Early christmas for all the owners of a SD2SNES card: The team over at www.sd2snes.de just released their new firmware version 1.9.0 ready for download. Highlight in this release is for sure SA-1 support again by RedGuy.
There is obviously much more into it. Here is the summary:
- SA-1 support by RedGuy! Big thanks to RedGuy again 🙂 This was a really tight fit for the FPGA so there’s a little catch – MSU1 is not available for SA-1 games.
- Also from RedGuy comes partial SRAM detection for some known games (SuperFX & SA-1). This calculates a ROM CRC and chooses to monitor only specific regions in cartridge RAM for changes. This enables automatic saving without having to resort to periodic saving, reducing wear on the SD card.
- SNES CPU <-> PPU clock phase alignment. This is a long standing issue on a sub-CPU-cycle base inside the SNES. HDMA to certain registers can cause flickering sprite slabs to appear when CPU and PPU are out of phase after a cart-side reset (which does not reset the PPUs). This fixes the notorious flickering of characters with the giant frog attack in Chrono Trigger, sprites in Kirby Super Star, characters behind the text box in Star Ocean, and probably more. See https://github.com/RedGuyyyy/sd2snes/issues/6 for technical details.
- Added an option to always go back to menu on reset, regardless of whether it’s a short or long reset.
- LED brightness setting (16 levels)
- Added an option to choose whether you want to start a game with or without cheats enabled (of those that are marked as enabled in the YAML file). You can enable / disable them later using the L+R+Start+A / L+R+Start+B button combinations if you have in-game buttons enabled.
- Disable Satellaview emulation when a real Satellaview base unit is detected to avoid bus fighting and facilitate Satellaview development
- System Information now shows the currently effective video mode (50 or 60 Hz).
- Fixes:
- Control signal edges are detected a bit earlier, improving stability on some consoles (Github Issues)
- Fix timing of auto region patching. This should solve cross-issues with Super Scope games because they rely on the same register that is also used to read the console region.
- Fix brightness patching / limiting for games that use HDMA to alter the brightness register. (e.g. Star Fox)
- Fix an occasional imaginary access cycle carried out by the FPGA after reconfiguration. This fixes lockups when loading games with dedicated FPGA files, i.e. SuperFX, SA-1, OBC-1.
- Fix SuperCIC pair mode entry for consoles with ≤ 3.072MHz CIC clock (notably GPM revisions). (Github Issue)
- S-RTC register state is reset when the console is reset.
Source: SD2SNES Blog
