Hacker News Reader

One thing that's interesting about this memory map is how much is crammed into the first 8KB of the SNES's 128 KB main RAM, while the rest is mainly used to store large blocks of uncompressed data. This is probably a remnant of how the SNES was originally designed have just 8KB of RAM. (http://www.chrismcovell.com/secret/SFC_1988Q4.html)

View on HN

It's likely due to being easier to deal with across various memory mapping modes. There's a Retro Game Mechanics Explained video about it that I can't seem to find right now.

This. The Super NES memory map is divided into 256 banks of 64KB each. The bottom 8KB of RAM is visible in 128 of these banks, but the remaining 120KB only appears once. The bottom 8KB of RAM is therefore faster to access (at any time, it's more likely to be visible in the "current" bank).

Of course, game developers tried to put as much data as possible into the part of RAM that is faster to access.

Here you go:

https://youtu.be/-U76YvWdnZM

Highly recommended channel. The video about blanking is a particularly awesome entry in this series and it even features Super Mario World:

https://youtu.be/Q8ph2OVqZeM

Reply on news.ycombinator.com