccup.

[@Dom_Maretti]

Capcom was the source of so many headaches from early emulation...MMX2-3 took a lot of pain to figure out how to emulate in early SNES emulators. The worst, however, was all of the self-destructive DRM in Capcom arcade hardware...from the self-destruct batteries in some CPS-1 games (most notably, 3 Wonders), to the absurd XOR Table data in CPS-2 games that was literally encrypted and only solvable on the hardware because of a battery-RAM that held decryption keys. Anyone around from the early days of emulation will remember how much of an absolute revelation Callus and Final Burn Alpha were. Nowadays, you're probably using a MAME core in Retroarch for all arcade emu needs (aside from electro-mechanical, pinball, slots, and redemption equipment)...but back then, you had a dedicated emulator for CPS-1, CPS-2, and Neo Geo MVS. Hell, for a while, classic Taito arcade games didn't work correctly in Mame and you had to use the long-defunct RAINE. But..that's enough digression. Oops.

[@nate567987]

that was soved by alpha on cps1

[@Dug88]

I still run into Megaman X's copy protection occasionally depending on where the game is sourced from. The first time it happened I had no idea what was going on. I thought I'd stumbled on some weird glitch I'd never found in all the years I'd played it as a kid on the snes. But, apparently bad rom dumps will still trigger the copy protection. It was incredibly frustrating being sent back to the intro stage over and over again and actually put me off playing the game for a while until I learned what was going on.

[@Demoncradle]

@@nate567987all of the street fighter alpha games were cps2 hardware

[@wiggy8912]

The GSU2-SP1 is simply a chip revision. It’s literally a Small(er) Packaging. Just like all tech, it got smaller, more efficient, & cheaper.

[@inlovewithi]

7:25 Remarkably so, the reason for the load time was not due to the chip. The freezes were actually caused by slow audio uploading to the SPC700 sound chip, not the S-DD1 decompression. A patch was created by a modder named gizaha that fixed these slowdowns and loading. Even though the game pretty much never crossed my mind since the 90s, it's one of those things, that makes you go, wow, interesting. All this time I thought it was because of the compression.

[@greensun1334]

That's actually a very clever and cost effective strategy: less focus at the CPU power itself, more focus at expansion chips inside the cartridges. But there are also many quite impressive SNES games running without expansion chips at all.

[@watchm4ker]

Kinda-sorta. They originally wanted backwards compatibility with the Famicom, and a lot of the hardware maintains that functionality. But they also knew that the Famicom's most memorable titles relied heavily on enhanced cartridges or the FDS - before the advent of mapper chips, the best the NES was capable of was the original Super Mario Bros. Knowing this, they fully anticipated that the Super Famicom would also have considerable upgrades, not least of which would be its disk system, the CD-based Play Station. Plans are funny things, sometimes.

[@tancar2004]

The SA-1 didn't just boost the speed of the snes. It was a full 65816 CPU, a twin of the CPU in the snes but running 3X faster. Essentially replacing the snes CPU.

[@NoSpamForYou]

If the SA-1 could have been the CPU from the beginning they probably wouldn't need add-ons, or it would have been even better. SA-1 plus the DSP or FX2 chip together would be impressive. SA-1 can also address 8MB (64Mbit) without bank switching, twice as much as stock CPU.

[@eddievhfan1984]

Though one could use multiprogramming techniques on both CPUs to take advantage of the combined firepower.

[@brandonsteele2826]

That sounds expensive.

[@eddievhfan1984]

@@brandonsteele2826 It was. Extra-large and complicated releases like Super Mario RPG were the only ones that used it, and they had high prices to match.

[@ryanthecommenter2030]

It’s kinda the same with how the MegaCD has the same cpu as the Megadrive but faster.

[@bluedistortions]

Tengai Makyō Zero, another Japanese exclusive RPG, also used the real time clock chip. Apparently the idea was, like animal crossing, certain events would only trigger at certain times and days.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

As far as I know, it used **a** real time clock chip, but not the one that was called S-RTC. It used a different one, specifically designed to be accessed by the SPC7110. I didn't mention this game specifically in the video when talking about this chip but I do say it was used in 3 Japanese exclusive games.

[@bluedistortions]

@@WhitePointerGaming it hadn't occured to me there were several chips with the same function. I don't know! Lol.

[@ArimaXavier]

So, I had already heard that this would be the "biggest" game on the SNES. This idea of ​​"what would be the greatest game on the SNES" is a question that I still have to this day. Every place I search, a different one appears. Would it be the Tengai Makio Zero, or the Star Ocan?

[@rovervitesse1985]

Seeing doom with the music from yoshis island is hilarious 😂

[@vittosphonecollection57289]

Unless it's the final boss theme, in which case it fits

[@johnfriscia1731]

The algorithm spit this out at me, and I'm glad it did! I'll have to watch more of your videos.

[@Naedlus]

If someone had told me that Olympic Gold was a proof of concept for a PS1/Saturn game, I wouldn't have doubted for a moment. I was shocked at how... gorgeous the game was for the SNES the first time I loaded it up, and I was low key wondering if they found a way to pre-render the backgrounds, due to tastefully they went about using the relatively small number of polys they had access to.

[@JB_inks]

Brilliant video, mate! We bought a Wildcard and used to load in games via floppy disk and some games required a cartridge in the top with the relevant chip in it or the game wouldn't work. I had no idea there were so many custom chips for this amazing games console.

[@llynellyn]

2:34 For those unaware, DMA is what SEGA referred too as "Blast Processing" xD

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Not exactly. DMA was just one element of it, but it was referring to a specific technique that was theoretically possible on the hardware but never actually used. I talk about it in this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hqHHo5ifjcSIfK8

[@americaonline3835]

i thought SEGA was referring to the faster CPU the Genesis has over the SNES, not DMA

[@vittosphonecollection57289]

​@@americaonline3835Same

[@RaptorShadow]

I really enjoy this sort of look into the hardware behind consoles. Good stuff mate!

[@rockerteen8300]

The only successful add on chips were mapper chips, other than that consumers didn't want to pay extra for additional chips and manufacturers stayed away from them because the consumers didn't financially make it worth their investment.

[@M1XART]

That Balls -beat -em -up, is kind of hidden gem on SNES. Admitedly, it's way it is because of the limitations of the console, -but what a great example how to turn limitation into benefit. Similar example as Rayman -character desing.

[@byson542]

Just want to say your channel is straight fire dawg! these technical breakdowns are top tier

[@rsmith02]

For favorite game using an enhancement chip probably Super Mario Kart is what I played the most. I only discovered Yoshi's Island in the last decade and also think it's excellent and very inventive for a platformer.

[@gargervon8697]

My favorite chip enhanced SNES game was Super Mario RPG, with Star Fox in second place.

[@owenvogelgesang7314]

There's already a reasonably accurate open-source version of the SPC7110 chip, but I'm currently working on delidding it and making a gate-accurate version of it to improve emulation of the chip even more

[@WhitePointerGaming]

That's really cool!

[@anahisavately6696]

I always liked the idea of ​​additional "chips" that expanded the console's capabilities, allowing you to do "impossible things" on both the NES and SNES. It's a shame this didn't continue on the N64, as it could have been a huge advantage over Sony's CDs.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

The N64 didn't really need it, it was a very powerful console for the time, but was held back by some odd technical restrictions.

[@greensun1334]

The good old Megadrive was my first home system, but the SNES is still my all time favourite with the best library of games and the one I had the most fun with. Back then, I was amazed by its mode 7 and multi layer parallax scrolling abilities.

[@blastproces]

It doesn’t have a better library of games. 60 per cent of that library is RPG and less resolution than the megadrive. The megadrive has a plethora of good platformers where snes lacked smw or dkc being the pinnacle of that the rest were poorer versions of its rival

[@marafolse8347]

Oh my god, ive never seen Olympic Gold. Really blows me away!

[@johncoulter7006]

Great video. Loved learning which games used which chips and what they did. Fun and informative!

[@HouSlalom]

Second!

[@Blxz]

Metal Combat was an amazing game. Never knew it used special chips.

[@Vanessinha91Pucca]

The Super FX chip was a overclocked one, it run at 10.7 MHz and the Super FX 2 chip runs at 21MHz

[@WhitePointerGaming]

It was actually the opposite, the original Mario chip was actually clocked at 21MHz, the same as the others, but it was halved by an internal clock speed divider. The revisions that followed it removed this divider so the chip ran at full speed.

[@MaxOakland]

@@WhitePointerGaming Why'd they slow it down on the first revision?

[@WhitePointerGaming]

@@MaxOakland No idea, I'm guessing there was some kind of technical limitation at the time.

[@omegarugal9283]

​@@MaxOaklandprobably the silicon overheated and / or didnt work properly

[@LeviathanRX]

I had Vortex among my collection as a kid took a long time to clear the game back then and I still have some of the level passwords memorized

[@MartinPiper6502]

It was an interesting time being at Argonaut and seeing all the pre release games being worked on for the SFX.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

It's really cool an ex-Argonaut dev found this channel, thanks for the comment :)

[@MartinPiper6502]

@@WhitePointerGaming I enjoyed the video

[@gamalielshapira]

It’s interesting to me that Nintendo of America allowed 3rd parties to develop and use their own enhancement chips for the SNES era after refusing to allow NES era third-party chips in the North American market (example: Castlevania 3)

[@donoteatmikezila]

It really was the right way to go. Most games didn't need an enhancement chip, but having the option there was probably the only thing that let some of the system's most iconic games come out in the form they did, or at all. It was a much easier sell to have a handful of more expensive games rather than every single console being more expensive and less flexible. That said, maybe if the SNES had a SuperFX onboard, or the SA-1, or a compression chip, we would have seen more games take advantage of them. It's a fork in the road, for sure, but with how great the SNES was it's hard to argue they made the wrong choice.

[@wirlogx]

SNES was the most powerful console of it's generation!! (with the help of this extra chip, that chip and the other enhancement chip)

[@HouSlalom]

I remember when speech in video games was such a treat. That, and FMV. We take it for granted now but seeing and hearing that on a cartridge was always a nice surprise. Do you have a video about old these features?

[@erockbrox8484]

There is also the SuperRT (the real time ray tracing enhancement chip) that someone made and posted on youtube, but the chip is so powerful that no everdrive actually supports it. You need a DE-10 nano to run that.

[@joshuakrieski9628]

No mention of Top Gear 3000, the only game to use the DSP-4 chip.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

I actually did almost add some footage of it but thought I already had enough racing game examples. But yeah it was unique to use the DSP-4 chip.

[@joshuakrieski9628]

@@WhitePointerGaming Im a bit biased since TG3000 was one of my favorite SNES games lol.

[@FernandoSebastian]

​@@joshuakrieski9628mine too, the music is also fantastic.

[@joshuakrieski9628]

@@FernandoSebastian It really is

[@vittosphonecollection57289]

Ooh I never knew that! Top Gear 3000 is my least favorite of the series tho, and I have the 1st one on my SNES 😄

[@TS-yz3ud]

I think you forgot to touch up on the other DSP chips, especially the DSP-4 chip. It was used in Top Gear 3000 to draw forks, and probably explains why it's possible to drive so fast without slowdown (if I recall correctly).

[@MIKandJEAN]

Dungeon Master still gets some play every now and then so that has to be my fav.

[@sdmayday]

My favourite chip enhanced video game? Virtua Racing, of course!

[@SylveonTrapito]

So, even the poligons are copied into tiles. I see now why they can't be rendered in HD in emulators.

[@RyumaXtheXKing]

Afaik that process really slows down the framerate.

[@BalancedSpirit79]

I remember playing Dragon Ball Z: Hyper Dimension on my modded SNES. The decompression chip it had allowed for amazing animation and lots of voice clips (but the OST wasn't the best imo).

[@josephdouglas6482]

Incredibly interesting, great work!

[@Stratelier]

It's useful to note that not all enhancement chips required extra pins on the cartridge. IIRC, among other things the SNES Game Genie was _not_ compatible with the extra pins, but you could still modify certain enhanced games like Super Mario Kart. The NES also had its own series of enhancement chips built-in to various cartridges, most of which provided memory mapping and DMA services to support larger ROM sizes and add new features, but some of which also added additional audio capabilities (which were not used outside Japan).

[@paulbunyangonewild7596]

Mario kart used an fx chip? I thought that was raw mode7

[@WhitePointerGaming]

@@paulbunyangonewild7596 Super Mario Kart used a DSP chip, I even mentioned this in the video :)

[@Stratelier]

@@paulbunyangonewild7596 Point was that not _every_ enhancement chip required adding extra pins to the cartridge connector.

[@wiggy8912]

Oddly enough, the most recognizable special chip (FX) didn’t even utilize the extra 16 pins.

[@kenh6096]

We have seen a few more chips come out since support for the system was officially drops. The MSU-1 is a very popular one and the Superfx 3 is due out very soon.

[@jcrowellz2000]

Never played Star Ocean or Tales of Phantasia, but they sound like great games. My favorite enhancement chip game, back in the day, was Doom. I know it's inferior to some other ports, but it has the music. Also it's what i had and spent many hours trying to beat it. Although it has a slow frame rate, it's still a technical achievement.

[@LeviathanRX]

Star Ocean 1 is available as a remake/slight remaster on the Switch and probably other consoles and pc, Tales of Phantasia has an English release on the GBA

[@InkfinityOkamix3]

Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia also has been English fan patched on the SNES

[@CoolTI-Daniel]

That's a super detailed list. I have the scope and Metal Combat... it's the only amazing Super Scope game. Sadly as it's a Scope game, it's fairly unknown.

[@MaxOakland]

My favorite game that uses an enhancement chip is Yoshi's Island. It's the best game on SNES

[@inceptional]

Yeah, I basically agree. I switch back and forth between Yoshi's Island and Super Mario World as my favourite SNES game of all time on any given day. Today I'm going with Super Mario World, but Yoshi's Island is right up there. And that's kinda funny in the context of this video, because one game came out literally on launch day and runs entirely without any in-cart corporcessors and is even stuck using SlowROM running at a paltry 2.68 MHz, while the other came out near the end of the system's life and uses the most powerful in-cart coprocessor ever created for SNES running at a whopping 21 MHz. And both games are equally amazing and not only arguably the two best titles of the entire 16-bit generation imo, but even two of the best games of all time as far as I'm concerned. Goes to show that it was never coprocessors in the carts or random under-the-hood tech-spec CPU speeds and such that determined how great these old 16-bit games truly were, but rather that the base SNES plus a great development team is all that was needed there to create some truly awesome 16-bit gaming magic. And we got a lot of that. :)

[@MaxOakland]

@@inceptional It can be hard to pick! They're both amazing games. I think the art style and world design pushes Yoshi's Island above for me

[@inceptional]

@@MaxOakland And you ain't one iota wrong on that. :D

[@spikester]

@@inceptional The Donkey Kong country games also didn't use any enhancement chips, which is hard to believe at times given how much they were able to squeeze into the games.

[@wiggy8912]

It’s mind-boggling to think about the fact that SMW is a 512KB program (game). That is literally the smallest ROM size used for any SNES game. To put that into perspective, a simple iPhone screenshot is about 5-10MB, which is 10-20 times as large as the entire SMW ROM 😵

[@Vextrove]

Apparently DOOM only uses the SuperFX chip to upscale the rendered output at two times the size EDIT: I was wrong. I think it uses mode7 for that

[@WhitePointerGaming]

You're getting a bit confused. Wolfenstein 3D on the SNES did exactly as you describe, I have a video about it here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r3aom5ice6mMjMU . Doom did not do that, it used mode 7 for the map that you could display on the screen and rotate. It's not being scaled with mode 7 like Wolf3D is. The 3D visuals are being rendered with the Super FX2 chip.

[@jonjimihendrix]

This is why I could never afford Street Fighter II. My mother just couldn’t believe that a single game was worth half the price of the system

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Street Fighter II didn't use any extra chips, it ran on stock hardware. Only Street Fighter Alpha 2 had one.

[@thystaff742]

Retailers raised the prices on popular titles. They did the same on N64 games too. That's why the ps1 was more popular with games costing less. Retailers couldn't claim it costed them more from the distributor since they were all disks.

[@DrAcOFoto]

Why did you choose to not specifically talk about "Tengai Makyō Zero: Far East of Eden" and its use of the Real Time Clock, plus the SPC7110, it's puzzling, taking into consideration that you made a special remark to Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia being the largest games at 6 MB, with Tengai Makyō Zero being the third largest - and only one - at 5 MB (40 Mb). Interesting to note that the game is still not playable on SNES flashcarts. Special mention to "Dragon Ball Z: Hyper Dimension" that didn't even show up in the video, and it is another largely popular SA-1 game.

[@NeoAF10]

Very insightful and entertaining video. Thank you! ...and keep the good work.

[@xTerrySunderlandx]

the difference between GSU2 and GSU2-SP1 is that the 2nd one has SP1 on it... No seriously, its the very same chip but smaller (a rev) About sfa2 the game actually loads super fast , there is no loadtimes with the decompress there... , the loadings are purely because the game cache the music every single round (for some reason they left the music as a wav instead of reducing quality and let it work as super sf2 or use the same metods used for killer instinct). there is a hack that removes the music tracks from the game and there is 0 loading on it. your channel is great ;)

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Yeah some others have commented the "load times" in SF Alpha 2 was due to a sound bug. Thanks for the comment!

[@xTerrySunderlandx]

@@WhitePointerGaming its not a bug .. its by design, not sure why they did It this way

[@Kawa-oneechan]

How about stuffing an entire ARM7 CPU inside a SNES cartridge, to play shogi of all things?

[@vittosphonecollection57289]

Wow I didn't know it had THIS many chips! (I only knew the Super FX 1 (I never knew about the two revisions), the Super FX 2, the SA-1 and the DSP!) It's interesting how even external companies could make their own chips with all those complex functions, I'm guessing it was simple to do, because those chips seem very powerful, so if it was hard I'm guessing less companies would've bothered to make one for their own games. I'm impressed because these seem to do some very complex math and they were from the '90s, imagine what modern systems must do while running ray tracing or an open world game! Plus a funny thing about Yoshi's Island is that the cartridge actually gets a bit warm after a bit of gameplay! 😂😂 Also didn't Kirby Super Star/Fun Pak also use the SA-1/DSP? (I don't remember which one of the two) Plus I kinda wish this was done with the Switch aswell, imagine a NFS game from 2015 to Unbound with a CPU on its cartridge! Or that you could buy a "pro cartridge" so that you buy a cartridge with a special chip on it, you dump the game's data, insert said cartridge and put the data inside it and, in that way, you get boosted performance! I would totally use a Pro Cartridge to run Sonic games at 1080p! (Or 720p 60) If it was possible, it could be a pretty neat alternative to having a "Switch Pro". Instead of spending like 500$ on new hardware, you could choose which games to enhance and you could still use the system you already own! I would so love for that to exist!

[@ShinAntonio]

Street Fighter Alpha 2 is an impressive port, but they definitely made heavy compromises to get it running on SNES. Maybe it's because I played other versions first, but the differences in SNES version are very noticeable (music, animations, game speed, etc). Still a great option for people who haven't upgraded to the 32/64 bit generations

[@GunFeverr]

I don’t know if anyone else has pointed this out but the pixel crawl in your games recordings caused by non-integer scaling is really unfortunate, even without integer scaling and assuming you’re using a modern emulator you can use sharp-bilinear shaders for crisp fullscreen scaling

[@PedroManX]

Very good!!

[@fatalist6663]

SF alpha 2 on SNES is really impressive I must say.

[@IncognitaEX]

Wish we had Super Street Fighter II Turbo with the SDD-1 chip.

[@loganjorgensen]

Thinking back on the Super-FX 1&2 chip they really could have just done a passthrough cart like Sonic & Knuckles rather than a chip for every single FX cart. People love to complain about upgrade modules like the 32X but the form factor is the most cost effective design, that was definitely what Sega should have done with their more expensive SVP chip as it was used only in one game total. Likely something the homebrew community will work out some day for both chips.😁 Sprite scaling & rotation is an underrated feature of Super-FX chips, always figured that would have allowed 2D sprite scaler arcade games to run on the SNES. Yoshi's Island alone is a real "tour de force" for sprite transform effects.😁 2:22 Always wondered about that since eventually everything has to go through the standard 2D pipeline of the platform, makes a lot of sense to use a frame buffer, and decently large one at that.🙂There wasn't much choice in not using a Super-FX for Doom, even consoles more powerful than the SNES later on struggled with sector engine performance. I guess that makes sense about the chip models differing like that, it isn't a cheap process designing and manufacturing a custom chip that it would be easier to just upgrade speed and ROM size afterwards. Too bad they couldn't "Moore's Law" it in hindsight, double both factors with each new model as that would have made the performance contrast more dramatic. 5:45 I was quite unimpressed with the SNES when I found out that even a launch title like Pilotwings needed a DSP chip. Such an odd thing to have the functionality but not the performance for it within one's stock hardware Ie. SNES Mode7* (requires DSP chip). Pretty cool those later day helper-chips, really pushed the limits of what a SNES cart could actually contain. I could see AI needing a boost given the slow CPU speed. That MSU1 Road Blaster port is pretty neat, never would have thought I'd see FMV on SNES after their CD-ROM project collapsed. Idk about developer "freedom", I heard some anecdotes about the difficulties of getting the publisher to even buy those extra chips.😉

[@Aquascape_Dreaming]

I was a teenager in Australia during the 90s. I never once heard Star Fox referred to as Star Wing. From my point of view, it has always been 'Star Fox'.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

It was always called Starwing (one word) here in Australia and in Europe back then. The N64 sequel was also renamed here and was called Lylat Wars (rather than Star Fox 64). Go and check your old SNES cartridge if you still have it :) Here's an example: cdn.mobygames.com/covers/1378238-star-fox-snes-media.jpg

[@lodoss118]

Excellent stuff

[@casekocsk]

It's amazing that one of the best game of all times, Chrono Trigger, doesn't use any enhancement chip at all... Now that's what we call pushing the limits.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Only around 70 of the ~1700 games released for the platform had enhancement chips. So yeah, most of the system's best games didn't use one and are running on stock hardware.

[@RyumaXtheXKing]

The system was basically made for RPGs. Slow and colourful.

[@G.L.999]

What I personally think Nintendo should've done was release stand alone cartridge chips in cartridge form without a built in rom, then just manufacture the roms that'll take advantage of msaid stand alone cartridge chips; thus, making production cheaper!

[@yoshisreal]

I wonder if an SNES homebrew developer could combine two (or even more, but I doubt that) of many said chips in the video for a project? I want to see how possible it is to overclock the hell out of this system with these chips.

[@DenverStarkey]

doom . back then i had no PC ,and my first experience with doom was on the super nintendo . at the time it was mind blowing.

[@FernandoSebastian]

Love this tip of info, it's fascinating, new subscriber here. 🎉🇦🇷

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Thanks for the sub and I hope you continue to enjoy my content :)

[@JedHelmers]

"SP-1" probably means "Service Pack v. 1" and likely includes bug fixes or slight improvements... though it could mean something entirely different 😅

[@uncledot1868]

Excellent video!

[@willrobinson7599]

Very clever way of ensuring the console can evolve over time by using these chips, unlike sega who just kept bringing out expensive addons, the svp chip by sega was only used on virtua racing before they abandoned it

[@4jp]

except this is much more expensive for both game makers and the end user. having the chips in a single box would have enabled greater utilization and support.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

@@4jp Most SNES games with these enhancement chips were not any more expensive on average than regular SNES games. In fact the price was more determined by the size of the rom than anything else. There were games with no extra chips that were more expensive than those with them. Maybe Super FX games were a little more expensive than usual but that was about it. As for the strategy of having a single box - well, Sega tried that with the 32X. It didn't work very well.

[@scottmog]

Sub'd and "watch later'd" your previous related videos. Thanks for the content!

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Thanks for the sub and I hope you enjoy my other content!

[@carlopepi]

how about the granddaddy of enhancement chips, Konami would love to see a breakdown of these and what they do, system 16 has a full list of these but not much information

[@nangld]

Funny how the company working on Super FX then went to make the Playstation devkit. And PS1 also had the updated version of the audio chip from Sony. Maybe that is why people call it SNES2?

[@greensun1334]

Fun fact, the first prototype was actually called Nintendo PlayStation and worked with SNES controllers. The PS is the sucessor of the SNES, so to speak. Even the PS controller was modeled after the SNES' one, and it's still quite the same with todays controllers button layout. They just got thumbsticks and additional shoulder buttons. It's safe to say, the SNES had a huge influence on the whole evolution of video gaming systems.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

@@greensun1334 Ehhhh... not exactly. That "Nintendo Play Station" was a prototype for the planned CD add-on for the SNES that Nintendo and Sony were jointly working on. Nintendo pulled out of the deal at a late stage because they weren't happy with the terms, and Sony decided to take what they had done and push forward on their own to create the PlayStation.

[@akkudakkupl]

Add a games list to the timeline.

[@Shaggyjunior760]

Very interesting bro💯

Nice video, but still don't understand what exactly did the SA1 chip in Mario RPG and Kirby?

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Boosted the clock speed and provided more RAM, so the game was able to run faster and smoother.

@@WhitePointerGaming so, the game's main RAM and CPU is the SA chip? And the SNES CPU?

[@AFourEyedGeek]

If the SNES CPU operates it interrupts the SA-1, so using it for additional performance would be inadvisable. The SA-1 is extremely similar to the SNES system, with it including the same CPU. The differences are massive in performance as it runs at a faster speed (10.74 MHz vs 3.58 MHz), includes 2KB of internal RAM, ROM access is now 16-bit instead of the SNES 8-bit, ROM can be up to 8MB, ROM can run at faster speeds, it can have up to 256KB of RAM, a DMA controller, plus some other features. The original SNES system was so slow that it needed an enhancement chip in a game 30 days after it launched in Japan. So no need to use the SNES CPU or RAM.

[@aaendi6661]

Hide sloppy code.

[@AFourEyedGeek]

-EDIT- My next comment is wrong, keeping though: I can see why Mario RPG would need it, the SA-1 allows for more sprites on screen. When you have a full team battling a lot of enemies, that would take it past the SNES's limited sprite limit. It could also allow for larger sprites, helpful for the bosses in that game. I don't know Kirby Superstar that well.

[@brandonsteele2826]

It looks like about half my favorite Snes games used enhancement chips. What does that say about me?

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Doesn't say anything, really :P Aside from the Super FX, you probably didn't even know those other chips existed back then.

[@Tahoza]

Kirby and Mega Man X by far. Here's me offering tribute to the algorithm for you.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Thank you!

[@JohnSmith-zw8vp]

I liked to call these and the ones on the NES helper chips...do a video about the NES ones if you haven't already?

[@h8reset194]

Dragon Ball Z Hyper Dymension look and run better then some later titles on the PS1 xD

[@pieguy279]

I have no idea how any of these chips actually work, but interesting video nonetheless.

[@TotalDec]

So, DL Starfox 2, Vortex... What are the names of all these game? Is Metal Combat FR any good?

[@joezar33]

Kirby All Star used a special chip

[@tsvtsvtsv]

is it confirmed that yoshi's island relies on the super fx 2 chip for its polygonal graphics? games like a link to the past previously used flat shaded polygons sparingly with no enhancement chips

[@WhitePointerGaming]

An example like Link to the Past is only doing it when there's nothing much else happening on the screen. The Super FX2 provided the processing power to pull it off during gameplay with a whole lot of other stuff going on. They also aren't real polygons, it's actually really clever manipulation of background tiles.

[@rembrandteinstein8688]

The one that always baffles me is Dungeon Master, where they used a DSP-2 chip (Same thing as DSP-1, but with different microcode). Supposedly this was used to convert the graphics data on the fly from the Atari ST bitplane format to something the SNES could use. Seems like they could have just converted all the graphics from the start rather than adding extra hardware to every cartridge, so I've always suspected there was more to it than that.

[@ZipplyZane]

I would suspect a bit plane format might take up less space, being easier to compress continuous regions of color.

[@Crawlinuk]

Star Wing! 😊

[@geoffreychauvin1474]

What about tengai Makyou zero? It uses the real time clock chip as well

[@inceptional]

So, there were more than 40 games on SNES with either the 10.74 MHz SA-1 chip, the 10.5 MHz FX chip, or the 21 MHz FX2 chip in the cart, and then around 30 using other coprocessors, all of which were running directly on the base SNES console like any other normal games and available back in the '90s when everyone was actually playing these 16-bit consoles. With the best thing about this being it was pretty much invisible and hassle free to the end gamers/consumers for the most part, as most of these games with coprocessors in the cart didn't even cost more than many of the other regular games on the system either. In fact, some regular games actually cost more than some games with coprocessors in them, crazily enough. Overall, very deliberately designing the SNES with the use of these in-cart coprocessors in mind all along and actually implementing said strategy from literally day one (see Pilotwings) was a really smart strategy from Nintendo there. And I imagine if the system had been around for longer, it could/would have taken even more advantage of all those various in-cart coprocessors, both the existing ones as well as newer ones too. The one thing Nintendo didn't make as smart a decision on imo was not making all games FastROM out the box, as [ignoring developers trying to pinch a few pennies for a moment] there was zero benefit to the end consumers with such a move that I can see. I mean, as far as I'm aware, SlowROM games certainly weren't universally cheaper than FastROM games, so it didn't save us any money. And it really did create an initial impression that the base console was much slower and less capable than it actually was in reality, which was unfortunate. What we're learning now though is that most of those early SNES games with the most egregious slowdown could have easily avoided most/all of it by simply running in FastROM instead. But at least a whole bunch of the titles once artificially throttled by SlowROM have now been patched to run in FastROM by the community and run great, which is awesome.

[@jsr734]

It seems it was part of Nintendo´s strategy to lower the production cost of cartridges. Remember that back in those days, rom chips with higher capacity were expensive, so to offer a cost reduced option with SlowROM to developers was a good business strategy. And, even at SlowROM speed the SNES was still faster than the NES.

[@inceptional]

@@jsr734 Yeah, I'm sure that was the business decision behind it. But I think Nintendo itself was also the cause of SNES games being slightly more expensive in general compared to other systems of the era [excluding Neo Geo], probably taking a bigger cut than the competition at the time, and I think they ultimately could have removed the SlowROM carts and sold the FastROM games at the same price as the competition and helped everyone more in that way. I honestly think that would have been a better decision there, for developers/publishers, end consumers, and the SNES' first impression with those early games that has stuck with some people who don't know any better ever since.

[@MaxOakland]

What is FastROM and SlowROM and how does it slow games down?

[@inceptional]

@@MaxOakland Back in the day developers could chose to user either cheaper SlowROM cartridges or more expensive FastROM cartridges for their games, and the difference was that the SlowROM cartridges artificially throttled the SNES' CPU to run at 2.68 MHz, which is a pretty significant 30% CPU speed reduction from the normal 5.68 MHz there. Many early SNES games used SlowROM cartridges so publishers could pinch a few pennies, especially all the well known shmup games (Gradius III, Super R-Type, Axelay, Parodius Da!, Super Aleste, Thunder Spirits, etc), and it's one of the main reasons why those games suffered sometimes minor and sometimes major slowdown. Certain bad actors today will try to lie and say it's just because the SNES is just "slow", but the reality is that slowdown is not some inherent limitation of the console that is unavoidable, and most of these games have now been patched with FastROM versions by some awesome ROM hackers in modern times, such that they now run far better and smoother with that single change. But interestingly, even with SlowROM [and on coprocessors in the carts] some SNES games still run brilliantly regardless, like Super Smash TV, Super Turrican, Super Aleste, Wild Guns, F-Zero, Turtles in Time, Rendering Ranger R2, etc. Hope that explains things for you.

[@rbrosz]

I think you're looking at ROM speeds from a modern perspective, and not fully appreciating what was available for the time period. The SlowROM access time spec is 200ns, and FastROM is 120ns. The SNES was publicly announced to be in development in 1987, but I'm sure Nintendo was laying out the required specs and doing some preliminary work for the system in 1986. In 1986 you could have had ROM with single digit nanosecond access times... if you only needed about 1k. Nintendo was looking at 4 or 8Mbit ROM chips (or bigger), and access times for those in the mid 80's would have commonly been 250 or 300ns. So Nintendo choosing 200ns as their "slow" spec wasn't really slow at all for the time period, and providing for a faster 120ns "fast" spec was actually somewhat forward looking. The other thing to consider is that RAM in the system is always accessed at SlowROM speeds. I couldn't find the spec Nintendo used for their RAM, but if they weren't willing to access it at FastROM speeds it was probably 150 or 200ns. By the time the system was released in 1990, they could have had 80 or 100ns RAM but they probably couldn't guarantee that would be available just a few years before. There were also major chip shortages during the time the SNES was being designed, and I'm sure Nintendo wasn't willing to consider anything bleeding edge for fear that RAM wouldn't be available for mass production. It was actually pretty hard for Nintendo to meet demand for the SNES even with the lower spec parts. Given all that, the ROM speed for the "slow" spec was probably to keep RAM and ROM access times equal, and avoid the need for developers to copy code into RAM to get faster execution. In 1989-1990 as developers were gearing up for release, 200ns "slow" ROM was a reasonable enough speed to use and I think would have been significantly cheaper and certainly much more widely available in the sizes they needed. By 1993-1994 that was no longer a limitation, and that's why many games - including the largest games ever released for the system - were using FastROM.

[@1337Shockwav3]

Didn't count pins and don't consider the SNES my field of expertise, but maybe the GSU-2-SP1 is "small package"?

[@ostiariusalpha]

It does indeed have fewer pin outs. They were able to shrink the package by not connecting to all the chip functions that weren't being used in Yoshi's Island.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

@@ostiariusalpha This seems to be it.

[@JonFroboy]

i surprised they didn't have anything on sound quality chips

[@WhitePointerGaming]

The Japanese Famicom had some chips that were able to add extra sound channels, but the international NES did not allow this. The SNES didn't need any enhancements when it came to its sound capabilities honestly, the sound chip was already quite advanced for the time.

[@TimeTravelingFetus]

Good video.

[@wiggy8912]

*to be clear, it’s an additional 16-pins. 4 per corner, on both sides of the PCB.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Yes, the way I put it in the video might be a bit confusing so yes, it's 16 extra pins in total, 8 on each side, 4 segments with pins on both sides of the PCB.

[@DoinThatRag]

This is NOT a complete list! ST011 is used for AI functionality in the shogi board game Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shogi. It also uses a NEC μPD96050, clocked at 15 Mhz. ST018 is used for AI functionality in Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shogi 2. It is a 21.47 MHz, 32-bit ARMv3 processor

[@WhitePointerGaming]

I talk about the ST series of chips at 8:17. I don't mention them all by name but I do say that there were three of them (each used in only one game) and they were used for advanced AI.

[@vittosphonecollection57289]

​@@WhitePointerGamingI wonder what "advanced AI" means, while the AI in games like Super Mario Kart still hold up to.this day... Plus I did a thing with Stunt Race FX that if I choose multiplayer mode with a single controller and I'm fast enough with the swapping to go past the menu, if the game notices there is no secondary controller, it will control the second car with the CPU! Now, it's super laggy like IDK 10fps or something, but I was impressed it even worked at all, I was just expecting the Player 2 car to stay still!

[@glurp1er]

Dragon Ball Z Hyper Dimension also used the SA1 chip

[@LeoStaley]

How do emulators handle games with these enhancement chips?

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Two ways - they can either emulate the chip's code, much like how they emulate the rest of the hardware, or they rely on BIOS files that have been extracted from the chip.

[@EriknocTDW]

Could a cart have more than one enhancement chip and use them both? I know the cost of each added chip would make a game even more expensive. But from a technical stand point, could it be done? Something else I've been thinking about, though I do realize there may not be a right answer. Back in the day, I kind of felt that the more games I've seen released on SNES with expansion chips, the more I wondered if Nintendo should have gone the 32X route, or maybe an SNES enhanced model (like Sega Neptune that had the 32X build-in) that was backwards compatible with the SNES original. I suppose people would be annoyed to have to throw out their original and buy the enhanced model, and the failure of the 32X add-on on Sega Genesis I think speaks for itself, so I can see why Nintendo didn't want to put their customer base through either of those situations. Another idea idea I had was what if each different enhancement chip was a separate lock on cart, like the Sega Genesis Sonic & Knuckles add-on. Or maybe, since Nintendo had already foreseen that the system would eventually need expansion, they could have designed the system to have an additional slot for system expansion chip carts, like the RAM expansion and battery backed RAM carts on the Sega Saturn. With this cart, maybe it could be expandable itself where you could buy each enhancement chip individually as they are released, add them to the enhancement cart, and manually switch between them with a build in switch. Older chips could be replaced with later revisioned chips of the same model, assuming they were backwards compatible. I suppose that if that was done, people would reuse their expansion carts with multiple games which would've lead to less sales of the expansion chips themselves, unless the carts themselves were priced well enough to cover the cost difference for all enhancement chip developers, it would have led to less revenue for R&D of future revisions of those same chips. But then I don't think Nintendo would want customers opening anything up and messing with the guts of anything. Eh, I don't know what the correct answer would have been if Nintendo could go back and do it again... or for that matter, going back to redesign the NES and it's expansions all over again. Maybe the NES could have been expandable to to the point where it could've use some of the same SNES enhancement chips in an 8-bit NES mode if needs be? I know the Super FX development started on the NES, but the developers were told by Nintendo to develop it for the SNES. So I wonder just how much they had to expand or change things to adapt it to the SNES, and how the NES counterpart compares to it.

[@elaynet382]

Generally it's not a good idea to require console users to buy additional add-ons to support specific games. Console players, especially at the time, wanted a single package that allowed them to play any game released for the system. The consoles even came with two controllers so you didn't have to buy extra to play multiplayer games (except in cases of 4/5-player add-ons that came later on). Developers were always wary of making games exclusive to specific add-ons because they knew the potential customer base would be much smaller than those who only purchased the system. The only reason the N64 expansion pak was accepted is because it was included with very popular games that required it, leading to a larger number of gamers already having it when later games came out. Even then, i knew people who skipped some games because it required the pak they didn't have. A modular add-on system like you're describing would've almost certainly failed miserably. Also, see the Aladdin Deck Enhancer for a 3rd-party attempt to do something of what you're describing for the NES. (Spoiler: it was a miserable failure)

[@EriknocTDW]

@@elaynet382 I agree that most people would want their systems to just work out of the box without buying add-ons. But if I had a choice between, say, a $50 add-on + 10 $30 games ($350) vs 10 $50 games ($500) with the chip built into each game, I would choose the add-on. It does make things a little more complicated, but the cost savings could have been worth it, especially if the add-on supported more than one enhancement chip. The Aladdin Deck Enhancer might have been successful if it were handled properly. More R&D should have been put into it, plus they lied about the 64K memory upgrade, they lied about the built-in MMC and other enhancing elements, the games released for it were all pretty poor quality, and it was created way too late in the NES's lifespan. That's a lot of strikes against it, but that doesn't mean the idea wasn't solid. If Nintendo had handled this themselves earlier in the NES's lifespan, I think there's things they could have done to make it successful. 1. Actually deliver on the extra features and sell it at a reasonable price for those with original NES models. The lock-out chip would likely still be required to be in each gamepack, though. 2. Release a newer enhanced model NES that has this built into the system. To help sell this new system they could expand the 8 horizontal sprite scanline limit and have 4 built-in controller ports. This would also have to be backwards compatible with original NES carts and would use the systems expansion chips if they weren't present on the cart. 3. Allow authorized service centers to install upgrade kits on original NES's. This should provide all the enhanced features of the new model but without for the 2 additional controller ports, so you would still need the 4-score adapter for 4-player games. 3. Also make the games available in the original cart form with the chips built in so you don't alienate those who don't want the extra hardware or the new console but are willing to pay full price for just the games. I still think Sega's 32x could have worked if it wasn't priced so darn high, wasn't such a monster for plugging in, and wasn't developed so late in the Genesis' lifespan. The Sega Neptune would have been a nice compliment to the 32x for those who wanted everything consolidated into one package. I think these kind of things have a bad rap because the companies keep doing a poor job executing the process from development to market. They're so focused on getting their next-gen consoles out that they neglect in the making of any decent hardware compliment to their existing systems.

[@ravagingwolverine666]

Whether it could use multiple chips in one cart probably depended on how much data could be accessed. There would be a limit due to pins and traces of the PCB and the system itself. There may not have been much reason to want to do that though. Something like the Super FX chips were capable enough to make the other chips redundant in many cases. There's not a lot of info about it out there, but there seems to be some indication that Sega was considering using the SVP chip in a lock-on cart with the idea of selling that once and then having multiple SVP games. I remember seeing Daytona USA was mentioned. People aren't wrong saying that Nintendo's simpler approach is easier to market and sell, but I think a situation with lock-on carts could have worked if the accelerator carts were not particularly expensive and if there were not more than one or two kinds. It would be interesting to know how consumers viewed the System Card situation at the time for the PC Engine/TG-16, especially in Japan. It also would have been interesting had the SNES CD add-on came to be. They likely would have sold a memory cart, so the idea of throwing a faster CPU like the SA-1 or the Super FX in there seems like it might have been a realistic thing that would not be too tricky to market.

[@EriknocTDW]

@@ravagingwolverine666 If it had to be a one chip working at a time sort of deal, I was sort of thinking having a external switch on the device, and as newer versions of a chip are released, one could buy the upgraded chip and install it... or... have trained resellers install it for a reasonably low service fee, since game companies don't want consumers opening things up and messing around with the guts of their products. If you or anyone else is interested, I made a similar comment in this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aXXHYXaoqJyCoqssi=f4RshhhrNUDHQsPs ...although I think we pretty much covered everything here. I guess I just like to rant sometimes.

[@Dinosaur_Arcade]

Great video, but I'm not sure I understand what the SA1 chip actually does. Yes you mentioned a few things, but what effects specifically did it add to say Super Mario RPG or Kirby's Dreamland 3? A lot of games used the SA1 chip in ways I'm not sure they're that visible to the average user. Some people speculated that it was more for anti-piracy than real enhancements. Also have you heard of the RP2040 chip used in the SNES port of Xeno Crisis? I tried to dig up info on this enhancement chip but found nothing. I did heard talks from the devs about it being good for anti-piracy.

[@WhitePointerGaming]

It provides a faster CPU and more RAM, allowing games to run faster and smoother. It doesn't really provide any kind of obvious visual effects, but if those games were running on the base hardware, they would be noticeably slower.

[@ravagingwolverine666]

Yeah, a lot of the SA-1 games don't appear to really need or benefit from that enhancement chip. I've also seen the theory that it may have been used as an anti-piracy measure. This is also plausible due to the timing, as the SA-1 would have been in use later in the console's life, when piracy would have been a bigger problem. If Nintendo had a lot of those chips and wanted to get rid of them, that would be a way to do that while making piracy of those games more difficult if not impossible at that time. It seems like a reasonable theory.

[@sumez4369]

ok but what did they do

[@joseavalos9988]

ia there a game that used more that one chip? is there something likfe that for ths megadrive/genesis?

[@WhitePointerGaming]

No games to my knowledge used multiple enhancement chips. Yes, the Mega Drive did have a chip that was basically their equivalent of the Super FX called the SVP chip, but it was only used in one game (Virtua Racing).

[@joseavalos9988]

@@WhitePointerGaming thanks for the info!

[@TheVdub1980]

It has to be Starwing for me ..

[@tsvtsvtsv]

i know what the chips did, they made the cartridges more expensive!

[@AdaptiveSystems]

doom was entirely re-written for the snes. its nothing to do with the pc version. think the code is still on github somewhere

[@WhitePointerGaming]

Wolfenstein 3D was entirely re-written for the SNES as well. I have a video all about that! kzbin.info/www/bejne/r3aom5ice6mMjMU

[@foxdavion6865]

Other consoles: Cartridges are just games. Super Nintendo: Cartridges are actually expansion cards with a ROM on it.