Tidbits about the development of the SNES
German website Nintendo-Online has conducted some research about the development of the SNES. Through their investigation, they were able to find a discover interesting facts. You can find a summary of what Nintendo-Online passed along below.
– The SNES was developed by Nintendo’s Research & Development 2 department under Masayuki Uemura, which had already been responsible for the NES.
– The buttons on the controller were originally named A, B, C and D, while the shoulder buttons were supposed to be called E and F.
– In 1988, the SNES was supposed to have 8 KB RAM. This was increased to 32 KB in mid-1989. The final console comes with 128 KB RAM.
– The main advantages the SNES had over its rivals TurboGrafx-16 and Sega Genesis were the high amount of colors displayable and Mode 7. The console’s bottleneck was its 5A22 processor, which, as already the NES’s processor, was based on the 6502 chip.
– The reason for using a modified NES processor was most likely the goal to make the SNES backward compatible. But as this feature would have increased the console’s price, Nintendo had to drop those plans.
– Instead, backward compatibility should have been made possible by the Famicom Adapter, which was basically a stripped down Famicom that you were supposed to plug into the new console to play the old 8 bit games. Although the Famicom Adapter had been publicly shown, it was never released, rendering the SNES absolutely incompatible to NES games.
– The SNES was first announced on September 9, 1987 by local newspaper Kyoto Shimbun. Announced were the consoles name, the 16 bit architecture and the planned backward compatibility. The console was supposed to retail for less than 20.000 Yen, but was finally released for 25.000 Yen.
– On November 21, 1988 Nintendo first presented the Super Famicom to the Japanese press. Instead of fully featured games, Nintendo showed mere tech demos, but also announced that Super Mario Bros. 4 and The Legend of Zelda 3 were in the making for the new console. Both games were sheduled as launch games at that time.
– The Super Famicom was supposed to launch in Juli 1989, but although the console was next to finished at this time, it was delayed to November 21, 1990.
