Guide SNES FastROM Games - How Hackers Are Supercharging Your Super Nintendo

It just shows you how many publishers shafted SNES owners time and time again by going with SlowROM over FastROM to pinch a few pennies. When, to get rid of most of the slowdown we see in all these [mostly early] SNES games, all they had to do was use the slightly more expensive FastROM cartridges and this all could have been avoided. It was never truly a SNES hardware problem, but really a publisher and even Nintendo problem (for even including it as an option in the first place).

By the way Vitor Vilela has also been doing some great work in this area of converting a bunch of SlowROM games to FastROM. He's also done quite a few examples of converting SNES games to use the much faster SA-1 chip too, which runs at a very zippy 10.74 MHz:

https://twitter.com/HackerVilela?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Also, just for record, if you compare what Vitor managed simply moving Gradius III to SA-1 (again, running at 10.74 MHz) vs what Aaendy managed with the much slower FastROM (at 3.58 MHz) and some properly optimized code, it shows you that it's mostly all about just doing things right more than anything else:

https://youtu.be/myXWaOASRd4

@Sketcz It terms of removing slowdown, it can make a huge difference. One of the best examples would be how much it's improved Gradius III, which went from having regular and sometimes extreme slowdown to running pretty great other than in areas where any system of the time would have similarly suffered some slowdown too (including the original arcade version):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc5_BZjZtzs

And there's very few games on SNES where the controls are an actual issue in terms of lag or something, unless they were just kinda crap games in the first place and had somewhat badly implemented controls to start with, but I guess moving to FastROM could possibly have a very minor effect there too, assuming the controls in these games were ever genuinely being affected by slowdown. Because, the switch to FastROM is mostly just allowing the system run at its full speed and removing slowdown as a result, which, as mentioned, can also help with some loading times too, but it's not fundamentally altering the controls or anything like that. I wouldn't count on FastROM fixing any game where you feel the controls are just unresponsive or janky or whatever though. That's not a CPU speed issue; it's a designer and/or programmer issue.

thank God these classic, perfect games are now playable at last.

@-wc- Well, they were all always totally playable, and mostly still great fun regardless of any slowdown. It's much like how Thunder Force IV on Genesis is still brilliant fun to play, despite some prevalent slowdown and stuttering in many places in that classic, perfect game too. And now these games on SNES are simply playable without the [mostly] completely avoidable and unnecessary slowdown the stopped them being the best they could be. Finally, the SNES is getting to run at full speed and these titles are being done [mostly] proper justice.

@Sketcz it depends, honestly. If the game was CPU-bound during busy times then it will see an improvement: an example would be Mega Man X3. The faster CPU mode of FastROM mostly means data can be shifted from the cartridge more quickly, so it depends how much transferring of data to/from the cartridge the game does. Think of it as widening the bandwidth to/from the cartridge. In some games these patches even fix problems with the original FastROM implementation! Top work by KandoWontu.

@Sketcz best thing to do is try for yourself. I think it's worth knowing. It's possible that some games drop checking input during heavy slowdown. I recall that happening on Super Valis 4, which is not the best specimen, but I still kind of like it. On other games, inputs might not be dropped, but the unresponsive feel might be a problem.

I can tell you that FastROM made a huge difference to me for Super Ghouls & Ghosts, which is the first FastROM conversion I learned about some time ago. I absolutely hated the game specifically because of the slowdown. For others, the game was playable, but not for me. With the performance improvement, I started enjoying the game a lot more right away which persisted throughout the game. It was vastly improved and felt much more responsive in terms of control. These patches won't speed up a game that is designed to play slowly, which may apply to Hook, but games that suffer speed drops will see big improvement.

I randomly stumbled upon these FastROM hacks a couple of days ago while looking for something else(improvements for the first Mega Man Zero). I saw on romhacking main page that Natsume's Ninja Warriors had a featured hack and had to check because that's a top-five game on the SNES for me. Absolutely love that game. I saw that it was a FastROM hack and that a whole bunch of games have been and are in the process of being converted. I'm quite excited to try these. Ninja Warriors doesn't really NEED it as it never had bad slowdown, but just the idea of it running even better sounds wonderful. One game in which I always wanted to see slowdown reduced is Pocky & Rocky, also by Natsume and it's also there. Might actually make the game harder, but whatever. Wild Guns also has a patch.

Every so often, I look around to see if any more FastROM and other speed patches have come along. Discovering these this week was a wonderful surprise. This is great!

@sdelfin And more to come

It's kind of ironic: much of the infamously slow SNES's reputation is not because it was actually slow, but because it had to be underclocked to properly handle the cheap cartridges. Run it at stock speed, and things don't look so bad!

Weaponlord is a game that I never figured had a huge issue with slowdown or lag. The controls being so weird was my main gripe with it. Maybe I should try the fastrom version, and see if the experience is better with it.

Definitely wanna try Rock n' Roll Racing. Still one of my favorite racing games of all time.

The speedup is probably not 33%. That's not how SNES games work. A lot of CPU time in games is spent just waiting for the main CPU to sync with the PPU.

The bigger difference would be rewriting inefficient code in games.

One of the games is the USA version of ActRaiser. Shocking thing is that, if one were to revert the 50hz sound, the European version of ActRaiser would actually surpass the USA version in content. The difficulty selection and arcade "Action" mode were exclusive to that version.

@KingMike Its not 33% faster, its UP TO 33% faster. It is still limited by the rest of the system's clock cycles and 50/60fps. Its still only ~1MHz more so its not as dramatic as SuperFX 21mhz, but its still pretty significant.

@Christopher_Jones I hear from someone who's pretty good at weaponlord that he can actually pull off some of the special moves he couldn't before!

@KingMike The US version has professional mode which is arcade mode. You have to beat it first though if I recall.

@Synthatron_Prime As I understand there are difference between "Professional Mode" and "Action Mode".
I've never actually finished the game to confirm Pro Mode myself, but aside from the requirement of beating the game, I read it retains your saved game HP meter but disables magic completely.
What I know is that Action, aside from being available regardless of save data, reverts your HP to the default 8, adds a powerup to raise max HP, adds magic-swapping power-ups also gives extra lives for points. I recall it also defaults to five lives instead of three. However, unlike the actual arcade (NSS) version, no Continues allowed. The other unfortunate difference from arcade is that, because it was only on the home PAL version, the expected speed difference is of course in effect.

These games were trash as SlowROM. I never bothered with them as they were just so unplayable. I’m glad they’re now FastROM so I can finally enjoy them. Only took 30+ years.

@GravyThief Well, that's just as long as it took for the Genesis to finally get "Blast Processing" properly working in a single actual game, despite what Sega had everyone believing for the last 30+ years, and ultimately still with a result that's below the SNES running in standard 256-colour mode:

http://gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3341

And, let's get real for a moment: If you think games like Super Smash TV, Super Aleste, F-Zero, Rendering Ranger R2, Super Mario World, etc, were "trash" as SlowROM and "unplayable", either you're a troll who's not very good at hiding your motives or you have been doing something seriously wrong for decades.

Let's just have a second look at some of the "trash" and "unplayable" SlowROM games on SNES again:

https://youtu.be/yXMNkIK4fI0?t=173

https://youtu.be/DM9B36ZvH7M?t=223

https://youtu.be/sak--JiDnBA?t=19

https://youtu.be/Tl7D25I6yDc?t=2833

https://youtu.be/l0XtXB0fEaA?t=60

Now, to be very clear, that's just a tiny selection from tonnes of possible games I could have picked. There's plenty of brilliantly-playing SlowROM SNES games. In fact, many of them are actually some of the best games on the console and indeed the entire generation, despite running at the slower CPU speed.

FastROM simply helps improve those games that suffered the most from previously being in SlowROM.

@RetroGames I was… joking.

very cool article! would not have known about this otherwise, thanks for the info!

@RetroGames your first sentence is what i thought too, so i was surprise to see some nintendo first party games (smw! ) on the list.. Et Tu, Nintendo?

@romanista Yeah, there's honestly loads of SlowROM games, from both first and third party, and, like I said, many of them are still brilliant regardless. It shows that good design is just as important as things like optimized code and running in FastROM and stuff too. This is why I want to see a bunch of brand new AAA-quality games for SNES in 2023 and beyond, so we can see what the system is really capable of when pushed to the limits in modern times.

Interestingly, it's not even supercharging the SNES here, but just letting it run at proper 100% CPU speed finally in all these cases of games that were once stuck in SlowROM because a bunch of publishers cheaped-out and went with the lower cost cartridges that artificially throttled the console to 2.68 MHz, which is only 70% of the system's full CPU speed. So, yeah, not supercharged, but rather just the stock SNES as it should have been all along in these cases.