Bismarck.Dracondria said:
»This is what I found on google but I'm sure leo has the answers
Quote:
The Super Nintendo was capeable of addressing 128 mega*bits* of space (bits vs bytes).
In reality, there was only about 117.5 megabits available that a game cartridge could use and they NEVER used close to this size because of technical limitations and cost.
The largest SNES games were 48 megabits in size, which is roughly 6 megabytes. Most games used hardware that was capable of using 32 mbit (4 megabytes) ROM chips in the cartridges. Some games used as little as 2 megabits of storage.
Super Famicom (and NES) had two "memory maps" possible which Nintendo called "MODE 20" and "MODE 21". Effectively "MODE 20" skipped one address line on the cartridge connector so the maximum memory possible for the ROM was 64 megabits. "MODE 21" allowed for the said 117.5 megabits size.
The quote calculates "117.5" megabits because the total maximum possible memory (including the 128 Kilo Bytes, not bits of RAM already inside on the console as RAM and the areas of memory allocated for the hardware registers) is 128 megabits.
But then, the sky is the limit, because on top of that already enormous ceiling one could still put extra hardware to either map more memory in or to compress data.
Most curious, Star Ocean was one of the two Super Famicom games which used the hardware graphics compression chip (S-DD1). I HAD to make myself a copy of the game with the translated rom:
That was a while ago, in 2013. I still did not play the translated copy of the game, shame on me -_-;
P.S.: The other game which used the graphics compressor chip was Street Fighter Zero(or Alpha)2.