#superdisc

Todd Osborn - “Not Too Real”

July 2016 Challenge: The Superb Heroes of SuperDisc!

Will Carrot take up the mantle of Captain America Morporkia, or become the Disc's Flaming Carrot?

Will Carcer be teaming up with the Joker? How much time does Bat-Vimes spend complaining about the nipples on his breastplate?

Would you rather draw Hulktritus or the Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed DetriThing?

Does Angua become Wolfsbane?

Should Rincewind be the Flash or Quicksilver, or simply The Runner?

It’s all up to you, True Believers! Now, let’s see those drawings!

The rules (or guidelines) are the same as before.

Remember to tag your drawings with #letsdrawdiscworld, or include a link to our Tumblr in your post. You can also send us a link to your drawing via the submit box: letsdrawdiscworld.tumblr.com/submit

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to send an ask to LetsDrawDiscworld.tumblr.com/ask

If you’re stumped for ideas, and you’ve already read this fine list by bookhobbit, you could try visiting the Discworld chat room (the password is Ridcully); there’s often several lovely creative people hanging out over there, who could offer helpful input and suggestions.

This is the splash screen from the so-called Super Disc System Cartridge. This is probably where you should be able to run any Sony SNES CD games and probably Audio CDs, as the buttons on the top of the console suggests.

SFX-100 Monitor Menu, for testing the hardware if everything works fine or not.

- Self Check: Checks each part of the hardware for diagnostic. - ADPCM: An audio compression format. I suggest that XA Audio could be supported, it was used on the CD-i (1992) and the PlayStation (1994). I should mention that CD-ROM XA is an extension of the Yellow Book standard which was made in 1991. - Communication: Could mean anything. It’s not very clear. - CXD-1800: It’s the ID of the CD interface chip. Can probably test everything about it.

Self Check Part 1.

- きほんきのう = Basic Functions (Probably the SNES hardware itself.)

- おんげんCHECK = Sound Source CHECK (should we hear audio though? I should mention the audio output isn’t working)

Self Check Part 2.

- かくちょうきのう = Extended Functions (Probably the CD player and the cartridge’s contents)

- かくちょうRAM = Extension RAM (WRAM of the cartridge?) - BACKUP RAM is maybe the CMOS RAM of the cartridge. There is indeed a battery on it. - CD-ROM DECODER sounds like the CD DSP mentioned in the last post. - CD-PLAYER I/F (I/F means Interface) should be CXD-1800.

しゅうりょうしました = Terminated. Means the Self Check is done.

NG probably means Not Good. The red color hints at a failure anyway.

You can also see “0.95″, same as the versioning on the ROM chip itself.

Here are my research about the SNES Playstation / SNES CD / SuperDisc.

First of all, aside from the CD drive part on the console, this is nothing more than your regular Super Nintendo. No glorified chips that adds power to the machine itself. You could compare it to the homemade MSU1 enhancement, it’s not too far from it.

Second, I should mention that I’m not in any way an expert on hardware stuff, I know a bit of how things work but I’m not the guy to ask about that.

As you can probably see, the board is divided into several parts, but the ones we are interested about are SFX and CD-ROM. SFX is the Super Famicom part of the PCB.

SFX contains everything of your typical Super Famicom, including the CIC. Interestingly, the sound chips (S-DSP & S-SMP) has their actual IDs on them, which is unusual.

The CD-ROM part has the CD interface & the DSP, not unusual. It happens that the Playstation as we know it uses chips with similar IDs (SONY CXD1815Q, SONY CXD2510Q) and for similar uses as well.

If you are wondering about the other side of the PCB...

To the right side is the SFX part, there’s only the RAM for the PPU and the SMP/DSP.

The CDROM part only has CXK58257AM-70L... which is CMOS Memory. A very similar chip was used for the Playstation: CXK58257ASP-70L. Both provides 32Kx8 of SRAM.

No traces of a powerful chip, it would have been bigger, and we would have noticed it at this point even if we couldn’t see the ID.

One of the most interesting part is the cartridge that came with it. This is indeed the Super Disc System Cartridge (that’s the official name).

It contains the BIOS ROM (version 0.95), 8Kx8 of SRAM, and two S-WRAM chips. Considering the SNES only has one and it is known to have 128KB of WRAM, we can assume this cartridge brings 256KB of WRAM for CD drive use.

You can’t directly run a game from a disc, you need to pull the data from it to memory first and then you can be able to run the code. You have a total of 384KB of WRAM (Cartridge + SNES) for running a SuperDisc game. 128KB is the equivalent of 2 full memory banks (7E-7F), meaning you have 6 full memory banks to work with.

Also, people seemed to think that the console has a SuperDisc BIOS in it. There are no BIOS ROMs in the console, else I would have mentioned it.

So the only enhancement is brought by the cartridge, which has the BIOS (for CD drive functions), and more RAM. And the CD drive on the system, of course, which isn’t used without the cartridge. Not too shabby.

Also, it means it cannot run any Playstation games. That shouldn’t even be a question. This hardware is from 1991. The Sony Playstation was released in 1994.