Using an additional graphics processing chip in the cartridge, Star Fox went above and beyond by bringing 3D graphics to the 16-bit Super Nintendo. The decision to develop the SNES hardware to enable this upgrade was a smart decision by Nintendo, and 29 years after its debut, Ben Carter has used a similar trick to convey real time ray tracing to the now obsolete console.
The Super FX chip, as it was called, was not just another term coined by Nintendo’s marketing team to sell hardware, as Sega’s claimed “blast processing” was. The chip, contained in cartridges such as Star Fox and lesser known games such as Dirt racer, was a coprocessor designed to enhance the Super Nintendo’s display capabilities. The console would essentially describe what was happening in a particular frame, and the Super FX chip would display the images and return them to the console to display on a TV. That’s a gross simplification of the process, but unlike games like Donkey Kong Country that mimicked a 3D effect with pre-generated sprites, Star Fox was the real deal.
As impressive as seeing polygonal 3D graphics in the era of 16-bit gaming was, looking back, Star Fox is not particularly pleasant for the eyes. The textures used on the 3D models were essentially solid colors, shadows were minimal, lighting effects were non-existent, and models did not interact visually with each other through reflections. These are all tricks that modern 3D games use to look so hyper realistic, but not even the Super FX chip was capable of that.
This is why Ben Carter, a “freelance game developer / software engineer based in Japan,” wondered if he could take inspiration from the Super FX and design his own graphics co-processing chip that works with the Super Nintendo’s own hardware. worked to create real-time 3D graphics with an advanced effect known as ray tracing. In the real world, when light particles bounce across a room and off objects, they create shadows, reflections, and other visual interactions. Place your hand next to a red ball in a bright room and you will notice that your hand also looks a little red. Ray tracing can mimic this effect by tracing the path of the light in a particular scene and calculating the effects it has as it interacts with and bounces off simulated objects.
It’s a very processor intensive process, which is why even older 3D consoles like the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 lacked this feature and why do their graphics look so outdated. Making it happen at all on the Super Nintendo sounds like an impossible task, but Carter managed to make it work.
The demo he shared on YouTube can’t even begin to compare the images of a game like Cyberpunk 2077 running on a pc with a Nvidia RTX 3080 under the hood. Rotate the images at a resolution of 200 X 160 (slightly lower than the SNES ‘native resolution of 256 X 224) and the ray tracing effects are limited to single reflected reflections and focused light shadows, but compared to Star Fox, the 3D animations look like they are running on a completely different console.
G / O Media can receive a commission
To get it done, Carter had to break open a Super Famicom console (the Japanese version of the Super Nintendo) and get a bad Pachinko game cartridge. The game ROM hardware has been removed and the cartridge is connected to a DE10-Nano FPGA development board associated with a Cyclone V FPGA. If you’ve heard it that term for it is probably because the Cyclone V can also be found in the coming Analog Pocket Handheld.
Carter shared pictures of the wiring needed to get this done on its website, and needless to say, it’s a rat’s nest that will deter all but the most determined hardware hackers. Real-time in its current form ray tracing demos only run at around 20 frames per second, but Carter is optimistic that this can be improved, although it is unknown for what purpose. Even if they like the graphics of a game Star FoxCarter would be the only one who could enjoy it unless he found a way to make a mod chip for the original game carts – another huge undertaking. But as it stands now, and as console upgrades go, this is an impressive trick that a very old dog learned.