An innovative engineer who has worked on programming games like Star Fox 64 has revealed a side project he's been working on, and it pushes the boundaries of the classic Super Nintendo Entertainment System to modern-day visual effects. He has introduced ray tracing to the SNES with the SuperRT chip, allowing the 30-year-old console to a feature that developers are still struggling to implement into the newest and current-gen games.
The SuperRT chip goes above and beyond what the SuperFX chip can do, but illustrates what may have been possible all the way back in the '90s had Legend Of Zelda, and it was produced with the SuperFX on the SNES. While the character is just a pattern of polygons that resembles Link, it showed what the SuperFX was capable of, but the chip wasn't adopted into many games, probably because developers started focusing on the Nintendo 64 at the time.
The SuperFX was the building block that Ben Carter, the engineer of the SuperRT, needed to bring ray tracing to the SNES. Ars Technica reveals that the SuperRT chip works with unmodified SNES hardware, it just adds on to the console through a web of wires and breadboards that connect to an FPGA board. This project can run a visual on his display that handles real-time light, reflections and shadows. It can also create 3D shapes like spheres and planes which can merge with each other to make different shapes, being able to make inverted reflections too. Carter demonstrates his project in a video that runs at 20fps, slightly faster than original games, and Carter says that he could optimize his demo to run at a higher frame rate, but "the SNES can't DMA screen contents faster than 30fps."
A CGI world of primary-colored shapes is the set that Carter uses to demonstrate his invention. On his YouTube channel, Ray tracing has now become a goal for games being released on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, as it better simulates real-world environments, giving players more realistic visuals and a more immersive experience.
It is amazing that one man managed to pull off this feat of engineering as a hobby on the SNES, while big development companies are still trying to work it into their PS5 and Xbox Series X/S games. One can see why developers are pushing so hard for the effect now, as it really changes the visual experience, and games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales exhibit the new and improved graphics of today's games that includes ray tracing just like the SuperRT chip can produce.
Source: Shironeko Labs - YouTube (via Ars Technica)
