Supaboy (portable SNES clone)

3gengames · Post by **3gengames** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 5:05 pm

You're the only person I've heard anything say bad about it. And with the way your carts are stored you must not play them often so whys it matter? Organize them in some way and picking a couple games to bring doesn't take 40 minutes.

Near · Post by **Near** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 5:11 pm

> You're the only person I've heard anything say bad about it.

If it were $30 it'd be a neat toy. But it's an imperfect copy, just like emulators. Anyway, I don't care. I just said I don't think it's worth the money. If you do, buy it. You don't need my approval.

> And with the way your carts are stored you must not play them often

Right, I store them on a MicroSD card =)

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 6:16 pm

byuu, I agree it's not worth the money. All I'm saying is unless we know of specific problems we can't assume random internet talk is fact or reliable. I do not own any clones and neither do you so we have no way of knowing without someone else presenting evidence of some sort of fault.

Now I certainly am find with my 2 SNES consoles and have no desire or reason to get a cloned SNES hardware that you see in the FC16 or other cheap clones. I don't believe they are equal to a real SNES console. I would be interested in hearing what their problems are though, just like with Famicom/NES clones.

kyuusaku · Post by **kyuusaku** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 9:24 pm

I have a clone (an old one) and I haven't noticed anything out of place in any games I'm familiar with. Since my clone's ASIC are packaged the same as Nintendo's I tend to believe they are functional replicas, not the result of reverse engineering. I also believe the poor accuracy for NES clones is probably the result of noisy/contaminated processing leading to a few bad transistors or something. There are analog changes from process to process so things like DAC may be affected, but I believe digital areas carry over well. Perhaps due to the SNES' (static?) CMOS nature it's "more digital" than the dynamic NES logic and was cloned what seems to be very successfully. I'm not going to argue for clone build or design quality though, just the ASIC.

Probably the only reason SA-1 games take issue with SNES clones is that clones typically lack CIC.

Jagasian · Post by **Jagasian** » Fri Dec 02, 2011 11:54 pm

byuu wrote:> You're the only person I've heard anything say bad about it.

If it were $30 it'd be a neat toy. But it's an imperfect copy, just like emulators. Anyway, I don't care. I just said I don't think it's worth the money. If you do, buy it. You don't need my approval.

> And with the way your carts are stored you must not play them often

Right, I store them on a MicroSD card =)

I have multiple SNES and SFC consoles made by Nintendo, in addition to two SNES clones. I notice subtle differences in the video output of my early revision SNES1 compared to the later revision SNES1. The early revision SNES1's video is "softer" looking, while the later revision SNES1's video is "sharper". Would you say that Nintendo's SNES is an imperfect copy of itself?

Regardless, I prefer official brand hardware, carts, peripherials, etc. But if a clone is good enough, its a fun expensive toy.

To make the discussion more constructive, has anyone systematically quantified the "latency" difference between a real SNES and various SNES emulators? The sound latency and controller latency must be considerably higher on an emulator running on a non-real-time OS such as Windows or Linux than a real official SNES.

Near · Post by **Near** » Sat Dec 03, 2011 1:48 am

> I notice subtle differences in the video output of my early revision SNES1 compared to the later revision SNES1. The early revision SNES1's video is "softer" looking, while the later revision SNES1's video is "sharper". Would you say that Nintendo's SNES (second revision) is an imperfect copy of itself?

Yes I would. It either behaves the same or it doesn't. I've not noticed the same color differences, but yes. They changed many behaviors and addressed various hardware bugs like DMA and HDMA starting too close together crashing the CPU.

But even with that, the functional differences between the 1/1/1 and 2/1/3 system are only a fraction of the changes compared to what was done for the Super Famicom Jr; which did not share the courtesy of chip revision# increments, and pretends to be a late-model 2/1/3 SNES.

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Sat Dec 03, 2011 4:01 am

Does the SNES JR have compatibility issues with software?

Post by **tepples** » Sat Dec 03, 2011 5:39 am

Jagasian wrote:To make the discussion more constructive, has anyone systematically quantified the "latency" difference between a real SNES and various SNES emulators?

You'd have to have the latency down to the cycle in order for a Super Scope + CRT combination to work properly.

Once I did measure emulator lag by making a short demo that plays a sound effect whenever I press a button and then recording myself hitting a key and waiting for sound to come out. VisualBoyAdvance was up there at 6 or 7 frames, making a music game near unplayable, compared to a GBA which was less than 1.

Near · Post by **Near** » Sat Dec 03, 2011 9:37 am

> Does the SNES JR have compatibility issues with software?

If you're asking me specifically, I'm not sure. I don't own one. The differences I know of were from blargg's research and pictures from others running my PPU mid-scanline tests, and they're pretty substantial.

> You'd have to have the latency down to the cycle in order for a Super Scope + CRT combination to work properly.

(Nearly?) all SS games have a calibration screen for exactly this purpose. You can probably get away with 8-16 scanlines of difference. And MAYBE get away with delaying things an entire frame and triggering during the next frame, but that would obviously not be the same anymore.

> VisualBoyAdvance was up there at 6 or 7 frames, making a music game near unplayable, compared to a GBA which was less than 1.

Yeah, it ruined the Mother 3 battle system.

Post by **tepples** » Sat Dec 03, 2011 9:49 am

byuu wrote:> You'd have to have the latency down to the cycle in order for a Super Scope + CRT combination to work properly.

(Nearly?) all SS games have a calibration screen for exactly this purpose.

The X position in OPHCT ($213C) can be 0 to 339. Do games correctly handle the case of wrapping from 339 on one line to 0 on the next?

You can probably get away with 8-16 scanlines of difference. And MAYBE get away with delaying things an entire frame and triggering during the next frame, but that would obviously not be the same anymore.

Yeah, it's not like the Zapper, where you can't have a frame delay because the NES game is cycling among targets. But then a handheld would probably use a resistive or capacitive digitizer to emulate the gun and the mouse anyway.

Near · Post by **Near** » Sat Dec 03, 2011 2:34 pm

> The X position in OPHCT ($213C) can be 0 to 339. Do games correctly handle the case of wrapping from 339 on one line to 0 on the next?

Probably depends on the game. You can always increase your latency a few extra cycles so the X-pos is the same, and Y-pos is real Y-pos+latency.

3gengames · Post by **3gengames** » Sat Dec 03, 2011 7:43 pm

It seems so far the only chip giving any problems with a guy on NA is SA-1, and the Capcom X2 custom chip for polygon rendering works and so does SFX1/2 so it seems like the CPU is pretty good, just gotta see if it really has problems with SA-1 or if it's a problem with his cart, which he says is also shaky in a system.

Jagasian · Post by **Jagasian** » Tue Dec 06, 2011 11:42 pm

Do you have a link to the NintendoAge thread?

Super Mario RPG works on my Supaboy, but I after a few playing a few times, my saves ended up getting erased. Now, my cart has its original batteries in it, so it might just be dead batteries and not the Supaboy that erased the games. Is it even possible for the system to erase save games?

infiniteneslives · Post by **infiniteneslives** » Tue Dec 06, 2011 11:58 pm

I've got this same issue with my FC mobile II. I didn't think much of it when I noticed the problem. But now that I think about it... The issue is most likely that the portable is operating at a lower voltage around 3.5 or so for me and prob you too. So when the batteries run low you actually get too low for the battery back circuitry to work properly on the WRAM (in my case not sure the term for SNES)

So when that happens the SRAM will end up operating during game play off the cart's battery and not the console/portable. This would cause huge issues and due to the in line resistor on the batteries supply it probably switches power supply back and forth a lot. I would imagine this type of action would wreak havoc on the save data. So this could explain why all the issues with battery back saves on any portable really operating at a lowered voltage.

Ganapoes · Post by **Ganapoes** » Thu Dec 08, 2011 1:31 am

How is the sound on yours, I have read that people can here a noise on theirs like what was present on the prototypes.