Nintendo's 16-bit machine paired a 65C816 CPU with two custom picture units and a Sony-designed sound system, and famously left room in the cartridge for extra chips. Mode 7's rotating, scaling backgrounds and add-on silicon like the Super FX kept it competitive for years.
The Four Natures
each piece emerges by one of four natures
The Idea
the three-beat story
The Ricoh 5A22 wraps a 16-bit 65C816 core. Graphics come from two cooperating PPUs that composite layered, tile-based backgrounds and up to 128 sprites, with a deep colour palette — a clear generational jump from the NES.
Mode 7 let a background plane rotate and scale, faking 3-D for racers and RPGs. And the cartridge could carry enhancement chips — the Super FX did polygons (Star Fox), others added DSP math — so the console kept growing from the slot.
Audio runs on its own little computer: a Sony SPC700 core plus an 8-channel sample-based DSP and 64 KB of dedicated RAM. The lush, sampled SNES sound is effectively a separate machine inside the box.
The Teardown — Click a Block
the machine, laid out as a block diagram — the main processor on top, the rest of the silicon beneath, buses showing what talks to what. Click any block to read its spec. An accurate architecture diagram (a teardown illustration, not a schematic).
The Spec Sheet
the headline numbers — the spec edition
16-bit · ~3.58 MHz (variable).
512 colours from 32,768 · 128 sprites · Mode 7.
8 sample channels · 64 KB audio RAM.
plus cartridge ROM/RAM + enhancement chips.
Super FX, DSP-1, SA-1, …
The Reckoning
the teardown, and the honesty about it
The Domain: Open It and Spec It
the teardown
- EXEREÚNESIS takes a real, made machine apart down to the chip and writes the honest spec — not a story-world but a technical anatomy.
- >One of a growing series of console teardowns; siblings link from the marquee.
Two-Layer Honest
datasheet vs lore
- Settled: the 5A22/65C816 CPU, dual-PPU graphics, Mode 7, the Sony SPC700/S-DSP audio, and the enhancement-chip mechanism are documented.
- Flagged: the CPU's effective clock varied with memory speed — quoting a single MHz number is a simplification, noted as such.
Render, Not Invent
sourced
- Summarized from the public technical record for the SUPER NINTENDO · SNES; the manufacturer and its engineers are cited, not minted.
- No ROMs, BIOS, or copyrighted code are reproduced. Emergents are physical components; the block diagram is an illustration, not a schematic.
The Roster
every chip and part as an ACI .agent — each a birth certificate & a nature (7)
