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[Frumple]

Mentioned it a bit above, heh. It's Far East of Eden Zero. Got translated after about fifteen years of attempting within the last month or so.

[smjjames]

How come it took so long to translate?

[Frumple]

Couldn't say with any specificity... far as I'm aware it's largely because the thing's one of the more/most technically advanced of the SNES library, though, or something along those lines. Wasn't until relatively recently (some point during bsnes's development) that anything could even run it, iirc, and I recall earlier attempts actually requiring an additional graphics pack thing on top of the rom dump to even try to get anywhere. Want to say it was star ocean or somethin' (one of the later street fighters?) that had a similar thing going on on that front, but memory, shot, etc., etc.

Having poked around it a bit, I can see it. The damn thing has a biorhythm system and real time synchronization for in-game special events (festivals, the character's birthday, etc.). There's been anime-style cutscenes and wuxia style shit happening in more in-game cutscenes/plot stuffs. At least one, and possibly two (or party characters that eat them for upgrades), pet system(s). Apparently there's giant robot fights at some point going by screenshots, I'unno. Seems to have a good bit going on for its time, and I've barely played any.

[Reelya]

I sort of suspected as much, but I just looked it up. The game in question actuallly shipped with a custom chip in the cartridge. Hence why nothing could emulate it. that was one of the advantages of catridges: you could cram extra hardware in there including entire CPUs.

Basically, the custom chip included hardwired graphics compression algorithms, and like Frumple said, it had an actual clock in there with a battery that computed actual time events. The game is unique enough that even the ripped version now can only run in custom-versions of a SNES emulator.

[TalonisWolf]

I sort of suspected as much, but I just looked it up. The game in question actuallly shipped with a custom chip in the cartridge. Hence why nothing could emulate it. that was one of the advantages of catridges: you could cram extra hardware in there including entire CPUs.

Basically, the custom chip included hardwired graphics compression algorithms, and like Frumple said, it had an actual clock in there with a battery that computed actual time events. The game is unique enough that even the ripped version now can only run in custom-versions of a SNES emulator.

...Huh. With games systems like the Nintendo Switch using what is essentially computer chips as a cartridge, I wonder if stuff like this can be done now.

[smjjames]

If the chips are standard, yeah, but if they're custom hardware (that is , nonstandard) like that particular game is, then it'd be harder.

[Reelya]

It's also not really necessary anymore.

Back when that came out the console was extremely limited in it's abilities and had no online connectivity, and memory was extremely expensive. So it would have made sense to implement compression in hardware, once you already decided you were going to put a chip in there that did the clock thing. e.g. a chip capable of tracking time would be idle most of the time so it could be used for other things. Also, those were the days when all games were written in assembly language for consoles, so those designers were in fact assembly language programmers. It wouldn't have made any difference to them whatsoever whether they were writing assembly code for the SNES CPU or a secondary CPU in the cartridge.

Nowadays if they wanted better compression they could just code that as software in the ROM that the switch runs, much more easily and cheaply than trying to change up the hardware itself.

[Lord Shonus]

This was extremely common in the early cartridge era. Ever wonder why Super Mario 1 has ratchet scrolling but 2 and 3 don't? The NES didn't have enough RAM (the system itself had only 2k) to keep an entire Mario level loaded in memory, so there was no way for the system to remember what blocks had been broken or what enemies had been killed. Later games had extra RAM in the cartridge to compensate.

Development was done this way because computer hardware was improving at a rate that is almost unimaginable today - in 1977 4K of RAM was the highest you could easily get. By 1987, you could buy a PC with 16384K (16 MB) of RAM for a comparable price - a increase of a little more than 400000% bytes-per-dollar in ten years. This trend was pretty obvious when the NES/Famicom was designed in 1983, and Nintendo realized that putting RAM in thirty thousand cartridges five years later would cost much less than putting the same amount of RAM in ten thousand consoles now, allowing them to set a much more attractive price point.

From there, it was a very small leap in imagination to advance to putting more extra hardware in cartridges, and the practice became almost an art by the SFC/SNES days. Capcom put arcade chips in some of the Mega Man X titles, Nintendo themselves used a special rendering chip in Super Mario Kart, a high end coprocessor was used for Starfox, DooM, and Yoshi's Island.

[Egan_BW]

...And these days games are just bunches of files that you download from the internet, probably even if you bothered buying a disk. ;P
On the one hand games are less limited in what they can do now. On the other hand how they work can't be quite as sicknasty cool as having an extra processor in the cartridge.

[Arx]

Well, you can always download more RAM.

[Khan Boyzitbig]

There is a spider in my curtain. Literally inside the curtain. Good thing I like spiders.

[Jopax]

So a while back the slingshot channel dude got dragged trough mud by Daily Mail, claiming the dude was a monster that was making terrorist training videos, this caused some trouble with YT but in the end nothing much happened.

They did it again recently and this time asked for his comments, hoping to clear up the situation and be amicable he gave them a statement but with the caveat of either printing it in full with no changes or not printing it at all. Suprise suprise they cut it down to suit their needs and rolled with that.

Now, I'm not entirely familiar with the UK/EU law on libel, but this seems like a pretty clear case of taking someones words and pulling them out of context to paint them in a negative light, all so you could get some reader outrage and clicks. If that isn't breaking the law then I'm not sure what would be. The WTF here is, the journo in question, did he honestly not think this trough? Did he know the potential consequences but still decided to do it? Did he think that the dude wouldn't be able to reach him legally from Germany because of Brexit? It's just baffling how someone can make such a blatantly stupid move and how such a person is supposedly a functioning adult.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There might be a reason for the confidence, but frankly, if one is rational one probably would avoid working for the Daily Mail. (Daily reminder that the Daily Mail was a pro-Nazi newspaper back in the day.)

[hector13]

It's a tabloid. I don't think they give a shit what they print so long as they sell some papers or ad space as a result.

[Jopax]

But a libel lawsuit can hit them for more than they made from that one article.

There honestly should be some sort of strike system, if you get hit for writing shit and falsehoods enough you just lose your licence or whatever, go flip burgers or something, your writing clearly did more harm than good.