Late last week, a year-long project reached a fantastic milestone: Ben Heck brought the Super CD to life. After tinkering on and off with it over the last year, Ben and his team used a full month to push forward to get the system working.
In his latest video, Ben found that the Nintendo/SNES portion works and the CD-ROM/Sony part was not, in fact, functional. One of the digital analog converters (DAC) prevented the CD-ROM drive from reading anything. Eventually, after working through the problem and mapping out a “mystery chip,” Ben found himself on the right track. Starting at 3:40, Ben was able to get the system to play an audio CD, and eventually got everything working at the 6:53 point.
As of now, the Super CD is in the hands of fan programmers because there’s no official game library for the system. In fact, the game that Ben used to test the Super CD (Magic Floor) needed to have its coding tweaked due to glitches. Now that everyone in the community knows how the system works, they can see how far off they were in their estimated emulator.
Check out Ben Heck’s site for an in depth look at the process and journey he’s taken with the prototype.
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Written by Jennifer Burch
Illustrator, designer, writer and big Nintendo geek, you can find Jennifer with an N3DS within reach 24/7. As the oldest of three, she has survived many Mario Party, Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart sessions intact in addition to getting her brothers hooked on some really weird games. (Cubivore anyone?)
