I just got my
Supaboy. I've had a
FC-16 Go for almost a year now. The Supaboy has some advantages compared to the FC-16 Go:
1. The Supaboy has two SNES controller ports, so you can hook up real SNES peripherials.
2. The Supaboy is compatible with games like Super Mario RPG.
3. The D-pad and buttons have a better feel on the Supaboy. Button placement is a bit better. The FC-16 Go places the reset button right between the start and select buttons, which can lead to accidental resets.
I've only had the Supaboy for a few hours, so I've only tested a few games. Super Mario RPG (which works on my Supaboy but does not work on my FC-16) and several games including Super Mario Kart (running off of a SNES PowerPak flash cart).
I tested a few more games on my Supaboy, which are not playable on my FC-16 Go. I tested the games using my SNES PowerPak, since most of my SNES carts are in storage. Faceball 2000 is not playable on the FC-16 Go, but it plays perfectly on my Supaboy. Any idea as to why the FC-16 Go is incompatible? Faceball 2000 loads on the FC-16 Go, the initial credits screen displays, you can select 1 or 2 players, but it only shows a black screen when loading into a level.
How is the sound on yours, I have read that people can here a noise on theirs like what was present on the prototypes.
How many expansion chips work with it, all of them? It sounds like the CPU is pretty good but I haven't seen a full mapper support list yet.
Regarding the sound, I do notice a faint very high pitched hum. It is so high pitched that I can't always hear it and I only notice it when the game is not outputting any sound.
That's a fairly expensive emulator. A PSP is only $20 more and you can put all the games (and system emulators) you want on that.
> How many expansion chips work with it, all of them? It sounds like the CPU is pretty good but I haven't seen a full mapper support list yet.
An emulator that uses the actual cartridge does not need special chip or mapper support. That's handled by the cartridge. All it needs to do is properly interact with the cartridge pins. The other one probably had poor handling of the extra pins on certain special chip carts.
Emulator? Pretty sure we are talking about a SNES clone, not some kind of emulator. I know there are the Sega Genesis Firecore clones which are emulation, but I think all SNES stuff is cloned hardware.
> Emulator? Pretty sure we are talking about a SNES clone, not some kind of emulator.
Eh, same end result. An attempt to duplicate the original hardware, inherent with many, many flaws as a result. Maybe you cut down on the latency a tiny bit, or maybe not, but that's about the only advantage.
Assuming the chips are the same as those used by other clones, they are literal clones of the mask work. One advantage is that you get a better accuracy/power ratio than any software emulator today can offer. One disadvantage is that it's hideous and clunky compared to a mainstream handheld running a software emulator.
If they are clones, they clearly have serious flaws with their cloning process, as many of the chips seem to be unable to run lots of games, and have unique bugs in other games.
And so aside from power usage and perhaps a slight latency difference, the only other major thing is you get an uglier form factor with no ability to fix bugs post-production.
That's BS because so far no games are said to not work, although I doubt they're that good myself still, unless you have a list of games which don't work which is what I am after too. And plus I'd love to shove a cart into my PSP and see if it plays.
That's the only real advantage honestly.
byuu wrote:
If they are clones, they clearly have serious flaws with their cloning process
Possibly because they're manufactured on different processes with different microns. That might change the timing just enough that the cartridge might not respond correctly, especially if a coprocessor wants more current. But then I know nothing about IC die-shrinks.
People may say clones are bad or whatever but unless you cite a specific example of a problem that can be verified then it's all just unverifiable talk.
As kyuusaku said, these are real "clones" not emulators. The NES clones are pretty accurate but various problems lead many to believe they are quite poor. Primarily the duty cycle's being swapped and the incorrect cartridge port wiring that leads to the belief that they don't work with MMC5 which they probably would if the cartridge port was wired properly. And audio and video quality of output could be related to the circuits the builders of particular clones used and not a fault in the chip cloning.
I've heard some SNES clones do infact work with SA-1 games. But I cannot provide any proof myself since I have no SNES clone and have no reason to buy one. But on Youtube I recall seeing a video showing someone running SM RPG on some clone.
I've heard people say SMRPG works on it perfectly, and also Star Fox I heard worked with it, but I'm interested in other chips like Capcoms expansion chips used in MMX2+ and also F1:ROCII's AI chip.
> And plus I'd love to shove a cart into my PSP and see if it plays. ;)
What is the advantage of using an actual cart? It's kind of a chore to drag around my complete US game collection with me when I'm on the go.
Not to mention just finding the cart I want to play. And then there's the size of each cart adding to what you have to hold while playing.
All of that can fit on a microSD card the size of my pinky nail. The ROM data is pretty much the only thing we can truly say we have bit-perfect copies of.
> People may say clones are bad or whatever but unless you cite a specific example of a problem that can be verified then it's all just unverifiable talk.
Going from what I've heard about many of these in the past. But yeah sorry, I'm not spending $80 on this to prove a point. So if you want to ignore what I'm saying, by all means, be my guest. It's your money.
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 [I have them in stacks on a Billy shelf from ikea labels out 2 deep] in some way and picking a couple games to bring doesn't take 40 minutes.
> 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 =)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Does the SNES JR have compatibility issues with software?
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.
> 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.
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?
Quote:
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
How is the sound on yours, I have read that people can here a noise on theirs like what was present on the prototypes.
How is the sound on yours, I have read that people can here a noise on theirs like what was present on the prototypes.
It's in all of them. I wonder how they can fuck up such a big thing but get the CPU/CPP/SPC working solidly. Oh, engineers.
If you put headphones in its really bothersome but it is barely noticeable while playing. I love the cartridge lock idea, it works very well. I am enjoying the system, but it seems to electrically shock me while it is plugged into the tv, every time I touch the device. It's enough to almost hurt. anyone else have that problem?