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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

 

[Jayro]

Suckls that most of the patches are behind a stupid patreon paywall. Someone should release the rest of them to us.

 

[niuus]

this will work on real hardware with a FX Pro?

They do, It was always the intention.

Suckls that most of the patches are behind a stupid patreon paywall. Someone should release the rest of them to us.

You're kidding, right?? They are ALL 100% free.

 

[SargeSmash]

Yep, they're all free. The Patreon is just if you want to support kando's efforts.

 

[Jayro]

They do, It was always the intention.


You're kidding, right?? They are ALL 100% free.

Oh. Then how come some are on romhacking.net and the rest aren't..? Seems weird.

 

[ShadowOne333]

Oh. Then how come some are on romhacking.net and the rest aren't..? Seems weird.

Not all the FastROM patches are on RHDN because until a week or so ago, kando started reuploading them into the siteafter clearing some things up with the staff, and you're limited to a certain submission number until the previous ones are accepted.

The Patreon patches are all free and you can get them without even a Patreon account.

 

[niuus]

Oh. Then how come some are on romhacking.net and the rest aren't..? Seems weird.

There's nothing weird when the site was causing the issue, but it was resolved. Read that post and the linked tweet, then page 2 for the conclusion.

The guy still has an open Patreon page and a Twitter where you can download all the releases without delays or problems.

 

[gaga941021]

Interesting... I'm understanding this as a SA-1 chip patch to rule them all.
It'd be interesting to discover new glitches with patched roms.

Congratulations on understanding written text.

 

[SDA]

I knew about all of these FastROM hacks for some time, since I go checking RHDN everyday.

 

[Purple_Shyguy]

That's the reason I kept dying in those games. Cus of laggy inputs from the slow ROM. Thats definitely the reason OK!!!

 

[Deleted member 42501]

Added a discussion thread for SNES Mini compatibility with more patch providers linked:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/snes-mini-fastrom-hacks-and-mods.629163/

 

[LSDMTCH420]

I hope he does Zombies Ate My Neighbors next! Best non first party game on SNES

Suckls that most of the patches are behind a stupid patreon paywall. Someone should release the rest of them to us.

Says the dude asking for $300 on ko-fi lol. They’re all free donations are optional.

 

[Angelus3K]

This is brilliant. One thing I don’t understand. Why would Nintendo of all people not use FastROM for Yoshi’s Island? Surely that’s not down to costs etc.

 

[Bladexdsl]

This is brilliant. One thing I don’t understand. Why would Nintendo of all people not use FastROM for Yoshi’s Island? Surely that’s not down to costs etc.

nintendo cutting corners is what they do best

 

[matt!]

Fantastic work. Keep it up!

 

[Deleted member 194275]

Suckls that most of the patches are behind a stupid patreon paywall. Someone should release the rest of them to us.

Now I'm sure you did not even bother to try to downloading. It is harder to post here than it is to download and patch the games.

 

[Yokimari]

bookmarked for later. lets hope them c**** at nintenDMCA don't try to take dowen the patreon page

Just IPS patches, should be fine, it's not like he's distributing roms.

 

[BLsquared]

Wait, Mega Man X was one of those affected? Maybe that's the reason for the slowdown in Armored Armadillo stage in the OG. Huh. Now I wanna test it out, I assume someone will be trying each of these on real hardware?

 

[Deleted member 194275]

Wait, Mega Man X was one of those affected? Maybe that's the reason for the slowdown in Armored Armadillo stage in the OG. Huh. Now I wanna test it out, I assume someone will be trying each of these on real hardware?

mega man X is not on the list as of now. Mega Man X2 and X3 are. I can check on OG hardware for you tonight if you want to.
(I just can't test anything too deep on the game, as mega man games are too hard for me).

 

[BLsquared]

mega man X is not on the list as of now. Mega Man X2 and X3 are. I can check on OG hardware for you tonight if you want to.
(I just can't test anything too deep on the game, as mega man games are too hard for me).

Oh, okay! They makes sense, I think X3 had the FX chip if I remember right, so they might have cut corners to be able to budget that in.
I'm not as familiar with those ones though, so I'm not totally sure where the slowdowns in those two games are. But it would still be cool to hear that they work!

 

[Deleted member 194275]

Oh, okay! They makes sense, I think X3 had the FX chip if I remember right, so they might have cut corners to be able to budget that in.
I'm not as familiar with those ones though, so I'm not totally sure where the slowdowns in those two games are. But it would still be cool to hear that they work!

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.