Modern SNES Games and Demos

There’s nowhere near enough happening in the SNES indie/homebrew development scene right now imo, especially when compared to how active the Genesis scene is in comparison, but there is some new stuff out there, and I just thought I’d showcase some of it here.

Note: Some of these examples may be a few years old, but they’re still new games for SNES that came out decades after it was no longer officially on the market. And some of them may be barely more than simple concept tests, or possibly just glorified ROM hacks, but I still think they’re worth covering here.

Without further ado, let’s begin:

SNES Background Modes

Did you know that some people still aren’t aware that the SNES has a whopping eight different background modes to play around with, not just the infamous Mode 7 that everyone has heard a load about already?

Well, the video below by Retro Game Mechanics Explained covers the first six of the SNES’ background modes in great detail and is well worth viewing (he has a whole separate video dedicated to Mode 7 too):

In this video, you’ll find a great overview of the SNES background modes 1-6

Despite being the best resource for how backgrounds work on SNES that I’ve found [that laymen can actually understand], there were a few things that still weren’t entirely clear to me when I first watched the video above, such as the actual amounts of colours per layer and overall for the backgrounds in Mode 0 for example, or that the amount of colours onscreen can be increased well beyond the standard 256-ish total [for background and sprites combined] using thing like direct colour in some background modes, HDMA on the backdrop colour, and colour math for transparency effects. So I’ll detail some of those things more below.