28 years later, hacker fixes rampant slowdown on Gradius III

[dlevere]

Original SA-1 enhancement chip leads to 2-3x speed improvement on real SNES hardware.

Many gamers of a certain age remember the early 90's disappointment of buying the SNES version of hit arcade shmup Gradius III.

In magazine screenshots, the game's huge, colorful sprites were a sight to behold, comparable to the 1989 arcade original. In action, though, any scene with more than a handful of enemies would slow to a nearly unplayable crawl on the under powered SNES hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cheKZMe-Uuo

Now, Brazilian ROM hacker Vitor Vilela has righted this nearly three decade old wrong with a ROM patch that creates a new, slowdown free version of the game for play on SNES emulators and standard hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmJyQiL9wYg

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/28-years-later-hacker-fixes-rampant-slowdown-on-snes-gradius-iii/

[Rom Raptor]

Cool! I own the original game. Will try this on emulator to see the difference. Any other SNES games that would benefit from a similar hack?

[Reaper man]

Yeah we've known about this project for about a year now. Still pretty impressive nonetheless

Personally I would be more impressed if he pulled it off without enhancement chips.

EDIT: I just realized that Rom Raptor nercobumped this thread.

Any other SNES games that would benefit from a similar hack?

I mean any SNES game that suffers from any sort of lag, sure.