Brazilian software engineer Vitor Vilela has been singing the praises of Nintendo’s SA-1 upgrade chip for almost a decade, but never before have the benefits of the built-in Super Nintendo processor been more evident than when applied to Drivin ‘Race, the little-seen 1992 Atari Game SNES ports’ 3D arcade runner that originally ran at a one-digit frame rate on the home console.
In a video released yesterday, Vilela shows how powerful the relatively common SA-1 chip could be by comparing images of the original Drivin ‘Race a a conversion they developed for use with the most powerful coprocessor. The updated hardware increases the gameplay by about 4 frames per second to over 30, making it look more like a real video game and less like a slide show.
Unlike recent attempts to do so add ray tracing to SNES gamesHowever, these improvements do not come from modern technology, but from a chip that already exists in a few cartridges of the time. A total of 34 SNES games used the SA-1 “Super Accelerator” chip. which features much faster clock speeds and RAM, between 1995 and 1997, including classics such as Kirby Super Star i Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.
Vilela has spent the last few years demonstrating how the SA-1 chip can benefit games that do not yet include it in their cartridges, implementing performance updates Gradius III, against III, i Super type R. Every conversion, says Vilela, takes over one hundred hours of work reverse code engineering of existing code, remapping RAM and adjusting 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 so far is available through Github, compatible with various SNES emulators, as well as real hardware, if you can get the hacked code in a cartridge.