Although the Nintendo 64 was the first to bring real 3D graphics to the table in 1996, the Super Nintendo had an ace up its sleeve in the form of the Super FX chip. One major advantage of using cartridge-based games is that you have the option to add wild features such as a 3D graphics chip to your SNES, something that got used to make games like Star Fox, and as [Tobi] demonstrates in a recent video, can also totally run Super Mario 64 if you squint a lot.
While there’s a rumor that Nintendo was looking to release a ‘Super Mario FX’ game for the SNES, there’s no evidence for such a project. Fortunately these days we got hobbyists prepared to give it a shake to see what a determined group of SNES game developers could have accomplished back then.
The pleasant surprise here is that although a new engine was needed, the SM64 assets could be used with this ‘SMFX’ game and it runs fairly well. There is still room for performance improvement, and the 2 MB memory limit is a problem that may require some culling of parts of levels.
Frames are painted back to front since there’s no advanced Z-culling or similar features, but it shows just how capable the Super FX chip is. [Tobi] has said that he’ll look at releasing the project in some form once he’s happy with how it works and runs, which is definitely something that we’ll look forward to.
This is one of the reasons why i loved cartridge based game consoles, the cartridges in theory could house extra hardware that could add new concepts to the game system.
For example a company could put a small ISM radio in their cartridge with a small processor to interface with an external peripheral (like a wireless light gun, or something entirely new!). Or enable wireless play. GBA had cables that could enable multiplayer but there is no reason why the cartridge itself couldnt have a radio. Or a mic to shit talk while you beat someone in a wireless pokemon fight?
Sadly cartridge based games were also a waste of resources to essentially have an entire FR board with memory chips, and other hardware. Optical media rightfully beat them
I think alot of manufacturers kinda just despise the whole idea of a electrical interface to anything on the outside world, I just think back to all the exploits in the past to circumvent drm and many of which manipulated hardware. the nintendo switch is a great example of these physical consequences
Boktai, a vampire-fighting game, with an integrated light sensor used to power your in-game light gun, was kind of fun, too.
Ever since the mario decompile code got out, “Can it run Mario 64” has become the new “Can it run doom”
It’s a cool project and pretty surprising to me. But you can totally see why Nintendo would not release a Mario game like this. It was challenging to manage the Mario 64 camera even at 30 fps. A <10 fps version would have been unplayable for most people. And Nintendo has a high standard of polish for Mario games.
From the same generation, Super Mario RPG was a great transition into the 3rd dimension. Isometric and almost all pre-rendered, but very lush.
Which is ironic because after our government was overthrown in 1989 there was a period without any copyright law. For about 5 years (until 1994 or 1996, don’t remember exactly) we didn’t have NES but chinese Pegazus instead. You could go to central bazar and buy “99999999 in 1” carts with games. When they made it illegal people were still too poor to buy original GameBoy or Game Boy Advance so everyone moved to PSX where games could be copied with a simple CD-R recorder.
This is a groundup rewrite, I would say its a demake. So no the superfx is not actually running sm64, but a fanmade port.
This is extremely cool however.
It blurs the line, since it is built from actual game assets. As far as I know it’s using the original art, animations, and levels. Maybe other things like AI too.
But yes, the game engine is unrelated to Super Mario. It’s reused from a different homebrew game.
Do cssdoom, rustdoom, and mocha doom count as Doom? When you use ScumVM to play Monkey Island, does it count as Monkey Island?
A classic DOS game running in a source port could be considered many things since source ports span conservative (as close to vanilla as possible) to moddable (new gameplay features, qol updates).
A demake is a remake, a new engine, that features gameplay mechanics and assets. A demake is a brand new game. ScumVM runs off the original games files, same as doom ports. Sm64pc is a sourceport as well. This is a remake/demake, basically a new game meant to copy the original