Talk:List of Super NES enhancement chips

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This page was created per WP:SUMMARY to remove minor information from Super Nintendo Entertainment System#Enhancement chips.

Merge proposal

I have proposed merging a number of SNES special chip articles into this one article, as none of them contain a whole lot of useful information. The hardest part, IMO, will be including the game lists from the individual articles in a sane format. Anomie 16:00, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. --Endlessdan 20:14, 22 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Support, except for Super FX, as it does have a decent amount of information, I think enough to keep it as a separate article. Dansiman (talk|Contribs) 11:46, 28 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Super FX should remain separated, I agree with Dansiman, leave the SFX chip separated, it has enough information and it was a very popular topic back in the day, almost all SNES users heard about it and played SFX chip games, so I believe a fair amount of users will search for the chip and expect to see a single article. Darolu (talk) 08:45, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Super FX should remain separated, the chip is notable enough to stand on its own. None of other SNES chips had as much focus or promotion than the Super FX chip. However, the other chips should be merged into a single article. Misterkillboy (talk) 02:13, 8 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support, except for Super FX as per above. AMHR285^(talk) 02:05, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Are you sure that the Super FX handle scrolling is Yoshi's Island ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.119.20.243 (talk) 12:37, 21 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Transparency

I'm pretty certain the CX4 chip was responsible for the transparency/translucency effects in the first Mega Man X game; it made levels such as Launch Octopus's possible as it was all under water (basically the level was behind a translucent water layer). 217.154.84.2 (talk) 10:49, 19 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm pretty sure that isn't necessary. The SNES supports color addition, which lets you simulate certain kinds of transparency, like the one you mention here. See http://www.romhacking.net/docs/428/ Amaurea (talk) 17:31, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Do an article on the NES enhancement chips too

Can someone do an article on the NES enhancement chips too, especially MMC1-MMC5?75.81.204.244 (talk) 08:38, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There is the Memory Management Controller article, which should qualify to be added to a see also section in this article, imho. --Abdull (talk) 20:54, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

DSP-2 use for bitplane conversion

OK, am I missing something here? First up, the ST video chip was a bitplane device itself - albeit, as proven when the STe came along and they had to bodge the extra bits on "the wrong end", not a very well engineered one. Either the graphics would likely have been saved like that in the first place, or the conversion isn't so hard...

And converting a few hundred k's of 4-bit image data from one bitplane format to another - or from bitmap to a presumably fixed bitplane format for your target device - can't be more than an afternoon's work with a moderately advanced bit of BASIC or simplistic C++, can it? Read in a max of 8kb of sprite data (that alone would fill a quarter of the screen), bitslice each byte a certain way, output 8kb (16?) of usable stuff. Wash rinse repeat. Even if your routine, measured from inception, thru coding, testing and final use only manages to convert a few hundred bytes per second on average, you'll be done in a working day.

So why did they go to the effort of designing the DSP and/or writing code for it in order to do this on a near-continual basis in the production model?

It's not as if there aren't plentiful other SNES titles with large-ish not-very-high-colour not-particularly-high-motion sprites in that manage perfectly fine without it... 193.63.174.11 (talk) 17:34, 23 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

...*researches* ... OK, it's in fact INTERLEAVED bitplane. Maybe the SNES is just line-by-line or even whole-screen bitplane then, and that's what needs converting? All the same, whilst looking this up, I found a blog post that includes about thirty lines of assembler code that does the chunky-to-bitplane conversion, and does it fast enough that (on an 8mhz cpu) it only requires about 15% cpu time to render chunky graphics in realtime on a bitplane display... interleave-to-fullscreen (or whatever) would, at worst, be twice that - convert to chunky, then back to the other bitplane type. Still none the wiser as to why they'd need to do it in realtime rather than just converting the data beforehand. 193.63.174.11 (talk) 18:46, 23 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Soukou Kihei Votoms / Armored Trooper Votoms

I changed: Armored Trooper Votoms: The Battling Road to: Soukou Kihei Votoms: The Battling Road because, although the franchise is known as "Armored Trooper Votoms" in English, this game never had an English-language relase. I don't think it was ever released outside of Japan. Notice also the lack of any SNES games listed on the linked (English) page. 126.210.110.119 (talk) 07:58, 1 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Image examples

Can you add image examples of the enhancement chips (e.g 16-bit rotating square) and animated?--72.50.79.77 (talk) 14:32, 15 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Section for unofficial/homebrew chips such as MSU-1?

Would it be appropriate to add in a section for unofficial/homebrew SNES cartridge chips such as the MSU-1 (a theoretical chip that lets the SNES use up to 4 GB of optical disc space for CD quality audio, FMV, general purpose storage, etc...), or would that be better off as a section under the SNES CD-ROM page? Leo2Kirby (talk) 19:58, 9 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

SuperFx in Yoshi's Island

I removed the note that SuperFX is used for screen warping and large bosses in Yoshi's Island. I don't have a source to cite for this, but with a little know-how, one can verify this himself using an emulator with debugging capabilities. Screen warping is done by using offset-per-tile mode. The large vector-graphics bosses are rendered by using HDMA to select pre-rendered slices of graphics for each scanline. Both of these features are built directly into the SNES stock hardware. The latter is easy to very easy to confirm: Play the game to a boss in SNES9x and disable HDMA emulation. You'll be able to see the prerendered slices used for the bosses, generally appearing as a large triangle with some kind of interesting coloring. One each scanline, HDMA scrolls this graphics layer to select an appropriately-sized slice and position it horizontally. 98.217.97.77 (talk) 19:59, 13 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

34 games with sa-1 chip?

WHICH games are those? I try to look it up and all I find is page after page, including copies of this one, mentioning "Hacker" or "Man" who retroactively put that chip into games that didn't originally have it. True enough I never heard of the chip before he did but it is certainly irritating to be teased with a big figure like 34 but no details beyond that. Volcabbage (talk) 19:52, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The "List of Super NES games that use enhancement chips" table halfway down this article lists the 34 games that originally used the SA-1 chip, as well as all other games that originally used other chips. The chart does not include any that were added by hackers/editors later. Jtrevor99 (talk) 21:04, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Romanization of Yoshi's Island

Interesting disagreement brewing in the recent edit history of this article. The Wikipedia manual of style for Romanization of Japanese at [[1]] seems to indicate that the Hepburn system is universally to be preferred, which would mean "Yoshi". On the other hand the Japanese box does say "Yossy". My preference is for "Yoshi", but anyone else care to weigh in? Goldenband (talk) 17:05, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Hepburn style generally is only to be used when a specific Romanization has not already been explicitly provided by the source and needs to be created for the English WP. In this case, Nintendo of Japan has explicitly provided “Yossy”. Using Hepburn would constitute a deviation from the source. Jtrevor99 (talk) 22:55, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It's a bit more complicated than that, as Nintendo of Japan has switched back and forth between spellings when releasing Yoshi games. See this Legends of Localization article [2], for example.

For that reason, I don't find your claim (in the edits) that "Yossy is the most common romanization of Yoshi's name in Japan" to be well-founded, and the Cutting Room Floor article you mention [3] doesn't seem to substantiate your argument -- they simply call it an "an alternate romanization of Yoshi's name". However, if your argument is that in the case of this exact SFC release, they used the "Yossy" spelling, that seems well-founded to me as a basis for using the spelling in this very specific case, and I can agree with that (though in general I affirm Wikipedia's policy of favoring Hepburn). Goldenband (talk) 22:09, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Also, hang on, your claim that "the Hepburn style generally is only to be used when a specific Romanization has not already been explicitly provided by the source and needs to be created for the English WP" doesn't seem to match the manual of style I linked. That style manual is quite clear that "common usage in reliable sources" is the standard, which is not at all the same as following the primary source (in this case the SFC game box), as seems to be your claim. Can you provide a link that matches what you said in your 27 March 2022 post? Goldenband (talk) 22:16, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I meant in the specific case of this game. One of the TCRF pages, for example, shows a level where Yoshi’s name is spelled out in the level itself - and the level itself was edited to change from Yossy in the Japanese version to Yoshi in international. I make no claim on Nintendo of Japan’s general or modern stance on the romanization other than to note they seem to find either acceptable. (See World 6-Extra notes at https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_World_2:_Yoshi%27s_Island/Version_Differences.)

First, remember that a MOS article is a guideline for WP, not a rule. Second, the Hepburn MOS article you link to states “excepting those cases where another romanization is determined to be in common usage in reliable sources”. Technically, a primary source may not be a reliable source for WP’s purposes; however, the fact that the romanization Yossy was literally programmed into the Japanese version of the game, appears on the game box and manual, was retained for subsequent rereleases including on Virtual Console a couple years ago, and even today Nintendo of Japan considers it an acceptable romanization as reliable sources do show, should (per the exceptions section in that same article) outweigh other considerations.

In short, if we were talking about the character in general, it should be "Yoshi" - that's the predominate romanization and the Hepburn one. If Nintendo of Japan had not explicitly provided its own romanization for this game, it should also be "Yoshi". But, when referring to this one game, where Nintendo of Japan gave the romanization in several forms, and in the absence of reliable sources giving a reason to override that, it should be "Yossy". All that said, I see no reason why you couldn’t footnote the SFC version and state it's more commonly known as "Yoshi's Island", since that's the name for the international release. —— Jtrevor99 (talk) 04:14, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Homebrew(/MSU-1) chip section reintroduction

The homebrew section, more specifically the MSU-1 section causing the entire category to be removed, was removed for no unreliable sources. I disagree as one of the two sources is a documentation of programming the MSU-1 chip with it’s own sited sources at the bottom of the page (https://helmet.kafuka.org/msu1.htm). I definitely should have included those relevant sources here, but I think that documentation of the chip is enough of a reliable source in itself. King Mayro (talk) 22:39, 28 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Disgarding the fact that all but one of the links in the sources are broken, at a glance they're all unreliable sources (self-published; posts on forums; Snes Central). We require reliable sources covering the MSU-1 and even that may not be grounds for notability. ThomasO1989 (talk) 23:11, 28 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, most of the documentation by Near (Byuu) was on his personal website and forums (which Byuu.org is, and also is where two of the five sources link). It's difficult to find more documentation outside of the SNESLab and Kafuka sites as Near's websites were taken down and definitely won't come back online as he commited suicide two years ago unfortunately.

If I find sources that could be considered reliable, I will definitely post them in this talk page for opinions. King Mayro (talk) 23:30, 28 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've been gathering new sources and rewriting a lot of the text I wrote about the MSU-1 chip, I'm just replying to suggest that a Twitter tweet (cite 5) is probably an unreliable source regardless of being a self-published or not. Citing the actual documentation instead of a tweet about the documentation would be best for reliability. Oh and looking at it now, cite 10 and 24 are Twitter tweets too. King Mayro (talk) 08:42, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It is possible that there are other unreliable sources in the article which need removed. The presence of other unreliable sources does not justify their use. Just remember that, per WP policy, they need to be reliable SECONDARY sources. Jtrevor99 (talk) 14:06, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I never said that the presence of other unreliable sources justifies their use nor justifies use of more unreliable sources, I was simply suggesting that Twitter tweets probably aren't reliable (especially considering some things such as ease of deletability by the author, and that you could say just about anything on Twitter). King Mayro (talk) 20:00, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]