Vitor Vilela's Laboratory

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! 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.

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$

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

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

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

I recently published an article explaining the throughput problem, a limitation where it's directly attached to the amount of operations per second the SNES CPU can do per second and how many pixels you must draw to achieve a certain resolution + frame rate. But what about Star Fox? How many frames

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

On my last post, I asked which project should I work now. If you view the poll results, Star Fox won with 31 votes, followed by Axelay with 18 votes. Widescreen Super Mario World was the least voted option, with 3 votes only. If you saw the pictures about and my recent tweets however, I've shown tha

The latest SA-1 Pack version with MaxTile is available here: https://github.com/VitorVilela7/SA1-Pack If you have been looking on my Twitter, you probably saw the many things that SA-1 MaxTile made it possible to the Super Mario World ROM hacking scene, mostly the possibility of putting multiple gia

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

Hi! You all might have noticed that I'm been gone from all social networks lately, including Discord, Twitter, GitHub and here. I'm sorry for not publishing about that earlier, the reason for my hiatus are the following: 1) I have recently lost motivation on the SNES ROM hacking scene because of som