etabeta's playground

Before 0.148u2 release, SNES carts got converted to slot devices as well. Like with MegaDrive and Virtua Racing, the main effect on the end-users is that now games using add-on chips like DSP-1/2/3/4 (e.g. Super Mario Kart, Dungeon Master, etc.) or ST-010 (e.g. Exhaustion Heat 2), or SuperFX (e.g. Star Fox) can be loaded into snes & snespal directly, without the needs of additional clone systems (snesdsp, snessfx, etc.) like in 0.148! And we also support dumps with the DSP bios attached at the end of the file, like byuu’s higan, for ease of compatibility of the files between emulators.

The rewrite had however also many other effects. For instance, the Powerfest ’94 competition cart is playable in MESS now (DipSwitches included)

But we also added support for DSP-1 games with large ROM, like Super Bases Loaded II

Furthermore, some basic support for BS-X Satellaview was added to both BS-X – Sore wa Namae o Nusumareta Machi no Monogatari

and some other compatible games

Even if most games making non trivial usage of flash memory are not working yet (which means that 70% of the BS-X carts, including the popular BS Zelda, BS Excitebike, Radical Dreamers and Treasure Conflix, will only show a black screen 🙁 ), a few other work fine

Luckily, even our sloppy BSX implementation is enough to support the character data in Same Game, by just dropping samegmcc or samegamecd in the -cart2 slot available when loading samegame…

Same Game + Chara Cassette, Bomberman flavor

Same Game + Chara Cassette, Momotarou flavor

Same Game + Chara Data (which adds Tengai Makyou characters)

A more interesting addition was probably the Korean 20-in-1 multigame cart showed here, which mostly work in current MESS (even if a couple of games freeze at start)

As in the MegaDrive case, the slot code allowed for emulation of more protected SNES pirate carts

Digimon

Pokemon Gold Silver

X-Men VS Street Fighter

Pocket Monster

Soul Edge

KOF 2000

Pokemon Stadium

Tekken 2

Street Fighter EX Alpha

Also, even if MESS has supported 8MB ExHiROM/ExLoROM games with no problems since 2007, support is now more transparent and they work exactly the same as HiROM/LoROM

snaps from Dragon Quest 3 English translation


snaps from Super Demo World

As you might have guessed at this stage, a byproduct of the usage of slots is that it is now very easy to add emulation of the copy protection and of the bankswitch mechanisms used in many pirate carts. However, I can’t stress enough that without slots it would have never been possible to support properly the add-on chips as we do now 🙂