Japanese Secrets!

Here are some incredible pics from the second major demonstration of the Super Famicom's power. These pictures come from a press meeting on July 28, 1989, a mere 16 months before the Super Famicom went on sale.  All the major magazines published their reports on the event.  Seen below are pages from Famicom Tsushin.

Some images of the press conference itself... As Hiroshi Imanishi, general manager of Nintendo corporate communications, announced the SFC's eventual 16-month delay, slides would appear on the projector screen in the centre of the room. Perhaps video reels of the SFC software would also have been played via the large-screen TV on the right.
All this projection technology, and photographs of games being taken from it from across the room, unfortunately led to most early SFC pre-release screenshots having poor contrast and being very muddy in general.  So, apologies before you reach the screenshots below.	Nintendo technology director Masayuki Uemura shows off the SFC's internals (as he had done a year earlier...)	We can also see the all-important Shigeru Miyamoto waiting in the wings.

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And now, for those of you following at home, here is a timeline of the Super Famicom's progress as followed (rumoured?) by the Japanese press:

(Click on image for a close-up)

Here are the technical specs of the prototype SFC, circa mid-1989...

So it looks like the SFC was pretty much shippable then. The only big differences I can see between these specs and that of the released version is much less main RAM. The release SFC has 128Kbytes of RAM, a very large increase. Most games don't use such a whopping amount of RAM, except for SlowROM games to run their code in at 3.58Mhz. So, perhaps Nintendo added the RAM in to get that speed boost.

Hmm... 2048 colours at once in the BG???!?!? (A technically-savvy friend has pointed out that this is the SFC's "direct colour mode" which displays 256-colour tiles, but with a lower single bit of colour selectable from the palette memory (256x8) for each tile. In other words, a mostly useless colour mode.)

Famicom Magazine Famicom Tsushin

Since the two leading Famicom magazines of the day, Famimaga and Famitsu, each published almost a dozen pictures of the games demonstrated here, I thought I'd put similar photos side-by-side to give readers a better chance to pick out details in the game itself.

Unfortunately, these shots are rather small and indistinct in both magazines.  As they were too dim, faded, or blurry even on paper, I had to do a lot of colour adjustment to bring out the details of the underlying game screens.  I did minimal descreening so as to minimize extra blurring during my scanning process.  Well anyway, I hope you can make out enough detail to fire the imagination as to what these games could have been.

My comments:

Wow!  Now, while the eventual Pilotwings was a real technical showcase for the Super Famicom, this early version called Dragonfly looks to have been an attempt to make an actual action game out of the Mode 7 flight simulator.

Taking off from a helipad on a cruising ship, hovering like a dragonfly, and zipping up above the clouds, the game appears similar in concept to Atari's Blue Lightning or Namco's Metal Hawk.

First off, a digital mock-up I made giving you a good idea of what the game would look like on a clear screen:

               

Famimaga Famicom Tsushin

My comments:

This is the first time I've ever seen the old title screen to Super Mario World! Well, it's good that they changed it, since this seriously lacks colours... I can count maybe just 10 colours or so. It does have a nice Japanese "parchment" feel to it.

It's interesting to note that the island in the title screen is the same as the "world" that you walk on in the map. It's an interesting mushroom-shaped world, though it's disappointingly small for a world if you ask me.

Super Mario World looked very much like a 16-bit version of SMB3 back in 1989, what with the note blocks, coins, square question blocks, and raccoon-Mario power-up. No sign of Yoshi whatsoever.        

"COUSE [sic] CLEAR!"

In this early version of SMW, the worlds and stages had a weird Japanese numerical naming convention.  "4 W-1" meant World 4, Stage 1, the worlds seemingly branching in each direction from the house in the centre of the map screen.

Again, if I had an army of trained ninjas, you know to whose archives I would send them to rifle through and pilfer, don't you?