Vitor Vilela's Laboratory

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.

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

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$

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

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

The Super Nintendo master clock is 21.48 MHz (derived from 21.477272727272...). Normally, everything you do from the SNES derives from the clock speed. Super FX speed is 21.48 MHz. SA-1 speed is 10.74 MHz, which is 21.48 MHz / 2. FastROM speed is 3.58 MHz, which is 21.48 MHz / 6, etc. Let's say I wo

One concern regarding my improvement patches is that sometimes they make the enhanced games run too fast. Although some people defend that it's the way that the game was originally intended to play, other people argue that it ruins part of the gameplay, by making it excessively too hard and the devs

If you are curious how Race Drivin is currently running on the SA-1 chip, this is your chance! The file download is available under attachments of this post. Make sure to apply the patch over the USA version of Race Drivin. Currently, the game plays really well and it's much better compared to the S

When I initially analyzed Race Drivin, I said on Twitter that it was impossible to convert the game to SA-1, because the game would simply skip frames and make them so fast that it would be unplayable. However, after hearing the game had different ports and each one ran at different frame rates (the

Finally got all glitches fixed and Super R-Type for SA-1 Root is now done! The download link is available under the attachments. A few fun facts: It took about 60-70 hours of work to finish it. It uses SA-1 parallelism to ensure maximum performance. Unlike other SA-1 releases that required 128 KB of

Hello! If you have some free time though this week and you are the Super R-Type hero, this post is for you! I need two or more beta testers to actively test Super R-Type SA-1, possibly several test ROMs, against bsnes-plus v05. It's important to you know most of the details from Super R-Type, since

Hello y'all! After a long hiatus on releases, I'm glad for releasing a new version of SA-1 Pack for Super Mario World. As you know, the SA-1 Pack aims both for SNES players interested in playing an optimized gameplay and ROM hackers interested in using SA-1 on their work. SA-1 Pack v1.35 bring a few

It happened: I'm back! After months of hiatus, I have decided to return into the ROM hacking community, now exclusively focused on SA-1 Pack/Root content. The COVID-19 screwed up São Paulo, my city which I live (it just registered 1,000 deaths today and over 20,000 cases) and I'm been into home offi

I'm aware that I could not make any article dedicated for you, my patrons, this month and I'm sorry for that. I could not finish nor update my most recent projects and that I ended up leaving a gap though this month. But the good news is that December we will likely get at least two updates and one

And finally it's out! Thank you everyone that tested and supported me for this new challenge called Contra III! Download: https://github.com/VitorVilela7/SA1-Root Contra III (SNES) - Original x SA-1 Comparison (YouTube)

The first alpha version of the Contra III SA-1 is finally out! You can download here: https://sneslab.net/sa1/Contra-III-Alpha-1.bps - This initial release is exclusive for all of my patrons! Remember that this is a BPS patch! If you would like to learn more how they work and how to patch them, chec

On this Sunday, September 1, I'm gonna get live at 14:00 GMT-3 for finishing everything else for getting the SA-1 version of Contra III done. I will code, test, talk about current issues/challenges and once we get everything working, I'm gonna release an alpha patch exclusive for all patrons subscri

But the SA-1 chip made the main villian so strong that is imposible to beat it right now! Jokes apart, first of all I would like to give an apology for not having a new post here for a while. As you might know, most of the my work is done via researchment and studies, which makes them hard to get in

I have four main activities that I do during my available time. I noticed lately that I'm doing a bit of everything which is not very good -- without focus I end up doing producing less than the normal. For that reason I would like to have the opinion of you people to know which one I should give a

Since my SA-1 Collection post I got a few game tracing submissions and had progress in other ones. Here is my results so far: Contra III: 100% - Difficulty: 3/5 (same difficulty as Gradius III) F-Zero: 100% - Difficulty: 2/5 (same difficulty as Super Mario World) Goof Troop: 90.8% - Difficulty: to b

I got a full SA-1 TLR friendly disassembly format of F-Zero in three hours using my experiment disassembly system which I teased on my Twitter on the other day. WOAH! I pretty much took three months for doing the same job on Gradius III. I was talking with Catador, one of the main F-Zero ROM hackers

slidelljohn discovered the cause of the little lag that the game still had after beating a boss. It wasn't that the graphics dissolving effect was too heavy for SA-1, but the code was executing twice: one time on the SA-1 CPU and another time on the SNES CPU. It was a programming error on my part be

When I released the Gradius III SA-1 mod, some people asked me why did I name it SA-1 Root and not SA-1 Pack. The explanation is reasonably logic: the Super Mario World SA-1 version was made thinking on the ROM hacking, not for playing. It would not make sense releasing a SA-1 version of Gradius III

Honestly, I never thought that the Gradius III SA-1 conversion would end up having a so great reception. I have already converted Super Mario World in 2012 to SA-1 and overall the public was another: ROM hackers. And they were more concerned about the possible compatibility issues over the benefits