 Ssssssss. There are many things that suck about having a hobby that revolves around retro gaming like the fact that there are so few genuine new homebrew games being made for Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis these days, but, thankfully, many fans are happy to continue to tinker with what is already out there. That's why I decided to make a video about some of the best and most useful improvement patches out there for Super Nintendo Games. These are not to be confused with rom hacks that create an entirely new game game out of existing content so to speak. With improvement patches, I'm talking about just that, improving performance, or tweaking things here and there. So how do you use these patches? Each patch I talk about in this video has a corresponding link in the video description. Go there and download the patch, and it'll either be an IPS, BPS, or UPS file extension. From there, you use a utility program to join that patch file with a ROM of the game. The most reliable utility program I've found is called Beat, and there's a link to that in the description as well. Whether or not the patch drum will work on your SNES Classic depends on what platform you're running on it. For more specific technical help on that, I'd recommend visiting a forum like the SNES Mini Mods subreddit. All I can say personally is that each of these patch drums all worked totally fine on my SD2 SNES flash cartridge playing on my original Super Nintendo. The absolute best example out there of what I'm referring to by improvement patch is this one, made by Vitor Vilela. What he was able to do somehow is apply a coprocessor chip to a game that never had one. He took the schematics of the SA1 coprocessor normally found in games like Super Mario RPG for example, and applied it to the programming of Gradius 3, and as you can see the results are breathtaking. It's like playing overclocked Gradius, and it eliminates 99% of the slowdown you're used to seeing. It is incredible to play this now, and I highly recommend you check it out because it totally changes the game entirely, mostly because it makes the game really difficult. But still, it is really frickin' cool to see this work, and for what it's worth Vitor's made other patches similar to this for Super Mario World, but this patch for Gradius 3 is his best work yet, and all I can say is bravo. Vitor's method isn't the only way to eliminate slowdown in an older SNES game, there's also plenty of what are referred to as Restoration Hacks, and this one for Super Ghouls and Ghosts is one of the best I've found. It cleans up I'd say around 80-85% of the slowdown, which is obviously pretty dang significant. It's not as jarring as the Gradius 3 patch, but it's still pretty cool, and for the record I do not believe the slowdown actually helps you in games like this. The simple reason being that you have no idea when the slowdown will start and when it will end. Slowdown sucks, no matter how you slice it. So I'm really thankful for Restoration Patches like this one for Super Ghouls and Ghosts, because it helps people play through this one without all that nonsense. I should also mention, in addition to fixing most of the slowdown, the patch also puts back in certain stuff that was censored in the NTSC version, like crosses in the background and on the coffins and such, so that's pretty cool. There's also lots and lots of improvement hacks out there that fix flaws in games that have been well known for decades. Maybe the most infamous of these flaws is the screen scrolling in Secret of Mana. A lot of people really do not like the fact that you have to be so close to the edge of the screen to get it to scroll. This hack centers the viewpoint, so to speak, and yeah, it leads to some graphical glitches and weirdness here and there on the edges of the screen, but it still works great and it does a great job preventing you from bouncing off of enemies that you can't see until the last split second. So if you want to get into Secret of Mana but the screen scroll has always been a deal-breaker for you, then try playing it with this patch. Sticking with Secret of Mana, there's also Relocalization Patches, and this game has one of the most popular. As many of you know, Secret of Mana was originally planned to be a launch title for the Super Nintendo CD peripheral, which ended up getting scrapped, so the game was kind of retrofitted back to the Super Nintendo, and as a result, the story and the dialogue suffered. Everything had to be significantly abbreviated, so the story kind of fell flat to some people. This Relocalization not only improves the text, but it does a nice job keeping it in the same spirit as the original, and that's a tough balance to pull off, so kudos to the team that worked on this one. This hack also makes a lot of cosmetic changes as well, everything from adding lowercase letters to characters' names to restoring what was censored in the NTSC version of the game after it was localized. If you're a fan of Secret of Mana, I highly recommend checking this one out any way you can. There's also just straight-up re-translations out there, like for games like Breath of Fire 2, and thank God for that, because the translation of the original release is by far that game's biggest flaw. It cleans up everything from dialogue to the names of spells, and the people doing the work here didn't try and shoehorn in any cutesy jokes or anything, they just straighten things out, so they make more sense. Kudos to Ryusui for doing such a great job with this one, and if you've played Breath of Fire 2 but haven't played it with this patch, you're doing yourself a disservice. This game is much more enjoyable with the re-translation. There are also games with re-translation patches that you might not expect, I mean RPGs would be an obvious target because of all the dialogue, but games like Cybernator also got cleaned up quite a bit. Technically speaking, this is really just a brand new translation of the original Japanese version of the game, Assault Suits Vulcan, but yeah, this one came out of left field for me, and I appreciate that no stone goes unturned with the ROM hacking community. Just thought I'd point this one out as an example that re-translations aren't exclusive to just role-playing games. Everyone's excited about the recent collection of Mana package, released for Switch recently, because it's the first time trials of Mana, or Seiken Detsetsu 3, had been officially released stateside. One issue I've always had with that game, however, is that unlike its predecessor, it does not support three players, it's a two-player game at most. However, there is a patch out there that you can apply to the Super Famicom edition of the game that allows you to play with a third player. Obviously, this isn't going to work with the collection of Mana, but I'm just throwing it out there as a possibility if you have the Super Famicom edition, because this game is a lot more fun with the second and with a third player. Another multiplayer hack that people may like is for Secret of Evermore. I remember being really excited when I found out your partner in this game as a dog, but subsequently bummed out when I realized that this game wasn't two-player. This hack produced by Fusoya changes that, and it's a welcome change that makes this game a lot more palatable. When it comes to action RPGs, the more players, the merrier. Finally, here's an improvement patch, so to speak, that has some very specific parameters. Thanks to Blaze Hedgehog on YouTube for pointing this out, it's overclocking the Super FX chip in the original Star Fox using the RetroArch emulator. So just to explain quickly, RetroArch is like an emulator hub. It comes packaged with all sorts of stuff already built into it. So to run Super Nintendo games, for example, all you have to do is open a core, as the program refers to it, and in this case, you want to select a BSNES Mercury core. If it's not there, find the online updater and make sure you download it. Then go to load content and select your Star Fox ROM. Once it's running, back out and go to the options menu, turn on respect accuracy impacting settings. Make sure the special chip accuracy is set at HLE, and then you can set the speed as much as 10 times faster. Again, if you want more details on this, check out the Blaze Hedgehog video in the description. But yeah, once you get this going, holy crap, it is really crazy. Now, if you have RetroArch installed on your SNES Mini and you try this approach there, I don't think this will work because it requires a lot of processing power. But it works great on my PC, and it's a fantastic way to play an old classic. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.