The NEW Build Your Own Arcade Controls
Main => Consoles => Topic started by: opt2not on May 09, 2019, 12:39:49 am
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This came up on my Twitter feed. Turns out this conversion makes Gradius III on the snes slowdown free!
It’s especially great on the bubble level.
https://twitter.com/hackervilela/status/1126003826614513665?s=21
If you told me in the 90’s I could play this game on my SNES without slowdown in 2019, I would have scoffed. But it has happened and it looks glorious!
Gonna try this out soon.
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Really impressive! It looks super difficult. Thanks for sharing.
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Damn that's cool! One of the first games I got for the snes back in the day... I wonder if anyone is going to sell the modded carts.
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After playing this for a little bit, I would totally buy a conversion cart of this. It feels like arcade Gradius quality now!
I haven’t seen any slowdown, but also the game is a lot harder at full speed. Especially in the 2nd (bubble) level. It took me a while to adjust to the frame-rate particularly at parts I remember had bad slowdown. Before you used to be able to use the slowdown as an exploit on plotting yourself out of a sticky situation. But with this version you have to react quickly, like a normal shmup!!
This feels like what the developers intended; it’s one of the nicest looking Gradius’s, and now it plays smooth at full fps.
This is fantastic. :applaud:
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What a cool mod. I see it also has a Super Mario World version as well. Seems like that would lend itself well to the rom hacking community that creates the super difficult levels since it allows more on-screen entities at a time.
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I thought that I would be terrible at it and hate it, but it's super fun when you don't have to guess just how slow things are going to be. It's amazing. Gradius III is one of the best SNES games ever now, IMO.
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Damn that's cool! One of the first games I got for the snes back in the day... I wonder if anyone is going to sell the modded carts.
I wonder how rare carts with the SA-1 chip are. In the US, it looks like only five or so games were released with it. The most popular game was Super Mario RPG.
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Well there's whatever the suped up super everdrive is called, but my regular super everdrive plays 99% of the games I want to play just fine and I'm not paying $300 for gradius 3.
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Damn that's cool! One of the first games I got for the snes back in the day... I wonder if anyone is going to sell the modded carts.
I wonder how rare carts with the SA-1 chip are. In the US, it looks like only five or so games were released with it. The most popular game was Super Mario RPG.
You can nab a PGA Tour 96 cart for <$10 on ebay right now. Same with PGA European Tour.
SA-1 chip carts seem to be pretty easy to obtain, and if it's just a matter of burning a rom then you can get this onto a real cart for pretty cheap. In fact, I'm going to look into doing this now.
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Hmm... I wonder if yots could recommend a good rom burner.
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Damn, this game is kicking ---my bottom---! I am having a hard time getting passed the Moai statues level.
But I'm still enjoying the speed. It's still pretty amazing to see some of the areas you were used to slowdown be run at silky smooth full-frames. :applaud:
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Tutorial on how to mod the cart for the new chip:
https://youtu.be/ImH8B1cG3p0 (https://youtu.be/ImH8B1cG3p0)
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Nice. I watched the tutorial video from the creator of that eprom adapter, but this one is more instructional.
Picked up some cheap donors recently and got them prepped for conversion. I’m just waiting for the adapters to arrive to install the eproms.
(https://i.imgur.com/Zcsz0ZB.jpg)
Removing surface chips is strangely satisfying. :)
(https://i.imgur.com/agDAApd.jpg)
So far so good. I got them off pretty cleanly, hopefully I will be able to install the adapters just as clean. The next part is the toughest, soldering back onto those pads. I guess I have 3 chances to make 1 good cart, that’s good odds imo.
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If you make a second good cart, sell it to me
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Then count me in to buy the third cart if successful. Easily one of my top 5 games from childhood. Can prob still play the levels with my eyes closed from pattern memory.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Voultar tweeted today that if you're using a PGA Tour 96 cart as a donor, you gotta also upgrade the SRAM to get Gradius III SA-1 to work correctly. Turns out the 64k of SRAM on those boards is not enough. This is what he recommends: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/IS62C1024AL-35QLI-TR/706-1308-1-ND/4733138/?itemSeq=293511355
I'm going to put in my order. Yay, more surface mount soldering practice. ::) fml
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Also somebody alerted ebay that demand might be going up because the price of the carts is now well above what they normally are. Any SA-1s that already have 64k? Perhaps some Japanese carts that nobody has heard of?!?
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PGA European Tour is still around $10 on eBay. It’s also SA-1.
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Voultar tweeted today that if you're using a PGA Tour 96 cart as a donor, you gotta also upgrade the SRAM to get Gradius III SA-1 to work correctly. Turns out the 64k of SRAM on those boards is not enough. This is what he recommends: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/IS62C1024AL-35QLI-TR/706-1308-1-ND/4733138/?itemSeq=293511355
I'm going to put in my order. Yay, more surface mount soldering practice. ::) fml
So in hindsight, the PGA boards are a lot more work than using a cart with > 64kb of SRAM. The SRAM Voultar suggested has 32 pins, while the original is 28. With this swap you gotta manually wire 2 of the pins to the SA-1 chip, and 1 to a 5v source (the 4th is NC).
Attached is a picture of what needs to be wired to what.
I’m still waiting on the EPROM adapter boards to arrive, but sometime this weekend I’ll try the SRAM adaptation and post my results.
Overall this is a lot more trouble than it’s worth, but I’m “pot committed” right now so I might as well follow through to the end.
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Vitor Vilela has done it again, now with Contra III!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4DrF42WyBo
https://twitter.com/HackerVilela/status/1180558277735792640
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That looks great, can't wait to try this.
Thanks for sharing.
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I'm hoping he takes on Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts next. That game could really use the bump in fps.
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I finally patched Contra III and it plays amazingly well. He apparently had some issues getting the hack to work with 2 players, but it should be good now.
How did your cart converting turn out?
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Unfortunately I didn't get to finish it due to work/life schedule getting in the way of hobby projects.