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Comment by drludos | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone!

Here is an article I've just published about making a brand new game for the Super Nintendo (SNES) console using today's technology. It starts with the various steps to designing and program the game, and then details how me manufacture new cartridges (with box and manual) for a console whose commercial support ceased more than 20 years ago!

I hope you'll enjoy it, and don't hesitate to ask me if you have any question!

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Thanks for writing! I'm impressed by your dedication and effort, but also a thanks for your writing style, which was really easy to follow. I've read a lot about the SNES and Mega Drive before, but you've given me the best understanding of how the sprite updates per frame are limited by CPU time (and it's nice to see someone else who suffered with bad 50Hz versions). Are you tempted to try this for another console. I've always wondered how horrible programming the N64 must be!

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the article! I actually have made several games for other consoles (GB, Mega Drive, Atari 2600, Atari Lynx, Neo Geo), that you can find here: https://drludos.itch.io/

And I wrote two other articles like this one, that try to cover "how the console works" and their limitations I faced during each project:

- Making a Game Boy Game in 2017: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DoctorLudos/20171207/311143/

- Making a Mega Drive /Genesis game in 2019: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DoctorLudos/20191019/352537/

I hope you'll enjoy them too! :)

For the Nintendo 64, this is way beyond my current programming skills (3d and all that). But I know that Matt Philips (who made the incredible Mega Drive game Tanglewood in 2018) was toying with N64 development and sharing about his experiments on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigevilboss

which of the consoles you've developed for was the most pleasurable/least hassle to work with?

That was a fantastic read thank you — even If I'm far to understand the whole programming part. The cartridge with the box (and pictures) plus the manual really make it feels like it was done 20 years ago. Nice feeling.

When you made your own cart, did you do anything about the lockout chip? (I think it's called 10nes?)

Or do you carts only work on a modded SNES?

10NES is the algorithm running on the CIC lockout chip of the original Nintendo Entertainment System; the SNES had a similar lockout chip, but used a different algorithm.

These days, the SNES CIC algorithm is fully understood, and you can program an ordinary microcontroller to run either the "cartridge" or "console" ends of the algorithm for every region, or even for a cartridge to detect at runtime what region the console expects. See https://sd2snes.de/blog/cool-stuff/supercic

Hi! The cart works on all SNES consoles from any region. For the lockout chip, it uses an "aftermarket" lockout chip that is able to play on any console region (you simply need to hit reset 5 times to change region).

Today, there are several different lockoutchip available on the market, including the opensource "SuperCIC" one: https://sd2snes.de/blog/cool-stuff/supercic

For Yo-Yo Shuriken, we used the CIC chip made by Infinite NES Lives (a great producer of NES and SNES hardware supplies!): http://www.infiniteneslives.com/snessupplies.php

Congratulations. This is truly amazing! Thank you for spending the time to write this... I am sure it look a long time to write.

Thanks for your feedback! :) I did take a long time to write (I didn't keep track of it, but I'll say somewhere between 20-30 hours in total), so I'm glad you enjoyed it!

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