Snes Central: Super Famicom Box

Super Famicom Box

The Super Famicom Box was a special Super Famicom hardware system that utilized special cartridges and was used in hotels. Thanks to Kiryu1985, djense1, and d4s for the information and pictures.

By: d4s, Kiryu1985, djense1 and Evan G
Last updated: May 15, 2011

The Super Famicom Box was used in hotels as a pay-per-play system. It had a coin slot and a certain amount of money (possibly 100 yen) gave 5 minutes of playtime. The interesting part of this system is that it used special multicarts that contained two or three games.

There are many games known to be made for the Super Famicom Box. These include

Super Mario Kart/Star Fox/Super Mario Collection (Regular cart that is required for the system to work) - PSS-61
Waialae No Kiseki (Waialae Golf) & Super Mahjong 2 - PSS-62
Super Donkey Kong & Super Tetris 2 and Bombliss - PSS-63
Super Donkey Kong & Bomberman 2 - PSS-64


Games selection screen	Game selected dialogue

Game Menu with Super Donkey Kong and Super Bomberman 2

Super Famicom Box with special cartridges

The Super Famicom Box has a special menu that allows you to select the game. It also gives introductory material for each game. The system uses a special hardware feature to add a graphics layer for in-game messages. It is notable for being the only Super Famicom system that fully uses S-CPU I/O-Port.

d4s dumped several of the ROMs of the for the Super Famicom Box. The Waialae No Kiseki (Waialae Golf) and Super Mahjong 2 cart was also dumped and the ROM images provided, dumped by Paul Thacker and Guru. The game ROM images actually are different from the standard releases. I suspect the ROM image of Waialae No Kiseki is a bad dump, as it has huge areas of blank data that are not in the standard release (the first 0x10000 bytes are identical). Super Mahjong 2 is identical to the version 1.1 release.

Dumps from the Super Mario Kart/Star Fox/Super Mario Collection. (ATROM-4S-0, GROM1-1, GROM1-3)

Presumably, the game ROM images would be identical to the standard releases. There is a SNES rom image in there (ATROM-4S-0), which called "4S ATTRACTION" in the internal header. Emulators don't seem to be able to load the image. It looks like it is mostly blank space.

GROM image from the Waialae No Kiseki & Super Mahjong 2 cart (GROM-1-IC1)

ROM image of Waialae No Kiseki (suspected bad dump) (SHVC-GC-0)

I included the Waialae No Kiseki ROM image, but I strong suspect that it is a bad dump. If emulator authors want to support the Super Famicom Box, it probably requires the standard release of the ROM image.

Scans

Bibliography

Video by d4s showing the Super Famicom Box in action (link)
Pictures of the Super Famicom Box 2 on Japan-Games.com (it has a different design that takes standard carts). (link)
Blog posting on Video Games are Rad with lots of pictures of the unit (link)
Video by Gamester81 showing an overview of the Super Famicom box. (link)