Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
Summary
One of the exceptional characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. The simplest PCB we will look at today, Street Fighter Alpha 2 ships with a lot of ROM in U1 (4 MiB) and the DD1 to decompress assets on the fly. The DSP offers instructions such as fast 16-bit multiplication, inverse, sin/cos projection, vector size, rotation and so on which were obviously paramount to program the HDMA and update the 3D view in Mode 7[21]. While introducing bug fixing and improving the process, the chip behavior was slightly altered which resulted in planes in Pilot Wings demo crashing into the ground (as unveiled by Foone[22]). A data decompression chip by Epson, used in three games: Tengai Makyou Zero, Momotaro Dentetsu Happy, and Super Power League 4 which also has real-time clock capability.