SNES pirate ports of NES games

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Individualised
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SNES pirate ports of NES games

Post by Individualised »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTnP4RG0v28

Not quite sure if this has been discussed here before, but it seems quite obscure and I find it fascinating, so I thought people here might be interested too. Not sure if this is the proper sub forum. (Uhh, I think for some reason me mentioning the word for a forum inside a forum triggered the spam detector. I have a feeling it thought I meant the Reddit term which shares 3 letters at the beginning. Edited, hopefully it doesn't do that now. Sorry for the consecutive edits.)

This appears to be a SNES multicart featuring ports of various (mainly NROM or simple mapper) games, including but not limited to: Super Mario Bros., Arkanoid, Battle City, Balloon Fight, Bomberman, and Donkey Kong. These aren't just poorly-made from the ground up remakes of NES games as was seen on the Megadrive a few years back, these are actually proper ports, similar to the more recent homebrew ports of SMB1 or one of the Mega Man games (I forgot which). The only thing it seems they didn't port is sound stuff, it seems that they had to do everything from scratch for that (as a result, some games seem to use the wrong music and SFX, for example Battle City has the Bomberman theme? And SMB1's sound is very messed up.), but apart from that, these seem to be 100% accurate conversions (although some games, like Super Mario Bros and Arkanoid, appear to be based on NES pirate multicart versions.) The cartridge also appears to include a (Christmas themed?) version of Tetris but it does not seem to be a port of any of the NES versions of Tetris and seems to rather be a SNES pirate original (or a homebrew they stole and put on the cart?)

I find this multicart really cool because it seems that this is a really old cartridge, possibly from the 90s. So it's interesting to see how the pirates disassembled all of these games and manually ported them over way before doing stuff like this was even remotely easy to do. Comparing the port of SMB1 here to the official All Stars version as well as the homebrew port could be interesting. But I'm not actually sure if this has been dumped or not. If it has, I'd love to see what's going on behind the scenes.
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freem
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Re: SNES pirate ports of NES games

Post by freem »

Apparently, d4s dumped it at some point, and support was added to MAME: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/pgc_for ... -t603.html
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Individualised
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Re: SNES pirate ports of NES games

Post by Individualised »

Thanks for sharing, so it does seem as obscure as I thought then. Reading through the initial posts on that thread almost got me disappointed because the mention of a "special mapper" almost made me thought they were just doing things with a co-processor on the cart (as in typical redundant pirate fashion), but it seems to just be a memory mapper.
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