Brazilian software engineer Vitor Vilela has been praising Nintendo’s SA-1 enhancement chip for nearly a decade, but never before have the benefits of the souped-up Super Nintendo processor been more apparent than when Race driving, Atari Game’s lackluster 1992 SNES ports’ 3D arcade racer that originally ran on a single-digit frame rate on the home console.
In a video released yesterday, Vilela shows just how powerful the relatively common SA-1 chip can be by comparing footage from the original Race driving to a conversion they developed for use with the more powerful co-processor. The upgraded hardware boosts the game from about 4 frames per second to over 30, making it more like a real video game and less like a slideshow.
Unlike recent attempts at add ray tracing to SNES gamesHowever, these improvements do not come from modern technology, but from a chip that is already in quite a few cartridges of that time. In total, 34 SNES games used the SA-1 “Super Accelerator” chip, with much faster clock speeds and RAM, between 1995 and 1997, including classics like Kirby Super Star and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
Vilela has shown in recent years how the SA-1 chip can benefit games that didn’t already have it in their cartridges, implementing equally impressive performance upgrades for Gradius III Against III, and Super R-TypeEvery conversion, says Vilela, takes over a hundred hours of work reverse engineering existing code, remapping RAM and tweaking the game to make sure it doesn’t run too fast on the SA-1. In this case Vilela estimates they touched about 90% of the game code.
All of Vilela’s work to date is available through Github, compatible with various SNES emulators and with real hardware if you manage to get the hacked code on a cartridge.