Moving Forward with my SNES projects

Monday, January 11, 2021

Now that some time has passed, and things have settled after dropping my Switch projects, it's time to think about whats next.

As I look around at my projects and notes, and consider what its the most interesting/fun thing to work on. Well, I'm a bit all over the place for the moment. I immediately dove into past projects I found enjoyment in purely for myself, those being the Game Code list and SFROM Tool. These I enjoyed because the work was useful to others, but there was no demand for them that made me feel pressed. I could work on things at my own pace, and take the time to have fun doing so. I find figuring out the SFROM format details interesting in a similar fashion to solving puzzles like sudokus. Reverse engineering for what I do is a lot of evaluating the data I know to fill in the blanks enough of that which I don't so after the process of elimination, what remains is clear.

There's not a lot left for work on the game code list. But still... I made some new conclusions. In my first days back working on this stuff I deduced that 0x111C belongs to Super Turriacan 2 E-PAL, and 0x1125 belongs to Power Instinct J-NTSC. I can't say I'm 100% certain, thus I cant label them as "verified". But for me the evidence is fairly strong. The short of it is, the de-compiled code suggests these.

As always, with this list seeing further progress, what remains ahead is going to be that much more difficult to solve. While it may look like more, there are about 12 remaining game codes that are valid to the emulators. 4 more that may or may not be valid, and at least 2 or more that are unused but probably reserved. On the other side, there are about 19 known games that should, or may have a spot on the list.

I can make some guesses based on available data. But for the moment I'm unable to work towards verifying anything more. At the most, as mentioned in my christmas post, maybe DQ 1+2 and 3 at some point.

But for now, 2 new ones to this level of confidence is nice to see!