blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Honestly, you have no idea.
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I seriously love the Super FX chip
- Thread starter SOR5
- Start date
Speaking of SuperFX2 and Yoshi's Island: while the GBA version has the awful Yoshi sounds and a destroyed palette, has anyone compared the technical effects between the two versions? The GBA's vanilla hardware was able to "handle" YI without any extra hardware. But I wonder if there were any benefits/losses involved in doing that conversion.
The fuzzy effect and the rolling lava in the castle suffer, but everything else is fine.
And there's a homebrew patch to restore the SNES colours and sounds to the GBA version. I have it installed on my 3DS and its fantastic.
the Super FX chip is a math co-processor. You send it data across a bus, it sends back data across a bus. It literally cannot be a patent or licensing issue, because those would apply to the physical chip itself. You don't need to step on any patent toes to solve math problems in software.
GuyKazama
Member
Do you have a source for this being a legal issue, or are you speculating?
wild wild rice
Member
It is wonderful, but I kind of hate it because there's apparently no way to put up Yoshi's Island or Star Fox in their original forms on eShop.
Edit: Without homebrewing, etc.
Edit: Without homebrewing, etc.
Business
Member
That and the tiny screens on 2 player mode.
At the time I looked at Virtua Racing on Megadrive and thought it was better but in hindsight I think VR had nothing on Stunt Race FX.
I think its more of a "nintendo being cautious bastards" issue.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Reproducing the ISA can be a copyright issue if the vendor never made the ISA public.
Fallout-NL
Member
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgr5y0Jk5nM
My first PS1 game, loved it. Doesn't look as close to SFX as I remembered, but the very very very minimal textures meant it basically didn't have load times. Gorgeous still, love the aesthetic.
bonus points because Mary's stage with the aurora borealis has awesome music
https://youtu.be/v2ndajsFZa8
My first PS1 game, loved it. Doesn't look as close to SFX as I remembered, but the very very very minimal textures meant it basically didn't have load times. Gorgeous still, love the aesthetic.
bonus points because Mary's stage with the aurora borealis has awesome music
https://youtu.be/v2ndajsFZa8
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
You lost me here. There's a standard nintendo ISA? I'm referring to the Instruction Set Architecture of the SuperFX - was that ever made public, outside of the NDAs devs had to work under? If it was never made public, there's a good chance it was subject to licensing agreements with 3rd parties, and said ISA is still a trade secret, and at the very least a copyrighted material.
cartman414
Member
The chip that led to the 32x. Let that sink in for a moment. (Then again, Sega's management was already a little spotty. Cutting loose on the Genesis so soon? Really?)
Indy 500 on the PC reminds me of a Super FX game.
Also: 4D Sports Boxing is another one I remember that reminded me of Super FX games. I know it's another PC game but at the time even, it always made me think of Star Fox.
Also: 4D Sports Boxing is another one I remember that reminded me of Super FX games. I know it's another PC game but at the time even, it always made me think of Star Fox.
entremet
Member
It doesn't take a genius to notice it.
Star Fox, Stunt Race, and Yoshi's Island SNES never made the original Wii VC, which had most first party Nintendo SNES titles.
Argonaut, the co-developer of the chip, is no longer in business. It was dissolved. That means the legal rights to the chip are who knows where.
Could Nintendo probably track down the rights? Probably? But it is worth it to them? Notoriously penny pinching Nintendo? I don't think so.
NeOak
Member
Ooh look, someone talking out of his ass.
Sir Abacus
Member
The ARC ISA, as far as the Super FX is concerned, is well documented. ARC was basically designed for use by Nintendo and then was expanded to general purpose CPU work.
What is this? ARC was sold a couple of times and ended up with Synopsys. They still own the rights to the ARC architecture.
I don't think it's a legal issue. The patents for the SuperFX chip probably expired by now. It's in Nintendo's court on whether they want to take the time to emulate SuperFX on the Wii U or N3DS.
On the New 3DS side, I wonder if we'll even get SA-1 games (Kirby Super Star, Super Mario RPG), let alone SuperFX titles. Mega Man X2 and X3 are the only titles announced (in Japan) that use special chips that aren't the DSP-1 chip found in Super Mario Kart and a few others released.
SiegfriedFM
Member
Frontier: Elite 2 had a similar look to it on Amiga (PC version had primitive textures).
Pokemaniac
Member
Jeeze, I said I hadn't looked into it.
Though I don't really follow this SA-1 is working, therefore there's no technical obstacle to getting Super FX working line of logic. It'd be one thing if the chips were pretty similar, but, from my understanding they don't really seem to resemble each other all that much.
Sir Abacus
Member
Hell, the SA-1 is just an upclocked SNES CPU.
Sorry for talking about SVP in a SuperFx thread, but this is such an awesome game. V. R. Was way ahead of its time. 1992! Damn. I loved Stunt Race Fx but V. R. is in another level. So blistering fast, playable, time triable and split screenable lol.
Music was awful though.
The Genesis conversion was spot on. Someone mentioned 15 fps but I don't think so. Feels like 20sh something.
KojiKnight
Member
Point remains, this is not a technical issue. Even if Nintendo's engineers somehow didn't have access to the original design documents, the chips have been fully reverse engineered and documents available in the public domain.
These chips aren't harder to emulate than other similar add-on chips already available (such as the SA-1 in super Mario RPG, or the Cx4 in MMX 2/3)
3x the speed of the snes, plus additional ram and other features... It wasn't simply just a faster snes processor.
The super fx chip honestly isn't anything too spectacular on its own either.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
You completely missed what I said (ed: re-reading it, it's not quite clear, so mea culpa). I asked if it was made public, as in published by its owner, be that nintendo or whoever nintendo licensed it from. Otherwise people can reverse-engineer whatever they like.
Aha, so that's the actual owner of this IP - a 3rd party. Good. Now we can actually hypothesize if nintendo had a deal with Argonaut about ownership and if that permitted emulation. I would go out on a limb, and suggest, just suggest, that since nintendo were a customer to Argonaut, there might be a clause that nintendo might need to still pay licencing fees if they used the MARIO ISA in a commercial product again.
Sir Abacus
Member
Fox Mulder
Member
Yeah, that God awful FX chip fps. It was still neat at the time though.
I think I recall someone getting star fox to run better on fx2 chips or something.
Sir Abacus
Member
Man, I loved how that game looked back in the day. Plus it's pretty quirky and fun to play too. I dig that they chose spheres as the base objects for building nearly everything in the game, even in the pre-rendered backgrounds. It gives a very unique look that hasn't been seen in anything else afaik.
The old Moto Racer game for PC allowed you to turn off the textures in the game and that gave it a very unique and cool look that I might prefer to the intended textured mode. Note how the most distant riders turn into just wireframes. I guess this mode was meant for computers that have difficulty running the game normally.
s_mirage
Member
Man, I loved how that game looked back in the day. Plus it's pretty quirky and fun to play too. I dig that they chose spheres as the base objects for building nearly everything in the game, even in the pre-rendered backgrounds. It gives a very unique look that hasn't been seen in anything else afaik.
The old Moto Racer game for PC allowed you to turn off the textures in the game and that gave it a very unique and cool look that I might prefer to the intended textured mode. Note how the most distant riders turn into just wireframes. I guess this mode was meant for computers that have difficulty running the game normally.
Probably, although, seeing as the game was developed by Delphine, perhaps they put the mode in for that Flashback like aesthetic.
s_mirage
Member
Virtually anything can render polygons, it's just a matter of how many and how fast. Another World didn't use many polygons.
Spladam
Member
Now that's pretty killer. Unfortunately the chip caps the frames at 20FPS, and you'd really have to OC the SNES's main CPU to get the real advantage, and that chip falls to pieces when OC to any useful amount because of bus timings. I've never tried to do it in emulation, but I'd like to give both a go in software emulation some time in the future. There are two versions of SNES9x that allow you to do this if I remember right.
Yeah, I want try this, when he turns it up to 400% he appears to defeat the 20FPS cap the SFX chip had for that game had, but the game is still being fed by the SNES's main CPU, which is still being emulated at default speeds to maintain emulation accuracy, limiting the benefits, and I think this could be overcome too without the crashing and graphical artifacts with some machine level tinkering in the emulation. I'm not skilled enough to do this.
Speaking of which, come on GAF Nerds, get on this please, I'll wait for the thread that marks your success.
There are a few homebrew star fox demos for the genesis floating around
I think this was the original one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuYFmIEtLLk
these ones by gasega68k run even faster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUZpF2JLF4s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHLc0AzD85g
he also has other cool demos worth checking out, including a mario kart style demo, and a genesis port of wolfenstein 3d.
No way. The music in virtua racing is great.
Wait, I was thinking of the 32x version. The genesis music isn't bad though.
I think this was the original one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuYFmIEtLLk
these ones by gasega68k run even faster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUZpF2JLF4s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHLc0AzD85g
he also has other cool demos worth checking out, including a mario kart style demo, and a genesis port of wolfenstein 3d.
No way. The music in virtua racing is great.
Wait, I was thinking of the 32x version. The genesis music isn't bad though.
Spladam
Member
Pretty sure he was being snarky. Race the Sun and Super Hot are pretty awesome though.
NOLA_Gaffer
Banned
No snark intended. Indies seem to be going either for the faux-retro pixel look or going straight to "proper" polygons, skipping over that awkward mid-to-late 90s terrible polygon aesthetic that I really have a soft spot for.
shinjimimura
Member
As a 14 years old enjoyng my SNES and dreaming on Neo Geo in the arcades, I could NEVER stand those early 3D graphics. I remember going to the arcades and seeing all those people lining up behind VF, while I was enjoying my SSF2T and thinking "how the hell can they stand such UGLY graphics?". I think I only started to warm up to 3D when PS2 came along and I bought MGS2.
Couldn't it also be a question of how accurate Nintendo's SNES emulator is? Could be that the hardware isn't quite there to run games using the SFX chip. Though that sounds silly when even the Wii ran N64 games very well :lol
Sure it can.
Same for the crystals in the dark world cutscenes. They're 3D.
The 3D Triforce will never stop being amazing. God damn.
Cow Mengde
Banned
Same, I found Star Fox really ugly. My friends and I saw Virtua Fighter in the arcade, and we started making fun of how ugly the game looked.
JailDesigner
Member
Super FX games:
Stunt Race FX (1994)
Stunt Race FX/Wild Trax is a Super FX2 game. The proof is that is a good donor to do a StarFox 2 repro.
Vindicator
Member
DID made some remarkable 3D games back in the days, like Robocop 3, Epic, Inferno and F-29 Reataliator for example.
MrCunningham
Member
That's interesting if true. I'm guessing it may have been under clocked to run at the same speed as the Mario 1 chip in Star Fox then? Was Nintendo using the same chip for Stunt Race FX and onward, and just up clocking it?
Edit... looking at it closer, I have come up with this:
Code:
[B]MARIO CHIP 1 [/B]
StarWing/Starfox
[B]GSU-1 [/B]
Dirt Trax FX
Dirt Racer
Stunt Race FX
Vortex
[B]GSU-2[/B]
Doom
Winter Gold
[B]GSU-2-SP1[/B]
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s IslandCredit from here: https://circuit-board.de/forum/inde...-SuperFX-Chip-übertakten-3-Methoden-zum-Ziel/
So GSU-1 can run at 21MHZ, but is halved to 10.5Mhz like the Mario Chip 1. I guess this chip can make a good donor for Star Fox 2 because it can be unlocked. But that would also be the case for Dirt Trax, Vortex and Dirt Racer as well. Though Stunt Race is probably the easiest cart to find out of that bunch since it sold the most cartridges. GSU-2 seems to be unlocked at 21MHZ and is capable of handling larger ROM sizes. The iteration of the SuperFX chip is in Yoshi's Island. I wonder if the final release ROM of Star Fox 2 uses the GSU-2-SP1? Dylan Cuthbert apparently owns a version of Star Fox 2 that even is more close to final release than the version that leaked and is out on the NET. But he won't release it.