snes enhancement chips = total rip off

In know that Star Fox uses the FX chip for the polygons, Yoshi's Island for the scaling and rotation special effects, and Doom uses it for it's first person view, but other than that, I can't find anything special about any of the other games that use enhancement chips.

Take for instance the SA-1 chip. From the information I've read it's a 10Mhz 65816 with features such as decompression and a better DMA. That sounds pretty good, but look at the games that use it.

First there is Super Mario RPG. It uses turn based battle. Yeah sure like you need 10Mhz to calculate AI when it is turn based? It has prerendered graphics, but so does Donkey Kong Country, and that doesn't use a chip. Nothing looks any special here.

Then there is Kirby Super Star and Kirby's Dreamland 3. They're both platformers like 100 other games on the system. Neither of them have any kind of special animation or an unusually high amount of sprites onscreen. They're just platformers.

Some people act like they can tell the difference. I don't know if they really can tell a difference or are they just assuming they have a difference just because it has a chip. What do these games do that couldn't be done without the chips? They look like your normal Snes games to me.

If you *really* want to know, ask Byuu. He's the emulator author of Bsnes (there's also a debugger version). I know he's made comments in the past how developers never really took advantage of the SA-1. From what I've heard, the most what was offsetted from the main processor besides decompression, was complex sprite priority sorting (juggling the sprite attribute table entries).

They use to advertise DKC uses 32Megs ..meaning 32MB..so for that being a example what is the size Super Mario World in comparsion. Since between the two there is a obvious difference in sprites.

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Originally Posted by FoxHound

They use to advertise DKC uses 32Megs ..meaning 32MB..so for that being a example what is the size Super Mario World in comparsion. Since between the two there is a obvious difference in sprites.

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32 Megs=4 MB, a megabit is 1/8 of a megabyte. Why on earth they even bothered with that crap back in the day is beyond me, I didn't know shit about memory/storage until I started hardcore downloading from the internet and had to start managing my space to keep from filling up the hard drive.

Super Mario World appears to be 512kb, so literally 1/8 the size of DKC, which sounds about right as SMW was honestly a really underwhelming game from a technical perspective. After seeing games like Mario is Missing on the NES and the NES pirate version of SMW, you realize the regular ol NES could've handled most if not all of SMW pretty easily. It seems, however, that all 2D Mario games are a little underwhelming for the time, even New Super Mario Bros. Wii feels like it could've been on the N64 with a slight downgrade (compare it to Smash Bros., for example).

As for enhancement chips in general, it's probably alot like the Sega CD and how many games ended up just being the Genesis version with a CD soundtrack. Though, for enhancement chips, you'd think they would utilize it more if they were going to bear the weight of the additional cartridge cost. A Sega CD or 32X game would cost the same to produce whether or not you utilized the additional hardware. Gotta love those CD soundtracks though, it even makes ultra generic games like Radical Rex and 3 Ninjas fairly entertaining.

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Originally Posted by dragonboy

Some people act like they can tell the difference. I don't know if they really can tell a difference or are they just assuming they have a difference just because it has a chip. What do these games do that couldn't be done without the chips? They look like your normal Snes games to me.

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Just judging from memory I'd say that Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Dreamland 3 and Yoshi's Island look A LOT more complex than other SNES games - including Donkey Kong Country.

One reason for SA-1 was for its data decompression hardware, even if the added CPU power wasn't needed.

Also the SA-1 and other enhancement chips (DSP etc) tend to be much cheaper than Super FX. (not least because of the 128 kB of RAM in SFX carts)

I got into a side discusson with A Black Falcon in this thread: http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?p=198225

About the practicality of having such expensive carts like Super FX or SVP (opposed to other enhancement chips on SNES which were far cheaper) and I suggested that a simple lock-on (game genie/S&K style) cart with Super FX/SVP hardware onboard would have been more useful in general, and could have attracted more developers to produce games in the format. You could have a game built into the passthough cart as well, to help justify the purchase, probably not costing too much more than existing SFX/SVP carts. (or they could have gone a little more expensive and added a bit more like expanded the RAM from 128 to 256 kB perhaps more)

One thing about Super FX though was that they later doubled the speed; 2 different enhancemt carts might confuse things too much, so maybe start with Super FX on-cart and release a lock-on enhancement when the Super FX 2 was ready. (otherwsie they'd probably stick with the slower model only)

One thing with the SNES is that the 256 color modes really facilitate 3D graphics compared to the Genesis being limited to 16-colors. (hence the copious dithering and garrish color scheme in Virtua Racing -even with 256 colors Star Fox uses a good bit of dithering as well)

The C4 chip used in Mega Man X2 and X3 was cool, but it wasn't used for much. All they used it for was a couple mid bosses, Sigma's virus, and the weapon demo in X3.

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Originally Posted by 17daysolderthannes

32 Megs=4 MB, a megabit is 1/8 of a megabyte. Why on earth they even bothered with that crap back in the day is beyond me, I didn't know shit about memory/storage until I started hardcore downloading from the internet and had to start managing my space to keep from filling up the hard drive.

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MegaBits are and still are used to tell you the size of the memory chip, it will give you right size no matter if the chip is 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16bits wide. MD ROMs should not be measured bytes as they're in Words, with largest ROMs being 2KWord and one game being 2.5KWord in size :P

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Originally Posted by 17daysolderthannes

32 Megs=4 MB, a megabit is 1/8 of a megabyte. Why on earth they even bothered with that crap back in the day is beyond me, I didn't know shit about memory/storage until I started hardcore downloading from the internet and had to start managing my space to keep from filling up the hard drive.

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dude-1: "Dude I got the new Super Street Fighter 2 game!!!!! Can't wait to play it!!!!"

dude-2: "Don't you already have Street Fighter 2 Turbo? Besides the new game isn't even the Turbo version."

dude-1: "But this game is 32MEGS!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

dude-2: "WTF is a meg?"

dude-1: "Gee, I dunno? It says it on the cover so must be a good thing?"

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Originally Posted by TmEE

MegaBits are and still are used to tell you the size of the memory chip, it will give you right size no matter if the chip is 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16bits wide. MD ROMs should not be measured bytes as they're in Words, with largest ROMs being 2KWord and one game being 2.5KWord in size :P

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I don't agree - always tell the size in bytes. We don't care if it's one bit wide or a thousand. We care about the total storage. The only thing the width affects is the speed at which the data is fetched. A one byte wide cart with 4MB holds the EXACT SAME amount of data as a 16 byte wide cart with 4MB. A MB is a MB is a MB.

Specifying the size in bits was a MARKETING ploy to try to trick people into thinking they were getting more for less money - a common ploy foisted on the ignorant and unsuspecting public.

Sleazy Salesman: "See, THEIR carts are only 4MBytes. OUR carts are 32 Mbits!!!"

Idiot Customer: "WOW!!! I'll pay TWICE as much for it!!!!!"

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Originally Posted by Chilly Willy

I don't agree - always tell the size in bytes. We don't care if it's one bit wide or a thousand. We care about the total storage. The only thing the width affects is the speed at which the data is fetched. A one byte wide cart with 4MB holds the EXACT SAME amount of data as a 16 byte wide cart with 4MB. A MB is a MB is a MB.

Specifying the size in bits was a MARKETING ploy to try to trick people into thinking they were getting more for less money - a common ploy foisted on the ignorant and unsuspecting public.

Sleazy Salesman: "See, THEIR carts are only 4MBytes. OUR carts are 32 Mbits!!!"

Idiot Customer: "WOW!!! I'll pay TWICE as much for it!!!!!"

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Don't hardware manufacturers go by bits in terms of RAM/ROM IC sizes? (seems to be prominent in arcade terminology as well)

There's...

MB's
Mb's

KB's
Kb's

Mega-Byte
Mega-bit

Kilo-Byte
Kilo-bit

Most people fail with the acronym terminology.
: (

like how no one understands about Kbps, Mbps, vs. KBps and MBps

One other nasty thing is, that there is not even a
normed Megabyte. It can be a binary Megabyte or
a decimal Megabyte. So the Megabyte is not 1024 KB
(as it always will be inside PC-hardware communication)
but 1000 KB.

This is how the hard drives can be always advertised
with the false size. And the more they "officially" can
hold, the more MBs you actually don't get. Hell, the
loss is measured in many many GBs for a loong time
already.

My "40 GB" drive only has 37,7 and my "160 GB" drive
has somewhere near 149,5. It's like I should get an
amount of free RAM pieces for the non-existant storage
place, but of course no one would do that.

That's why they introduced the binary byte notation, so you get Kibibyte (Kilobinary byte, or 1024 bytes) and Mebibyte (1024 Kibibytes), abbreviated as KiB and MiB. One gigabyte is only 93% of one gibibyte, so that's why you get 37 GiB on a 40 GB hard drive.

In practice, this 'standard' only adds to the confusion though.