After previously putting a very basic version of Minecraft on the Game Boy Color, [Tobi] decided to have some fun and port that version also to the Super Nintendo (SNES), just to see what would happen with its more powerful hardware. Even without using an add-on chip like the Super FX 3D chip that made games like Star Fox and Doom possible with its 3D-rendered geometry, the basic SNES hardware can already provide a serviceable Minecraft experience.
You can download the SFC file here, featuring a starting world in which you can do all the usual Minecraft-ing shenanigans, like world destruction and construction. Unsurprisingly the game’s resolution is much higher than on the GBC, though the brief glimpse [Tobi] shows of Minecraft on the Game Boy Advance (GBA) with its proper 3D-rendering hardware are leaps ahead of what the basic SNES can do.
This of course raises the question of what Minecraft on the SNES could look like once you add the Super FX or similar 3D accelerator chips for the SNES into the mix. Rather than just being limited to sprite-based graphics and transformations, suddenly you can use real polygons.
I guess we had to update the will-it-run-doom-meme at some point.
We don’t have capacity for two traditions?
Absolutely, it was just a joke, my friend.
Can we discuss this double-standard on that occasion?
Usually (almost always?) when someone ports/installs Doom on random hardware that hardware is literally running the Doom game – maybe cross-compiled, maybe with slightly shrunken maps or other limitations but still pretty much the original doom code etc.
Yet when a HaD article claims “Minecraft” was run on hardware that is by far not capable to run Minecraft (Java!) or even the bastardized half-baked clone attempt now called Minecraft it is always(?) some 3rd party partial minuscule re-implementation of a small subset of what is Minecraft.
Pretty sure a normal Minecraft client could not play together (both directions!) with any of the “Minecraft ran on X-hardware” “hacks” on HaD.
The original Doom supported multiplayer via serial cable. I assume many of the “it runs Doom”-hacks out there could play together with vanilla Doom.
I was just doing a funny, my guy.
SNES is more of a Terraria machine.
Actually…yeah. I imagine it’d be well suited to it. I hope someone tries to make a conversation
The GBA still had no intrinsic 3D rendering capabilities per se. What it did have was better hardware to implement software-based 3D engines – a much faster (and 32 bit) CPU, twice as much main RAM, and enough video ram that it could support a bitmap layer (which could be treated as a framebuffer) rather than being limited to tile-based graphics.
The GBA also offered hardware-based scaling/rotation/affine transformation, so it had no trouble creating the kind of pseudo-3D effects used in games like Mario Kart and F-Zero.
You forgot Golden Sun.
Thank you for that correction. Those boosts to overall performance and hardware acceleration options do definitely make a big difference compared to the GBC, so that somewhat skews one’s impressions.
I guess the NDS was the first time that we got a somewhat proper 3D accelerator in a Nintendo handheld?
Yes, the DS was the first handheld with “real” 3d hardware the way we think of it today – it could render triangles and quads with basic texture mapping and shading. Depending on which features you look at, it was either somewhat better or somewhat worse than the Nintendo 64, so of course people fight over it endlessly.
Side tangent – the ill-fated Virtual Boy also came out in between the GBC and GBA. It hardly counts as “handheld”, and, ironically, has no 3D hardware capabilities in the conventional sense, but its approach might be interesting nonetheless. It primarily used a tile-based graphic engine like older consoles of the time, but it had a lot of features to help automate the 3D effects in its games by converting the Z-axis “depth” of sprites and backgrounds into an appropriate 2-d parallax offset and (usually) rendering them in the appropriate Z-order.
Yeah, the Virtual Boy’s parallax rendering was an interesting feature. Bit of a shame that it wasn’t quite the hit Nintendo hoped it’d be. For me as a kid at least I wasn’t even aware of its existence, and just kept saving up to buy that N64 for Ocarina of Time. Even with that manky N64 texture buffer, it still did really good 3D.
Just remember they shoved a 32bit armv7 into a snes cartridge expansion chip, and it was only used in Japan, combined with superfx?
That should run Minecraft really good
Should definitely run with a raytracing chip, 640-480, 320-240 resolutions?
https://youtu.be/VeFF344NbZ4
Definitely should run Minecraft