Known Issues
Developed since 2012, one of the biggest SA-1 Pack challenges is to deal with potential emulation issues, because of the chip complexity and the so little known, accurate information about the SA-1 system.
Along that, there is always some issues that is from the SA-1 Pack itself and needs to be corrected. This document will attempt to list some potential issues the patch will present on emulators as well on real consoles.
For consistency, only issues from latest version of each emulator will be listed, with rare exceptions.
(!): Issues caused by an incorrect behavior of the SA-1 Pack, not from emulator/console.
sd2snes
- (!) The console has some slight PPU scanline glitch below status bar during mode 7 bosses.
- The SA-1 CPU has some speed inconsistencies. The CPU runs slight slower (~9.63 MHz) during ROM access and runs faster than normal on I-RAM access (~13.76 MHz).
Real SA-1 cart
- (!) The console has some slight PPU scanline glitch below status bar during mode 7 bosses.
bsnes
bsnes refers to the SNES emulation part of higan.
- On the older versions of bsnes (0.7x, probably 0.8x as well), variable length bit processing does not get affected by the Super MMC registers, making impossible to access the last 4 MB of the ROM though the SA-1 ROM bit stream feature. Although fixed on the newer versions, people unfortunately still uses older versions of the emulator and can be affected by this bug.
- 256 kB BW-RAM is not supported unless if the user writes an explicit custom mapper (BML/XML mapper).
Snes9x
- Since version 1.56, the SA-1 CPU is 12% faster than the nominal 10.74 MHz clock. It's clocked at ~12.01 MHz instead.
- SA-1 CPU is affected by the W-RAM refreshes.
- SA-1 CPU is wrongly paused during SNES DMA.
- SA-1 CPU is wrongly paused during H-DMA.
- Virtual Bitmap BW-RAM area (
$60-$6F
) can only access the first 64 kB of the BW-RAM.
- Virtual BW-RAM mapping (
$6000-$7FFF
) can only map the first 64 kB of the BW-RAM.
- For SA-1 ROMs larger than 4 MB, Snes9x may wrongly swap the upper 4 MB with the lower 4 MB.
- Does not lock W-RAM accesses.
- Does not support 256 kB BW-RAM.
- Probably... more coming.
ZSNES
- The SA-1 CPU is 42% slower than the nominal 10.74 MHz clock. It's clocked at ~6.18 MHz instead.
- Random crashes and freezes are often common, with an unknown reason for that.
- It's not possible to execute code on I-RAM nor BW-RAM. Applies to both SA-1 CPU and SNES CPU. To workaround, code must be placed and executed on the W-RAM.
- There is no Character Conversion support, with the exception from the one that Super Mario RPG uses.
- Has partial SA-1 IRQ support. Often SA-1 IRQs conflicts with PPU and H-/V-IRQs.
- Can drop frames out of sudden depending of the code executed on the SNES CPU.
- Does not lock access to any of the SNES registers. SA-1 can even DMA to the VRAM.
- Does not generate IRQ after SA-1 DMA execution.
- Does not support 256 kB BW-RAM.
- Does not support 8 MB ROMs.
- The first 128 kB on the last 2 megabytes on 6 MB ROMs is unusable because ZSNES uses it as an actual memory and for other tables.
- The H-Blank flag from bit 6 of $4212 does not work correctly.
- And more coming.