Random: Monitor next-generation real-time ray tracing now on the SNES

Lightning tracking is more than a buzzword, it’s actually a big issue for next-generation games. While we probably won’t see it on a Nintendo platform anytime soon, Ben Carter, a game developer and software engineer, has found at least one unofficial way to make this rendering technique work on Super Nintendo hardware.

In a video on his YouTube channel Shironeko Labs, he explains how he was inspired by the legendary Super FX chip that drove games like Star Fox, to create a modified cartridge called “SuperRT”, which allows Super Nintendo to manage the ray tracing in real time, and well … the results are pretty impressive. Watch the following videos.

“What I wanted to try and do was something similar to the Super FX chip used in titles like Star Fox, where SNES executes the game’s logic and delivers a scene description to a cartridge chip to generate the image. Finally, I tried deliberately restricting myself to using a single custom chip for the design, without using the ARM kernel available on the DE10 board or any other external processing resource. “