Byuu is one of my hacker heroes. He's passionate, opinionated, and dedicated. The steps taken to map out the SNES, and make bsnes accurate makes it one of my favorite non-library open source projects. I highly recommend checking out his emulation articles on his site[1], and also his piece on ars [2].
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
While not obvious by the headline, the reason for acquiring them was to make bsnes better. The reason for selling them is he's done with what he needed them for on the project.
Late weekend means different stories make the front page.
As other people have mentioned the use of these carts was not to collect (which could lead to interesting discussion about collecting) but to help with programming an precise emulator. There has been previous discussion about that emulator; and about whether it's better to have something that just plays the game or something that exactly models how the games would play on the real hardware / firmware.
I'd gently agree that this article isn't interesting to me. But it's more interesting than a bunch of stuff on HN.
Wow, that's incredible! Major props to byuu for doing this in the quest for better emulation. Wish I could justify the cash to pick this up, though it does make me think about picking up an SNES again.
My biggest non-purchase regret was when a friend going off to college offered to sell me his SNES and ~150 games for $150 (about 50 games were Japanese superfamicom carts, including all the DBZ, DQ, and FF RPGs).
I have my old NES, and my wife has her old Sega Genesis, and we spend almost as much time playing those as our newer games.
God, what a great system that was. I was 11 when that thing came out, and after seeing just how great the quality jump was from the NES to SNES (and my half-remembered, dust-covered Atari before that), it suddenly became clear to me just how good video games were going to get in the future.
It was a lesson in Moore's Law that even an 11 year old could understand.
What's really interesting -- and what most people don't understand about pre-5th gen consoles (Playstation, N64, etc) -- is that cartridges weren't just physical containers for code, but contained their own logic. When you have a disc, it's just a storage mechanism, but a cartridge back in the NES and SNES days had a fair amount of power over the functioning of the system. Several cartridges contained ARM chips, in fact, and boosted the computing power of the console tremendously; this sort of thing is why the 3rd and 4th gen consoles were able to last for so long.
NES games were produced for 11 years after the console was originally released (and the console itself was produced for 20 years!) because of this flexibility; SNES games were produced 8 years after the console was released as well. Cartridges were just incredibly powerful, and I'll always miss them.
Plugged in a N64 a year or so ago. Then spent a good 10mins fiddling with and cleaning the plugs while a friend commented on my progress. At that point it dawned on us that it wasn't broken. Golden Eye and Super Mario Cart really did have graphics that were that bad - and we loved it just as much.
The N64 had a lot of texturing issues that dramatically reduced the quality from what it "should've been". The PlayStation on the other hand was great, except for the fact that textured polygons were just ridiculously slow, so most games used a lot of shaded polys, e.g. the characters in Final Fantasy 7.
Looking back, nearly all of my favorites from that generation (Tales of Destiny, Symphony of the Night, etc) were really just 2d games with higher quality sprites than the SNES. Funny how that works out.
What was the advantage of using a 64-bit processor in a consumer electronics device like the N64? Presumably addressing more than 4GB of memory was not an issue back then.
What was that scam that lit up HN last week? Pay for item. Report item as "not as described." Get reversal. Keep item?
It looks like a cool collection. I didn't know games would be worth this much. Especially considering how practically all aren't in mint condition, many have missing manuals etc.
They are not cheap, $35~ per game. They are all in boxes and some games are easy to be found and dirt cheap, some of them are probably almost impossible to find with box or at all. I remember trying to score an European Chrono Trigger with box and I was looking at $100+.
It's a good collection and everything's done, you get it all in one shipping and everything's clean and verified.
Yes, and he wasn’t really into collecting all those cartridges. As far as I understand he bought all SNES games to scan the labels on the covers and check his emulator’s accuracy.
I am neither a gamer nor a game collector. However, the size of this collection and the effort you put in to amass it are incredible.
If the only reason you want to sell this collection off is to get more money that can be invested in improving emulation for European and Japanese sets of the games, would not a KickStarter/Indiegogo campaign be a better idea?
You would get to keep your prized collection, while the emulation efforts get funded by people who would benefit from it.
It's kind of insulting that the author of this article chose "A Reddit user" as the first three words. Perhaps "BSNES creator" or "The most fanatic Super Nintendo fan on Earth"? Surely "uses reddit" is not the most interesting quality of Byuu :(
There's some 3DS people trying to get a Chinese firm to do it, and they want $20,000 just to image the chip. No actual modification work.
You need access to machines and tools worth millions. Hobbyist level techniques like nitric acid and etchand sand to stain the ROMs just doesn't work even at SNES-era complexity.
It could be done for less in bulk, the issue is supply and demand. Very, very few people paying for this kind of work combined with wild costs for equipment.
That's pretty cool. I hope someone buys it because it's dev support in a sense. I own an NES,SNES,N64 and also stuff like the CDi (yeah I wanted to complete the Zelda collection...don't those games are horrible :D)
I always enjoy plugging them in. A good game doesn't need fancy graphics in my opinion.
I remember the day we got an SNES. One of my clearest childhood memories. My brother's and I collected 24 games and it was by far our most treasured possession. Too bad I've lost nearly all my patience for games that aren't fast-paced, competitive, and multiplayer!
I found that I'd reached the same stage. If it wasn't multiplayer with the chance for competition, I couldn't get into it. If you're looking to branch out a bit though, I found just playing through co-op games with the same people I'd normally, 'train' with so to speak, was a great way to get back into the vibe of single player and non-competitive multiplayer.
Then again if you're happy with things that way, then no need to change things up.
[+] [-] georgeorwell|13 years ago|reply
http://byuu.org/articles/emulation/snes-coprocessors
The process required an electron microscope!
[+] [-] agumonkey|13 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
[+] [-] Falling3|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwill|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://byuu.org/articles/ [2] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...
[+] [-] andrewfelix|13 years ago|reply
There seems to be a rash viral digg/reddit style articles creeping onto the HN front page as of late.
[+] [-] martincmartin|13 years ago|reply
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] sageikosa|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
As other people have mentioned the use of these carts was not to collect (which could lead to interesting discussion about collecting) but to help with programming an precise emulator. There has been previous discussion about that emulator; and about whether it's better to have something that just plays the game or something that exactly models how the games would play on the real hardware / firmware.
I'd gently agree that this article isn't interesting to me. But it's more interesting than a bunch of stuff on HN.
[+] [-] debacle|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daeken|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moepstar|13 years ago|reply
I've done so half a year ago and also purchased ~35 games - Best 150€ spent in quite a while...
[+] [-] aidenn0|13 years ago|reply
I have my old NES, and my wife has her old Sega Genesis, and we spend almost as much time playing those as our newer games.
[+] [-] rpm4321|13 years ago|reply
It was a lesson in Moore's Law that even an 11 year old could understand.
[+] [-] daeken|13 years ago|reply
NES games were produced for 11 years after the console was originally released (and the console itself was produced for 20 years!) because of this flexibility; SNES games were produced 8 years after the console was released as well. Cartridges were just incredibly powerful, and I'll always miss them.
[+] [-] lostlogin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daeken|13 years ago|reply
Looking back, nearly all of my favorites from that generation (Tales of Destiny, Symphony of the Night, etc) were really just 2d games with higher quality sprites than the SNES. Funny how that works out.
[+] [-] GabrielF00|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpierre|13 years ago|reply
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...
[+] [-] bobsy|13 years ago|reply
What was that scam that lit up HN last week? Pay for item. Report item as "not as described." Get reversal. Keep item?
It looks like a cool collection. I didn't know games would be worth this much. Especially considering how practically all aren't in mint condition, many have missing manuals etc.
[+] [-] Adirael|13 years ago|reply
It's a good collection and everything's done, you get it all in one shipping and everything's clean and verified.
[+] [-] DiJu519|13 years ago|reply
This guy has his own emulator aswell.
http://byuu.org/
[+] [-] cochese|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefsucker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdqali|13 years ago|reply
I am neither a gamer nor a game collector. However, the size of this collection and the effort you put in to amass it are incredible.
If the only reason you want to sell this collection off is to get more money that can be invested in improving emulation for European and Japanese sets of the games, would not a KickStarter/Indiegogo campaign be a better idea?
You would get to keep your prized collection, while the emulation efforts get funded by people who would benefit from it.
[+] [-] paraboul|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nornagon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Irregardless|13 years ago|reply
> ... [Dr. Decapitator] was willing to do it just for the cost of the donor cartridges and supplies. This worked out to $250 per coprocessor.
Sounds like there's some room for improvement in that market. Either that or Dr. Decapitator is one extremely generous dude.
[+] [-] byuu|13 years ago|reply
There's some 3DS people trying to get a Chinese firm to do it, and they want $20,000 just to image the chip. No actual modification work.
You need access to machines and tools worth millions. Hobbyist level techniques like nitric acid and etchand sand to stain the ROMs just doesn't work even at SNES-era complexity.
It could be done for less in bulk, the issue is supply and demand. Very, very few people paying for this kind of work combined with wild costs for equipment.
[+] [-] jonknee|13 years ago|reply
http://byuu.org/articles/emulation/snes-coprocessors
It's a fascinating story.
[+] [-] kriro|13 years ago|reply
I always enjoy plugging them in. A good game doesn't need fancy graphics in my opinion.
[+] [-] staunch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bockit|13 years ago|reply
Then again if you're happy with things that way, then no need to change things up.
[+] [-] kenneth_reitz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thejad|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] valugi|13 years ago|reply
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