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Recent years have seen an increment of retro videogame modifications, and even entire videogame recreations into other programming languages, with modders and hackers doing amazing things to beloved classics, like the latest Super Metroid and A Link to the Past PC ports, which saw the beloved titles completely recreated in C language to make it run natively on personal computers. The romhacking scene has also seen a surge of decompilation projects to better understand and map out the code of specific games, and some go to the disassembly route to be able to compile 1:1 ROMs based on recreated clean room source code.

Other romhackers try to better understand the code of the original games to be able to implement Quality of Life improvements into several classics, and one romhacker in particular has taken it upon himself to improve upon a large selection of Super Nintendo titles.

Kandowontu is one of those prolific romhackers that decided to work on a certain feature that almost all SNES titles can benefit from, with this being FastROM.
To better understand what SlowROM vs. FastROM is, it all comes down to basically CPU speeds. SlowROM has the CPU running at 2.68 MHz, whereas FastROM has the CPU running at 3.58 Mhz. In short terms, making a SlowROM -> FastROM conversion basically gets up to 33% faster CPU calculations and processing speeds, which tends to make loading times shorter, controls more responsive and lag/slowdowns reduced or eliminated.

Why was FastROM then not used on more titles if simply making use of FastROM allowed for such a big improvement in terms of performance for SNES games?
In the past, SNES publishers were cheap at times and sent the carts out with "SlowROM" chips, even if the game was programmed for FastROM banks, they were forced to disable it at the last minute for costs.

Kandowontu has worked on a wide variety of FastROM conversions already, with some of his most popular conversions being:

• The Megaman X titles
• Super Mario All-Stars (and its variant that includes Super Mario World)
• Mario Paint
• Super Punch Out
• Secret of Mana
• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
• ...and the list keeps increasing by the day thanks to the incredible efforts done by him.

He is also working on a complete revamp hack for Super Mario Kart, titled Super Mario Kart DX, and he also was a developer in the popular Star Fox EX romhack. All of this effort was possible thanks to the 65816 assembler, Asar, and Diztinguish, a SNES disassembler, that Kando utilizes in conjuction with the emulator bsnes to run the game and decompile the instructions that need to be modified live to properly add the FastROM implementation.

Those interested in checking out Kandowontu's works can visit his Patreon, where all of the patches are available for free and without requiring an account, or people can also refer to the list of contributions for him on Romhacking.net and download the patches through there.

Kandowontu's full list of converted SNES titles

 

[BLsquared]

The mega man x series on super Nintendo do use a special chip other tha the super fx. I don't even know the chip name, but It's use only on those games and nowhere else.

A quick look at the wiki shows that X2 and X3 used the Capcom proprietary CX4 chip for the wireframe effects. So yeah, my bad, not the SuperFX chip. But that's cool and interesting. No wonder emulating those games had been so hard in the past, since only those games used them.

 

[Shin Akuma]

hope we get some illusion of gaia trilogy and demons crest <3

 

[M7L7NK7]

No way in hell I'm playing a Shmup without lag! Are you crazy??

 

[SeventhSon7]

Do these work on original hardware? I would like to load up my SD2SNES with patched ROMs.

 

[Deleted member 194275]

Do these work on original hardware? I would like to load up my SD2SNES with patched ROMs.

I can't say that all of them work, but my guess is that they do as all the games I tried worked fine.

(My flashcard is SD2SNES pro, but I believe that "pro" and not pro do not matter at all for those patches).