Ask Slashdot: Understanding the SNES? 157
An anonymous reader writes "As a product of the 90s I grew up loving the classics that kids today know about from Wikipedia and pop-culture references. Games like Super Bomberman, Zelda: A Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country I and III (II was a sellout, come on) are the foundations of my childhood memories. Now, though, as a fourth-year electrical engineering major, I find myself increasingly impressed by the level of technical difficulty embedded in that 16-bit console. I am trying, now, to find a resource that will take me through the technical design of the SNES (memory layout, processor information, cartridge pin layouts/documentation) to get a better understanding of what I naively enjoyed 15 some years ago. I am reaching out to the vast resources available from the minds of the Slashdot community. Any guide/blog series that you know of that walks through some of the technical aspects of the, preferably, SNES (alternatively, NES/Nintendo 64) console would be much appreciated."
Re:take one apart? (Score:5, Insightful)
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
The SNES uses custom chips for most of its functionality. Unless he has access to decapping facilities, taking one apart will provide only limited information.
Re:The Ultimate Resource for SNES Development (Score:0, Insightful)
It's not an article. It's ASK SLASHDOT, which you jokers never seem to get through your skulls - it's NOT NEWS.
I would say SNES was the most technically pushed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Ultimate Resource for SNES Development (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of things like this. [slashdot.org] Sometimes it's good to have a current, real-time discussion with a range of knowledgable people, rather than searching the entire fucking WWW and figuring out for yourself who got what right and wrong.
First steps in reverse engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
Your first step in reverse engineering aka total mastery of a device should be something a little simpler, like a 2600 or a PDP-8 or if you "demand" something modern, perhaps a very small (pun intended) microcontroller like the pic 10F family. You don't mention any previous experience with reverse engineering so I assume you have none.
Because they scale non-linearily, reverse engineering something simple and something hard doesn't take 200% as long as just reverse engineering something hard, it takes more like 100.1% longer, so the tiny extra investment isn't going to slow down the overall project too much. However the experience you gain figuring out the simpler thing Might dramatically reduce the time taken to figure out the hard thing.
The standard /. car analogy is you probably should start with learning how to change the oil before you try to rebuild the engine.
Its not a hazing thing or making fun of noobs, its just good practical educational advice. Trying something way beyond your level at best results in frustration, at worst in a sorcerers apprentice disaster.
Re:take one apart? (Score:5, Insightful)
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
Unfortunately, EE is not like ME. What happens in an electrical circuit is almost always invisible to the naked eye. Monitoring high-speed digital signals takes special (expensive) test equipment, which even a university lab might not have lying around for open use. Even figuring out a schematic can be hard if you're dealing with multi-layer circuit boards and custom integrated circuits. The ICs in a SNES are all surface mount, which means even more specialized equipment and skill to remove them with no easy way to work with them afterward. Do a Google Image search for "SNES mainboard" and you'll see what I mean.
Also, simply being a fourth-year student doesn't necessarily qualify him to reverse engineer a console. Digital electronic systems are orders of magnitude more complex than mechanical ones, and EE coursework tends to focus more on theory than practice. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that going solo is probably not the best idea for his first foray.
Re:I would say SNES was the most technically pushe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:take one apart? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you guys keep disassembling Super Nintendos (and PS1s and Atari 2600s and N64s) pretty soon there won't be any left for us to play. It will end-up like the Japanese Zero airplane (only two left). It saddens me to see people destroying an item that is no longer being made & therefore becoming more-and-more rare with each passing day.
Re:take one apart? (Score:3, Insightful)
3.58Mhz might seem slow compared to modern electronics, but I'm pretty sure that "3.58 million signals per second" is still considered high-speed. Sometimes these terms are relative to the kind of electronics you could feasibly put together on your own (say for a physics class lab) rather than whatever whiz-bang tech is on the market (read: engineered for years by professionals).