A hacker has sped up Race Drivin' for SNES and a few other games

March 12, 2021, 06:06 Mikhail Sudakov ред.

If you love Super Nintendo consoles, you've probably either heard of the SA-1 chip or spent a lot of time playing games that use it - like Kirby Super Star, Super Mario RPG or Kirby's Dream Land 3.

SA-1 was vastly superior to the standard 5A22 processor used by the SNES, so the games adapted for it boasted, among other things, an increased frame rate and lack of brakes in particularly difficult scenes. No wonder - its clock frequency is three times higher than the 5A22 (and they work in parallel, which can give a fourfold increase in speed), the RAM is also faster, there are mathematical functions like multiplication and division, there are additional modes of direct access to memory, and so on and so forth.

So, it's no wonder that someone - specifically Brazilian hacker Vitar Vilele - had the great idea to start modding SNES games to add SA-1 support and thus significantly speed them up. He started with Gradius III, releasing a patch that eliminated all the brakes, especially on the overloaded level with bubbles. Fans of the game and console loved it, and demanded a sequel. Vitor didn't get stubborn and continued the work, calling his project SA-1 Root.

To date, the hacker has modified exactly four games, which we will now briefly describe. Somewhere the difference with the original is more noticeable, somewhere - less. In the case of Race Drivin', for example, it's just heaven and earth - how much faster the game is from the patch. On the way, by the way, modification Star Fox, although not entirely clear how exactly Vitor going to improve it, because it uses the Super FX chip from Argonaut. Well, let's wait and see.

You can follow the news of SA-1 Root on twitter or on GitHub, where he puts out patches. In principle, modify the game is very simple - download the original ROM, download the patch and using a special program make an already corrected version. For Windows FLIPS is good, and for macOS - MultiPatch. But to save you time and effort, we've patched all roms beforehand and post them here too. No thanks.

Gradius III (Konami, 1990)

The third installment in Konami's famous scrolling shooter series. The game had very few home ports, and only one of them was released almost simultaneously with the original, in 1990. Yes, we're talking about the SNES version, which not only added the ability to continue the game after finishing all the lives (from the arcade version this familiar thing was removed for some reason), but also added a fair amount of brakes, which are especially noticeable on the "level with bubbles.

The patch removes all the brakes, reduces loading time, and at the same time makes the game noticeably harder. After all, now the game does not slow down in particularly difficult scenes and runs at normal speed, and on the screen sometimes there is such a hell of a mess of enemy ships, unfriendly creatures and shots that every split second counts.

References: download patch, download patched game, GitHub.

Super R-Type (Irem, 1991)

At its core, this is R-Type II, a beautiful, complex and very playable sequel to Irem's legendary scrolling shooter. But when the game was transferred to SNES, they added new levels and new enemies, and took away the D from the title (evidently, because the first part wasn't released on SNES or NES) and added the usual prefix "Super" to it.

Of course, there were slowdowns in especially busy scenes, with what the SA-1 patch fights. And at the same time - removes the slightest delay in loading.

References: download patch, download patched game, GitHub.

Contra III: The Alien Wars (Konami, 1992)

The sequel to Konami's hurricane shooter doesn't need much acceleration, but the patch makes it perfectly smooth. Also the loading time of the levels is significantly reduced, and the table of records and settings can now be saved. On the European version, which is called Super Probotector: Alien Rebels, on the Japanese one called Contra Spirits, as well as on the beta version walking around the Internet the patch, of course, will not work.

References: download patch, download patched game, GitHub.

Race Drivin' (Atari Games, 1992)

A fully three-dimensional race from Atari Games, a sequel to the more famous Hard Drivin'. The developers emphasized "realistic" car behavior, which they did not succeed too much. However, on gaming machines Race Drivin' looks good, although the frame rate from time to time noticeably sags.

As usual, attempts to port the game to home systems have had very variable success. The Saturn, PlayStation and MS-DOS versions are played quite decently and smoothly, but the ports to weaker platforms such as the Atari ST, Amiga, Mega Drive and SNES can't boast anything of the sort.

The SNES port is the least lucky - without a patch the game looks like a natural slideshow, and fps fluctuate around 4-5 fps. The patch drastically improves the situation, raising fps to unashamed and stable 30. It could have been more, but Vitor added a frame rate limitation so that the game always runs at a constant speed, neither speeding up nor slowing down on and off. In short, an unplayable embarrassment turned into a normal, even entertaining 3D game.

References: download patch, download patched game, GitHub.