Is Gunstar Heroes Possible on SNES?

Continuing with my idea for a series of articles looking at both old and new Sega Genesis games and analysing whether they could run on SNES or not–I’m here to prove they can by providing examples of similar feats being achieved in actual SNES games, both old and new titles, plus any modern demos and the like where necessary–the next game I want to look at is Gunstar Heroes.

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Is The Cursed Knight possible on SNES?

I’ve heard a lot of people claim in recent times that the SNES couldn’t run this Genesis game or that Genesis game because it’s too complex for the system or it would just suffer slowdown on SNES because of its “slow” CPU, etc, which simply isn’t true in 99% of cases. And, not only are these assertions coming from hadcore Genesis fans, they’re even coming from SNES fans at times too, which is just very disappointing.

So, here’s an idea for a series of articles looking at both old and new Sega Genesis games and analysing whether they could run on SNES or not–I’m here to prove they can–by providing examples of similar feats being achieved in actual SNES games, both old and new titles, plus any modern demos and the like where necessary.

The first game I want to try this with is The Cursed Knight, just because I was watching a playthrough of it when this idea popped into my head.

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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:

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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.

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