When we corrected the processing drop of 'Gradius III' beyond the time of 28 years, the degree of difficulty rose to impossible level



Konami's shooting game '

Gradius III ', which was released for super NES in 1990, is known to be prone to ' dropping ' which causes a delay in the game frame rate due to processing problems. Overseas ROM hacker Vitor Vilela has developed a tool to emulate the special chip “ SA-1 ” mounted on the cassette of the super NES on a PC, and emulates the specification that would drop the processing of the super NES version Gradius III. It has been talked that it was solved above.




28 years later, hacker fixes rampant slowdown on SNES 'Gradius III | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/28-years-later-hacker-fixes-rampant-slowdown-on-snes-gradius-iii/

' Gradius III-From Legend to Myth- ' is a side-scrolling shooter game released from Konami in December 1989 for arcades. The ideas gathered in the game magazine ' Gemest ' published at that time were adopted, and the difficulty is the top class among successive generations. In addition, the arcade version Gradius III is a work of pros and cons, though it is a work of pros and cons from the long game contents such as unreasonable hit judgment, severeness of revival pattern and bonus game with 10 stages or more. There is a deep-seated popularity, and there are players who continue to capture even after nearly 30 years of release.



A year after the release of the arcade version, Gradius III, which was ported as Konami's first super NES software, was released. The package said 'complete porting', but in reality some stages and bosses have been removed from the arcade version, and the level of difficulty has been significantly reduced. It should be easy to play by it, but it is known that the difficulty of play has remained as it is due to the increase in processing loss that frequently occurred even in the AC version.

Vilela developed a ROM patch 'SA-1 Root' that emulates a special chip 'SA-1' that was loaded on a part of the Super Nintendo's soft cassette on a PC. We succeeded in playing Gradius III with improved processing by applying patches and playing on the emulator.

SA-1 is one of the special chip that is mounted on the SNES dedicated cassette,

65C816 is equipped with a 16-bit CPU called 'RF5A123' which is based on. While the clock frequency of the main CPU is 3.58 MHz, SA-1 is 10.74 MHz. In addition, advanced graphics processing, speeding up operations, and parallel processing had the effect of dramatically improving the processing performance of the game. In addition, it is said that SA-1 is installed in 34 Super Famicom late softwares, such as 'Super Mario RPG' and 'Karby Super Deluxe of the Star' 'Mini 4WD Shining Scorpion Let's & Go !!'.


by Yaca2671

Unlike the Super FX chip installed in 'Star Fox' etc., the SA-1 has the same architecture as a Super NES CPU, so it is relatively easy to port code written in the base system . That's why not all SA-1 emulations can be applied to all game ROMs immediately, and Viela has spent as much as three months on research and disassembly, code analysis, memory remapping, and code editing. It seems to have succeeded in patching -1.

So, when I applied this SA-1 Root to the Super Nintendo version Gradius III, the game speed seems to be 2 to 3 times faster than the original, and the frame rate is kept smooth even if a fine sprite is displayed on the full screen. About. The actual movie compared with the normal ROM and the ROM to which SA-1 Root is applied is the following movie. The time it takes to display the opening demo video is overwhelmingly short, and it is clear that smooth gaming has been reproduced with improved processing omissions from the appearance timing of enemies and terrain.

Gradius III (SNES)-Original x SA-1 Comparison-YouTube


In stage 2, a large number of large and small colored bubbles appear on the screen in large amounts, so the processing dropouts are particularly severe. In the movie below, you can see how Stage 2 is played and compared between a regular ROM and a ROM with the SA-1 Root applied. If you apply the SA-1 Root, there is no delay in the frame rate, especially if you hit a bouncing bubble with the missile, ripple laser and 4 options attached.

speed comparison gradius 3 snes regular (left) with speed sa-1 patch by vitor vilela (right)-YouTube


I wondered if the Super Nintendo version Gradius III has become easy to play with the appearance of this patch, and 'The situation where the intentional processing was supposed to be dropped from the arcade version has been resolved by the processing drop too 'There is also a part that has dramatically risen and has become impossible to capture with human play,' said Viela. However, on the other hand, he said, 'Don't underestimate the ability of human beings,' he was looking forward to the future of human beings.

The SA-1 Root is published on GitHub .

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in Video,   Game, Posted by log1i_yk