U.N. Squadron (エリア88) new NO SLOWDOWN FastROM Beta is here! SNES
1,790
Published 2021-07-24
Vitor Vilela just released his FastROM beta hack of (arguably) the finest shmup on the SNES: U.N. Squadron (エリア88).
The game is a Capcom masterpiece, merging tight shooter gameplay with RPG elements, such as earning money, grinding, upgradeable aircraft, selectable characters and configurable weapons systems.
The only downside is it suffered from slowdown, which plagued early games at the time as Nintendo finalized the system with an underpowered CPU - something the game developers didn't expect. Gradius III, Super R-Type and U.N. Squadron all suffered greatly from this.
Thanks to Vitor, he's reverse engineered the game and applied a FastROM hack so the game almost never loses a frame. I certainly never noticed it. Consequently, the game is more difficult without the game slowing down when lots of enemies and bullets are on the screen.
Support Vitor Vilela:
www.patreon.com/vitorvilela
MiSTeR system, 8BitDo M30 2.4g controller, Elgato HD60 1080p @ 60fps
All Comments (14)
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One of my favorite games. Thanks for sharing! Just subscribed.
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Very interesting, a huge amount of the slowdown has gone. The slow SNES CPU was blamed for the problems in so many early games, yet in many cases as we see here, it was the cheaper slower ROM chips that were just as much the culprit!
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I think companies like Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, etc, should re-release all these SNES games that originally used SlowRom as new physical FastROM versions now in 2021 that still play on the original SNES, alongside similarly updated digital versions of them too. I guarantee there would be enough retro gamers, collectors and modern gamers on systems like the Switch to make this absolutely worth the money. In some cases they could even go the whole hog and update to use chips like the SA-1 to absolutely make sure any/all slowdown was eliminated. I know I would certainly be well interested in that.
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The slowdown is reduced a lot, but FastROM is not enough to eliminate it from this game completely. The huge boss fights still have it - the ground carrier, the battleship, the submarine, and the final boss all still exhibit some slowdown. It's more like brief foot dragging though, not the half-speed slogs that the unmodified ROM drags you through. Given how much less effort a FastROM conversion is than an SA-1 hack, this is still a huge win.
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I'd like to see other early SNES games receive the fastROM hack. The original Ganbare Goemon, Thunder Spirits, Magic Sword, Super EDF, Raiden Trad and others. It would be interesting to see what the difference would be.
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21:31 I'm kinda curious as to how that submarine is being rotated as it jumps out the water, if it's using column scrolling on one of the backgrounds via Mode 2 or something else.
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It is the video about "reflections" of power-up!
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Do you know where is the secret extra life? the icon is the pilot's helmet
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UN Squadron never had much slowdown most of the time so I don't understand what the big fuss is here. I also fail to understand what a slow ROM has to do with slowdown in the game. Wouldn't that only affect the time it takes for a level or boss to load? I doubt if this game is constantly accessing new data from the cartridge while you play through the level.
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Was axebox using turbo 😂😂🤣😁😃😄😅😀😆😉😎🤔😯🤐😛😜😝😲😮😣🤪😬😰😨😧😦🤫🤫🤫🤫🧐
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You didn't play on 'gamer' mode hot shot, it's a step above hard.
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I don't notice a difference. I never noticed slowdown to begin with.
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