The thing that blows my mind about the SNES is that even its onboard RAM can't be accessed at the nominal 3.58MHz clock; the system slows down for that.

Always confused me why the SNES was so paltry with its speed when the competitor TurboGrafx-16 usually ran at 7MHz, and also had a 6502-family CPU that required similar memory timing. But the TurboGrafx flopped (in the west) and the SNES was a hit world-wide, so I guess they did something right.

SNES had 3 background layers and color math/transparency, TurboGrafx 16 was stuck with one background layer. SNES also had much better sound capabilities.

I'd say TurboGrafx's biggest advantage was that they had a full handheld version of the system available very early on. The Turbo Express crushed the Game Gear and Lynx in terms of power. (The Game Boy still beat all its more-powerful competitors because of its far lower battery consumption)

I'd say the Game Boy also won in terms of library of games, and the popular properties owned by Nintendo, such as Super Mario Bros., Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, among many others.

Yes but that was due to it's popularity, not the cause of it, there is quite a bit of network effect, but that only comes into play once you have the network.

The gameboy won because it was half the cost of any of it's competitors. while being more than half as good.

> But the TurboGrafx flopped (in the west) and the SNES was a hit world-wide, so I guess they did something right.

Still have all my old consoles including the Turbo Graphics 16 and SNES. It was all about the software. Mind you this was during a time when games were $50 each which today is something like $100. If you wanted to sample a game you hoped a friend had it so you could borrow or the local video store had it to rent. If not it was a crap shoot and game review magazines were a staple.

TG16 had nothing to compete. I only remember the popular side-scrollers like Bonks Adventure or Splatter House. The rest were "weird" games no one was interested in. We had about 7 or 8 games before we gave up on it. I had I think one other friend who had one who also gave up on it with just a few titles.

I definitely lucked out on my dad being in touch with the technology at the time. I was ready to get a TurboGrafx 16 just for Bonk's Adventure, and I definitely would have missed out over that purchase. The SNES was so popular, that I had many friends that were willing to trade games with me, so we were able to experience new games without the stiff price of having to purchase everything played. One of the things gaming companies made sure to kill off as things turned to fully digital.

I still want to play all of the Splatter House titles, though. I didn't find out about those until I was older, but I've watched plenty of walkthroughs of the various iterations, and it looks like the perfect amount of strategy, gore, and need for proper timing to master.

I personally think that Devil's Crush represents the very best of video pinball, and that's a TG16 exclusive.

There was a time around the turn of the century when some friends and I shared some studio space, wherein we had a long-lasting (years!) high-score competition for that game. (Scores had to be witnessed, and were then written on the wall by the door.)

The SNES has a 65C816. That's a 16 bit CPU, not a 6502. It can process more data per clock cycle than the 8-bit 65C02 in the TurboGrafx.

This is irrelevant for external memory, however, because it only has an 8-bit data bus.

Technical specifications rarely have to do with whether or not a console succeeds, as long as they don't affect MSRP too much. Price and game library are typically the most important aspects. Or ease of piracy in some territories.

Out Of This World is a case of SlowROM/FastROM where the dev was not allowed to use FastROM. Iirc they claimed it saved a whopping 50 cents a cartridge to use slowrom in that case.

I don't know how much the publisher made in revenue from each cartridge. $0.50 might have been 5% of revenue?

Probably. For a game selling at 60$ assuming Nintendo took half and publisher took other half in profit, its 1.6%. Still significant as the publisher has other costs.

Always wondered if that was just an arbitrary licensing distinction made up by nintendo or there were actual differences between carts data reading speeds. At the end of the day, all SNES carts sported mask roms.

At various points it was very hard to get ROM made due to shortages. It may have been an attempted solution to that, can’t get fast but you could have slow.

Was there any hardware reason for this, or was this just nintendo making gamers' lifes worse by gouging their customers?

The ROM chips were literally lower specced / worse tolerances, and thus cheaper. FastROM chips were guaranteed (by the manufacturers) to yield stable results in under 120ns, versus 200 for SlowROM.

Interesting. Having not looked at all yet. Wonder if the emulators out there take this fact into account.

SNES emulation is extremely accurate at this point - any modern/reasonably competent emulator handles this correctly. Shoutout to Near (RIP) here - they wrote an article on Ars which documents how we've reached this point.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-...

On top of this, most emulators allow you to run the game at faster speeds than the original. I haven't encountered a game yet where I wanted to do this, but the fact that it's available just shows how far emulation has come (and the wizardry that is involved in emulating an entire computer system).

Ostensibly the reason is that the ROM chips have to run in lockstep with the CPU clock, so the CPU may need to be downclocked if cheaper ROM chips can't keep up with it, but I don't know what the actual cost difference would have been at the time, if any. Maybe all of the chips were capable of 3.58mhz and Nintendo was just gouging.

The article does mention LoRom and HiRom, I imagine you're talking about the same thing.

No that's something else, LoROM and HiROM differ in how the ROM data is mapped into memory, while FastROM and SlowROM differ in the bus speed. You can have Lo/Slow, Lo/Fast, Hi/Slow or Hi/Fast carts.

They're related but not the same. This wiki page explains LoROM and HiROM; FastROM is explained by this sentence.

> Different address ranges are accessed at different speeds, and the speed of the ROM at banks $80-$FF may be changed with register $420D.

https://snes.nesdev.org/wiki/Memory_map