Super Nintendo Entertainment System
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES or SNES) is a video game console designed and built by Nintendo in the 1990s. It was Nintendo's second home console, the successor to the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America and Europe, and was the major rival of the Sega Megadrive/Sega Genesis during the 16-bit era.
For more information on the Japanese version, see: Super Famicom
Market history
Development
In 1988, Nintendo executives showed little interest in developing a rival system when Sega announced that they would release their 16-bit Sega Genesis. However when the Genesis quickly took over the market in North America and Europe due to its superior technology, Nintendo quickly decided to begin development on their own system.
Hiroshi Yamauchi, the current Nintendo CEO, put Masayuki Uemura in charge of designing the console. They had originally planned a 16-bit Famicom/NES. However, at the time of development 16-bit components were far too expensive and the system was developed as an 8-bit system. As 16-bit components were much cheaper when the SNES was in development, Nintendo did not hesitate to build a more powerful system.
Release and sales
The Super Famicom was released November 21, 1990 in Japan.
Many companies who bought NES licences also purchased SNES licences due to the success of the NES such as Squaresoft, Capcom, Tecmo, Konami and Koei. This gave Nintendo an edge against its competition.
The console was released in the United States in August, 1991 with a starting price of $200. The first SNES set was packaged with Super Mario World and two controllers. The fact that it was not backwards-compatible with previous Nintendo consoles (NES) like some Atari models, may have caused some mild consumer hesitation. In addition, the Sega Genesis had already gained some popularity, and was also about $50 cheaper than the SNES.
A few months after its initial release, the Power Set, a bare-bones version packaged with only one controller was released in North America for $100. Towards the middle of its life it was re-distributed with different accessories. One such set was sold with the Super Game Boy accessory.
The hardware internals only varied depending on the TV standard in that country. With the exception of games that required the use of large amounts of text (e.g. role-playing games), many cartridges in Australia were imported from Europe because both used PAL systems. Likewise, games from Japan can be played in the North American consoles since they both use NTSC.
With the help of marginally superior technical capabilities, family-friendly image, icon game characters like Mario, and a larger base of developers, the SNES was fairly dominant throughout the early 1990s. By the end of the 16-bit era, Nintendo had recorded twice as many sales of its console as Sega had with the Genesis.
The SNES had a large library containing many exclusive titles. It had a number of best-selling RPGs, including Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. Some SNES games are enhanced remakes of NES games; two examples are Super Mario All-Stars and Ninja Gaiden Trilogy.
The SNES was released in the United Kingdom for £150 in April 1992. The German release took place a few weeks later. The European case design was similar to that of the Super Famicom. However, Nintendo never got much of a footing in Europe due to distribution problems.
Before the beginning of the SNES's lifecycle, Nintendo worked with Sony to develop an eventual CD-ROM add-on for the SNES[1]. Disagreements between the two companies caused Nintendo to cancel its involvement with Sony. Ironically, Sony would eventually use the CD-ROM add-on prototype they developed as the base for their console, the Sony PlayStation, which ended up taking away Nintendo's dominance in the console market. Nintendo never did follow through with the idea of having Nintendo games on a CD-ROM format, although they did allow their Mario and Zelda franchises to be used on the Philips' CD-i. Instead they disregarded the format altogether and embraced the cartridge format for their next system.
Mid-1990s
Sales of the SNES in North America declined between 1996 and 1997, with the release of Nintendo's new console, the Nintendo 64. An SNES redesign which was lighter in weight came out in October 1997 for $99.99 in the United States to get the last few sales from people still interested in the 16-bit market. The console was packaged with Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The RF ports and expansion ports did not come with this version, which was never released in Europe.
Nintendo discontinued production in North America in 1999. Production continued in Japan until September 2003.
Many of the SNES's successful games were ported to the Game Boy Advance which has similar capabilities. The Nintendo 64 was released in 1996 and officially became Nintendo's flagship product.
Emulation
Like its predecessor, the SNES has had a continued interest among its fans. It has continued to thrive on a second-hand market and later through console emulation. Many gamers discovered the SNES after its decline. The SNES has taken much the same revival path as the NES.
Emulation projects began approximately in 1996 with projects such as "VSMC" and "Super Pasofami". None of these projects lasted past 1998. During that time, Snes96 and Snes97 emerged, the predecessors to Snes9x. Honorable mention goes to SNEeSe, an emulator that is considered to be very accurate, although of limited functionality.
In early 1998, SNES enthusiasts began programming a console emulator named ZSNES. One year later, development also began on Snes9x, its closest "competitor." From then on, these two emulators continue to offer the most complete emulation of the system and its various add-on chips like the Super FX Chip.
Nintendo took the same stance against the distribution of SNES ROM image files and emulation as it did with the NES, insisting that they represented nothing but flagrant piracy. Proponents of SNES ROMs cite as arguments for their continued distribution: the discontinued production of the SNES, the right of the owner of the respective game to make a backup, the frailty of SNES cartridges (even though cartridges are far more durable than optical discs), and the lack of certain foreign imports. Starting in the 128-bit era, both Nintendo and emulation proponents began to have a less active stance on this issue.
Despite Nintendo's attempts to stop the proliferation of such projects, ROM files continue to be available on the Internet. Since the console's discontinuation, second-hand market decline, and rapid growth of the Internet, finding the files has become less of a challenge than it had been with the NES. Most general ROM sites offer files for the SNES.
Some video game critics consider the SNES era "the golden age of video games," citing the many groundbreaking games and classics made for the system. [2] whereas others question this romanticism [3]. See also video game player.
Screenshots
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Screenshot Super Mario Kart | 
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Screenshot Street Fighter 2 Turbo |
| F-Zero | Super Mario Kart | Star Fox | Street Fighter 2 Turbo |
| Nintendo (1991) | Nintendo (1992) | Nintendo (1993) | Capcom (1993) |
More screenshots can be found in the gallery of Super Nintendo Entertainment System screenshots.
Hardware
Specifications/features
The design of the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom was unusual at its time. It featured a relatively slow low-performance CPU supported by very powerful custom chips for sound and video processing. This approach is common in present-day video game hardware, but then it was new to game developers, and as a result early third-party games were of low technical quality. Developers got accustomed to the system later, though, and were thus able to use it to its full potential. It was the first console capable of applied acoustics in video game audio sold in North America, Europe, and Japan.
- Core
- CPU: Nintendo custom '5A22', believed to be produced by Ricoh; based around a 16-bit CMD/GTE 65c816 (a predecessor of the WDC 65C816). The CPU runs the 65c816-alike core with a variable-speed bus, with bus access times determined by addresses accessed, with a maximum theoretical effective clock rate around 3.58 MHz. The SNES/SFC provided the CPU with 128 KB of Work RAM.
The CPU also contains other support hardware, including hardware:
- for interfacing with controller ports;
- for generating NMI interrupts on Vblank;
- for generating IRQ interrupts on screen positions;
- DMA unit, supporting two primary modes, general DMA (for block transfers, at a rate of 2.68MB/second) and Hblank DMA (for transferring small data sets at the end of each scanline, outside of the active display period);
- multiplication and division registers.
- Cartridge Size Specifications: 2 - 32 Mb which ran at two speeds ('SlowROM' and 'FastROM'). Custom address decoders allow larger sizes, eg. 64 Mb for Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia
- Sound
- Sound Controller Chip: 8-bit Sony SPC700 CPU for controlling the DSP; running at an effective clock rate around 1.024 MHz.
- Main Sound Chip: 8-channel Sony S-DSP with hardware ADPCM decompression, pitch modulation, echo effect with feedback (for reverberation) with 8-tap FIR filter, and ADSR and 'GAIN' (discretely controlled) volume envelopes.
- Memory Cycle Time: 279 Minutes
- Low-pass filter for improved quality of low-frequency (bass) tones
- Sound RAM: 512 Kb shared between SPC700 and S-DSP.
- Pulse Code Modulator: 16-Bit ADPCM (using 4-bit compressed ADPCM samples, expanded to 15-bit resolution, processed with an additional 4-point Gaussian sound interpolation).
- Note - while not directly related to SNES hardware, the standard extension for SNES audio subsystem state files saved by emulators is .SPC, a format used by SPC players.
- Video
- Picture Processor Unit: 15-Bit
- Video RAM: 64 KB of video RAM for screen maps (for 'background' layers) and tile sets (for backgrounds and objects); 512 + 32 bytes of 'OAM' (Object Attribute Memory) for objects.
- Palette: 32,768 Colors.
- Maximum colors per layer per scanline: 256.
- Maximum colors on-screen: 32,768 (using color arithmetic for transparency effects).
- Resolution: between 256x224 and 512x478. Most games used 256x224 pixels since higher resoulutions caused slowdown, flicker, and/or had increased limitations on layers and colors (due to memory bandwidth constraints); the higher resolutions were used for less processor-intensive games, in-game menus, text, and high resolution images.
- Maximum onscreen objects (sprites): 128 (32 per line, up to 34 8x8 tiles per line).
- Maximum number of sprite pixels on one scanline: 256. The renderer was designed such that it would drop the frontmost sprites instead of the rearmost sprites if a scanline exceeded the limit, allowing for creative clipping effects.
- Most common display modes: Pixel-to-pixel text mode 1 (16 colors per tile; 3 scrolling layers) and affine mapped text mode 7 (256 colors per tile; one rotating/scaling layer).
- Controllers
- Controller Response: 16ms
- 2 seven-pin controller ports in the front of the machine
Accessories
Licensed
- A Game Boy adapter cartridge called the Super Game Boy - Allowed Game Boy games to be played on the system and to use the better capabilities of the Super Game Boy (most commonly improved colors and custom borders).
- Super Scope - A wireless light gun shaped like a bazooka.
- SNES mouse - A mouse made specifically for the creative game Mario Paint.
- Super Multitap and Super Multitap 2 - A licensed multiplayer adapter by Hudson that allowed the SNES to have up to 16 players for games which could support it (4 ports per multitap).
Unlicensed
Third party cheat devices released for the SNES enable players to modify in-game data and enable such things as infinite lives, energy etc. All of the cheat devices were made by third party companies and none were licensed nor endorsed by Nintendo.
See also
- 16-bit era
- List of SNES games
- Super Famicom
- Nintendo Entertainment System
- Nintendo 64
- Nintendo GameCube
- Nintendo Game Boy
- Nintendo Game Boy Advance
- Nintendo DS
- Nintendo Power
- Nintendo Revolution
References
- Bellis, Mary. History of Sony Playstation. Retrieved 9 February 2005.
- Liedholm, Mattias. The golden Era. Retrieved 1 February 2005.
- Silent Axis. The Golden era - Just for the nostalgics?. Retrieved 1 February 2005.