SNES Classic & Switch: Update

Monday, September 30, 2019

I was waiting for the Switch's SNES Online app to come out for a while. I new it was going to bring some new answers/verifications based on lists found in the files. Mainly I was waiting to get Stunt Race FX/Wild Trax verified, as I already deduced their ID's and posted them as guesses a while ago. I was right!

We got some new ID's too. Sadly, those ID are unlikely to work any different than 0x0000 on the SNESC. But its still worth documenting.

It took me a bit to get around to trying to solve the Switches new version of the .sfrom format, but it's coming along. Code was found that alluded to SNESC format .sfroms being supported, which would be good because all my current work would translate to the switch. But attempts to use them failed.

Focusing on the switch .sfroms for the time being, we ran into a roadblock of the fact that it just seemed like only the PresetIDs for the games officially released on the switch worked. That would render my PresetID list work completely useless for the switch.


Well, after a couple weeks of trying various things, I finally got my hands dirty and poked around the asm myself. After a few tries... I finally got a hack working to enable all other Preset ID's! And incidently, that same hack also happened to get SNESC .sfrom working!

Now for SNESC type .sfrom's made with my tool, there should only be 2 stipulations. Don't use PCM audio, and make sure the first byte of the Product ID is a capital W in the Advanced window. There's no evidence to suggest that PCM audio is supported anymore. It's been completely dropped from the official ROMs. And there appears to be a new check in the code to check that character of the Product ID. That was not a thing on the SNESC.

Whats more, SFA2 and even my custom Star Ocean patch have already proven to run on the switch app now. Pics courtesy of user RadMcFist of the GBATemp forums.

As for the hack. I've posted the code on a thread there. I'll likely have to be updating it from time to time as the app is updated itself. And I may try to improve upon it, so there no point in posting it here. Maybe I'll figure out a better home page to post it later. Like on my unofficial WIP release page.

I'll likely ad a disclaimer to the sfrom Tool page too for switch users.