Road Blaster, now also on SNES

[Near]

If only MSU-1 was more accessible. It's a shame that only SD2SNES supports it right now. =( That and I can't buy an SD2SNES right now even if I wanted it.

Yes, if only it were emulated or something ... :P

But yeah, I've brought it up with the Snes9X devs. Although MSU1 is only ~4KB of code, the problem is that you need to have an audio mixer to combine the SNES output with it. This would already be there for an emulator with Super Game Boy support, but missing otherwise.

However, providing a strong reason for adding it (playing great games like this), will certainly help make the case for it sooner.

[Greg2600]

Finally got me an SD2SNES. Road Blasters (NTSC) works fantastically! Hoping more conversions are on the way!!!!

[qwertymodo]

If only MSU-1 was more accessible. It's a shame that only SD2SNES supports it right now. =( That and I can't buy an SD2SNES right now even if I wanted it.

Yes, if only it were emulated or something ...

But yeah, I've brought it up with the Snes9X devs. Although MSU1 is only ~4KB of code, the problem is that you need to have an audio mixer to combine the SNES output with it. This would already be there for an emulator with Super Game Boy support, but missing otherwise.

However, providing a strong reason for adding it (playing great games like this), will certainly help make the case for it sooner.

And adding support in more widely used emulators will encourage developers and ROM hackers to use it. It comes full circle, and everybody wins. I'd love to see that Chrono Trigger FMV hack finished...

[Near]

I'd like to see CD audio replacements made more prevalent. There's a lot of awesome video game music remixes, higher quality remasterings, orchestral CDs, etc out there.

I did this for Der Langrisser and for Earthbound. Takes ~10 minutes a game. Trace writes to $214x near a song start, then jump up the call stack until you find the lda #trackNumber; jsr PlayTrack routine. Replace the PlayTrack function with an MSU1 play track command. Done.

But I don't have the time or bandwidth to put together full game sound tracks.

> I'd love to see that Chrono Trigger FMV hack finished...

Yeah, it's a damn shame I was trying to make it an expansion port device first, so it no longer works with MSU1.
But if we kept it that way, Super Road Blaster would not have been possible.

[qwertymodo]

Why doesn't the CT hack work with MSU-1 anymore? I thought it worked in BSNES... or was that only in an old version? Could the hack be altered to work with the finalized MSU-1?

[Near]

It was made for 21fx, which was a prototype of the API that used different registers.

[qwertymodo]

Could it be modified to work with the finalized design? From my understanding of the hack, all it does is jump to a cutscene at a specified point, then returns at the end of playback. The movie playback aspect is still viable, so is the finalized MSU-1 really not capable of achieving the hack, or is it just not capable of playing it in its current state since it's accessing non-existent registers?

[MottZilla]

What changed with MSU-1 from 21FX that made it no longer an expansion port device? I knew you'd changed up the idea, but I never read up on what all changed.

[Near]

> What changed with MSU-1 from 21FX that made it no longer an expansion port device?

SNES has two buses. One is 24-bit (A-bus), one is 8-bit (B-bus). The 8-bit bus is all the expansion port has access to, and it's also where you write to VRAM from. You can't DMA from and to the 8-bit bus at the same time.

So as nice as an expansion port is for housing more hardware, working with existing flash carts, and just being cool as shit; it's better for the chip to be on the A-bus, which means inside of a cartridge, so that you can DMA directly from the chip to VRAM. It doubles the amount of data you can get into VRAM because you don't have to copy it to WRAM first.

So 21fx was in $21f0-21f2, and MSU1 is in $2000-2007.
http://byuu.org/21fx/programming-guide
http://byuu.org/snes/msu1/development

I also unrolled the registers to be a bit easier to program for, per ikari's input on what would be easier to do on hardware.

> is the finalized MSU-1 really not capable of achieving the hack

It's more capable than the original, it's just that nobody has ported it to MSU1's new register interface.
It's not hard to do, it's just that there's nobody with both the time and interest to do it.

[qwertymodo]

> What changed with MSU-1 from 21FX that made it no longer an expansion port device?
It's not hard to do, it's just that there's nobody with both the time and interest to do it.

Well, time, interest, and knowledge. I have the first two, but lack the third. I've got a pretty strong software background, and have done assembly work (x86), but never anything on a system like the SNES.

[Shiru]

Time and interest are the things that needed to get knowledge. Read some docs, try some SNES programming tutorials, and you'll obtain it.