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>I'm not sure the title implies that Sure it does.. it says "Realtime Raytracing on the SNES". To any normal person "SNES" means a super nintendo you would ha

by mrlala 6y ago

>I'm not sure the title implies that Sure it does.. it says "Realtime Raytracing on the SNES". To any normal person "SNES" means a super nintendo you would have at home.. not one that has expansion cards etc. Anyway cool project but the title is indeed a bit misleading.

wan23 6y ago
The expansion chips were in the game cartridges, though. This article is talking about how you could potentially make a game cart that you could plug into an SNES as normal and have it play with real time raytracing.
yaseer 6y ago
I don't think it's misleading, given the SNES history. For me the SNES was famous for its expansion chips - I immediately assumed one like the super fx chip that gave it 3d graphics. The title may be skewed towards an audience that knows slightly obscure details of SNES history, rather than misleading the general audience.
- Igelau 6y ago
  I'm guessing the division comes down to generational ignorance. Commenters on both the oldest fringe and the younger half of the age curve aren't going to remember the big deal Nintendo made about these chips.
Kranar 6y ago
The title is no more deceptive for using an expansion chip than a game like Mario Kart is deceptive for calling itself an SNES game even though it also used an expansion chip. Almost any popular SNES game you can think of came with extra technology included in the cartridge and commercials often bragged about it, like the SuperFX chip used by Star Fox. Heck if it weren't for expansion chips, you wouldn't even be able to play Super Mario World or Zelda, since the SNES had no persistent storage, all save games were stored physically on the cartridge itself.
aeturnum 6y ago
As I understand it, if the OP put their chips and wires into a SNES cartridge, you could take that cartridge, plug it in, and you would see their ray tracing demo on your stock SNES. This is just like Nintendo adding their own co-processors over the lifetime of the system, albeit with more advanced technology. If Mario Kart is running on the SNES, so is this.
- Jetrel 6y ago
  Perhaps one way to put it: You couldn't download this demo into a ROM image and run it on an emulator. To make it run, you'd have to beg the author of the emulator to actually support your chip. This is more than a silly, pedantic distinction; emulators are probably the way that >95% of the current SNES playerbase runs the software, and they're likely to remain that way … forever? I don't see the interest in running SNES games ever really going away, since they're fun in a timeless way (like classic books/film), so emulators that support it are likely to stick around for several centuries, barring civilizational collapse. Actual hardware's pretty close to dying out (the recent "SNES Classic" physical devices, afaik, are just neatly packaged emulators). So I think it really does matter whether it runs in an emulator or not. (Not to diminish the fairly awesome technical prowess of this hack)
  - Kranar 6y ago
    That's true of probably 90% of ROM images though. To get most SNES ROMs to work you need to not only emulate the SNES console itself but also emulate the individual game's chipset. Most SNES games use one of the following expansion chipsets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_... Many SNES games include one-off chipsets that common SNES emulators implement as well; for example just something simple like saving your game can't be done on an SNES and needs an expansion chip.
  - aeturnum 6y ago
    > So I think it really does matter whether it runs in an emulator or not. If you were to write a SNES emulator that only emulated the console itself, it would not be able to run the many SNES games that use addon chips. SNES emulators include code that emulate the addon chips originally contained in the cartridges[1]. So, I think your test is a false one. Games run in the emulator because the emulator added emulation for the chips in the game. This game cartridge would also run on a SNES emulator if you emulated its chips. [1] Code to emulate the behavior of the DSP chip in Super Mario Kart (among many others): https://github.com/bsnes-emu/bsnes/tree/master/bsnes/sfc/dsp https://github.com/bsnes-emu/bsnes/tree/master/bsnes/sfc/dsp
Jarolis 6y ago
I'm confused. Did you really think somebody found a way to do real-time raytracing on a stock SNES? I saw the title and the first thing I thought is "It's not possible, so clearly they did some black magic fuckery to subvert the system's limitations". I wasn't disappointed either, because it's impressive what he managed to do. Maybe try not to take every title completely literally? And maybe try a little bit harder to appreciate people's creativity and hard work?

by mrlala 6y ago

wan23 6y ago

The expansion chips were in the game cartridges, though. This article is talking about how you could potentially make a game cart that you could plug into an SNES as normal and have it play with real time raytracing.

yaseer 6y ago

I don't think it's misleading, given the SNES history. For me the SNES was famous for its expansion chips - I immediately assumed one like the super fx chip that gave it 3d graphics. The title may be skewed towards an audience that knows slightly obscure details of SNES history, rather than misleading the general audience.

Igelau 6y ago
I'm guessing the division comes down to generational ignorance. Commenters on both the oldest fringe and the younger half of the age curve aren't going to remember the big deal Nintendo made about these chips.

Kranar 6y ago

The title is no more deceptive for using an expansion chip than a game like Mario Kart is deceptive for calling itself an SNES game even though it also used an expansion chip. Almost any popular SNES game you can think of came with extra technology included in the cartridge and commercials often bragged about it, like the SuperFX chip used by Star Fox. Heck if it weren't for expansion chips, you wouldn't even be able to play Super Mario World or Zelda, since the SNES had no persistent storage, all save games were stored physically on the cartridge itself.

aeturnum 6y ago

As I understand it, if the OP put their chips and wires into a SNES cartridge, you could take that cartridge, plug it in, and you would see their ray tracing demo on your stock SNES. This is just like Nintendo adding their own co-processors over the lifetime of the system, albeit with more advanced technology. If Mario Kart is running on the SNES, so is this.

Jetrel 6y ago
Perhaps one way to put it: You couldn't download this demo into a ROM image and run it on an emulator. To make it run, you'd have to beg the author of the emulator to actually support your chip. This is more than a silly, pedantic distinction; emulators are probably the way that >95% of the current SNES playerbase runs the software, and they're likely to remain that way … forever? I don't see the interest in running SNES games ever really going away, since they're fun in a timeless way (like classic books/film), so emulators that support it are likely to stick around for several centuries, barring civilizational collapse. Actual hardware's pretty close to dying out (the recent "SNES Classic" physical devices, afaik, are just neatly packaged emulators). So I think it really does matter whether it runs in an emulator or not. (Not to diminish the fairly awesome technical prowess of this hack)
- Kranar 6y ago
  That's true of probably 90% of ROM images though. To get most SNES ROMs to work you need to not only emulate the SNES console itself but also emulate the individual game's chipset. Most SNES games use one of the following expansion chipsets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_... Many SNES games include one-off chipsets that common SNES emulators implement as well; for example just something simple like saving your game can't be done on an SNES and needs an expansion chip.
- aeturnum 6y ago
  > So I think it really does matter whether it runs in an emulator or not. If you were to write a SNES emulator that only emulated the console itself, it would not be able to run the many SNES games that use addon chips. SNES emulators include code that emulate the addon chips originally contained in the cartridges[1]. So, I think your test is a false one. Games run in the emulator because the emulator added emulation for the chips in the game. This game cartridge would also run on a SNES emulator if you emulated its chips. [1] Code to emulate the behavior of the DSP chip in Super Mario Kart (among many others): https://github.com/bsnes-emu/bsnes/tree/master/bsnes/sfc/dsp https://github.com/bsnes-emu/bsnes/tree/master/bsnes/sfc/dsp

Jarolis 6y ago

I'm confused. Did you really think somebody found a way to do real-time raytracing on a stock SNES? I saw the title and the first thing I thought is "It's not possible, so clearly they did some black magic fuckery to subvert the system's limitations". I wasn't disappointed either, because it's impressive what he managed to do. Maybe try not to take every title completely literally? And maybe try a little bit harder to appreciate people's creativity and hard work?