With the help of an additional graphics processing chip inside the cartridge, Star Fox it did the impossible by bringing 3D graphics to the 16-bit Super Nintendo. The decision to design the SNES hardware to allow this upgrade was smart on the part of Nintendo and 29 years after its debut, Ben Carter has used a similar trick to contribute real time ray tracing on the now outdated console.
The Super FX chip, as it was known, was not just a term prepared by Nintendo’s marketing team to sell hardware like the one claimed by Sega’s “explosion processing”. The chip, included in cartridges like Star Fox and games less known as Dirt Racer, was a coprocessor designed to increase the rendering capabilities of the Super Nintendo. The console would basically provide a description of what was going on in a given frame and the Super FX chip would represent the images and return them to the console for display on a TV. This is a gross simplification of the process, but unlike games like Donkey Kong Country who faked a 3D effect with pre-rendered sprites, Star Fox it was the real business.
Looking back, it was as stunning as seeing polygonal 3D graphics in the era of 16-bit games. Star Fox it is not exactly easy for the eyes. The textures used in the 3D models were essentially solid colors, the shadows were minimal, the lighting effects were non-existent, and the models did not interact visually with each other through reflections. These are all tricks that modern 3D games use to look so realistic, but even the Super FX chip wasn’t capable of all that.
That that is why Ben Carter, a “standalone game developer / software engineer based in Japan,” wondered if he could be inspired by Super FX and design his own graphics coprocessing chip that would work alongside the Super’s own hardware. Nintendo to create real-time 3D graphics with advanced effect known as ray tracing. In the real world, as light particles bounce around a room and release 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. The ray tracing can recreate this effect by tracing the path of light in a given scene and calculating the effects it has on interacting with simulated objects and bouncing them.
It’s a very intense process in processors, which is why even older 3D consoles like Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 lacked the feature and why their graphics look so old. Getting this to happen to the Super Nintendo seems like an impossible task, but Carter made it work.
The demonstration him shared on YouTube i can’t even begin to compare myself to images of a game like Ciberpunk 2077 running on a PC with a Nvidia RTX 3080 under the hood. The graphics work at a resolution of 200 x 160 (slightly below the native SNES resolution of 256 x 224) and the effects of ray tracing are limited to single bounce reflections and directional light shadows, but compared to Star Fox, 3D animations seem to work on a completely different console.
G / O Media may receive a commission
To get it out, Carter had to open a Super Famicom console (the Japanese version of the Super Nintendo) and sacrifice an evil Pachinko game cartridge. The game’s ROM hardware was removed and the cartridge was connected to a DE10-Nano FPGA development board that was paired with a Cyclone V FPGA. If you have heard it this term before is probably because Cyclone V can also be found in the nearby Analog pocket laptop.
Carter shared wiring photos necessary to achieve this on your website, and needless to say: it is a nest of rats that will scare all hackers except the most determined. In its current form, in real time ray tracking demonstrations only work at about 20 frames per second, but Carter’s optimism can be improved, although the exact purpose is not known. Even if they could update the graphics in a game like Star Fox, Carter would be the only one able to enjoy it unless he found a way to create a mod chip for the original gaming cars: another Herculean company. But as it stands, and as the console updates progress, this is an awesome trick that is taught to a very old dog.