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> standard SNES hardware It was not uncommon to have expansion chips: even early games such as Super Mario Kart had a (DSP-1) chip to help with 3d calculations

> standard SNES hardware It was not uncommon to have expansion chips: even early games such as Super Mario Kart had a (DSP-1) chip to help with 3d calculations. Later chips such as Super FX 1/2 (Star Fox, Doom, Yoshi's Island), Cx4 (Megaman X2/X3), and SA-1 (Kirby's Super Star, Mario RPG) were used in a significant portion of the library. The SA-1 was basically an additional 10Mhz SNES CPU (which was a 65c816 at about 4Mhz)

simias 6y ago
You're right but I agree with the parent that it's still a bit misleading. When I saw the video at the top of the article showing a fluid, high framerate realtime video I knew there had to be a trick. Of course many games shipped with mappers, but if you're willing to put no limit to the amount of hardware you put on said mapper you might as well interface a full high end PC and play Cyberpunk 2077 on "standard SNES hardware". Basically once you've figured out how to best use the SNES hardware to output fullscreen, decent FPS video from the cartridge port to the TV you can do whatever you want. It's still a very cool hack but I was hoping for some ultra-optimized software-only SNES raytracer when I read the title.
- nicetryguy 6y ago
  > What I wanted to try and do was something akin to the Super FX chip used in titles such as Star Fox, where the SNES runs the game logic and hands off a scene description to a chip in the cartridge to generate the visuals. Bruh. It's in the third paragraph. > Of course many games shipped with mappers No. You're thinking of the NES. The SNES handled memory mapping natively. The SNES chips had specific calculation functions, or ended up being co-processors, or both. > It's still a very cool hack but I was hoping for some ultra-optimized software-only SNES raytracer when I read the title. Not even the SNES games in the 90s did 3d without an expansion chip. You can't do any raytracing, or any 3d for that matter (without SEVERE compromises) with 3.5 Mhz. If you read the article, the guy designed his own 3 core chip at 50Mhz... Yes it's more powerful than any chip that was in an SNES, but, it's not entirely period-incorrect.

simias 6y ago

You're right but I agree with the parent that it's still a bit misleading. When I saw the video at the top of the article showing a fluid, high framerate realtime video I knew there had to be a trick. Of course many games shipped with mappers, but if you're willing to put no limit to the amount of hardware you put on said mapper you might as well interface a full high end PC and play Cyberpunk 2077 on "standard SNES hardware". Basically once you've figured out how to best use the SNES hardware to output fullscreen, decent FPS video from the cartridge port to the TV you can do whatever you want. It's still a very cool hack but I was hoping for some ultra-optimized software-only SNES raytracer when I read the title.

nicetryguy 6y ago
> What I wanted to try and do was something akin to the Super FX chip used in titles such as Star Fox, where the SNES runs the game logic and hands off a scene description to a chip in the cartridge to generate the visuals. Bruh. It's in the third paragraph. > Of course many games shipped with mappers No. You're thinking of the NES. The SNES handled memory mapping natively. The SNES chips had specific calculation functions, or ended up being co-processors, or both. > It's still a very cool hack but I was hoping for some ultra-optimized software-only SNES raytracer when I read the title. Not even the SNES games in the 90s did 3d without an expansion chip. You can't do any raytracing, or any 3d for that matter (without SEVERE compromises) with 3.5 Mhz. If you read the article, the guy designed his own 3 core chip at 50Mhz... Yes it's more powerful than any chip that was in an SNES, but, it's not entirely period-incorrect.