The Supaboy - New SNES handheld from Hyperkin

[ShakeyOwnz]

It sucks to say the Super Mario RPG barely works with my supaboy. It started up the first time I put it in, but froze shortly after. And now it starts about 1/20 times, but not without erasing all my saves.... again. *Sigh* Maybe a Japanese copy will work better?

Does anybody know of any issues with Earthbound? I don't want to pay the $100-150 unless it works like a game should.

[JSnake]

It sucks to say the Super Mario RPG barely works with my supaboy. It started up the first time I put it in, but froze shortly after. And now it starts about 1/20 times, but not without erasing all my saves.... again. *Sigh* Maybe a Japanese copy will work better?

Does anybody know of any issues with Earthbound? I don't want to pay the $100-150 unless it works like a game should.

EarthBound works perfectly fine in my experience. No increased enemies or anything.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

Does anybody know of any issues with Earthbound? I don't want to pay the $100-150 unless it works like a game should.

I don't want to say JSnake is lying, but he's definitely not correct in saying that EarthBound plays fine on the Supaboy. EarthBound employs all of its anti-piracy measures when played on a Supaboy. Expect enemy encounters to be increased by a factor of four, making the entire game an absolute grind. Just go to the part in the beginning of the game with the town gang thugs. There will be so many of them onscreen it will cause slowdown! And of course, the horrible delete your SRAM final boss.

If you want to play EarthBound, the only system that's suited for it is a real SNES or Super Famicom.

For more on the Supaboy, check out my video review. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAxAu6kx7Zg

[TKO]

Maybe he plat EB on Flashcart? There's a rom that has disabled anti-piratcy measures.

[JSnake]

I don't want to say JSnake is lying, but he's definitely not correct in saying that EarthBound plays fine on the Supaboy. EarthBound employs all of its anti-piracy measures when played on a Supaboy. Expect enemy encounters to be increased by a factor of four, making the entire game an absolute grind. Just go to the part in the beginning of the game with the town gang thugs. There will be so many of them onscreen it will cause slowdown! And of course, the horrible delete your SRAM final boss.

If you want to play EarthBound, the only system that's suited for it is a real SNES or Super Famicom.

For more on the Supaboy, check out my video review. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAxAu6kx7Zg

I'm not sure then. But I do know my EB cart works fine on my Supaboy. If your game is affected by the anti-piracy measures, you should see Spiteful Crows outside of the arcade after defeating the sharks. There are plenty of other examples where enemies appear in areas where they shouldn't. And also I was able to walk all the way from Twoson to the pencil statue in Peaceful Rest Valley without seeing a single enemy. Considering the encounter rate in Peaceful Rest Valley is typically very high in normal circumstances, I should have been seeing a shitload of enemies if the anti-piracy was engaged.

I also was not playing on a flash cart.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

does your supaboy have the horrible audio screech? You might have a different revision than the one I do. Doubtful, but possible.

[kedawa]

Why would any developer code their game to not function on clone hardware?
Clones didn't even exist when the game was programmed, and even if they did, why would they care what sort of hardware it was used on?

[Satoshi_Matrix]

Clones didn't exist, but copying devices did. At the time, there were many third party copying devices that would dump any SNES or Super Famicom game that didn't require special chips to a floppy disk and therefore allow for illegal copies, sort of the predecessor to burning CD based games.

To get around this, many later SNES games began to include anti-piracy measures into their games if they detected any latency from the lockout chip to the system. For example, this happens with Killer Instinct, Donkey Kong Country 2, Megaman 7 and many others.

In the case of EarthBound, Nintendo was heavily promoting the game, and since Final Fantasy II and III were common targets of copying devices, they wanted to ensure EarthBound wouldn't be in the similar position. So rather than refusing to boot, EarthBound would place 2-4x more enemies in EVERY AREA making the game no fun to play, and if you did manage to get your way through the whole game, you'd have your game save erased by the final boss. Nintendo: the original trollface.

[kedawa]

I see. So it does some kind of timing check, and if the result is anything other than the expected value, it sets off the anti-piracy measures. Is that about right?
I guess none of these clone systems are cycle exact.