Manual
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Introduction
Welcome to Super Road Blaster.
This is an unlicensed SNES port of the 1986 Laserdisc arcade game by Data East, making
it the first interactive movie game and the biggest game on the system yet (6320 Mbit).
You assume the role of a vigilante who drives a customized sports car in order to bring the
biker gang responsible for your wife's death to justice.
Super Road Blaster is the first game to use the MSU-1, an enhancement device
comparable to special chips such as the Super FX included in certain SNES cartridges.
This game shows what titles on the ill-fated SNES CD-ROM drive might have looked like.
The primary reason why this port has been created:
I've been in love with this game since childhood.
I sincerely hope that you'll have as much fun playing this game as I had developing it.
-Matthias “d4s” Nagler, 2012-05-14
Requirements
This game uses the MSU-1 enhancement chip.
Due to this, a MSU-1-enabled device is required to play this game.
At the time of writing, your only options are:
• bsnes, an SNES emulator developed by byuu
• sd2snes, an SD-card adaptor cartridge for the SNES developed by ikari01
This means you can play the game both with an emulator on your PC or on a real Super
Nintendo system.
In order to play this game, unzip all of the game archive content into a single folder on your
hard disk or SD-card.
Open the file SuperRoadBlaster.sfc.
You can play in either NTSC (60Hz) or PAL (50Hz) video modes.
The game will adjust to the required speed automatically and run just the same in any of
these two modes.
This game is provided as-is and free-of-charge, without any express or implied warranty.
Use at your own risk.
Gameplay & Controls
Super Road Blaster consists of nine deadly stages, each having more unrealistic high-
speed chases, over-the-top explosions and cheesy 80ies rock music than you can shake a
stick at.
All this is delivered in fullscreen, at 30 frames per second animated video and with CD-
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quality audio.
In order to survive, you'll have to react to the commands presented on screen, namely:
• steering left and right (directional pad)
• braking (B-button)
• turbo-boosting (A-button)
Failure to react timely to any one of these commands will result in instant death.
You have a total of 6 tries before the game is over.
Each command executed successfully will net you 1000 points.
Hitting the appropriate button at just the right time (within one sixth of a second of the
respective commands appearance) will yield 2000 points.
After the game is over, you will be able to enter your name, which will be saved in a
persistent highscore list in battery-backed memory.
Troubleshooting
bsnes:
This game works out-of-the-box with bsnes version 070 to bsnes version 086.
For bsnes version 089 (and presumably all future versions), the supported ROM format
was changed and the files in the Super Road Blaster archive have to be renamed in order
to be recognized by the emulator.
There should be tools available to do this.
Please refer to http://byuu.org/bsnes/.
Other emulators:
At the time of writing, all other emulator besides bsnes (such as ZSNES or SNES9x) do
not support the MSU-1 and are thus unable to play the game.
sd2snes:
If you experience choppy, slow or jagged video and audio output using the sd2snes, your
SD-card might be too slow. Try one with enhanced access speed. Please note that you will
at least need to have sd2snes firmware 0.1.4a installed. Lesser firmware versions will not
support highscore saving and the game will display an error when trying to save.
At the time of writing, the sd2snes is unable to auto-save highscore data during gameplay
of msu1 games, requiring you to press and hold reset to re-enter the sd2snes menu in
order to save before shutting the system down. Please refer to the sd2snes
documentation.
crashes/errors:
If the game gives you a pink error message at some point, something went wrong and the
game cannot continue.
If you are playing on the sd2snes and you get some kind of data access error(timeout,
unable to read data, video frame corrupt etc.), first try a different sd-card.
Incompatible/slow sd-cards are the number one reason for these kind of errors.
Apart from that, this may happen if the game is unable to access the MSU-1 (most likely
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because it is not supported by the device you're trying to play the game with), or the
corresponding video data file(SuperRoadBlaster.msu), or if this video file is corrupt or
in the wrong format (for example, when you try to use the video file from the beta version
of Road Blaster).
Also, you may be missing any of the files required by the game.
Make sure all of the following files are present in the game folder:
• SuperRoadBlaster.sfc (program ROM image)
• SuperRoadBlaster.msu (video data file)
• SuperRoadBlaster.xml (cartridge manifest)
• SuperRoadBlaster-0.pcm to -121.pcm (audio tracks)
That's a total of 125 files.
When in doubt, redownload game package and try again.
Changelog
Version 1.2
• added support for 1/1/1 chipset SNES/SFC (Yes, finally!), this included moving the
fat black bar from top to bottom of the screen
• added persistent highscore saving to SRAM
• added level completion screens
• added support for new msu1 command (audio error)
• fixed glitching sprite tiles after game over/new game (super rare)
• fixed wrongly allocated palette on hud sprites (super rare)
• fixed death events in level 4
• fixed death event in level1
• fixed black flickering on scene change
• fixed invalid frames on real hardware (relatively rare)
• fixed single-frame gfx glitch on dashboard when dying
• fixed flicker on video load
• fixed pause not pausing video bug (rare, happens if start button is triggered on the
exact frame msu-1 video is loaded)
• fixed super logo not getting deleted (super rare)
• fixed dashboard bg layer having wrong tilemap size
Version 1.1
• Fixed orthographic mistake
• Sped up loading of video chapters
• Fixed missing register initialization
Version 1.0
• Initial release
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Contact & bug reports
Feel free to contact me with any questions and/or problems you might have concerning
this game:
E-Mail: matt@dforce3000.de
Web: http://www.dforce3000.de
