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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

 

[JuanMena]

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.

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.

 

[Bladexdsl]

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

 

[Deleted member 42501]

Can anyone get the Actraiser fastrom working on SNES Mini? After patching you get the intro screen in silence. Rock N Roll Racing was also glitched.

Another fastrom project that works perfectly on Mini:

https://github.com/VitorVilela7/fastrom

 

[Deleted member 194275]

As of now just a few were verified on console, I hope this do not become an emulator only thing.

Anyway, Rock and Roll Racing and Top Gear are included on the list!!! This means I'll be playing those today no matter where, console or emulator.

Post automatically merged: Mar 23, 2023

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

As far as I know, nothing like that ever happened for any improvement patch for the snes.

 

[SaulFabre]

This is actually very impressive! Gonna try some of my favorite SNES games with these FastROM patches.

 

[eyeliner]

I hope real hardware yes

 

[Bladexdsl]

As of now just a few were verified on console, I hope this do not become an emulator only thing.

Anyway, Rock and Roll Racing and Top Gear are included on the list!!! This means I'll be playing those today no matter where, console or emulator.

Post automatically merged: Mar 23, 2023

As far as I know, nothing like that ever happened for any improvement patch for the snes.

yeah but his getting pledges ($) for them nintendo seems to really hate this. they have taken down rom sites in the past when the owner was making a profit.

 

[eduall]

Only for Secret of Mana than im here for!

 

[urbanman2004]

This is very elightening info. I never knew that there was a difference between Slow and FastROMS for SNES carts. The more you know

For any of those interested, here's a really good article that I've kept after all of these years referencing the developer of SNES emulator bsnes, byuu's methodology to game history preservation: "16-bit Time Capsule: SNES Emulator Makes a Case for Software Preservation"... Enjoy

Post automatically merged: Mar 23, 2023

That Super Mario Kart DX is off the freakin' chain... Sheesh

 

[thekarter104]

Star Fox. Nuff said.

 

[Nostalgia]

this will work on real hardware with a FX Pro?

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Huh? IT seems similar to sa-1 chip thing. But it's not the same I guess. I wonder, if you use it in street fighter 2 turbo, maybe someone can program even faster turbo speeds

 

[Guacaholey]

yeah but his getting pledges ($) for them nintendo seems to really hate this. they have taken down rom sites in the past when the owner was making a profit.

Wasn't that for the guy that was renting ROMs and sites like [Dromaius novaehollandiae]paradise that offered paid premium tiers to uncap downloads?

 

[Deleted member 194275]

I hope real hardware yes

this will work on real hardware with a FX Pro?

The answer is yes, it's working on OG hardware.

I tested just now on real hardware Rock and Roll Racing (works flawless) and Top Gear (if you press start on title screen, it freezes, title screen animation takes longer, perfect besides that).

I used SD2SNES pro for that.

 

[MikaDubbz]

tends to make loading times shorter, controls more responsive and lag/slowdowns reduced or eliminated.

While I can appreciate the reduction or flat-out removal of lag in some SNES games (I recall at least one of the Mega Man X games having significant slowdown in some action-heavy areas), I still have to ask: what load times? Am I not remembering the SNES correctly? I don't recall having to wait for anything to load, it was all pretty instantaneous.

 

[chrisrlink]

yeah but his getting pledges ($) for them nintendo seems to really hate this. they have taken down rom sites in the past when the owner was making a profit.

when will these rom hackers learn?do your work for free +VPN and youll less likely be sued or dmca'd same with fan games sheesh some people don't learn

 

[Kioku]

While I can appreciate the reduction or flat-out removal of lag in some SNES games (I recall at least one of the Mega Man X games having significant slowdown in some action-heavy areas), I still have to ask: what load times? Am I not remembering the SNES correctly? I don't recall having to wait for anything to load, it was all pretty instantaneous.

There wasn’t an always an immediate loading screen, but transitions found as loading I believe.

 

[M7L7NK7]

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

Why are you scared to say cunts? Or is it craps?

 

[kando]

While I can appreciate the reduction or flat-out removal of lag in some SNES games (I recall at least one of the Mega Man X games having significant slowdown in some action-heavy areas), I still have to ask: what load times? Am I not remembering the SNES correctly? I don't recall having to wait for anything to load, it was all pretty instantaneous.

Its a matter of frames at a time sometimes, maybe 2-4 frames, but they do add up!
-kandowontu