SNES-CD Boot ROM Discovered (Maybe)

The news team at retrocollect.com got an anonymous screenshot and link to what appears to be the Super Nintendo CD Boot ROM. While this may prove to be the missing link between Nintendo and Sony's rumored disc-based system, chances are it may just be an elaborate homebrew hoax.

US9IFCv.jpg


You can check out more info and what they found when the BIOS was viewed in a hex editor by following the source link.

:arrow: Source
 

smf

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The SNES CD has 256k of ram, according to Byuu. Although, from his tests, maybe only 128k was planned.

Sorry, I misunderstood your post. Yeah the Play Station would definitely load code dynamically, they aren't going to add 650mb of ram to that thing :-)

There are lots of reasons why there might be ram in there that is inaccessible. A lot of dev kits have more ram so you can have debug code, but that ram can often be disabled for testing release builds too. So there might be a way to enable it, or it might just be they had a load of bigger ram chips sitting around on the bench when they made them. Or the ram may be used for other things, like streaming red book audio, so not all of it would be accessible by the CPU.

Even 256k doesn't seem like very much though. But Sony didn't really know what they were doing back then, they caught up ironically by getting into Sega CD game development. How time flies http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/21/b...-to-make-cd-video-games.html?pagewanted=print
 
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cdoty

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A lot of dev kits have more ram so you can have debug code

That's exactly what I was thinking, the Nintendo DS dev kits had twice the normal ram.

but that ram can often be disabled for testing release builds too. So there might be a way to enable it, or it might just be they had a load of bigger ram chips sitting around on the bench when they made them.

Byuu was only testing the CD checking routines, so it's possible it only checks the normal amount of ram.
 

smf

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Byuu was only testing the CD checking routines, so it's possible it only checks the normal amount of ram.

Buggy ram tests are also pretty common. The only console I've heard of that has a decent ram test is the xbox, because they bought a load of marginal ram and the console figures out at boot how fast it can run at.
 

cdoty

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So? The UFO was real too. View attachment 41282

Real? Yes, Official? No.

The UFO and similar devices replaced the cartridge ROM with hardware that could load a ROM from a floppy into internal RAM, that acted as a ROM. The device wasn't something a developer could use to load additional data from a floppy drive.

One of the early attempts to block these devices involved checking the speed of ROM access.
 
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smf

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So? The UFO was real too. View attachment 41282

So? I don't see how that helps your argument that there were official floppy disk drives for the SNES. Your first example wasn't for the SNES, your second example wasn't official. I get the feeling you're trying to pick holes in what I'm saying because you think you'll win something. Here you go, you won this :sp:
 

urherenow

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@smf... Awe shucks... I wanted to win the Internet!

Seriously though, I just want to understand and get my facts straight. At first, I couldn't remember the name "ufo", and then I didn't realize that the ufo wasn't official.

Things start getting jumbled up and confusing when you're in your 40's... My first systems were the Atari and odyssey, and my first home computer was the Commodore VIC-20!
 

z11111

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It's kind of confusing because in the source article, the date found in the hex editor is written in US format, where as "The most commonly used date format in Japan is 'year month day'". Fishy.
 

smf

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It's kind of confusing because in the source article, the date found in the hex editor is written in US format, where as "The most commonly used date format in Japan is 'year month day'". Fishy.

This is big, I looked in the PS1 bios and they are also stored in US format. This goes right to the top, not only is this SNES bios fake, but every single PS1 ever made is fake too. They are probably watching you right now, you need to destroy all your tech and leave the house as they are able to track you using it.

Good luck.
 

z11111

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This is big, I looked in the PS1 bios and they are also stored in US format. This goes right to the top, not only is this SNES bios fake, but every single PS1 ever made is fake too. They are probably watching you right now, you need to destroy all your tech and leave the house as they are able to track you using it.

Good luck.
:rofl:
 

FranckKnight

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I'm no expert, but a few things from the various comments here came to mind :

It may LOOK fake because it's an unfinished product, a placeholder. They don't need to make it pretty if it's not retail yet.

The SNES had the ability of running chips through the cartdridge slot, as we know from Star Fox, Megaman X or even Star Ocean. So it's not farfetched to think that they could have made an add-on that'd use the basic SNES as a passthrough to the TV, probably something similar to the Sega CD and 32X. But given how 'good' those Sega add-ons were to the Genesis, I'll side with the opinion that *maybe* we were better without them.

That said, maybe it would have been better than the Sega version too. It depends on the product, it's capacities, the marketing and the games made for it. The Sega 32X and CD were only terrible because the developers didn't follow with the idea (not-withstanding other concerns like production costs and what not). A more recent example is how things go with the Wii and WiiU. Where they get really solid First-Party titles because they know how to handle their own hardware, many other companies apparently couldn't figure out how to use the Wiimote for anything more than waggle-fests. Some titles were good though, but most couldn't use the controls as well as Nintendo does (Zelda Skyward Sword, Wario Ware...).

So is it Nintendo that did a confusing console/control scheme, or the developers that lack the imagination to use it? It's hard to tell, I'd be inclined it's somewhere in between. The Sega-CD/32X may have been in a similar situation, and maybe the SNES-CD would also have.
 
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smf

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It may LOOK fake because it's an unfinished product, a placeholder.

It doesn't look fake, it appears people were expecting it to look like a PS3. Sony would totally have tried to sell it looking like that. Their expertise was in CD drives, not gaming systems. They had made an MSX, but the boot screens on those were even less artistic.

The PC Engine CD ROM boot doesn't look much better http://boards.dingoonity.org/gcw-ze...mper-or-another-working-pcengine-emulator/45/

The Sega CD boot screens are bad beyond words. Google it if you want, I won't post a link in case someone clicks it by accident. The boot animation was probably added so that shops could stick one in the window, but not actually have a game running. Either because the games were so dire that nobody would buy the system if they saw one or the drives would die if they were running all the time.

I think people just want to believe it's fake and incorrectly believe that something they have seen backs up their theory. Not that I'm saying it's definitely not a fake, but there is reasonable evidence that it is real. In the unlikely event that someone did fake it then I don't think it's going to be possible to debunk it by posting crazy conspiracy theories on a message board.

If Sony had released the drive then nobody would care, because it would have been terrible.
 
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