Vitor Vilela's Laboratory

Hello all, again! Super Probotector, the European version of Contra III, with SA-1 support is now available for download, as early access and pre-release. This version, just like the Contra III SA-1, removes all slowdown from the game and reduces the loading time. With this one, all three versions o

Hi, everyone! Before it goes public on YouTube next Tuesday, here is a new video: Contra III, Contra Spirits and Super Probotector side by side, every difference. While working on the Japanese and European SA-1 versions, I had to look at what changed between them, and this let me learn a lot more ab

Hi! Very short post, but SimCity SA-1 beta 3 is now available for download. All features were finished and now it's mostly bug fixing and polishment work. New features since last beta: Languages: pick English, Français, Deutsch or Nihongo (Japanese). The language data uses the original games as sour

Hello, everyone! I'd like to share a progress update on all projects and make an important announcement. Older members may remember that I used to make "here what is coming in the next 2-3 months" posts (like this one from July 2021) sharing the status update of all projects and what I was planning

Hello everyone. Contra Spirits, the Japanese version of Contra III, with SA-1 support is now available for testing. No more slowdown, much faster loading, and the bombs last a bit longer now (see below for details). For who remember when Contra III (USA) SA-1 was released, I thought Contra Spirits (

Picture was made by my wife :)Hi! This is a very short post. I'm looking for testers for SimCity and Super Metroid. SimCity SA-1 - Multiple language support For SimCity, even though I already did a few beta release cycles, I'm looking for testers to validate the multiple language feature. Besides En

Hi, everyone! Two things today. First, Super R-Type SA-1 is officially out for all three versions: American, European and Japanese! It is part of SA-1 Root v1.9, download it here. Thank you to everyone who tried the European and Japanese betas here first. Second, before it goes public on YouTube nex

Hi, everyone! Happy to share that the Japanese Super R-Type now runs with the SA-1 patch too, so the slowdown is gone from this version as well. Back in 2020, when I released the American patch (you can download here - open for everyone), I looked at the Japanese version and gave up: there were too

Hi, everyone! Happy to share the first game of the SA-1 Regional project, the one I promised on the announcement post: Super R-Type SA-1 now works with the European version. If you never saw this patch before, it removes all the slowdown present on the original game and drastically reduces the loadi

Hi, everyone! I'd like to share a side project that I always wanted to work in the past and finally I got the opportunity to put into practice: bring the SA-1 patches to the European and Japanese versions of the games. Why the SA-1 patches were (mostly) USA only When I did the initial SA-1 conversio

Hi, everyone! Just a little post asking for your opinions and thoughts about the Patreon as platform. Long-time supporters are aware that when I used to be active here, Quips weren't a thing yet. I saw that they're apparently intended for quick updates, and I believe the main benefit is the more gra

Happy to share that the new SimCity SA-1 version is available for download. Just like the first beta, beta 2 is currently available exclusively for patrons (consider supporting if you're not already!). Beta 1 remains available for everyone. In summary: the SNES Mouse now works on all screens, additi

Hi everyone! It has been a long time since my last post here. First of all, I want to sincerely apologize for my long absence and thank you so much for sticking around to read this. A lot has changed over the past few years in my life, my engineering career, and across the retrogaming scene. However

Hello everyone! My SA-1 ROM hacks are known mostly as performance improvement patches. Games that used to run poorly either with slowdown (Gradius III, Super R-Type) or low frame rate (Race Drivin') are transformed into games that runs with much better performance thanks to the 10.74 MHz base clock.

Hello everyone! Hope you all are fine. Writing this post after a long time without activity brings me mixed feelings: mixed because while I'm happy to write once again to Patreon, I feel very sad and awkward for being inactive for a so long period. Health: some surgeries and the fight against obesit

Hi! This is the part 1 of my monography "IMPORTANCE OF EMULATION FOR HARDWARE PRESERVATION", which I used for getting my bachelor degree at computer engineering. This part focuses on the definition of emulation, the difference between emulation and simulation, and the importance of preserving hardwa

After two years, Race Drivin' SA-1 continues to be one of my favorite SA-1 versions. I also made a FastROM version of it, but I believe I never had the change to release it to everyone before. For who don't remember, Race Drivin' ran at average 4.77 FPS and had a frame buffer capped at 12 FPS (so ev

Hi! This is the part 2 of my monography "IMPORTANCE OF EMULATION FOR HARDWARE PRESERVATION", which I used for getting my bachelor degree at computer engineering. This part focuses on reverse engineering techniques, different emulation methodologies and the challenges of system emulation. The part 1

Hi! This is the part 1 of my monography"IMPORTANCE OF EMULATION FOR HARDWARE PRESERVATION", which I used for getting my bachelor degree at computer engineering. This part focuses on the definition of emulation, the difference between emulation and simulation, and the importance of preserving hardwar

Hi! First of all, I hope you all had excellent holidays. 2023 is finally here and I personally I'm excited for this year. For who wasn't aware, 2022 I was very busy for several reasons, with the main reason being the final activities of my computer engineering bachelor degree. Thankfully, everything

Hi. More good news! After fixing Gradius III and Super R-Type, which you can download the pre-release here, Contra III - The Alien Wars - with SA-1 chip support has been updated to work with real hardware too. I remember that unlike Gradius and Super R-Type, which some people successfully managed to

Hi everyone! Hope everything is okay. As some might be aware, some of my SA-1 patches doesn't seem to work with specific SA-1 cartridges. The reason seemed unknown so far, but recently Jonas Quinn caught my attention to the fact that apparently my patches attempts writing to I-RAM before it's "allow

Hi! For sharing more information about the SA-1 enhancement chip, what are the expectations for the following years and the possibilities of the co-processor, I'm making a small series of articles talking about the current state of the SA-1 ROM hacking. If you have any suggestions about this series,

Hi! It's been a while since I wrote the last post here - for the past months I'm been more busy than usual on my university and in addition, I was having some difficulty in adapting Super Metroid to the SA-1 memory map - which not just I had to remap the RAM memory, but also the ROM and SRAM memory

Hi! 2021 was a great year... and challenging too. I think the first semester was completely amazing. We got Super R-Type & Race Drivin' SA-1 patches which shown what amazing things you can do with the SA-1 chip. We also got many FastROM patches, with the ones made by me being Axelay, F-Zero and U.N.

Finally after a long time investing hours disassembling each block, sorting out what's code and what's data and figuring out the processor modes I'm happy to announce that the Super Metroid is now fully disassembled and ready to be processed. This took much more time than I thought. The disassembly

Hi! I'm aware you all have noticed an activity decline over my Patreon and this has a direct correlation of the current on-going projects: Super Metroid SA-1 (currently focused) and Super Mario World Widescreen. As reported on my last progress update, Super Metroid is still being a huge project and

Hi! I have not been able to share much updates lately - I often forget that most of my work is programming and reverse engineering based and sometimes even if you are doing a lot of work you usually don't have anything to share since you are building new projects from scratch. That's the situation f

For who missed, I recently released a test version of U.N. Squadron with FastROM support. It increases the game internal speed from 2.68 MHz to 3.58 MHz. I have received some positive feedback from the work so far and I would like to know your thoughts about the patch. Is FastROM sufficient for U.N.

Hi! I'm happy to share the beta version of the FastROM (3.58 MHz) patch for U.N. Squadron. This patch is part of the SA-1 Root conversion of the game for understanding how the game works and to validate if the disassembly is correct. This patch will make the game up to 33% faster compared to the 2.6

Hi! I'm happy to share with you all the release candidate version of SMW Widescreen v1.10. This version adds support for 2:1 screens (with PAR enabled - SMW Extrawide), 16:9 screens (with PAR disabled - SMW Extrawide and enabled - SMW Widescreen) and 16:10 (with PAR disabled - SMW Widescreen). This

This publication was originally planned to be done around 10 days ago, but it had to be postponed by personal reasons and because of the recent events. Apologies for anyone who was waiting for the Roadmap post. This roadmap normally contains projects which can be released on July, August or Septembe

Now that Super Mario World Widescreen was released I would like to hear what are your current interests for the next months. This is important for having an idea about the expectations of all patrons. If possible, please pick at least one option. If none of the options interests you, please send a c

As promised on the first beta thread, today I'm releasing the 2nd beta patch of SMW Widescreen. Thank you everyone who played and tested the first beta version. I got a lot of feedback and some issues were improved or fixed compared to the previous version. Here is a summary of changes compared to t

Finally after a long time, almost 5,000 lines of code, 100 KB of ASM files and many days improving the game I'm happy to bring the first beta version of the game. This is an exclusive download for patrons. Thank you all for the support! Hope you all enjoy. A few important notes: This version is made

The rare SA-1 cartridge which was dumped and made available for everyone and sent to me - for further researchment about the SA-1 chip - just reached Brazil. However, unlike the Super FX cartridge which I just had to pay the shipment fee - R$ 15 - this time they figured out the object is worth USD$

I'm been reflecting myself about what I'm been doing and working lately. The more I think about the currently work in progress SNES projects, the more confident I feel about my future. I really love what I do and everything we have achieved together so far. Before the pandemic started, I barely had

Good news! As everyone might know, while I'm doing Super Mario World Widescreen (which is very nearby completion, by the way! -- I wanna the final version out before my birthday, which is June 9); I'm also looking for potential candidates for getting a SA-1 or FastROM conversion. U.N. Squadron is on

Hi! I know some people are pretty excited for SMW Widescreen, either for playing it or for looking for the next SA-1 related projects once SMW is done. I have initially planned to finish everything on May 31 (around 4 days from this post). I will work intensively for getting this within May 31, but

This took a bit more time than I wanted since I was focused on the current projects, but I have commented every single comment on Brainstorm Time, so take a look if you haven't already :D -- I took notes about all games commented and I made a compilation list of games mentioned on the posts (you can

Hi! Thank you for everyone who provided feedback to me, either directly or though the comments on the last feedback thread. I've annotated the mentioned points, which I will later make a post pointing some of the valid concerns I received though the process. Today I would like to hear from you what

On March, Forest of Illusion, a Twitter account designed for "Preserving Nintendo's History", posted a tweet about a SA-1 demonstration cartridge being available on eBay for acquiring. The cartridge was undumped at that time and shown two mysterious demos, which the first demo suggested a comparison

Hi! If you are reading this post, it means you are one of my patrons. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you once again for supporting Vitor's Laboratory. Your support is always welcome and important for keeping up with more SNES related projects. Every three months, I would like to hear

Good news! After around 25 days without updates, I just receive a message from Correios (the brazilian USPS equivalent delivery service) that my package just arrived my country and I won't have to pay any import taxes, only the mandatory international shipping fee which is R$ 15 (about US$ 3). The S

How are Vitor Vilela's projects going? This post is a summary of which projects are work in progress, which projects has updates planned and which projects are on the initial phrase (which means they will be worked on soon!) The roadmap will be monthly updated for keeping track of everything on Vito

Hi! I'm glad to share with you all the FastROM patch of F-Zero! Although F-Zero does not have many slowdown occurrences compared to other games, there's a few spots where slowdown can occur, in particular intensive tracks where you can end up seeing more than 4 vehicles at the same time. The patch w