Man Rewrites SNES Racing Game to Improve Its Framerate Sevenfold

https://kotaku.com/hacker-rewrites-crappy-snes-racer-to-improve-its-frame-1846328191

by DrinkWater • 5 years ago

51 15 5 years ago

40four2• 5 years ago

Seeing that game gives me some nostalgia. I remember playing it as a little boy. There was one in the corner of the local department store that got it’s fair share of quarters from me.

For as great as the SNES was, it’s kind of disappointing Nintendo out of such a poor quality port. Cool to see folks still working on these old games.

sgerenser• 5 years ago

The title credits Tengen, not Nintendo. Weren’t they infamous for releasing games not approved by Nintendo? I remember their NES era cartridges were black instead of gray and shaped differently.

qayxc4• 5 years ago

That headline is very misleading.

The guy didn't just "rewrite" the game, he ported it to a completely different hardware!

The rewrite takes advantage of a separate CPU (the SA-1), so while the original was rendered entirely in software, his version is hardware accelerated. That hardly counts as a "rewrite" (which would imply that his code changes led to the speed-up), but an actual port to a different platform.

So it wasn't his code changes that are responsible for the performance increase, it's the use of additional dedicated hardware...

WalterGR• 5 years ago

The article suggests otherwise.

A total of 34 SNES games used the SA-1 “Super Accelerator” chip, which features much faster clock speeds and RAM

and

Each conversion, Vilela says, takes over a hundred hours of work reverse-engineering existing code, remapping RAM, and adjusting the game to make sure it doesn’t run too quickly on the SA-1. In this case, Vilela estimates they touched some 90% of the game’s code.

qayxc4• 5 years ago

So? Yes, ports can be very intricate, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still a port, not a rewrite, which would run on the same target hardware but with a different runtime behaviour.

The first games with an SA1 chip were released two years after Race Drivin' hit the shelves, so my point still stands and is factually correct. The original Race Drivin' cartridge doesn't contain any enhancement chips and the game runs entirely on the SNES' internal hardware.

"Rewriting" usually doesn't mean making it run on different hardware - that'd be porting. So a game using hardware acceleration runs way faster than its software rendered equivalent? What a shocker! :D

That's not to diminish the guy's efforts by any means - I specifically criticised the headline, not the work of the guy.

molticrystal• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the Ray Tracing fpga for SNES that was making headlines a couple months ago.

https://www.shironekolabs.com/posts/superrt/

CM30• 5 years ago

Oh hey it's Victor Viela. He's known in the Super Mario World ROM hacking community on a patch that adds SA-1 functionality to that game too, with some truly insane effects:

https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=104830

Boltgolt• 5 years ago

TLDR: Adding an extra co-processor makes the game run faster

blackrock• 5 years ago

I wonder if he can improve on F-Zero?

Man Rewrites SNES Racing Game to Improve Its Framerate Sevenfold

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