star fox in snes9xgp


nerd of nerds

w00t!!!!
Joined
Feb 25, 2003
Messages
838
is there any chance that we will ever see support fotthe superfx chips used in some snes games :huh: it would be super cool to see star fox running on my gp32...
 
starfox and mario kart use different kinds of chips altogether, from what I know...

starfox used a "special-FX" chip (as they actually called it at the time) for all the polygons and stuff.. mario kart used something else called a DPP, I believe, and that was pretty different. i'm not uber-tech-heavy on the subject, but that much I do know.

Othre snes games that used super-FX were stunt race FX and an electrobrain title (can't remember the name.. 'paradox' or 'equilibrium' something along those lines) and I think that was that. Other snes games that used the DPP (again not sure of the name of that chip, don't quote me) were pilotwings, maybe some others..

not 100% sure of this info, I say to cover my ass, but pretty certain. ask some guys on the ZSnes board if you must know...
 
Quote: is that why street fighter alpha 2 does'nt work
I think that uses another kind of special chip called a DSP-1, and I'm not sure that's emulated in Snes9XGP
 
I thinks it's bad enough that snes9xgp is only just getting to the stage where it works on 2D games, let along 3D ones!.. It took a while for the GBA to get "3D" into their games.

On that point, and due to the fact that the GP32 is, in comparison, quite a bit more powerful than the GBA, I wonder when 3D games will start to come out for the little devil?
 
I think folks may be getting mixed up between Super-FX and Mode 7 (which is the scaling and rotating calls that mario cart uses, dunno if that is a chip on the cart though or built into the SNES.

In short - Polygon shifting is done by Super-FX chips
and Scale and Rotate is done by Mode 7
 
I don't think Pilotwings used an additional custom chip - surely it predated those games. (I may be wrong)

The problem with emulating those games is that you need the extra cpu horsepower to actually emulate them alongside the main and sound cpus. Emulating a single cpu isn't that difficult, but emulating a sound chip that may be way below the spec of the cpu requires a lot more care, as it needs to be kept in time with the cpu.

On top of that you then need SFX or DSP emulation as well. Sadly, I don't think the GP32 is up to it. Snes emulation (although early days yet) seems to be pushing the GP to it's limits. Frameskip 3 and no sound seems to be the order of the day at the moment. I can't see the SFX chip being emulated any time soon. DSP chip - is that an actual Digital Signal Processor? A dsp chip just takes a pattern of bits in, and spews out a different pattern on the otherside of it handy for colourful and quick special effects, but the host machine (be it your GP or your PC) will have to emulate that too, and that'll be way out of the boundaries of the GP's capabilities.

Has anyone played any DSP games on PC? What kind of spec are they looking for?

What do we reckon the GP32's equivalent PC spec is? (This will vary depending on the number of chips each emu has to power.) eg. What spec PC runs Snes emulation at Frameskip 3 with no sound? Pentium 2/300?
 
Ralp99 wrote:
Othre snes games that used super-FX were stunt race FX and an electrobrain title (can't remember the name.. 'paradox' or 'equilibrium' something along those lines) and I think that was that.

I think it was called Vortex. Since I own this game for the actual snes. :p
 
Kooli posted on Aug 27 2003 said:
Ralp99 wrote:
Othre snes games that used super-FX were stunt race FX and an electrobrain title (can't remember the name.. 'paradox' or 'equilibrium' something along those lines) and I think that was that.

I think it was called Vortex. Since I own this game for the actual snes. :p
Me too, it's awful...
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I ve played Vortex only on emulators, and i have admit that i know better titles, but latelly i was playing another Super FX chip game Star Fox 2 and have to say it really rocks but probably will never be emulated on GP32 :)
 
So to clear up a bit things :

some snes games used additionnal chips, most commons are DSPs (different versions, mariokart & pilotwings used dsp-1 for ex. ), Super-FX (math chipset
for 3D stuff) and SA-1 (same processor as the main 65c816 but running faster, 16Mhz I think).
"basic" snes emulation without transparency and custom chipset, with sound support, can be done on GP32 at frameskip 1 or even 0 but at the cost
of heavy rewrite of critical emu part. "advanced" emulation with transparency,
DSP & SuperFX support is possible too, but not a frameskip 0.
 
Back
Top