SNES PowerPak

[MatthewCallis]

My only concern is that the only thing people seems excited about it is to try all their bootlegged game even though where on a dev forum.

A sad day indeed.

Why would you want this for dev at all?
Compiling, hooking up a CF card reader, copying it over, putting it in, and booting it, oh shit typo, start all over.

vs.

Compiling it, USB upload to QuickDev16 already plugged in, oh shit typo, just reset and resend the changed portion

[tokumaru]

PowerPaks (NES and SNES) can be good development tools, you just can't use them exclusively. It's perfectly fine to do most of the testing in emulators, but try on real hardware from time to time to make sure everything works and looks OK.

[strat]

Maybe you can use it to play the extra difficult game in Earthbound that won't let you finish.
http://starmen.net/mother2/gameinfo/antipiracy/

[MottZilla]

Tokumaru is right on. While it certainly is nice if you can just quickly change, rebuild, and upload to test again with real hardware nowdays there are extremely accurate NES and SNES emulators available so you don't need to do real hardware tests that often that loading the file on a CF card will be such a problem. I have a GDSF7 which would allow uploading ROMs but it's still limited by parallel transfer speeds and more importantly the parallel port itself which my current PC lacks entirely. The QuickDev16 seems nice but face it, if I can get one device that lets me test and play homebrew as well as play all my other games I'll go for that and take the added hassle for quick cycle time testing.

[Banshaku]

I guess I'm quite tired these days because of work so this unusual comment from me came out. I need some rest I guess.

And yes, I would use it for dev, that would be my first reason for buying it. I'm no saint either so I'm sure I would try a game or two but this would not be my main reason of buying that device.

It just felt that people got more excited about the fact of playing their games on it than the dev aspect on the dev forum. This was my point I was trying to put emphasis on: where in the dev forum, not the general one.

[Super-Hampster]

Honestly, I do wish it would allow me to play Starfox 2 on real hardware. With that being said, this is pretty awesome. I'm glad to see this has finally be made.

[tokumaru]

I'm sure at least 90% of the PowerPaks bought are used for piracy, not dev'ing, sadly. But it seems that if it weren't for pirates these devices wouldn't exist, because there aren't many of us dev'ers out there and we're broken all the time.

I don't use my PowerPak for playing that often, I basically do that when friends want to play something I don't have in cart format, so I quickly put it in the PP. I have a few games in it, but I can't seem to play any of them longer than 10 minutes. Then again, I don't play my regular carts that much either, I guess I do most of my playing on emulators. I'm a sucky player, so I kinda rely on save states too much I guess.

[Bregalad]

I really want to do SNES-dev.
The problem is that I wanted to have already a couple of NES games out by now when I start SNES-dev, but making a full game is hard.
Maybe I'll start developping for the SNES soon I don't know.

[Hojo_Norem]

I'll be ordering soon but bunnyboy could you answer this, is the SNES Powerpak hardware final? There's talk of 'PicoCore' this and 'if you used this pin-compatible version' that.

Also, what version of the DPS1 is best to install for best compatibility?

[bunnyboy]

I'll be ordering soon but bunnyboy could you answer this, is the SNES Powerpak hardware final? There's talk of 'PicoCore' this and 'if you used this pin-compatible version' that.

I currently have no plans to change any of the hardware, unless a major unknown bug is found. Of course that could change quickly but prototyping boards is expensive! The Pico stuff is all configurable in the FPGA. Anyone who wants a bigger FPGA can swap it themselves

Also, what version of the DPS1 is best to install for best compatibility?

From what I have seen, nobody knows. Only seen brief mentions of bug fixes in the 1A/1B without details. Hopefully someone will use this product to check out any differences.

[tokumaru]

I really want to do SNES-dev.

I don't have any desire to do any SNES dev'ing. If I do eventually get this PP it would be for gaming only. For dev'ing I'm much more interested in the 2600 and the SMS... I guess I like to work with 8-bit systems better.

[MottZilla]

I'm the opposite Tokumaru. While I enjoy gaming on the 8bit NES, I can't really see myself developing much of anything for it when SNES seems like a much better option. Ofcourse that's because I think it's an easier system to work with than NES or atleast easier because of extra capability.

[Bregalad]

Yeah extra processing power, many BG layers and almost limitless sprites, mode 7 and automatic HDMA so that you don't need raster code are all exiting features. The fact to have a separate, VERY powerfull (for year 1990) SPU is an overkill.

[Memblers]

Since it was off-topic and getting quite extensive, I moved the customer complaint portion of the thread to here:
http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=5734

[Jagasian]

So I got an email from RetroZone that the SNES PowerPak orders are being put on hold due to a compatibility issue that was found before shipping out most of the PowerPaks. Does anybody know what the issue is?