Snes Homebrew

[Hollis Abdelkarim]

Iplayed it yesterday and it's a decently fun albeit brief ride. This was made by the same author who did Overcooked on SNES. It initially only available as a cartridge linited to 100 units but now the author has released the game for free on itch.io!

Wow one of numbnuts the banned games he would pop up on occasion to get attention with spam. I ignored it implicitly because of that clown, but now i'm looking at that itchio account and that looks pretty solid. Shame it only got a 100cart run, not that someone won't boot it as stuff is now, but hey the rom is out there and it's nice he's that sharing all things considered. I may just have to fire this up when I get some time and try it, been awhile since I did snes since I can't find games for it locally anymore it seems I'd actually play.

It's a Friday night as I type this, with a bank holiday weekend on the cards, and I'm obsessively playing Bubble Zap's Classic Kong, a Donkey Kong port for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System because I'm bloody minded and stubborn, and also because it's a top notch, classy port done slickly and smartly.I've not played much in the way of SNES homebrews apart from one that I picked up last year as possible RGCD review fodder and it was so terrible I just walked away from it. I forget its name and this is probably for the best. Coded by retro-developer Shiru (who recently gave us the excellent Zooming Secretary), Classic Kong blew away any prejudices I had about SNES homebrew games with its polished and completely professional appearance, and it backed this up with great gameplay.

It had been an age since I had last taken command of a plumber and faced off against a girl-stealing damn dirty ape and I found myself having to re-learn how to play Donkey Kong, getting my head around its peculiar quirks and its clinical requirement for precision jumps and Not Fucking Up Ever. After a honeymoon period of me swearing a lot as Jumpman/Mario stepped off a ledge and fell to his death AGAIN (and AGAIN and AGAIN) the game began to show just how special it is, and with frankly gorgeous SNES graphics to reinforce the addictive, challenging gameplay.

The graphics are brilliant. Charming, characterful and making great use of the SNES' palette, the game looks like a top-drawer commercial release with the Nintendo Seal of Quality, believable either as a SNES game or perhaps an easter egg concealed in one of the Nintendo 64 Kong games. My SNES, I must confess, has lately been in mothballs under the spare bed because my house is tiny but this little gem has goaded me into bringing it back into regular living room service, because the graphics more than anything opened up a can of nostalgia and spilled Nintendo everywhere.

The "how high can you get?" catchphrase that precedes each game tickles my prurient stoner humour funnybone as I imagine people the world over reading it and saying "challenge accepted" as they pack a bong and commit to a night of getting baked and playing Donkey Kong, but that's just an aside and a probably unnecessary look into my juvenile sense of humour, so let me talk about the soundtrack and try and look professional.

It's another tick in the box, and another mark on the target. The soundtrack is well executed and perfectly fitting accompaniment to the graphics and the gameplay, bouncing along in a time honoured Nintendo fashion and underlining the almost perfect illusion of a game that came with a golden mark on the box saying that damn right this is a Nintendo game, none of your shite here.

I had a good go at finding problems with this game and couldn't really put my finger on anything. There are a few places where it could improve its performance but they're nothing to get mad over. Classic Kong is a great game, a fine piece of work and a joy to play either as a five minute time waster or a strenous late night battle against both the ape and the player's own personal best.

My issue is that when i hit start to view the map in the game I can't unpause it and have to reload the rom to get out of the map screen. The rom doesnt freeze as I can cycle through the map. I tried using the retroarch 360 snes version and had the same issue. Also checked the checksum on the rom and it's good, even tried different rom versions.

This is my last piece of homebrew hardware. Long story short, my first attempt at running homebrew code on a Sega Genesis was ultimately a flop (see SegaCD Transfer Cable), and thus I was lead to try flash carts like this one. Unlike the NES or SNES Powerpak, this flash cartridge requires special software, a parallel port, and some luck to use. I would highly recommend using a different Genesis flash cartridge all together, but this one works for me.

If you want to do homebrew the right way make sure to pick up some homebrew hardware. At a minimum you will need a flash cartridge for the console and any software or tools to copy your binaries to the cartridge.

With the commercial death of the SNES long past, people who grew up with the console have longed for new releases. With this page, I hope to document non-commercial homebrew that will work on the SNES. I have attempted to play these on Higan or an actual console to ensure that they will actually work. I've trying to order things based on time of release, rather than practical playability (which at this point is limited in most homebrew).

Is it possible to add SNES controller as a control option thru USB? There are a few homebrew games that let you use a SNES controller (thru SNES to NES adapter) and make use of the additional buttons. It would be nice if this was a possible option so you could select SNES controller (I guess as a peripheral option?) and not have to buy a SNAC adapter to be able to use this feature for those games.

The Daemonbite adapters will let you hook various console controllers up via USB. They add about 1ms of latency versus a SNAC adapter, but in exchange, you can use the SNES controller to drive the menus. A SNAC controller talks only to its one specific core, so you need something else for the Mister's menus.

They're open source, so you can build one yourself, or buy one from someone else. The SNES adapters seem to be out of stock on the main Daemonbite site; the listed price is 20 euros. Other sites may have them, I haven't looked further.

I have a Raphnet SNES adapter, and that works great as a regular NES controller, but the core won't recognize it as a SNES controller with it's additional buttons. I'm asking if it's possible to have the core do that, and fully interpret it as a SNES controller, as a console does with a simple SNES to NES controller cord.

I don't think this is really an appropriate addition. None of the major emulators have this feature, the real hardware obviously doesn't natively have ports that fit snes controllers, and I think it introduces a slippery slope for peripherals, as technically you can read from 4016 forever if you want and use anything with any early-nintendo compatible serial protocol this way. It's probably best to not open up that can of worms. The last thing i'd want to see is people junking up input options with a dozen random peripherals from other systems. You end up with the same nightmare as atari consoles that way. If you want to use the wrong controller for the system, SNAC is always an option, otherwise embrace the fact that the system had two buttons and make appropriate games for it.

Gotcha, thanks for the answer. Makes sense. Just wanted to see if it was realistic without purchasing additional SNAC stuff, since I don't have any. I'll either do console or get SNAC adapters eventually.

The fabled SNES-CD peripheral may have never actually made it to market in the mid-'90s as planned. But that hasn't stopped homebrew developers from utilizing the magic of emulation to make software designed to run on the near-mythical "Nintendo PlayStation."

Armed with that BIOS file (and some additional sleuthing on components, memory, and IO mapping for the CD-ROM add-on), the latest version of low-level SNES emulator no$sns is actually able to simulate how games would have run on the SNES-CD prototype.

(Warning: we ran into some nasty malware warnings when trying to download and run no$sns ourselves. There's some indication these are compression-related false positives, but as always, let the downloader beware.)

Since there wasn't any actual software released for the SNES-CD's Super Disc format (and no official prototype software has surfaced) it's fallen on homebrew developers to figure out what the system might have been capable of. An extremely simple demo called Magic Floor was released as an emulation proof-of-concept months ago, but Super Boss Gaiden, released this week, appears to be the first full-fledged game designed to run on the newly emulated hardware.

The simple multiplayer brawler goes a bit meta with the Nintendo PlayStation concept, letting you control an unnamed Sony CEO who goes on a rampage when he learns his hardware prototype has leaked to the public and been emulated. Be on the lookout for totally unauthorized appearances from characters like Parappa the Rapper, LittleBigPlanet's Sackboy, and even the Famicom Disk System's Disk-kun mascot as you bust up the offices.

So far, there doesn't seem to be much concrete value in emulating the SNES-CD over the plain old SNES. The Super Boss Gaiden release includes both a standard SNES ROM and a larger Super Disc binary, and both versions seem to look and play practically identically (based on a trailer posted by the developer).

Still, the mere fact that you can now play a game designed for a classic console that never technically existed is a testament to the "do it because you can" spirit of the homebrew community. This is probably as close as you're ever going to get to being able to play a real SNES-CD game, so enjoy the simulated trip into an alternate version of console history.

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