Super R-Type FastROM is here

Hello! I hope you are all having a great xmas / holidays. Today I'm happy to release an exclusive FastROM patch for Super R-Type to all my patrons. The download link of the patch is available under the attachments of this post.

If you are not familiar with BPS patches and would like to know how to apply them, make sure to read my article on how to apply BPS patches on SnesLab: https://sneslab.net/wiki/How_to_apply_ROM_patches 

As a common practice I adopted recently, I'm initially creating FastROM patches for every SA-1 Root project as an experiment, to see how the games behaves in terms of performance and possible issues beforehand.

The patch is quite similar compared to Super Castlevania IV, but it's pretty notable that Super R-Type relies much more on dynamic pointers compared to the Konami game. Dynamic pointers are not FastROM friendly, because they build codepath dynamically while the game is running which often makes the enemies jump away from the FastROM benefits.

As you can see on the screenshot, sections marked as yellow is code effectively using FastROM, while the code marked as blue is only partially using the FastROM benefits, because the code highlighted as orange loads a dynamic pointer that is pretty hard to track on. They are used mostly by enemies to run their code when they are present on the screen. Inclusive, SA-1 Root often relies on dynamic remaps (data bank remapping at real time) for dealing with "dynamic pointers's pointers".

According from my initial analysis, the effectiveness of a FastROM patch on Super R-Type is quite low, really being needed a SA-1 version to remove the entire slowdown. You will probably not see many differences between the original game and the FastROM version in terms of speed. Still, if you are on the hype for the SA-1 version and would like to have a bit of fun with a game running at 3.58 MHz, make sure to check up the patch and comment below this post your thoughts about the patch and expectations for the SA-1 release! ^^

Stay tuned in here and on my Twitter for more news about Super R-Type SA-1 Root conversion!