nesdev.org

Apparently there are two glitches. First, on S-CPU A, if the last HDMA channel ends with its destination address set to $00 (meaning INIDISP), it disables the DMA unit (or at least borks regular DMA). (This is good to know for me, as it means (if I understand correctly) that you can't turn the scree...

There is the graphics chip, it is the master it rules the roost as you are now its slave. the CPU and you will dance to its beat, it will not stop, it will not slow, it will not pause the raster marches at constant pace and you are now its slave. Well said. Understanding the PPU's operation and how...

Are you supposed to set the all the colors in the whole palette once for the whole entire program/game, or do you "update" the colors in the whole palette through out the program/game? There is no "supposed to". You can do either one. If you're making Pong or Asteroids or someth...

Timing is indeed much better (looks nearly perfect in bsnes). Smoother frame rate too. Nice work.

Tablet vs Mouse : its not the screen resolution but the resolution of what you are drawing. If you are making a title screen in 320x200 sure tablet would be great because you are going to be drawing lines and shapes 100+ pixels and you are going for the overall shape and design. If you are in 1024x...

At what resolution does free-hand drawing become superior to mouse drawing? I'd say 640x480. But it's a very difficult question to answer authoritatively, so I'm not being entirely serious. I'm just expressing my feeling of the point where clearly pixelated graphics give way to something that could...

blargg's SNES NTSC library has a test program included that's good for previewing and mockups. I think the PAR is slightly too wide, but it's almost perfect; a lot closer than square, and probably closer than a lot of period TVs. Unfortunately it's source-only, and I had some trouble compiling it b...

If you have a lot of sprite animation to make, aseprite is good. Mostly I use GIMP with posterize (32 levels), save as an X1R5G5B5 bitmap, then run it through my custom tools I wrote in Matlab (at the time Octave wasn't up to the task, but it should be fine now). If you don't know Matlab this isn't ...

Another myth is about the use of an super fx like a sort of PPU3... Do really is so simple like to put it there, and that's it?. If the "EXTBG" inputs on the PPU had been connected to the cartridge instead of shorted with the VRAM bus, yes. But they didn't do that. Do the SA-1 manages two...

So, it's true that it has an 16 bits bus to communicate with its own RAM inside of the cartridge. I'm pretty certain the ROM is on a 16-bit bus, with the memory controller feeding one byte at a time to the 65c816's 8-bit bus (branches, jumps and ROM reads can generate wait states). Probably the BW-...

If I don't understand one line and it is not commented, there is a big chance I do not understand why something is happening there. Of course, then I have no way to assess the importance of the line or why it is there. A well-known SNES romhacker and emulator developer once remarked that 65c816 ass...

The only reason I can think of is to dunk on somebody. Like pointing out that Rendering Ranger R² uses the same CPU speed as Gradius III. Or coming up with a slowdown-free port of Gunstar Heroes or something like that without using FastROM (note that this may not be possible; it's just a hypothetica...

Alpha blending would have the same constraints as discussed earlier for transparent objects in general, but alpha blend/test wouldn't have any impact on the branch prediction as program flow wouldn't diverge based on the test result (SRT uses ARM-like conditional instructions to avoid branching in ...

If only we had something in the SNES hardware itself that allows us to overlay sprites on top of the 3D action... ...okay, so there's two types of "sprites" that we're talking about here. 1) overlay sprites, like for a HUD. These are easy to do with the S-PPU. 2) in-world sprites, like mo...

There are conflicting sources. How certain are you that it's a Cyclone V?

It would be incredible to have this on a flash cart.