Forsaken

Yeh, there's not anything huge IMO going for it right now. There's speculation about getting Super Gameboy into it (but no Gameboy Color), which would be cool, but even that's a pretty hard sell for a $200 upgrade. For that, you can get the GBA Consolizer, which is quite awesome looking, and plays everything up to and including Advance, obviously. But that assumes having a GBA and flashcart already...

No, I taped where the pivot rests on the board, nothing on the contacts. The problem with the Switch Pro at least is that the pivot is too low, enabling all four directions at once, and ridiculously easy diagonals. Raising it enough makes that impossible. The problem you run into is that they didn't leave much room overhead for the side opposite the one you're pressing down to pivot up, like a see-saw. So if you try to raise it too much, it will jam. The old d-pads were like see-saws, one side goes down, the other side goes up, so if you pushed left, the right goes up, and up/down don't really go anywhere. On these new ones, there little or no overhead clearance, and the pivot is low, when you press left, up/down also go down a little, closer to triggering, and right doesn't move much. The ultimate solution is to raise the pivot, which can be done simply with a durable tape (like kapton) under it on the PCB, and also increase the overhead clearance to allow full "see-saw" action. The latter is much more difficult, and in many cases may not be possible without fabricating a new shell, or somehow getting the PCB to sit lower. And if you make the PCB sit lower, you might cause other buttons to get funky.

The Switch Pro was messing me up soooo bad in Tetris99 because of that. I was able to fix it with 5 squares of Kapton tape on the PCB right under the pivot bump on the D-pad, so it's lifted up a bit higher. Now it rocks properly instead of being able to push all four directions at once, and diagonals aren't happening accidentally. It's still not quite as good as a NES or SNES controller, because there's not enough vertical clearance for the opposite side of the D-pad to see-saw up higher than the pivot, but it's much better than stock. Maybe it could be improved further by milling off some plastic somewhere to allow the pivot to be raised higher. 5 pieces of tape was the most I could raise it before it began to jam due to lack of vertical clearance. D-pads seem to require pretty tight tolerances to work right, and are basically a lost art.

The first upgrade will be the ability to use MSU with other special chips at the same time. Only people that enjoy MSU romhacks will care about this. Later, there may be slightly more accurate versions of the SA-1 and SFX cores. There's some speculation about getting a Super Gameboy core into it, so you could play gameboy roms right from the SD2SNES Pro. Stoneage Gamer just announced a trade-in program where you can get the Pro for as little as $100 when trading in an SD2SNES. Basically $100 off. Might be able to sell an SD2SNES for more than that though.

Of course it has. I just bought the regular one a couple months ago.

Great idea, and that would probably be more reliable than the APU hack for the real SNES. Just need a blurb in the Pro's menu when savestates are turned on about muting the APU in the SNT's debug menu.

Looks like jitter in the scan timing. Whole pixels aren't flickering, the edges are just moving very slightly. That's all I know.

AAAGGGHHH!!! MY EYES!!! MAKE IT STOP!

That reminds me of playing SimAnt on SNES. For the longest time, I could not win the full game. Then one day, I just started up the full game and let it run without ever touching anything, and the damn thing won the game without me doing anything! lol

Oh yeh, reprogramming a cart sounds like fun. My remark was about the way you've been playing the game.

Geez man lol. I would just wait it out until kevtris has a chance to figure out what's wrong with the mapper on the Mini. Although given how Analogue is working him, that might be quite some time away.

Yeh, in theory, an analog monitor should be able to do any vertical or horizontal scan frequencies within it's range. So arbitrary vertical resolutions should be possible, as well as non-standard frame rates. And as there is no pixel clock or anything in analog video, the horizontal resolution just rolls off softly, being only a function of how quickly the beam can turn on/off in response to the signal, just like the high frequency response of a sound system. The monitor couldn't care less how many "pixels" there are horizontally, it doesn't know what a pixel is, there's no such thing in analog, all there is is scanning a varying strength signal across a screen. Again, similar to how audio speakers don't care how high the bit rate of the sound file was before it went through a DAC.

Probably uses some new mapper that the NT Mini doesn't support.

If SD3SNES plays more than just SNES games, I might have to give in and buy one. That would be way too tempting. But Super NT could already play anything that NT Mini could, and probably more. I really hope it eventually gets a core store jailbreak like the Mini did. I skipped the Mini and opted for a HiDef NES instead for some reason, and rather regret it now, although the extreme cool factor of HDMI out of an original NES cannot be denied.

Super Tetris 3 says hello. It has a battery save for no purpose that I can discern beyond saving high scores. Have to admit that it seems to be a weird exception, not the rule.

I do use them on NES for high score tables too. On SNES though, most games with score tables have battery backup, don't they?

Seems like there's always something better on the horizon. If you're always waiting because something better is coming, you'll never have anything. I don't know how the SD2SNES could be functionally better with a larger FPGA though, other than this potential for save states, which aren't a big deal to me on SNES, since virtually all games have save files. Using save states more intensively than just saving progress is essentially cheating imo, and I try to resist the temptation. The feature not being available makes it much easier to resist. The regular one already is going to be able to play all but maybe 2 obscure SNES titles after the next update, and it seems virtually flawless, so what else is there to do?

I didn't even see that there was a light pipe option. I didn't see any options... I just saw the price had dropped temporarily by $50 and they had my favorite color in stock, and clicked "buy" as fast as I could lol

As far as I know, the save state doesn't work with the SA-1/SFX branch currently. You have to choose one or the other for now. And yes, save state is VERY beta. I don't know if it will be able to fit alongside SA-1 and SFX. For hooks, press X in the menu, go to configuration, then in-game settings, on/off is in there. They aren't really needed for SNT though, since you can do game-genie cheats and cart/system resets with the SNT itself. Press the SNT's reset hotkey very briefly, and the current ROM will reset, hold it for a bit longer, and the SD2SNES will reset fully back to it's main menu. If you have a translucent SD2SNES, you can see the yellow light come on when you've held down the reset hotkey long enough to reset to menu. I feel sorry for people that buy opaque SD2SNES and Everdrives, because there's no way to see the useful indicator LEDs inside unless the case is translucent, and they usually don't mention that in the item descriptions. OH! I should add that you don't "flash" the firmware on an SD2SNES in the sense one normally thinks of it happening. The firmware is ONLY on the SD card, and loaded everytime the SD2SNES is powered up. This means that all you have to do if you want to run different firmwares is setup different SD cards, and switch between them. So you could have a card with the official 1.9.0 for SA-1 and SFX games, another with the save state beta, and still another with the S-DD1 chip support for the few games that use it. Simple as popping one SD out and popping another in.

You guys saved my sanity. This is my first SD2SNES, got it just a few days ago, so I didn't know about the bins not being included. Stone Age Gamer had the bins with the correct endianess right on their site alongside the SD2SNES. DSP games are working for me now. So far, I'd say the SD2SNES is worth every penny, I've been very impressed. Be damned careful with that micro SD slot on the Rev J though... I'd been pushing the card in with my thumb nail, and my thumbnail slipped off it before it clicked in, and that tiny card went flying all the way across the room. BTW, you can now customize the menu if you like, someone made an automatic menu.bin patching tool to insert your own banner and color scheme. http://www.dotsarecool.com/sd2snesimg/

I didn't know I needed bin files for those, I thought they'd be included with the firmware. I will rummage around for those and report back.

DSP-1 games aren't working for me. Mario Kart says "nintendo" and freezes, Pilotwings gets through the intro screens, but just plays music to a black screen when gameplay is to begin. Ok... I tried 1.8.0 and 0.1.7e, and DSP-1 isn't playing for me with those firmwares either. Is DSP-1 just broken on SD2SNES with Super NT? I have the new Rev j SD2SNES. SA-1 games are playing great though. Just my setup, or is DSP-1 broken for anyone else?

Well if you don't play games where reaction time matters, then no, input lag doesn't matter for you. Input lag just slows your reaction time. Variable input lag is the worst, as that will mess you up even if you try to anticipate and hit early, and will mess you up on rhythm type games.

2 frames is 32ms. A good gamer's reaction time is around 170ms. So when you add another 32ms lag, it's making your reaction time almost 20% slower. That is very significant.

I can confirm that arbitrary refresh rates work over HDMI with at least some higher-end equipment. I use an iScan Duo video processor and an Eizo Foris monitor, and both are capable of working non-standard frame rates. the iScan can convert analog to HDMI with the output framerate locked to the input, and the Eizo happily takes the output from SNES and the like that way. Also the Ultra-HDMI mod can output native N64 frame rate, and the iScan happily accepts that and passes it unaltered to the Eizo with also accepts it. So I would welcome the option for native frame rate on Super NT and other FPGA console replications. Done the way the UltraHDMI and my iScan do it, there would be no risk. When selecting a non-standard frame rate (or any video change at all in the case of the iScan), the user is asked to confirm that they see a picture, and if they do not confirm, it reverts to the previous mode.