I like the subtlety in the way Yoshi's Island uses the enhancement chips. Goes to show how sometimes small details can go a long way in the overall presentation
Megaman X2 and X3 have a lot less slowdown than X1 because they offload the physics and sprite setup to the Cx4. That first giant boss of Megaman X2 for example use literally every single sprite of the system to draw the head/arms without missing a frame.
@@SeanWithTheBeard I imagine it is pushing the Cx4 hard because it is doing the sprite rotation trick along with physics and sprite setup and and and ..
There's a couple bosses that are fully 3D rendered as well, a miniboss and the final boss of X2. There's a few other bosses that use the enhancement chip to handle sprite and screen effects too like Bubble Crab, Crystal Snail, Wheel Gator, and Morph Moth.
According to Wikipedia, the DSP-2 chip in Dungeon Master converts from Atari ST bitmap image data to SNES bitplanes (although the ST also uses bitplanes, but I suppose the layout must be different), and some scaling and transparency effects. But this raises more questions. Why couldn't they convert the graphics "offline" and save them on the cartridge in the correct format? I can only assume that the original graphics were more efficiently compressed, and the cost of a bigger cartridge was higher than the DSP-2 chip.
I had read that too, but it just sounds too silly to be real, it might be for all I know though. I couldn't work out what was happening in the code with the debugger and I didn't want to get too bogged down in it. I guess you're probably right and it's a storage thing, but it still seems weird!
The ST was pretty much a raw horsepower type computer like the speccy. Simple graphics display and a CPU, so you could do all sorts of tricks. In more fixed hardware with custom chips like the SNES sometimes you just can't do some FX. So perhaps the chip was needed for the FX and they decided to also implement the image data conversion too.
Well RGB and tile graphics have some fundamental differences. Tile graphics have color limits within an 8x8 tile that don't exist with RGB. Could simply be that they didn't want to spend the time and money to convert and clean up the graphics and used an "on the fly" solution instead. It could also be that the ST version had some sort of real time pallet optimization going on with the graphics and they needed the DSP to do that on the SNES.
Memory was expensive in the early 90s. It could have very well been cheaper to use a DSP than add the memory needed to hold the graphics in a format the machine could handle.
I'm going off memory but there's also games like Star Ocean that the addon chip did graphics decompression. Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean were both crazy snes carts.
What's hilarious about Street Racer is that it's using parallax on the mountains and clouds (look around 5:00) during rotation of the player's point of view, which is utterly wrong - parallax arises from translation of the point of view, not rotation. The clouds and mountains should rotate together, and what's being drawn there is ludicrous... if pretty.
It kind of makes sense for mariocart because the camera is 3rd person view behind the player, so rotation causes the camera to rotate and translate simultaneously, but the translation should be almost insignificant.
Street racer one of the most disappointing games I ever bought. The hype claimed it rivaled Mario Kart or was even better. No it wasn't, it was trash in comparison. Diddy Kong racing actually lived up to the hype and was better than Mario Kart 64 in many ways.
Breakdown of enhancement chips used: 00:34 DSP1 allows for advanced Mode 7 operations through a simplified math coprocessor that allows for quick scaling, rotation and interpolation requiring floating point calculations. 06:43 The DSP2 chip found in Dungeon Master was designed to convert compressed images from bitmap format to the SNES bitplane format, as Dungeon Master for the SNES is a port of the Atari ST version. 07:05 Explicitly in Mega Man X2/X3, The Hitachi Cx4 is used to calculate floating-point trigonometrics to create and manipulate wireframe effects. By holding the B button on Controller 2 when starting up MMX2/X3, you can get a Cx4 self-test screen. 07:37 Super FX, Argonaut Software's brainchild, used in a bulk of the true 3D games, is a GSU add-on chip that alows for polygonal rendering and 2D image manipulation. It's more commonly referred to as a graphics accelerator. It was used in the port of DOOM for its advanced rendering capabilities. 16:56 The SA1 is a secondary processor chip that had a faster clock of 10.74MHz, 2KB internal RAM, bitmap to bitplane, floating-point multiply/divide/cumulative and secondary CiC (lockout). 23:16 F1 ROC II is the only game with the SETA ST010 which is used to improve computer-controlled AI. Bonus info: The Super Game Boy has a Sharp SM83, which literally means the Super Game Boy has actual Game Boy hardware in its cartridge.
The dsp did a few things not just fast math. It had the ability to pinpoint in a 3d area where something was without the help of the system processor. It had the ability to judge movement and inertia. It also could do vector mapping in that 3d space. All technically could be done on the cpu but the bus was just to slow and the cpu was only 4-5 mhz. Not to mention working memory. The dsp was pretty amazing. Hitachi knew what they were doing
What a great analysis of Yoshi's Island. They truly understood how to optimize the chip, which has really been Nintendo's strength all along. Brilliant stuff.
Interesting fact: 96% of all SNES games released worldwide run on stock SNES hardware. Only 4% of SNES games released worldwide have a special chip inside, which is only 74 games out of 1,757.
@@matiasd.7755 That guy grabbed that from Wiki...that isn't a proper source. There is no way only 34 games used enhancement chips for the Snes. Furthermore, the wiki article he got his number from states only really shows 12 different enhancement chips in total which isn't right either. List of Enhancement Chips for the Snes. 1. Super FX 2. Super FX2 3. CX4 4. DSP-1 5. DSP-2 6. DSP-3 7. DSP-4 8. Sharp LR3592 8. MX15001TFC 10. OBC-1 11. S-DD1 12. S-RTC 13. SA1 14. SPC77100 15. ST010 16. ST011 17. ST018
@@Sinn0100 Almost every SNES game which I say to myself "Man, that's a hell of a good game!" turns out to be using some enhancement chip built into the cartridge...
@@matiasd.7755 You're probably right and the Snes did have some great games on it. Honestly, I wish Sega would have utilized more specialized chips in their games as well. They were always trying to fix their color count and it could have been done without any 32X add-on's. I know they broke the color cap 3/4ths of the way through the Genesis's life but it never hit the numbers the Snes did. Speaking of absolutely bonkers insane color pallets did you see the guys making Symphony of The Night for the freaking Genesis. I can't believe my eyes but it looks so damn close it really blows my mind. We're talking a bone stock Genesis without any helper chips pushing Symphony. That's crazy.
Given that SNES add-on chips included a 37 MHz ARM CPU … I think it's safe to say that some of the games for the SNES were more powerful than the stock console by leaps and bounds. It doesn't matter sometimes if the stock console in the hands of an optimizing master could do something if using it sped up development and failed to increase the cost to a point that it hurt sales.
21:25 That's actually just SNES's background mode 2 (2 4bpp layers + offset per tiles function). It's totally possible on stock SNES, as you can see in Wormland from Super Turrican 2 or Aladdin's final boss. Nice video!
Thanks It is mode 2, but the Super FX is generating tables of scroll offsets that are sent to the scroll register by the CPU. You could do it on the main CPU, but the Super FX is faster.
@@Sharopolis Yeah, preventing slowdown was the main goal of the SFX here. Especially with that complex wavy background going on. @Ed y Genesis also have this vertical split function, but you can only move 16 pixels wide columns. On SNES you can move each 8x8 tile.
I always thought the super FX chip had such a slow frame rate because of a slow DMA transfer, am I wrong? I think Sega's SVP (Virtua racing) chip had a little bit of a faster frame rate just because it could move things to video memory a bit faster. I think the FX and the SVP chips were a little more performant but they are bottle knocked by transfer speed to video ram.
Finally somebody else that knows mode 7 is about background layers not rotation and scaling. I was beginning to think only a handful of us knew. Sick of telling people about mode 7.
heh, Doom! I thought the SNES game was so Amazing back then, even though I had the shareware version on PC. I hold the SNES version close to my heart because it was a game I bought w/ bday money at Service Merchandise for like 70 bucks on sale. Ah, childhood memories.
I had the shareware version too, but our PC didn't run it very well. One evening my grandma took me to Target and said she would buy me a video game. I very nearly picked SNES Doom, but talked myself out of it because I knew I would be getting a Playstation and its superior version of Doom soon. So I got Zoop instead. About the furthest thing from Doom, don't know why I settled on that. I made the right choice by waiting though, and Zoop was sorta fun I guess, but all I could think while playing it was, "This could've been Doom."
Same same. I still have my SNES cartridge and love this port of Doom a lot. Not only for the obscurity part (i mean.. DOOM on the SNES itself is wicked thought) but also because it's a damn fun version with the best version of the PC soundtrack (together with the 3DO version). And i just can't stop but admiring the sheer engineers work that went into the SNES version. Completely re-written to make it work with the SNES hardware. That alone is worth appreciating.
What's mind-blowing is that you can easily do the same thing with a $2 - 5 ARM Cortex M4F microcontroller nowadays, if you're so inclined to make your own custom SNES cartridge with fresh parts (since original parts could be already exhausted by now) - most microcontrollers are already clocked out at 100 - 300 MHz, and some at screaming fast 1 GHz speed, even packing a superscalar CPU, so you obviously have enough time to translate the SuperFX instructions and compute them in that time frame.
It's incredible that Nintendo decided to add additional chips in every single cartridge rather than release an add-on to be plugged between the console and the cartridge. Of course there are many advantages to this solution: it makes room for many different chips and it is totally transparent to the user. By the way, your channel is amazing. Unique, well-researched and well-presented content
i think sega showed that this was a terrible idea: the add on end up being costly not only for both sega and the consumer but also the retailer who have to stock another big ass boxes with a weird device that does nothing by itself, having to explain what it does. it also segments the market, so you have to deal with multiple incompatible games line-up, etc.
@@mkinitcpio Well, to be fair, Sega implemented it sooo badly in many ways... 1st, the add-on could be quite small and relatively inexpensive. It could be marketed as "Super FX+ cart", which enables you to play "Super FX+ games" which would be sold at no extra cost as no extra hardware was reguired in the game cart. The extension cart could be about as wide as game cartridges, but a fraction of their height. What Sega's 32x did was nothing like this - I'm not saying it wouldn't have failed anyway, just that it's not exactly obvious that Sega's failure was making an add-on and not an enhancement chip on game cartridge; the way they did the add-on had so much more that contributed to it's failure. 2nd, I dunno, I don't have a 2nd. Finally, I'm not trying to claim that Nintendo's approach was wrong or worse - there's obviously arguments for it, some of which you mentioned. I'm only saying that 32x is not really a clear example of why the add-on idea was a terrible idea - but how they implemented it certainly was.
My family was too poor nor was it necessary to have a home computer when I was a teenager in the mid 90s. I rented Doom from Blockbuster for SNES and it blew my mind! Seeing it now it's barely discernible what's going on.
Excellent explainer video! Vitor Viela has a really good breakdown of the Support Chip-CPU-RAM bottleneck on his Patreon (might be available elsewhere, not sure though). Some of his solutions are really creative--there's a strong possibility we'll see 30fps StarFox in the coming years if his projects continue to work out. Here's hoping!
The super FX was used for: scaling, rotating and manipulating/tilting images. All things the snes sucked at. Also it could perform floating point operations, used to draw polygons, polymorph and rotate things “smoothly”.
The snes had scaling, rotation and titling built in already. These are the functions that the snes could do without the super fx chip, and it did it well.
The SuperFX was a 32bit RISC CPU with a specialized "draw a pixel" function and hefty multiply capabilities. you could do the hell you want with it. There's even a voxel space demo for the chip on the internet (and a game that would use the same technique but got cancelled)
@@jabarijones7871 only mode 7 made use of those kindof functions, no other modes offer scaling, rotation, or tilting of sprites natively. And that is were some chips play a specific role in. FI: mario kart characters arent scaled, the sprites are swapped out for different versions of the kart at different distances, only this way they could give you the experience of characters being closer or further on the screen. Mode 7 was already used for background aka the track, so it could not scale both the map and karts at one since they did not made use of the same layer.
the reason why there weren't more SNES games using the Super FX chip was because it added to the cost of cartridge manufacturing, for example, the Another World port started out with the intention of using the SFX chip, until the publisher stripped absolutely everything from the cartridge, even the additional ram and save battery, making that port an absolute miracle in of itself.
So from what I understand. The Super Fx was a real unit cost booster when it first came out, and that cost only started to come down when you really made a lot of units. Seemed like a chip you couldn't really use unless you: A: Really needed it, and could justify the cost with the expectation the graphics would sell themselves Or B: Needed to sell a console that was starting to date itself C: Had the benefit of not paying licensing costs per unit D: Had a powerhouse of a pr team, an official magazine, and millions of fans. And could expect to sell a lot.
The SNES should have had a 7.16 MHz CPU and 256K RAM. Back in 1990 when the SNES was released, upgrading the SPECS to what I mentioned would have only cost pennies to do, but given a huge boost to performance.
The Turbo grafx 16 had an 8 bit CPU with a 16-bit PPU so similar to the SNES with its custom 8 bit CPU with some 16-bit dunctionality. But the SNES also had an independent 8-channel Sony sound chip, so the CPU could be half the mhz than TG16. Also bear in mind, the early SNES games only ran at 2.68 mhz instead of the full 3.58 mhz. If you play Fast ROMs of the SNES games with full 3.58 mhz speed added, you encounter much less slowdown.
I dream of an alternate reality where we saw super fx chip powered RPGs that were sprite based but used the polygonal effects like yoshi’s island. I imagine if final fantasy would have continued on the SNES this would have been how they did it.
To be fair it was the only way to try and keep pace with both arcade advances and (as time passed) the impending next generation from Sega. Who’d have thought it would be Sony that dominated?
Especially since they were mostly known for bad movie licensed games at the time. A more expensive LJN, basically. But when they hit the ground running with Namco and Psygnosis, they became immediate contenders. Of course, it helped that Namco and Psygnosis had gone on wild talent raids. Doubt they would have helped much with Pac-Attack and Shadow of the Beast. Or even Galaxian 3d and 3D Lemmings.
@Samuel Gu Good point. they defeated themselves ina way. Sony produced their own cd readers, so they put their own tech into the ps1, where as sega had to outsource to other companies on that front. sorta like the blu ray thing and x box.
7:10 to be more specific on the sprite stuff, I'm fairly sure a few of the bosses in X2 take advantage of the Cx4 chip the same way Yoshi's Island uses FX2, namely the rotation on Morph Moth's first phase and Crystal Snail's shell spinning.
At 20:00 you are visualizing what is most likely a H-DMA table. The PPU accesses this table to generate effects like those falling walls without any CPU involvement; the SuperFX generates those tables to manipulate the background scanlines into the shape of the falling wall.
You really have a gem of a channel... Your voice is palatable and I love your topics.... please do more hardware pushers and new retro system games its incredible to see what people come up with on older hardware
@@Sharopolis i have subscribed now because of how much info you give i love the explanation of how the development team got to the "trickery" to work with the system. I just found you today and you definitely are going to be one of the channels I'm going to be digging through today have to see if you have some commodore 64 stuff that was my favorite computer of all time and I think it's a lot of people's favorite as well
The one thing that bothered me was that you buy the superfx chip plus extra ram in every game. Would be cheaper overall if you put it an extra cartridge where the actual game cartridge is pluged into.
@@enriquegomez8114 But they had to many external cables and stuff like 3dfx Vodoo had. Maybe in form something like the action replay but with other game connector on the top. It would have saved money in the long run.
I mean, with what Travelers Tales did on the Genesis with Sonic 3D Blast, Yoshi's Island probably could mostly be done Super FX-less by a talented enough team.
@@queercommunist yoshi pace can be fast at times. Stock snes will have a lot of slowdowns. RPG games on the snes was amazing and looked like 2D ps1 and Saturn rpg's.
Sega did to some extent. The Sega CD had an additional processor, extra audio channels, and even sampled audio like on the SNES. But devs just didn't make use of it. You'd see a lot of games relaunched on the Sega CD with no real improvement. Looking at you, Road Rash.
@@diecarro79 Don't gaslight, enhancement chips in the cart and system add ons are not the same thing at all. As a kid of the 80s, I can tell you the 32x and mega CD were out of reach for most kids of the time, whereas many NES and SNES games had enhancement and mapper chips making them available for everyone.
7:17 other than the wireframes, if i had to guess which one thing X2 that X couldnt probably do without the chip is the graphic ripple effect of Crystal Snail's time slow down attack.
Was defo price. A game that used Super FX would get moved up at least one notch on the price bracket, and devs would have an aim for which bracket they wanted to end up in. Take International Superstar Soccer Deluxe, for example. The EU version is on a 2mb cart, has no save feature and has limited commentary. The Japanese version was on 4mb cart with save RAM and full commentary. You can't tell me that Konami wouldn't want to make EA look bad with full commentary on a SNES cart, but figured it would be a hard job selling a £60 football game in enough numbers to justify it.
It's obvious that Yoshi's Island uses it. The SNES can't rotate or scale sprites. Mode 7 can only rotate/scale 1 background layer. The GBA can do all this in hardware, so the GBA version of Yoshi's Island didn't need any extra chips.
6:18 Aim for the Ace looks amazing in BSNES HD, which is able to upscale Mode 7 content without it looking blocky while other SNES emulators just upscale the pixels.
Great video! I really like the way you show us how it's working under the hood. Has part 2 been released yet, as keen to know more about how the SA1 and other chips (S-DD1 will be interesting to dig into) work. Thanks!
PilotWings had multiple production runs with different revisions of the DSP-1 chip. The later revision cartridges had a bug in the demo where the plane would crash into the ground, as the corrections to the math broke the demo's physics.
I can't wait for part 2. It's a shame the Super FX chip never had a chance. Winter Gold on SNES actually does *not* use 3D polygons. It uses vector image animations to fake 3D, each frame composed of multiple polygons used to represent a 2D image. Also, the SNES can do sprite scaling and rotation, and it's similar to how it's done on the Super FX 2 with Yoshi's Island because both have to do it in software using the CPU. The Super FX is really just a CPU, it has to be programmed to manually draw polygons and manually draw sprites being scaled and/or rotated. The catch is that the Super FX is much faster as a CPU than the SNES'. Nitpick: Why do the gameplay recordings in your video have this weird motion blur applied to them?
If I recall correctly, the DSP-2 in Dungeon Master, simply converts the bitmap data from the original Atari ST game, into something that the SNES can actually display. (I'd read something about it a while back on a French website, when I was doing research, for a dungeon crawler that I'm currently developing.)
I think it’s cool the added chips they used to use and wish they were used more but this greatly changes how people interpret the graphics hp of the gen and snes. Both had advantages and disadvantages. It’s stupid to think the snes was 2 years newer and still would get upstaged by the genesis many times because they didn’t include the proper stuff in the console and put it in chip form to pass on the savings to themselves. It’s bs and if they had a better chipset in the snes like they should have so many games would have been possible that it would be hard to say genesis had better games but it did just not the best aging games.
The chip in Dungeon Master, as I understand it, is used to allow for directly loading the graphic assets from the original Atari microcomputer version. 🤔
It's not just the enhancement chip that made the Nintendo games possible. Credit also goes to how their programming department (formerly a contractor, but later acquired by Nintendo) is structured. If one gameplay element is required and it's possible with the console, they're required to execute it gameplaywise. There's no room for prima donna employees.
19:50 That's the kind of shenanigans that Traveler's Tales did a lot on the Sega Genesis. Seriously, go watch a few videos on Game Hut and you'll see the same thing being done in Mickey Mania.
Some of the early games that used DSP chips seem to have had them included to slightly boost the clock speed of the standard system from what I can tell to keep games running at a certain speed because other than that I don't think they had any other enhancements they could offer over stock hardware.
They couldn't exactly boost the clock speed of the main CPU using a subprocessor, but they could offload mathematic calculations to the DSP chip and achieve a similar effect.
Its a shame they didn't just cram all the chips into the SNES from the get go. They would have been a lot more creative games out there if it was simply base hardware
You can't show more colours than what the PPU already can. The special chip NEEDS to transfer the graphics to the PPU before showing on the screen. Yoshi's Island doesn't even use that much colours, is mostly between 60 and 80 on screen at once. DKC3 with colour math effects happening can reach 600 and even more.
There's some kind of a myth behind the idea that the SNES was designed to be upgrade by enhancement chips. I mean, any cartridge based system or systems with slots for adding cards is designed to be upgraded. The most desirable is that your game cartridge contains ROM and only ROM. If you need extra chips because the base system can't run the game, then you're going to have to pay for the extras.
Yes and no, as I understand how the Genesis's 32x works, it just abuses the bus same with the Sega CD. Super Nintendo doesn't use these types of hacks, Infact I think it was planned to be modular, otherwise their is no way the SA-1 could take over the system as it does, it's not just a co-processor, it effectively can replace the cpu and give orders to other chips.
@@daedalus547 If the SA-1 is taking over the system, then it is using the same system bus. If the SA-1 chip can stop other system chips (CPU as an example) in order to run the system, then it is sharing the same system bus... If SA-1 has its own buses and memory, then it is modular like the Z80 on the Genesis... Yes, modular is better, but you can do that on a Genesis cartridge too. It is just a design choice, they probably compared the costs and benefits of both aproaches and settle for the simpler one. I guess it was a good selection since both Sega CD and 32X work pretty well...
@@matiasd.7755 The 32x was a pain to develop for, it was not modular at all, the fact that it interrupts the main cpu to insert data is the very reason why Sega did have as many add-ons cause the core architecture was never made to handle it. It's a hack on a hack on a hack, there are only so many hacks you can abuse before it won't work anymore. Nintendo originally was going to make the SNES a powerhouse, the only problem is it would have cost the same as a Neo-Geo AES, so instead Nintendo just made the SNES upgradeable. It's core architecture was built with add-on chips in mind. They knew this from the get go.
@@daedalus547 Sega CD and 32x designs are not hacks. They use the bus for its main purpose. A hack would be using the Yamaha sound chip to generate display somehow... So SA-1 takes over the system and it is ok but interruptions on 32X are not ok? Moreover, Sega CD and 32x work just fine. They can even work concurrently SegaCD+32X, so I don't know what you mean? Virtua Racing is a cartridge enhanced game which requires no add-on. The game contains the SVP coprocessor and it works flawlessly getting higher framerate than the SNES games that rely on the SFX chip to generate 3d. If SNES is designed for expansion and Genesis is not, then why does Virtua Racing achieve a higher framerate on Genesis? Sorry, but I just don't think your argument is enough to convince me that SNES is designed to be more upgradeable than all of the other upgradeable cartridge based systems.
@@matiasd.7755 How is it not a hack? It literally needs to render and combine video output separately. It's a hack! How many SNES carts have video input and outputs? None!
Imagine if Nintendo had included the SFX chip on the console itself from the beginning. The possibilities! Edit: I read somewhere that the DSP in Dungeon Master was used to do bitmap conversion between Atari ST bitmaps and the bitplane format used by the SNES.
_"Imagine if Nintendo had included the SFX chip on the console itself from the beginning."_ They built NES and SNES to be extensible like this for a reason. 1st, they wouldn't have used same implementation if they had built the features and performance of the chip on console itself - as it is it still has to work through the SNES display chip, they would have made it into the display chip itself. The thing is, no matter how over the top they would've made it, they still had to decide on what features they would settle with and then go with it. And that would have set the hard limit on what you can do without putting an extra chip on game cartridge. And they had to do their best to choose something that wouldn't make the console too expensive (Neo Geo says hello) at the time. Whatever they would have chosen, provided they didn't chose too expensive stuff, we would still have the same situation - eventually there would rise a need for most demanding games to have extra punch, because it couldn't perform fast enough on SNES alone. And we would still be having this same discussion about them including the SFX chip on the console itself, only difference being that the SFX chip would be somewhat more impressive than it is now. I think overall they did design it well enough and made it extensible because they knew they couldn't cover every need for the consoles lifetime - and the speed that hardware was getting faster with never ever more impressing features during the 90's was astonishing, you had to be there to understand ;) It was a time when you could feel future happening in the now all the time :D
@@robsku1 Oh I was there in the 90s. :) My first console was a 2600 when I was 4. The SNES was the first console I bought with my own money from working all summer. I then fell for the "64 bit" lies of the Jaguar.
They do *something*. There's no way the companies would pay for that without a damn good reason. Those enhancement chips cost quite a bit especially when you think about how in some cases there were literally pressing millions of them.
Basically, Megaman X2 and X3 used the Cx4 chip as much as possible, the wireframes are just the most visible one. It was actually used mostly for... well, what you described Yoshi's Island using the Super FX chip for: rotating, stretching, and basically allowing graphical effects the original Super Nintendo could not allow and with much less slowdown. For example, the intro level's boss of X2 was not only too big to work without it but also... was basically made with skeletal animation.
Former NOA dev here! I actually worked on Yoshi's Island toward the latter half of development and I can tell you firsthand the FX Chip does NOTHING on the game. There is a very small transistor on the motherboard that actually controls the on and off state of a hologram that displays a Super FX Chip, the hologram of course being a very low power projector powered by the same battery that handles all your save data. As anyone who has replaced this battery can tell you, the FX Chip suddenly "disappears" when the battery is removed, and will disappear as well if said transistor is removed (the cartridge can function without it) and only reappears after installing a fresh battery. Hope this cleared up any confusion for you on the hardware side of Yoshi's Island!
When the Super FX chip draws polys on the screen, isn't it technically drawing tiles? Because that's what it looks like in RAM. Does this make the FX chip the first tiled renderer lol?
I think something similar already existed with NES - Elite for NES used something similar, it was 3D graphics rendered as tiles, although that was just wireframe-3D; in other words, line graphics, but the basic principle is the same. There were probably also Sega Master System and Genesis games that used some similar enhancement chips in cartridge. So Super FX chip would not be the first "tiled renderer" ;) If you want to see something crazy done using the same principle, search RUclips for "reverse emulating the nes" - IIRC the video also mentions Elite.
One game that could've got the SFX treatment was Another (Out of This) World but the publisher pinched every last penny on the cart. It's a shame, the SFX build would've been the definitive edition with how well it ran
I remember price being explicitly stated as an issue with the SuperFX chip back in the days, with magazines talking about how much the thing cost. No exact numbers were given that I can remember, just that it "was very expensive", and something that was given as a reason for why the 3D sequences of The Lawnmower Man was the way they were, they did not want to splurge on the SuperFX for that game (and something that the local Nintendo focused magazine complained about).
I wish there was some homebrew for the sfx chip or vdp even. And I have to wonder what the SFX chip could have achieved if they had built a console around it. Seems like it was really limited by the SNES.
Actually the reason we didn't put projectiles and other extra obstacles in was not down to not being able to do the maths, that was no problem, it was down to the cars being much bigger than the Mario Kart ones so there just wasn't enough spare sprites for them without adding extra multiplexing and stuff on top.
I wondered what the DSP-1 was doing in Super Mario Kart. I guess it handles all the additional calculations with the projectile weapons, and help's add more scenery to the enviroments? I heard that the Cx4 in Mega Man X2 and X3 are used to help render larger maps. No idea if that is true. But the maps do seem much larger.
Considering how the developers had to pay upfront for each cartridge, and then adding the price of another in-house product(the SFX/SFX2), I bet price was a main factor. That and trust.... Nintendo hardly trust's anyone, I bet they didn't offer that kind of support very often. Only conjecture here though....
Price was probably the upfront reason why they didn't want to do it. Learning how to use and make use of the SFX chip would have been additional time and effort (therefore $$$) to implement and many/most judged it wasn't worth it. After searching a bit: "Because of higher manufacturing costs and increased development time, few Super FX based games were made compared to the rest of the SNES library. Due to these increased costs, Super FX games often retailed at a higher MSRP compared to other SNES games." "Yeah they were very expensive, some reaching about $80..." ($80 with inflation goes up to an eye-popping $149 today. Almost NOBODY would pay that for extra features. DLC, sure.) So yeah, sounds about right.
Vortex is a pretty underrated game. Yes it was pretty difficult and a bit choppy FPS wise (just like Star Fox) but it was a neat concept with decent gameplay and the music was all real bangers
IIRC the DSP in Mario Kart computes the affine transformation coefficients used by Mode 7. Mode 7 by itself doesn't understand the notions of translation, rotation, or panning.
I like the subtlety in the way Yoshi's Island uses the enhancement chips. Goes to show how sometimes small details can go a long way in the overall presentation
Fr it's so beautiful to look at
Looking at the SuperFX memory, it seems it uses the SuperFX for just about everything.
Megaman X2 and X3 have a lot less slowdown than X1 because they offload the physics and sprite setup to the Cx4.
That first giant boss of Megaman X2 for example use literally every single sprite of the system to draw the head/arms without missing a frame.
Its also worth noting that the final boss in X2 was a 3D boss, so the effect was utilized for a major part in the game.
Morph Moth still causes a lot of slowdown (not that I'm complaining, it's easier that way)
@@SeanWithTheBeard I imagine it is pushing the Cx4 hard because it is doing the sprite rotation trick along with physics and sprite setup and and and ..
There's a couple bosses that are fully 3D rendered as well, a miniboss and the final boss of X2. There's a few other bosses that use the enhancement chip to handle sprite and screen effects too like Bubble Crab, Crystal Snail, Wheel Gator, and Morph Moth.
@@SeanWithTheBeard loved that "bullet time".
Yoshi's Island is a timeless marvel of art and technology, so beautiful, even the DS version looks inferior by comparison
Fun fact: The source code for Yoshi's Island that leaked in 2020 was so optimized, that people led to believe that it looked like a robot wrote it.
@@irridesu I want to believe that R.O.B for NES made it to prove he wasn't a useless gimmick lol
@@irridesu Yeeeeee
It's a perfect game... Tight controls, beautiful graphics, challenging but bot BS levels and bosses, hidden stuff... It had it all
w-w-w-w-w-hhhhatttt?
According to Wikipedia, the DSP-2 chip in Dungeon Master converts from Atari ST bitmap image data to SNES bitplanes (although the ST also uses bitplanes, but I suppose the layout must be different), and some scaling and transparency effects.
But this raises more questions. Why couldn't they convert the graphics "offline" and save them on the cartridge in the correct format? I can only assume that the original graphics were more efficiently compressed, and the cost of a bigger cartridge was higher than the DSP-2 chip.
I had read that too, but it just sounds too silly to be real, it might be for all I know though. I couldn't work out what was happening in the code with the debugger and I didn't want to get too bogged down in it. I guess you're probably right and it's a storage thing, but it still seems weird!
The ST was pretty much a raw horsepower type computer like the speccy. Simple graphics display and a CPU, so you could do all sorts of tricks. In more fixed hardware with custom chips like the SNES sometimes you just can't do some FX. So perhaps the chip was needed for the FX and they decided to also implement the image data conversion too.
Well RGB and tile graphics have some fundamental differences. Tile graphics have color limits within an 8x8 tile that don't exist with RGB. Could simply be that they didn't want to spend the time and money to convert and clean up the graphics and used an "on the fly" solution instead. It could also be that the ST version had some sort of real time pallet optimization going on with the graphics and they needed the DSP to do that on the SNES.
Memory was expensive in the early 90s. It could have very well been cheaper to use a DSP than add the memory needed to hold the graphics in a format the machine could handle.
I'm going off memory but there's also games like Star Ocean that the addon chip did graphics decompression.
Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean were both crazy snes carts.
What's hilarious about Street Racer is that it's using parallax on the mountains and clouds (look around 5:00) during rotation of the player's point of view, which is utterly wrong - parallax arises from translation of the point of view, not rotation. The clouds and mountains should rotate together, and what's being drawn there is ludicrous... if pretty.
This sort of parallax also seems to be present in Super Mario Kart.
It kind of makes sense for mariocart because the camera is 3rd person view behind the player, so rotation causes the camera to rotate and translate simultaneously, but the translation should be almost insignificant.
Your ideal probably would
have worked a little bit better
all the graphics should have been warping
🚨🎵🕹🤩🕹🤯🎧📺🎛🔉🎚🔊🎶‼
Street racer one of the most disappointing games I ever bought. The hype claimed it rivaled Mario Kart or was even better. No it wasn't, it was trash in comparison. Diddy Kong racing actually lived up to the hype and was better than Mario Kart 64 in many ways.
wow i didn't even notice that absolute godawful mistake.
Legitimately some of the best "how did they do it?" Content on RUclips
Absolutely 💯💯💯
That was Paul Rudd in the Super Nintendo commercial btw.
That's who it is! I knew I recognised him but I couldn't put my finger on it. Thanks!
That's amazing!
Breakdown of enhancement chips used:
00:34 DSP1 allows for advanced Mode 7 operations through a simplified math coprocessor that allows for quick scaling, rotation and interpolation requiring floating point calculations.
06:43 The DSP2 chip found in Dungeon Master was designed to convert compressed images from bitmap format to the SNES bitplane format, as Dungeon Master for the SNES is a port of the Atari ST version.
07:05 Explicitly in Mega Man X2/X3, The Hitachi Cx4 is used to calculate floating-point trigonometrics to create and manipulate wireframe effects. By holding the B button on Controller 2 when starting up MMX2/X3, you can get a Cx4 self-test screen.
07:37 Super FX, Argonaut Software's brainchild, used in a bulk of the true 3D games, is a GSU add-on chip that alows for polygonal rendering and 2D image manipulation. It's more commonly referred to as a graphics accelerator. It was used in the port of DOOM for its advanced rendering capabilities.
16:56 The SA1 is a secondary processor chip that had a faster clock of 10.74MHz, 2KB internal RAM, bitmap to bitplane, floating-point multiply/divide/cumulative and secondary CiC (lockout).
23:16 F1 ROC II is the only game with the SETA ST010 which is used to improve computer-controlled AI.
Bonus info: The Super Game Boy has a Sharp SM83, which literally means the Super Game Boy has actual Game Boy hardware in its cartridge.
The dsp did a few things not just fast math. It had the ability to pinpoint in a 3d area where something was without the help of the system processor. It had the ability to judge movement and inertia. It also could do vector mapping in that 3d space. All technically could be done on the cpu but the bus was just to slow and the cpu was only 4-5 mhz. Not to mention working memory. The dsp was pretty amazing. Hitachi knew what they were doing
What a great analysis of Yoshi's Island. They truly understood how to optimize the chip, which has really been Nintendo's strength all along. Brilliant stuff.
Interesting fact: 96% of all SNES games released worldwide run on stock SNES hardware. Only 4% of SNES games released worldwide have a special chip inside, which is only 74 games out of 1,757.
Yup. Hardly any games need an extra chip. Shows how powerful the SNES really is. It was advanced for 1990.
What's your source?
@@matiasd.7755
That guy grabbed that from Wiki...that isn't a proper source. There is no way only 34 games used enhancement chips for the Snes. Furthermore, the wiki article he got his number from states only really shows 12 different enhancement chips in total which isn't right either.
List of Enhancement Chips for the Snes.
1. Super FX
2. Super FX2
3. CX4
4. DSP-1
5. DSP-2
6. DSP-3
7. DSP-4
8. Sharp LR3592
8. MX15001TFC
10. OBC-1
11. S-DD1
12. S-RTC
13. SA1
14. SPC77100
15. ST010
16. ST011
17. ST018
@@Sinn0100 Almost every SNES game which I say to myself "Man, that's a hell of a good game!" turns out to be using some enhancement chip built into the cartridge...
@@matiasd.7755
You're probably right and the Snes did have some great games on it. Honestly, I wish Sega would have utilized more specialized chips in their games as well. They were always trying to fix their color count and it could have been done without any 32X add-on's. I know they broke the color cap 3/4ths of the way through the Genesis's life but it never hit the numbers the Snes did. Speaking of absolutely bonkers insane color pallets did you see the guys making Symphony of The Night for the freaking Genesis. I can't believe my eyes but it looks so damn close it really blows my mind. We're talking a bone stock Genesis without any helper chips pushing Symphony. That's crazy.
Given that SNES add-on chips included a 37 MHz ARM CPU … I think it's safe to say that some of the games for the SNES were more powerful than the stock console by leaps and bounds. It doesn't matter sometimes if the stock console in the hands of an optimizing master could do something if using it sped up development and failed to increase the cost to a point that it hurt sales.
Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shogi 2, imagine they release a 32-bit game on it or nec v810. Very impressive for a add-pn chip.
but yet those games were still fookin god awful. Like Starfox was as bad as Corncob 3D, seriously
21:25 That's actually just SNES's background mode 2 (2 4bpp layers + offset per tiles function). It's totally possible on stock SNES, as you can see in Wormland from Super Turrican 2 or Aladdin's final boss.
Nice video!
Thanks
It is mode 2, but the Super FX is generating tables of scroll offsets that are sent to the scroll register by the CPU. You could do it on the main CPU, but the Super FX is faster.
@@Sharopolis Yeah, preventing slowdown was the main goal of the SFX here. Especially with that complex wavy background going on.
@Ed y Genesis also have this vertical split function, but you can only move 16 pixels wide columns. On SNES you can move each 8x8 tile.
I always thought the super FX chip had such a slow frame rate because of a slow DMA transfer, am I wrong?
I think Sega's SVP (Virtua racing) chip had a little bit of a faster frame rate just because it could move things to video memory a bit faster.
I think the FX and the SVP chips were a little more performant but they are bottle knocked by transfer speed to video ram.
On Mega Man X 2 and 3 the enhancement chip is used to sprite scaling and rotation, thing that the SNES can't do, Mode 7 is only for background layers.
Finally somebody else that knows mode 7 is about background layers not rotation and scaling. I was beginning to think only a handful of us knew. Sick of telling people about mode 7.
heh, Doom! I thought the SNES game was so Amazing back then, even though I had the shareware version on PC. I hold the SNES version close to my heart because it was a game I bought w/ bday money at Service Merchandise for like 70 bucks on sale. Ah, childhood memories.
And people are complaining about games being $70/80 in 2021 🤣
I had the shareware version too, but our PC didn't run it very well. One evening my grandma took me to Target and said she would buy me a video game. I very nearly picked SNES Doom, but talked myself out of it because I knew I would be getting a Playstation and its superior version of Doom soon. So I got Zoop instead. About the furthest thing from Doom, don't know why I settled on that. I made the right choice by waiting though, and Zoop was sorta fun I guess, but all I could think while playing it was, "This could've been Doom."
Classy username. Really funny
...and the music was far better on the snes.
Same same. I still have my SNES cartridge and love this port of Doom a lot. Not only for the obscurity part (i mean.. DOOM on the SNES itself is wicked thought) but also because it's a damn fun version with the best version of the PC soundtrack (together with the 3DO version). And i just can't stop but admiring the sheer engineers work that went into the SNES version. Completely re-written to make it work with the SNES hardware. That alone is worth appreciating.
What's mind-blowing is that you can easily do the same thing with a $2 - 5 ARM Cortex M4F microcontroller nowadays, if you're so inclined to make your own custom SNES cartridge with fresh parts (since original parts could be already exhausted by now) - most microcontrollers are already clocked out at 100 - 300 MHz, and some at screaming fast 1 GHz speed, even packing a superscalar CPU, so you obviously have enough time to translate the SuperFX instructions and compute them in that time frame.
It's incredible that Nintendo decided to add additional chips in every single cartridge rather than release an add-on to be plugged between the console and the cartridge. Of course there are many advantages to this solution: it makes room for many different chips and it is totally transparent to the user.
By the way, your channel is amazing. Unique, well-researched and well-presented content
i think sega showed that this was a terrible idea: the add on end up being costly not only for both sega and the consumer but also the retailer who have to stock another big ass boxes with a weird device that does nothing by itself, having to explain what it does. it also segments the market, so you have to deal with multiple incompatible games line-up, etc.
@@mkinitcpio both the 32x and sega vd was expensive due to the hardware they used where both add-on did not utilized well by sega on paper.
@@mkinitcpio Well, to be fair, Sega implemented it sooo badly in many ways...
1st, the add-on could be quite small and relatively inexpensive. It could be marketed as "Super FX+ cart", which enables you to play "Super FX+ games" which would be sold at no extra cost as no extra hardware was reguired in the game cart. The extension cart could be about as wide as game cartridges, but a fraction of their height. What Sega's 32x did was nothing like this - I'm not saying it wouldn't have failed anyway, just that it's not exactly obvious that Sega's failure was making an add-on and not an enhancement chip on game cartridge; the way they did the add-on had so much more that contributed to it's failure.
2nd, I dunno, I don't have a 2nd.
Finally, I'm not trying to claim that Nintendo's approach was wrong or worse - there's obviously arguments for it, some of which you mentioned. I'm only saying that 32x is not really a clear example of why the add-on idea was a terrible idea - but how they implemented it certainly was.
Nice to see Street Racer remembered. It did a bloody great job considering it was lacking the extra chip oomph!
My family was too poor nor was it necessary to have a home computer when I was a teenager in the mid 90s. I rented Doom from Blockbuster for SNES and it blew my mind! Seeing it now it's barely discernible what's going on.
Every Tennis game I play:
Fault
Double Fault
0-15
*Turns it off
Mid-1990s Nintendo really loved British programmers (Argonaut, Rare)...
And eventually stabbed every last one of the min the back.
@@SomeOrangeCat in rare's case it was Microsoft.
@@Gamerappa Nintendo pushed them away first.
I used to work at Argonaut
Excellent explainer video!
Vitor Viela has a really good breakdown of the Support Chip-CPU-RAM bottleneck on his Patreon (might be available elsewhere, not sure though). Some of his solutions are really creative--there's a strong possibility we'll see 30fps StarFox in the coming years if his projects continue to work out. Here's hoping!
The super FX was used for: scaling, rotating and manipulating/tilting images. All things the snes sucked at. Also it could perform floating point operations, used to draw polygons, polymorph and rotate things “smoothly”.
Yep, that's pretty much what Sharopolis said.
@@RetroJack spare tour time, read my reply if you are in a quick hurr and still want to know what we just talked about
The snes had scaling, rotation and titling built in already. These are the functions that the snes could do without the super fx chip, and it did it well.
The SuperFX was a 32bit RISC CPU with a specialized "draw a pixel" function and hefty multiply capabilities. you could do the hell you want with it.
There's even a voxel space demo for the chip on the internet (and a game that would use the same technique but got cancelled)
@@jabarijones7871 only mode 7 made use of those kindof functions, no other modes offer scaling, rotation, or tilting of sprites natively. And that is were some chips play a specific role in.
FI: mario kart characters arent scaled, the sprites are swapped out for different versions of the kart at different distances, only this way they could give you the experience of characters being closer or further on the screen. Mode 7 was already used for background aka the track, so it could not scale both the map and karts at one since they did not made use of the same layer.
the reason why there weren't more SNES games using the Super FX chip was because it added to the cost of cartridge manufacturing, for example, the Another World port started out with the intention of using the SFX chip, until the publisher stripped absolutely everything from the cartridge, even the additional ram and save battery, making that port an absolute miracle in of itself.
So from what I understand. The Super Fx was a real unit cost booster when it first came out, and that cost only started to come down when you really made a lot of units.
Seemed like a chip you couldn't really use unless you:
A: Really needed it, and could justify the cost with the expectation the graphics would sell themselves
Or
B: Needed to sell a console that was starting to date itself
C: Had the benefit of not paying licensing costs per unit
D: Had a powerhouse of a pr team, an official magazine, and millions of fans. And could expect to sell a lot.
The SNES should have had a 7.16 MHz CPU and 256K RAM. Back in 1990 when the SNES was released, upgrading the SPECS to what I mentioned would have only cost pennies to do, but given a huge boost to performance.
The Turbo grafx 16 had an 8 bit CPU with a 16-bit PPU so similar to the SNES with its custom 8 bit CPU with some 16-bit dunctionality. But the SNES also had an independent 8-channel Sony sound chip, so the CPU could be half the mhz than TG16.
Also bear in mind, the early SNES games only ran at 2.68 mhz instead of the full 3.58 mhz. If you play Fast ROMs of the SNES games with full 3.58 mhz speed added, you encounter much less slowdown.
I dream of an alternate reality where we saw super fx chip powered RPGs that were sprite based but used the polygonal effects like yoshi’s island. I imagine if final fantasy would have continued on the SNES this would have been how they did it.
Super Mario rpg.
The CX4 chip also allows for faster processing power, more sprites, sprite scaling for Crystal Snail, & the transparency effects used on spotlights.
What about the Super Accelerator 1(SA-1) chip?
To be fair it was the only way to try and keep pace with both arcade advances and (as time passed) the impending next generation from Sega.
Who’d have thought it would be Sony that dominated?
Especially since they were mostly known for bad movie licensed games at the time. A more expensive LJN, basically.
But when they hit the ground running with Namco and Psygnosis, they became immediate contenders.
Of course, it helped that Namco and Psygnosis had gone on wild talent raids. Doubt they would have helped much with Pac-Attack and Shadow of the Beast. Or even Galaxian 3d and 3D Lemmings.
@Samuel Gu
Good point. they defeated themselves ina way.
Sony produced their own cd readers, so they put their own tech into the ps1, where as sega had to outsource to other companies on that front. sorta like the blu ray thing and x box.
Makes me happy to see more names on the patron list!
7:10 to be more specific on the sprite stuff, I'm fairly sure a few of the bosses in X2 take advantage of the Cx4 chip the same way Yoshi's Island uses FX2, namely the rotation on Morph Moth's first phase and Crystal Snail's shell spinning.
At 20:00 you are visualizing what is most likely a H-DMA table. The PPU accesses this table to generate effects like those falling walls without any CPU involvement; the SuperFX generates those tables to manipulate the background scanlines into the shape of the falling wall.
You really have a gem of a channel... Your voice is palatable and I love your topics.... please do more hardware pushers and new retro system games its incredible to see what people come up with on older hardware
That's lovely to hear, thanks! I'm working on more hardware pushing videos so please keep watching.
@@Sharopolis i have subscribed now because of how much info you give i love the explanation of how the development team got to the "trickery" to work with the system. I just found you today and you definitely are going to be one of the channels I'm going to be digging through today have to see if you have some commodore 64 stuff that was my favorite computer of all time and I think it's a lot of people's favorite as well
The one thing that bothered me was that you buy the superfx chip plus extra ram in every game. Would be cheaper overall if you put it an extra cartridge where the actual game cartridge is pluged into.
That was what SEGA did and failed.
@@enriquegomez8114 But they had to many external cables and stuff like 3dfx Vodoo had. Maybe in form something like the action replay but with other game connector on the top. It would have saved money in the long run.
@@enriquegomez8114 it was cancelled due to sega replace svp with the 32x add-on.
Stunt Race FX really deserves a remake, it plays really well, just a bit messy visually.
This, but also Star Fox plays amazing (especially with the Super FX overclock) but it is very, very low poly overall.
I love this stuff. Thanks for taking a deeper dive into the snes!
Do a video about the NES' enhancement chips.
MMC5, MMC3, VRC4 etc.
I kind of did that already, but there's more to come on that topic.
PRO TIP for Stunt Race FX, press Select when the race starts to change to a wider view, also use the shoulder buttons to steer more
I mean, with what Travelers Tales did on the Genesis with Sonic 3D Blast, Yoshi's Island probably could mostly be done Super FX-less by a talented enough team.
Stock CPU is way too slow on the SNES
@@queercommunist yoshi pace can be fast at times. Stock snes will have a lot of slowdowns. RPG games on the snes was amazing and looked like 2D ps1 and Saturn rpg's.
@@maroon9273 I agree. Also Yoshi has a lot of animated background and sprite scaling. It would drop below 10 frame per seconds on stock SNES
Looking forward to your coverage of the S-DD1 and how that made Street Fighter Alpha 2 possible on the SNES!
I always thought it was a shame sega never used these chips on megadrive. The one time they did it was impressive.
Too expensive.
Arguably (as the video mentions) the 32X (and the Mega CD to some extent) served similar purposes.
Virtua Racing for the megadeive had an enhancement chip in it, the only game to ever do it I think. It's super impressive though!
Sega did to some extent. The Sega CD had an additional processor, extra audio channels, and even sampled audio like on the SNES. But devs just didn't make use of it. You'd see a lot of games relaunched on the Sega CD with no real improvement. Looking at you, Road Rash.
@@diecarro79 Don't gaslight, enhancement chips in the cart and system add ons are not the same thing at all. As a kid of the 80s, I can tell you the 32x and mega CD were out of reach for most kids of the time, whereas many NES and SNES games had enhancement and mapper chips making them available for everyone.
The falling walls are NOT done with the Super FX chip (They are done with HDMA)
7:17 other than the wireframes, if i had to guess which one thing X2 that X couldnt probably do without the chip is the graphic ripple effect of Crystal Snail's time slow down attack.
Was defo price. A game that used Super FX would get moved up at least one notch on the price bracket, and devs would have an aim for which bracket they wanted to end up in.
Take International Superstar Soccer Deluxe, for example. The EU version is on a 2mb cart, has no save feature and has limited commentary. The Japanese version was on 4mb cart with save RAM and full commentary. You can't tell me that Konami wouldn't want to make EA look bad with full commentary on a SNES cart, but figured it would be a hard job selling a £60 football game in enough numbers to justify it.
It's obvious that Yoshi's Island uses it. The SNES can't rotate or scale sprites. Mode 7 can only rotate/scale 1 background layer. The GBA can do all this in hardware, so the GBA version of Yoshi's Island didn't need any extra chips.
The arm7Tdmi gba cpu did everything.
6:18 Aim for the Ace looks amazing in BSNES HD, which is able to upscale Mode 7 content without it looking blocky while other SNES emulators just upscale the pixels.
Great video! I really like the way you show us how it's working under the hood. Has part 2 been released yet, as keen to know more about how the SA1 and other chips (S-DD1 will be interesting to dig into) work. Thanks!
PilotWings had multiple production runs with different revisions of the DSP-1 chip. The later revision cartridges had a bug in the demo where the plane would crash into the ground, as the corrections to the math broke the demo's physics.
I can't wait for part 2. It's a shame the Super FX chip never had a chance.
Winter Gold on SNES actually does *not* use 3D polygons. It uses vector image animations to fake 3D, each frame composed of multiple polygons used to represent a 2D image.
Also, the SNES can do sprite scaling and rotation, and it's similar to how it's done on the Super FX 2 with Yoshi's Island because both have to do it in software using the CPU. The Super FX is really just a CPU, it has to be programmed to manually draw polygons and manually draw sprites being scaled and/or rotated. The catch is that the Super FX is much faster as a CPU than the SNES'.
Nitpick: Why do the gameplay recordings in your video have this weird motion blur applied to them?
The motion blur is crt emulation, it's supposed to show more accurately the out out the programmers were expecting.
If I recall correctly, the DSP-2 in Dungeon Master, simply converts the bitmap data from the original Atari ST game, into something that the SNES can actually display.
(I'd read something about it a while back on a French website, when I was doing research, for a dungeon crawler that I'm currently developing.)
I think it’s cool the added chips they used to use and wish they were used more but this greatly changes how people interpret the graphics hp of the gen and snes. Both had advantages and disadvantages. It’s stupid to think the snes was 2 years newer and still would get upstaged by the genesis many times because they didn’t include the proper stuff in the console and put it in chip form to pass on the savings to themselves. It’s bs and if they had a better chipset in the snes like they should have so many games would have been possible that it would be hard to say genesis had better games but it did just not the best aging games.
The chip in Dungeon Master, as I understand it, is used to allow for directly loading the graphic assets from the original Atari microcomputer version. 🤔
It's not just the enhancement chip that made the Nintendo games possible. Credit also goes to how their programming department (formerly a contractor, but later acquired by Nintendo) is structured.
If one gameplay element is required and it's possible with the console, they're required to execute it gameplaywise. There's no room for prima donna employees.
Is that Paul Rudd in the SNES advert?
Yes, he is.
Arguably Street Racer did have projectiles, there is a football you can crash into and push forwards.
But there's not really much else
19:50 That's the kind of shenanigans that Traveler's Tales did a lot on the Sega Genesis. Seriously, go watch a few videos on Game Hut and you'll see the same thing being done in Mickey Mania.
woah the offset generation on the "3d" elements of yoshi's island is mental, I'd never imagined it being done that way!
I'd that Paul Rudd in the advert at the start?
Some of the early games that used DSP chips seem to have had them included to slightly boost the clock speed of the standard system from what I can tell to keep games running at a certain speed because other than that I don't think they had any other enhancements they could offer over stock hardware.
They couldn't exactly boost the clock speed of the main CPU using a subprocessor, but they could offload mathematic calculations to the DSP chip and achieve a similar effect.
Its a shame they didn't just cram all the chips into the SNES from the get go. They would have been a lot more creative games out there if it was simply base hardware
Regarding the lack of speed in Star Fox. Most of the speed issues have been corrected with a patch available online to address bugs in the code
The cip was running all graphics you can wire the controls directly to the cartrige without needing the console at all
6:50 I think I’ve read it does something with converting Atari ST bitplane images into a format the SNES can understand
Does SFX 2 allow for more colours on screen in Yoshi's Island or have I imagined reading that somewhere?
You can't show more colours than what the PPU already can. The special chip NEEDS to transfer the graphics to the PPU before showing on the screen.
Yoshi's Island doesn't even use that much colours, is mostly between 60 and 80 on screen at once. DKC3 with colour math effects happening can reach 600 and even more.
@@maxwelseven snes color pallete and color count is impressive.
There's some kind of a myth behind the idea that the SNES was designed to be upgrade by enhancement chips. I mean, any cartridge based system or systems with slots for adding cards is designed to be upgraded. The most desirable is that your game cartridge contains ROM and only ROM. If you need extra chips because the base system can't run the game, then you're going to have to pay for the extras.
Yes and no, as I understand how the Genesis's 32x works, it just abuses the bus same with the Sega CD.
Super Nintendo doesn't use these types of hacks, Infact I think it was planned to be modular, otherwise their is no way the SA-1 could take over the system as it does, it's not just a co-processor, it effectively can replace the cpu and give orders to other chips.
@@daedalus547 If the SA-1 is taking over the system, then it is using the same system bus. If the SA-1 chip can stop other system chips (CPU as an example) in order to run the system, then it is sharing the same system bus... If SA-1 has its own buses and memory, then it is modular like the Z80 on the Genesis... Yes, modular is better, but you can do that on a Genesis cartridge too. It is just a design choice, they probably compared the costs and benefits of both aproaches and settle for the simpler one. I guess it was a good selection since both Sega CD and 32X work pretty well...
@@matiasd.7755 The 32x was a pain to develop for, it was not modular at all, the fact that it interrupts the main cpu to insert data is the very reason why Sega did have as many add-ons cause the core architecture was never made to handle it. It's a hack on a hack on a hack, there are only so many hacks you can abuse before it won't work anymore.
Nintendo originally was going to make the SNES a powerhouse, the only problem is it would have cost the same as a Neo-Geo AES, so instead Nintendo just made the SNES upgradeable. It's core architecture was built with add-on chips in mind. They knew this from the get go.
@@daedalus547 Sega CD and 32x designs are not hacks. They use the bus for its main purpose. A hack would be using the Yamaha sound chip to generate display somehow... So SA-1 takes over the system and it is ok but interruptions on 32X are not ok? Moreover, Sega CD and 32x work just fine. They can even work concurrently SegaCD+32X, so I don't know what you mean? Virtua Racing is a cartridge enhanced game which requires no add-on. The game contains the SVP coprocessor and it works flawlessly getting higher framerate than the SNES games that rely on the SFX chip to generate 3d. If SNES is designed for expansion and Genesis is not, then why does Virtua Racing achieve a higher framerate on Genesis? Sorry, but I just don't think your argument is enough to convince me that SNES is designed to be more upgradeable than all of the other upgradeable cartridge based systems.
@@matiasd.7755 How is it not a hack? It literally needs to render and combine video output separately. It's a hack! How many SNES carts have video input and outputs? None!
Imagine if Nintendo had included the SFX chip on the console itself from the beginning. The possibilities!
Edit: I read somewhere that the DSP in Dungeon Master was used to do bitmap conversion between Atari ST bitmaps and the bitplane format used by the SNES.
_"Imagine if Nintendo had included the SFX chip on the console itself from the beginning."_
They built NES and SNES to be extensible like this for a reason. 1st, they wouldn't have used same implementation if they had built the features and performance of the chip on console itself - as it is it still has to work through the SNES display chip, they would have made it into the display chip itself. The thing is, no matter how over the top they would've made it, they still had to decide on what features they would settle with and then go with it. And that would have set the hard limit on what you can do without putting an extra chip on game cartridge. And they had to do their best to choose something that wouldn't make the console too expensive (Neo Geo says hello) at the time.
Whatever they would have chosen, provided they didn't chose too expensive stuff, we would still have the same situation - eventually there would rise a need for most demanding games to have extra punch, because it couldn't perform fast enough on SNES alone. And we would still be having this same discussion about them including the SFX chip on the console itself, only difference being that the SFX chip would be somewhat more impressive than it is now. I think overall they did design it well enough and made it extensible because they knew they couldn't cover every need for the consoles lifetime - and the speed that hardware was getting faster with never ever more impressing features during the 90's was astonishing, you had to be there to understand ;) It was a time when you could feel future happening in the now all the time :D
@@robsku1 Oh I was there in the 90s. :) My first console was a 2600 when I was 4. The SNES was the first console I bought with my own money from working all summer. I then fell for the "64 bit" lies of the Jaguar.
Well now im damn curious what those chips that seemingly do little to nothing actuall do!
They do *something*. There's no way the companies would pay for that without a damn good reason. Those enhancement chips cost quite a bit especially when you think about how in some cases there were literally pressing millions of them.
Basically, Megaman X2 and X3 used the Cx4 chip as much as possible, the wireframes are just the most visible one.
It was actually used mostly for... well, what you described Yoshi's Island using the Super FX chip for: rotating, stretching, and basically allowing graphical effects the original Super Nintendo could not allow and with much less slowdown. For example, the intro level's boss of X2 was not only too big to work without it but also... was basically made with skeletal animation.
Former NOA dev here! I actually worked on Yoshi's Island toward the latter half of development and I can tell you firsthand the FX Chip does NOTHING on the game. There is a very small transistor on the motherboard that actually controls the on and off state of a hologram that displays a Super FX Chip, the hologram of course being a very low power projector powered by the same battery that handles all your save data. As anyone who has replaced this battery can tell you, the FX Chip suddenly "disappears" when the battery is removed, and will disappear as well if said transistor is removed (the cartridge can function without it) and only reappears after installing a fresh battery. Hope this cleared up any confusion for you on the hardware side of Yoshi's Island!
When the Super FX chip draws polys on the screen, isn't it technically drawing tiles? Because that's what it looks like in RAM. Does this make the FX chip the first tiled renderer lol?
I think something similar already existed with NES - Elite for NES used something similar, it was 3D graphics rendered as tiles, although that was just wireframe-3D; in other words, line graphics, but the basic principle is the same.
There were probably also Sega Master System and Genesis games that used some similar enhancement chips in cartridge.
So Super FX chip would not be the first "tiled renderer" ;)
If you want to see something crazy done using the same principle, search RUclips for "reverse emulating the nes" - IIRC the video also mentions Elite.
The chip in dungeon master converts the games bitmap graphics into snes format graphics, effectively serving as copy protection
One game that could've got the SFX treatment was Another (Out of This) World but the publisher pinched every last penny on the cart. It's a shame, the SFX build would've been the definitive edition with how well it ran
Aha, I had wondered how some of these games would look on a clocked superfx, Stunt Race does look far more palatable.
It was a very smartly designed console. Extra power for specific games that needed it, as opposed to a super expensive addon or two.
And expansion friendly as well.
I remember price being explicitly stated as an issue with the SuperFX chip back in the days, with magazines talking about how much the thing cost. No exact numbers were given that I can remember, just that it "was very expensive", and something that was given as a reason for why the 3D sequences of The Lawnmower Man was the way they were, they did not want to splurge on the SuperFX for that game (and something that the local Nintendo focused magazine complained about).
I know people like to speak poorly of it, but to me starfox 2 is a really cool game. It almost completely worked for me.
What a fantastic video, thanks.. Can't wait for part 2.
Now I want a detailed look into the Megaman games and what they are doing with the C4 chip.
They just use it to render larger maps. That's it. It's not a big mystery.
I wish there was some homebrew for the sfx chip or vdp even.
And I have to wonder what the SFX chip could have achieved if they had built a console around it. Seems like it was really limited by the SNES.
Dungeon Master on the SNES supposedly has the graphics compressed and are decompressed using the chip inside as some sort of anti-warez protection.
That could well be true, but it's hard to find any hard information about what was going on with that game.
I love that Paul rudd is in that snes commercial in the beginning
Any thoughts on why the Mega Drive didn’t use these helper chips except for the one time with Virtua Racing.?
This man deserves sooo many more subscribers!
Where's part 2??
I could watch videos on retro game mechanics 24/7 thank you for this series. It's fun, technical and informative👍👍👍
Thanks a lot!
Thanks for some good Vortex discussion and footage!
Great video, really looking forward to part 2!
Can’t believe Tales of Phantasia, Star ocean & Trials of mana didn’t make your list.
I'd have to say it was price of the FX chip that stopped it from seeing more use.
I think it was cuz they built a whole new console to serve similar purpose.
Very interesting insight using the emulator. I look forward to part II.
Actually the reason we didn't put projectiles and other extra obstacles in was not down to not being able to do the maths, that was no problem, it was down to the cars being much bigger than the Mario Kart ones so there just wasn't enough spare sprites for them without adding extra multiplexing and stuff on top.
I wondered what the DSP-1 was doing in Super Mario Kart. I guess it handles all the additional calculations with the projectile weapons, and help's add more scenery to the enviroments? I heard that the Cx4 in Mega Man X2 and X3 are used to help render larger maps. No idea if that is true. But the maps do seem much larger.
What is that McLaren doing on an F-Zero circuit?
Considering how the developers had to pay upfront for each cartridge, and then adding the price of another in-house product(the SFX/SFX2), I bet price was a main factor. That and trust.... Nintendo hardly trust's anyone, I bet they didn't offer that kind of support very often. Only conjecture here though....
Price was probably the upfront reason why they didn't want to do it. Learning how to use and make use of the SFX chip would have been additional time and effort (therefore $$$) to implement and many/most judged it wasn't worth it.
After searching a bit:
"Because of higher manufacturing costs and increased development time, few Super FX based games were made compared to the rest of the SNES library. Due to these increased costs, Super FX games often retailed at a higher MSRP compared to other SNES games."
"Yeah they were very expensive, some reaching about $80..." ($80 with inflation goes up to an eye-popping $149 today. Almost NOBODY would pay that for extra features. DLC, sure.)
So yeah, sounds about right.
@@IncertusetNescio good research!! thanks :)
Vortex is a pretty underrated game.
Yes it was pretty difficult and a bit choppy FPS wise (just like Star Fox) but it was a neat concept with decent gameplay
and the music was all real bangers
i swapped my super metroid for vortex for a few week swith a classmate. then we got into a fight and i never saw it back.
Vortex has one of the best SNES soundtracks.
Didn't SF Alpha 2 use the SFX chip?
The Super NES is a beast.
IIRC the DSP in Mario Kart computes the affine transformation coefficients used by Mode 7. Mode 7 by itself doesn't understand the notions of translation, rotation, or panning.
When people says "Snesss" i just always think to myself "Gesundheit". :P
I try and say the name of the system I'm talking about in every way possible just to annoy as many people as I can.