Load times... on a SNES game??!

[joshnickerson]

Okay, I recently picked up Mickey Mania for the SNES and upon playing it, I was a bit surprised to find out it had LOADING SCREENS. I mean, it's a cart based system, why exactly would a game need to load? I've heard about this happening with a couple of other SNES games.

Does anybody know exactly why load times were needed?

[pineapplehead2]

I havn't got any SNES games that laod but when I played Quake II on N64, that had loading screens but it only took about 6 secs tho.

[Lemmy Kilmister]

Yeah thats weird. The only other games I can think of for the snes that had to load were Street Fighter Alpha 2 and the Mario Bros version of Excitebike, though the latter is also a Satellaview download, so I guess that makes sense.

[Bratwurst]

An issue of compressed data on the cartridge rom chips so the publisher wouldn't have to get higher capacity storage and cost the consumer an arm and a leg in the end.

[Perkar]

Yeah thats weird. The only other games I can think of for the snes that had to load were Street Fighter Alpha 2 and the Mario Bros version of Excitebike, though the latter is also a Satellaview download, so I guess that makes sense.

SF Alpha 2 had terrible load times. not to mention on the SNES it was damn near unpolayable anyway. i was so excited when i found that game cheap (i think i paid $4 for it...), and i was so disappointed when i got it home and it just totally blew.

[whoisKeel]

one of the batman games for snes has load times as well. batman returns i think? can't quite remember, but it was a late snes game.

[Rogmeister]

I think the Batman game was probably the horrible Batman Forever. I don't recall Batman Returns having loading screens...it was actually my second SNES game so I don't know if I'd call that a late SNES game either. I probably got it in the fall of '93...or was that '94?

[soniko_karuto]

out of this world, or another world, who cares about localization.

It had load times on the us version, and the genny one rocked the hell outta teh snes one.

[yoursisterspretty]

I always thought the SNES version of Sim City had some loading going on. That or it sure was taxin' the SNES...

[Damon Plus]

Going from one room to another on Super Metroid counts?

[Ed Oscuro]

I havn't got any SNES games that laod but when I played Quake II on N64, that had loading screens but it only took about 6 secs tho.
Same with the original Quake...it's not really a loading screen, though, the way you traditionally think of one as being; the data's there, it just has to be dumped into memory (so it's just doing the last stage of what any computer FPS would). If that makes any sense.

With Mickey Mania...no clue. I've got the Genesis game of the same name and it didn't have any loading times - aren't there 3D sequences in the SNES game?

[Mayhem]

With SNES SF2 Alpha it isn't loading you see.. it's uncompressing all the graphics data on the fly that causes the slight blip in proceedings.

[Habeeb Hamusta]

Going from one room to another on Super Metroid counts?

Nah that isn't load time. That is just how you switch rooms. The game isn't really pausing to load. I think it was just made to do that.

[Zing]

A very old thread, but still relevant.

Why on earth are there load times with this game? They are relatively long, too! I checked the Genesis version, and there are zero loading screens. I checked the Sega CD version, and the load times are actually less than on the SNES! Is ridiculous.

I checked the ROM sizes and there is no real difference between the two platforms. To make matters worse, according to Wikipedia, the SNES version had several endings and an entire level removed! This looks like another matter of a game being essentially Sega native, then being ported to SNES.

[Az]

SNES Fatal Fury had a nice black loading screen with "WAITING!!!!" on it prior to each match.

[recorderdude]

Compressed data DOES make for load times on cartridge games. Even the SEGA Genesis has a few games that load, quite possibly the most famous being the infinitely-praised port of strider, which, between each scene change of each level, pauses for a second or two to load the next.

[sloan]

Michael Jordan - Chaos in the Windy City and NBA Jam T.E. on SNES both have loading screens, although they are somewhat camouflaged on NBA Jam T.E.

[SparTonberry]

I don't remember loading times on Jordan.

I do remember loading time on the SFC game FEDA: The Emblem of Justice.
And the worst is I recall is an infamous kusoge RPG called Maka-maka.
At least part of the load time is because it's poorly programmed.
Among the game's other flaws... essentially, the use a manual loop to reset literally an entire RAM bank (and they do it like 20 times every loading screen. I didn't bother to find out why), and during the graphics decompression, they use the SNES' memcopy like hardware (aka DMA) every time they write a single byte to RAM. Like whoever wrote that got the point of memcopy BACKWARDS! :P
As I recall, rewriting those routines to access the RAM in the more appropriate method reduced the total loading time by like 40%. (could probably reduce it more if I could be bothered to figure out why it clears RAM so often)
(makes us almost wonder if the game's credits sequence was INTENTIONALLY (reportedly) glitched to make it unreadable... :roll: )