SuperRT - Realtime raytracing on the SNES (walkthrough and technical overview)
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- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2024
- This is a demonstration of a homebrew expansion chip for the SNES that adds realtime raytracing capabilities to the console. An overview of the chip design and capabilities is also included.
Shorter demo: • SuperRT - Realtime ray... (video) Technical info: www.shironekol...
The vibe of that tiny resolution, primitive shapes and ray tracing is huge.
Yeah, I agree on that.
Nostalgic feels
While I understand how amazing this is from a technical standpoint, my favorite thing about this is the beautiful virtual world that was created for the test. I really just love this aesthetic regardless of the hardware running it.
It looks so basic yet so good
what is this aesthetic called?
@@F4sy Render96
Its like the LSD World
Watch the music videos for Jan Hammer called "Beyond the mind's eye". It's more like a miniseries on the future of computer graphics back in 1992. It's very much like this scene.
*RTX 30XX Out of Stock*
Ben: Fine, I'll build my own.
Taking the Thanos approach 😆
Shpegetlers
Are u a pastAfarian aswell
RTX cards suck compared to AMD
(atleast for what I do)
also I'm the 1000th like very pretty
bro imagine this in the 90s, the people would be CRAZY after seeing this, awesome
This is the kind of thing that we just wouldn't believe back then. If it was just a screenshot in a magazine or even a video, nah, no way. I'd need to have the controller in my hand and move it around to believe it. In fact, something like this happened with Doom 3 back in the day as well, with lots of people just saying it would be downgraded before release, that it was pre-rendered somehow.
Well it's using modern day technology
It isn't that out of reach for 90s.
Would be out of price range for the cartridge, though
@@fhunter1test Not just out of price range. He'd need far more electrical power for the prohibitively expensive computer or cluster that would need to take its place. SGI Octane workstations might have enough performance but they use roughly 500 to 1000 watts.
@@IARRCSim Una pregunta, está usando el hardware de la Super Nintendo, o el CHIP SFX?
Wow, that is probably the most impressive thing I've seen on the SNES in a decade. I'd love to build my own cartridge in case the design is made available to the public in the future.
thepoorstudenthobbyist.com/2017/09/14/how-to-make-a-snes-reproduction-cartridge/
It’s not on the SNES though, the SNES is only handling graphics output, all of the processing is being done on three CPUs in this board that happen to be connected to the SNES.
SNES as the car, and the CPUs as the drivers. Neat.
@@yellowblanka6058 0:30 mentions "one of the most interesting things from that era of gaming was that many titles made use of expansion chips in the game cartridge that provided extra functionality..." Shironeko Labs made all this ray tracing functionality work like an expansion chip that was supported by original SNES consoles. It is augmenting the hardware of the SNES but in the same way a lot of SNES games did when the SNES console was new. The main difference is that he has some very impressive 2020's real time ray tracing technology in his expansion chip which completely blows away performance of expansion chips from the early 1990's. Another difference is that he didn't compress his prototype to fit in a cartridge.
@@IARRCSim To be fair, I don't consider games making heavy use of expansion chips an indictment of the power of the host system in general, though at least in the case of games like Star Fox it was using the SNES for things like scaling the sprites for the shots etc. - if a piece of code would never work well without a co-processing chip far more power and/or specialized than the chips in the host console, it's not an indicator of the power of that console, or the game wouldn't NEED that chip.
If you could go back in time and show Nintendo this at the launch of the SNES, they'd have given you the keys to all development. Very well done and absolutely astonishing to see all these years later.
cramming 3 50mhz cores in a cart with 90s technology calls for a cart of at least NeoGeo proportions, and a price of at least 2 full fledged computers, so feasible? yes. Practical, nope. Cool af? you bet!
Nintendo,HIRE THIS MAN!
@@ceciliatavarez5655 NINTENDO, SUE THIS MAN
@@molo-molo5103 Well, suing this man for his achievements using Nintendo hardware could actually end up with a settlement that involves hiring him for his ability instead of shutting it down, as it has happened in the video game industry before. But Nintendo being Nintendo, I guess they could also get irrational about it...
@@data676 nintendo is just like Disney
Dislikes are just ray traced reflections from the likes.
Well only 25 likes got ray traced
@@bolby2232 low specularity, so it doesn't looks like a mirror
@@diefessonsousasilva3244 hahah you're briliant...
makes sense
@@bolby2232 It's diffuse reflections instead of specular reflections. Of course the numbers aren't perfectly reflective! ;)
i really hope this sparks a golden age of SNES fangames/homebrews creation
Ikr
I second that!
holy $&”@, I never thought there’d be a chance SNES would get ray traced Star Fox
@@protocetid ehh since star fox is fast paced, i'll probably struggle with RTX. a mod to improve framerate without speeding up the game might be possible though, remains to be seen.
@@lucaspec7284 Oof so a Super Mario 64 demake would be out of question? Paper Mario would be easier on the hardware with its many sprites, wouldn’t impress to the same degree as SM64.
Raytraced DOOM on SNES would be incredible.
Not really, the characters is flat
@Butt Cube Would work. Doom on SNES is built on a custom engine, which is genuinely 3D.
@@mcjodice No, it is not 3d it runs exactly like normal doom with more snes optimised code. The SuperFX chip is only used for sprite rotation and scaling.
Back then...
@@oliverjurd Randy Linden said 90% of the rendering was done by the SuperFX2
you should license this out to vaporwave artists for their music videos lol.
This is insanely cool though dude incredibly impressive you should be extremely proud!
maaan i wish platforms never died, i would love to play literally anything that could make use of this on my actual snes!
This would be awesome with an editor, ala 3D construction kit to facilitate that... SNES Devs??
People ARE still releasing new games on cartridges for retro systems.
Yeah, even static images would give some dope ass vaporwave album covers.
I would love to be able to use this more music videos.
Alternate title: sticking a 90s silicone graphics pc in a SNES cartridge
silicone?
Well as he said, the cartridge only gives the instructions. Not the power
@@middleclassthrash i wonder if it is possible to increase the resolution amd framerate of it by adding extra ram, that would be great, for what i understand is that due the limited bandwide the snes can only stream video at 160x200 at 30fps in 8bpp, but maybe if we could increase the ram, we could increase the bandwide to allow streaming video at 256x240 at 60fps ,
I say this because it comes to mind that the sattelaview addon for the snes has 256KB of extra ram to increase the performance of the snes, but if that also means that you can stream video at a higher quality on snes??? I just don’t know but am curious about that!!!
"So what have you done during the Pandemic in 2020?"
Me: "Played games from my backlog".
Friends: "Binged Netflix"
Ben: "Build a custom expansion chip for my SNES so it can do raytracing!"
so this dude made a SNES run ray tracing in his living room but my brand new PS5 console "is not quite there yet"
With low-poly models, no textures, and running at 200x160, I think even the PS5 could manage to do this.
You can do real time ray tracing on the original Xbox... if your scene is 15 cubes and 20 spheres :D
@@maighstir3003
No shit Sherlock
People still waste money on consoles? Lol.
@@lordkrythic6246 Can't play Smash Bros on a PC! (tho you can play Rivals of Aether... but it's not quite the same)
I hope this can be used to make a fully raytraced version of Starfox on SNES...
Raytracing in space could be a problem, cuz the only source of light is the near star.
@@metalslayer777 just have a light source at the camera and problem solved
I'd rather prefer star fox with textures instead imo
@@Sh-hg8kf Textures are overrated. Eventually, they'll be obsolete.
@@InfernosReaper bruh wat
I wish I knew any kind of thing related to this amazing type of diy. I wouldn’t even care if it had anything to do with games but this kind of logical knowledge is something I dream of sometimes…
Honestly one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Just superb!
I'm thoroughly impressed, it would be so cool to see homebrew SNES games utilizing this.
this should blow up the minds of game developers back in the snes era.
Starfox 3 confirmed
Some folks ask "why", some folks ask "why not?".
I feel like I've got a peg on what kind of person you are. This is incredible.
I'm sure that you can re-create your expansion chip using the FPGA in the SD2SNES Pro. Once you get that coded then you can do it in real time without all the wires in your video. Great video!!!
yeah i was thinking about it. At the very least, he can take a look at that backup device
Yeah, I was also wondering about whether or not this could be realized with the SD2SNES Pro/FXPAK Pro.
Fingers crossed it will happen; the firmware updates are live on Github, afterall.
github.com/mrehkopf/sd2snes
This mad lad literally came out of the gate with some of the most impressive FPGA work I’ve seen in a while.
looks like an old rendered demo animation, but its just a game running in real time. pretty interesting thing. i like it
This type of pure genius work is the exact kind of reason why I fell in love with the Tech community in the first place. To see someone complete a passion project out of pure curiosity is one of the best things. Even crazier when someone finds ways to break boundaries with classic tech. (Imagine seeing a version of the LSD dream emulator that is using this tech or something similar to this? I'm guessing things would need to be dialed back raytracing wise in order to play a game without possible lagging frame rate issues? Just guessing tho..)
Absolutely unbelievable how original you have kept everything
This is amazing work!!!! I remember how impressed I was as a kid, at what the SuperFX chip could deliver on the Super NES. Congratulations sir, your work is brilliant!
This is really neat. The shadows, the reflections and lighting, all amazing running on a snes.
This is spectacular, and "What I thought would be an interesting project (for certain values of 'interesting')" is now one of my favorite phrases.
This is freaking amazing! It would be awesome to see implementation of SuperRT in future SD2SNES (FXPAK PRO) or maybe to see as standalone SD cartridge. Imagine to see future homebrew games to use this kind of potential :D
Man you should make yourself a Patreon account so you can fund this project, it would be such a shame to leave this project to be only a prototype.
This just popped up in my recommendations, but it is VERY impressive! It makes me think of what could have been done with games at the time. And for sure the Demoscene would have had a field day with it, and probably still would.
There's something I miss about this era of computational electronics, where it was about performing low-level tricks or adding custom accelerators to really pull the most out of hardware. It had a strong element of developer ingenuity, which has more or less been replaced with either super corporate ICs or high-level development which assumes almost infinite RAM and CPU cycles.
This is so crazy, i love it! Hope you'll upload more videos, your voice is super nice to listen to and the effort and knowledge in this project is amazing!
The fact that you even made it 3d in first place is just amazing!
That is amazing. !
I actually Wondered a while back of anyone would make a superfx chip 3 ! Here it is !
The amount of technical expertise it takes to not only design this new chip but optimize your software to make it work blows my mind. The early-CGI art style reminds me of the music video for "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits, early Pixar, and Vaporwave.
My mind... she’s blown! Great work, sir!
you trapped in gilr's body?
I’m genuinely shocked this doesn’t have more views, it’s so cool.
Who knew that we had the tech to ray trace in real-time almost 30 years ago?
In 2004, I remember being in 3D animation class in college and being told that it was currently impossible to ray trace in real-time and that we were still years off from that tech.
The real ray tracing is performed on a modern FPGA. Using '90s hardware would require an expansion card 10 times the size of a SNES.
@Robert w It's an interesting story, can you elaborate further/refer articles? tnx
@@Rand0081 - If I remember correctly that was the company claiming they could do ray-tracing 10,000 times faster then the competition, dedicated hardware would help in that endeavor.
Also I believe they had an add-on card that could do ray-tracing at 30 fps running on a something as low as a 5 watt add-on chip.
I'm pulling this info from memory so it is possible I got some of the facts wrong and some of the info is more then 10 years old, but I do remember the articles were on tomshardware and they still should be searchable.
@@Rand0081 So, not impossibly large.
@@Rand0081 Perhaps, but imagine this sort of thing in an arcade cab back then
How incredible the results are I truly can not express. You are BEAST!!!
I wish this was around in 1990! Imagine the games!!
It would have been awesome!! :o
Feasible but would've been too expensive
This is just like the special effects in the movies! Wait, why does the cart cost more than the snes?
Super Mario FX
One of the sickest things I have ever seen!!!! Would love a game in this style! Combining both the feel of 3D SNES games with the modernity of ray tracing would make for such a cool aesthetic
Wow, this is an amazing display of FPGA programming. I'm really really impressed, especially since you used this project to _learn_ Verilog! What's next for this project?
I am out of words on how awesome this is! Congratz!
Finding this video was hell. I have no idea why the search algorithm is burying it.
This is so cool! I wasn't interested until you said you weren't just doing the heavy lifting off-console and then passing in a video feed to the SNES. This is great!
Me learning FPGA after several years of EE : implementing some base level logic and blinking some LEDs
This guy : yo guys i've created a Raytracing Engine for the SNES
its videos like these that have me dreaming up a perfect world where older generation consoles still receive official development updates by first-party, third-party, and independent studios. imagine if, because of this video, licensed snes games started using this technology? very epic if you ask me.
Impressive. Would love to see someone port the original Starfox to this rendering engine in future, completely get that might be unfeasible but a guy can dream :)
Very interesting project technically. I was really happy when you said, the ARM is unused, because else wise it was just an ARM PC using the SNES as output device (there are existing projects like this on NES and C64 you might know). But yours is different and yes, your goal is met, it keeps the 1990's retro-style gaming spirit in total - just with some additional spice. Keep on, stay healthy and have nice holidays! GTX from Germany
With this, you will be the king of vaporwave.
This is beyond impressive, amazing work sir!
How the hell people dislike this? Salty people because this is awesome!
@BroadTeamFaba or just missclicked
@BroadTeamFaba For last gen. Not all gen.
It's "vote fudging" and literally every website does this in order to throw off spammers looking to game the system.
@@awsomeboy360 agreed, i played through the entire game on pc without experiencing a single glitch or bug miraculously
This is very impressive. It may be a new expansion chip, but this is very cool that you can do something like this with older hardware.
Nerd of the year 2020👀👌
Very Nice work! I LOL'd so hard when you mentioned using 3x 50 MHz processors.
(SNES CPU is
"Now you're playing with power! Ray tracing power!"
This is lovely ... i restored an Atari ATW800 a few years ago, which was mostly used for showcasing raytracing in the 80s (since there never was any other use-case for the Transputer architecture on that machine). While the resolution was considerably higher, rendering a single frame took somewhere between 10-120 minutes. Lovely to see this done in realtime on hardware that came out a few years later ... of course with some more modern hardware added.
Looks like the SD2SNES has to be upgraded again once this project has been finalized ;)
The best thing that came out of pandemic.
This looks like interactive early cgi renders, really cool and surreal
Next challenge: Ray-tracing on a calculator
/watch?v=todarS6XTPc
already a thing
not that hard at all, how much time do you have?
I did write simple raymarcher in TI-Basic (quite different from raytracing but similarly processor intensive) and it took 35 hours to render an image. But hey, you never specified it needs to be realtime!
already exists
Im a little late (by one year) but this is genuinely amazing, I've seen Homebrewers break the limits of retro consoles before (like zippy the porcupine) but never to this extent, you have outdone yourself!
This looks like something Pixar would make back in '86
I have no idea what most of what you were talking about means, but it’s super impressive all the same!
This is amazing, good job man!
This is absolutely dope! I can't wait to see what else will be done!
I still cannot believe what I'm seeing! You're a fuckin Genius!
I would absolutely love to hear more about this. You've earned a sub, my friend.
A more in-depth explanation of how things are drawn would be nice, I always wanted to learn about hardware acceleration.
This is so cool! AmazIng work!
I like that you tried to make it on par with things of the era. Otherwise it's just modern hardware using the SNES as a framebuffer and video output.
This is just about the most impressive technical feat I've seen this year.
It would be extremely interesting to see software being made using SuperRT, but doing this en masse is likely a very difficult endeavor.
How difficult would you expect SuperRT be to emulate?
What a nuts project, love it! Both the hardware design as the resulting visuals are very impressive.
gets RTX running on a SNES while xbox and ps slowly set themselves on fire attempting it, truly amazing work!
Rtx is just the brand, and you gotta take into account that this is the lowest quality you can get away with and its not really a game he's showing it's just a collection of objects not doing much.
This is impressive!
I'm currently designing my own CISC instruction set, and I had an idea for possibly solving the branching hazard.
It went like this.
During the last stage of the pipeline, you check the next instruction to see if it's a valid branch instruction, if it isn't then keep on going as normal, but if it is a branch instruction, then we check the condition code of the branch, and based on whether the condition was met, or not, we set the branch target buffer of the next instruction (the branch instruction itself) to either the branch target (the address that the branch jumps to), or the address of the instruction after the branch instruction.
All of that would happen in a single cycle, within the last pipeline stage.
i particularly like the SPARC approach to efficient branching in a pipelined system - the instruction AFTER the branch is always executed too, before any branching take place. this helps give time for the pipeline to refill from the new location
@@pineberryfox Yeah, that was one of those architecture features I never really appreciated the significance of until I tried to build this! I actually considered using a branch delay slot system here, too (as, ironically, it's easier than handling that case "properly"), but decided the extra complexity on the code side didn't really justify it, especially as in this scenario there didn't seem to be very many situations where delay slot instructions could actually be used to do anything meaningful.
Woah, that's SO COOL! : D
Do you think there's any chance for a commercial release? Homebrew games for retro platforms are quite popular nowadays, but I have no idea what scale of production would be required for a reasonable price of the cartridge.
It's about 130 bucks for a DE10 nano with the Cyclone V. Honestly just build a MiSTer at that point instead.
I NEED a game with this artstyle.
Now re-make Doom and StarFox with this...Come on guys I know you are out there. Also The SNES was 16Bit can you make this run on a N64?
Or just romhack the support in
How about go a bit backwards
What if they made super mario 64 on the snes?
@@seymourkrelborn4780 that makes absolutely no sense.
You would have to remake Mario 64 from scratch to specifically run on a 16 bit cpu. Not to mention that the SNES has far less ram.
The reverse engineered code for Mario64 would help a bit but most of the rendering would need to be completely rewritten.
Absolutely nothing about this would be a "rom hack".
@@Cybertronic72388 I was refering to adding support for this chip to Star Fox. Did you mean to reply to @Mario Mario?
This is so cool!! I've always wanted to create a funky Gameboy cartridge,although I'm more interested in interfacing with weird hardware than doing fast calculations :)
just the right amout of crazy and amazing.
Congrats on your achievements this is amazing
Wow! please use this to RT Starfox!
The most astonishing project demo for Super Nintendo, you developed something more to the system to visualize what possibilities could have been made. If this was done this way, maybe Nintendo PlayStation could have made its way to gamers. For a demo demonstration, make a Star Fox level 1 flying through the area having camera rotation. Make a 3d model Link from the legend of Zelda as a remake demo of Zelda 2
Somebody give this man a Nobel Prize already
You had me at hello, but you lost me "Execution Unit Structure". Nice work!!!!!
The is why computers are the best invention in history.
Incredible. Amazing work.
I'd love to see an upgraded version of Starfox run on this.
most impressive thing I've seen in a while, nice work
Incrível!!
This is next level! Awesome work!
so snes > ps4?
It always have been
Hell yeah
This is absolutely amazing, well done sir!
Will you make it available for the snes core on mister? This is just mind-blowing!
Wow impressed graphics for such old game system
Bad ass! Now, can you do this on N64 with Goldeneye?
This is incredibly impressive
What could you do on an n64. Would a lot of the bandwidth limitations disappear?
@Fat Chocobo only thing that is upgradable is It Ram
@Fat Chocobo I am well aware of that but because it was cartridge based super fx like acceleration would have been possible however impractical. To what extent it could be done is what i was wondering.
Wow the amazing digital circus reference
Omg, o q que é isso, um Ray traycing no SNES?
Sim
This is fascinating. The effect is such a novel mix of old and new.
The internet: AMAZING USE OF OLD TECH!!
Nintendo: CEASE AND DESIST !!
This is unbelievable, congratulations! If you haven’t done so already, it may be worthwhile contacting Digital Foundry, as I’m sure this would be of great interest to those guys.