"Star Fox CD" To Take Advantage Of Super FX 3 Chip, Will Feature Rumble Support

Limited Run really opened the floodgates with this, and I love it.

It's gonna be real interesting to see what more can be done with Super NES technology. (Additionally, someone please enhance Stunt Race FX to a playable state with this thing, thank you.)

Randal Linden is an absolute wizard, I've been a fan of his work since the first Bleem and it's too cool to see him pick up this project. Guess I'd finally get on an fx pak pro for the Super NT before they become in high demand.

StarFox, Doom and Stunt Race are the ones I'd most like to see get enhanced frame rates. I'm genuinely curious as to how this FX3 can improve performance. We know you can overclock the SuperFX 1 & 2 which makes the games run faster but until now no-one had cracked getting more frames per second without the game also running too fast.

I kind of hope the new chip isn't doing too much work and is authentic to what would have been possible back in 199X. You can run the full version of Doom on a Megadrive using a Mega Everdrive Pro, but it's basically running the whole game on the cartridge and just using the Megadrive for controller inputs and image output which feels like cheating to me! 😂

Well this is an interesting development.

@LadyCharlie I played and enjoyed Stunt Race FX as a kid. I don't know what everyone else is thinking.

@LadyCharlie You may be interested in what some of us oldheads were doing about a decade ago:

https://archive.nes.science/nintendoage-forums/nintendoage.com/forum/messageview12b8.html?catid=22&threadid=100516

It's an old message board, and the photos look like they are no longer hosted. But essentially, some users found that the overall speed of Super FX games were determined by a crystal oscillator inside the cartridge which vibrated at a certain frequency. By removing the stock oscillator and replacing it with one at a faster clock speed, you could speed up / smooth out the gameplay of Super FX games.

It was imperfect. It was impractical. And some games performed better than others. Myself, I have done the mod with several games, including Doom. It bumps the stock speed from 21mhz to 28 mhz - a whole 33% boost! Unfortunately, while it does make the game run smoother, it has the side effect of increasing the speed of EVERYTHING - enemy animations, enemy response times, death animations, etc.

Effectively, it turns the game into a sort of Nightmare difficulty regardless of how hard you set it from the get-go. As soon as you see an enemy, they're already shooting and running up on you at alarming speed. But it is fun to see it in motion.

The game with the best results, though? Stunt Race! Not only is the game much smoother than with the stock cart, the increase in speed DOES NOT affect the UI or the in-game timer. Which means you will completely obliterate your old times, and rarely be in a position where you are running out of time while racing.

Inadvertently, it's sort of like activating a permanent cheat mode. But for the sake of seeing Stunt Race being much more playable, I think it's a fair trade ^_^

Well that's interesting, I've played Star Fox at a near perfect 60fps on a special build of SNES9X and whilst I don't expect this to hit that target, it should be a nice boost

@BulkSlash I know what you mean. The whole MSU stuff for the SNES falls into that category in my opinion. All those ‘enhanced’ soundtracks and FMVs just feel like you’re not playing a SNES game anymore. And they really don’t go with the games at all. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

Hopefully the FX PAK Pro build is also compatible with the SD2SNES. There’s no way I’ll be buying another flash cart for my SNES.

I played Starfox recently on my SNES. While it obviously has a sub-30fps frame rate, it’s perfectly playable and I had a blast!

I wonder if the code to make it work would ever be given to everyone?

Would the SuperFX 3 benefit the game that much over just using the FX chip though? From my understanding the reason Star Fox ran so poorly was that it used some sort of older/beta variant of the SuperFX called the Mario Chip that ran at half the speed, and all the SuperFX2 did was support ROMs up to 16Mbit while the FX1 topped out at 8Mbit, but otherwise performed the same.

I remember running into all this when looking up how to make a custom Star Fox 2 cart and finding out you didn't need a doner cart with a FX2 chip (which are a lot rarer and more expensive to get than FX1 carets, especially in the US). I think the initial reason people thought you needed a FX2 was because the early attempts used a Star Fox cart as the doner... which of course ran at a much slower speed (And I think SF2 was originally advertised as using the FX2, likely just due to it being more cost-effective not to produce FX1 chips anymore).

Star Fox 1 runs pretty well already when put on a cart/flashcart that's running it off a normal FX chip.

@BulkSlash yeah, at that point is it even emulation or a SBC bypassing the OG hardware?

Hopefully, it would be nice to finally see all this old hardware get news high quality games using this new chip. The SuperFX chip was such a gimmick back then and seemingly Starfox was pretty much the only "optimally " running complete game. Everything else was sluggish and comical they even released them.... doom aside.

Wasn't DK country a SuperFx game?

@RejectedAng3L
Nope
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588282-donkey-kong-country/boxes/47078
The super FX chip is mentioned nowhere on the box
unlike Doom https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588285-doom/boxes/47080
or StarFox https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588690-star-fox/boxes/40403

Argonaut is also responsible for Croc Croc 2 (obviously ) Buck Bumble, Malice among others.
It ceased to be in 2004.

@GravyThief @RejectedAng3L Yeah that's it, it's cool from a technical standpoint, but it's not really authentic to the era. Although someone the other day described the MSU1 as being a bit like what we'd have got if the SNES CD-ROM drive had launched! 😂

Erm how do you get rumble from a SNES controller? There is no rumble mechanics in it.

@BulkSlash I really wish the SNES-CD had been a real thing. I think the N64 could have used the incubation time better. Not that the N64 was a bad machine, but comparatively speaking the DC and PS1 left it in the dust.

Also, the SNES-CD I feel would have been able to squeeze more power out of the SNES. The games would have looked far better than anything that Sega did with the segaCd.

.....crazy times

@Bunkerneath It's a new controller they've made specifically for this release, or that at least coincides with it.

@RejectedAng3L The N64 was already heavily delayed as it was. The RDRAM latency issues were the main stumbling block, I believe. As bad as it was in the released hardware, it was apparently much worse early on. The machine is also, for its time, very powerful in the right hands. There's some crazy homebrew happening on the machine these days!
The SNES did a pretty admirable job of holding down the fort for a lot longer than it was really meant to against vastly more powerful hardware than it was designed to compete with. I don't think it would have held on until 1997, though, and the CD unit wouldn't have really changed that. It might have actually hurt it, as by focusing on the CD, you're only addressing a fraction of your machine's install base, sometimes a pretty small one. Pulling out all the stops to make competitive games that were available to everyone who bought the machine since its launch was probably a better move. That's a big part of why companies stopped doing add-ons.

I'd honestly like to see every single FX game get support for the FX3.

In fact, if possible, I'd like to see both the "FX3" and the chip the Bitmap Bureau have used in Xeno Crisis be made available for other homebrew developers to use too.

Same goes for a whole bunch of old and new SNES games getting rumble support added as well if possible.

@KitsuneNight Actually they've come back now.

That's weird, doing SuperFX AND MSU-1 at the same time? I always thought you could only have one enhancement chip per game, and I think on the SD2SNES it's actually a memory limitation that you can't do both. Maybe it will be an FXPAK Pro only feature? If you can use as many enhancements chips as you like, why not throw an SA-1 in there too to speed up processing! 😂

So will we actually see physical games released for snes with this tech inside the carts?

@avcrypt lol, that's going to blow up old consoles with tired capacitors. 😆 Are there any bandwidth issues with multiple enhancement chips?

@RejectedAng3L You realise that Yoshi's Island, one of the greatest platform games of all time, used the FX[2] chip, right?

Also, when you said the Dreamcast and PS1 left the N64 in the dust, I presume you meant Saturn there?

Now, assuming you did mean the Saturn, there's multiple ways the N64 left the Saturn in the dust too. Saturn almost certainly could not pull off a game like Wave Rave for example. And there's a few ways the N64 beat the PS1 too. But, overall, I think the Saturn was a superior 2D system and the PS1 a better rounded 3D system overall. The N64 was certainly extremely capable though, and it gave us some of the most groundbreaking and greatest games ever made up to that point, with multiple control innovations that both those other systems copied very quickly indeed.

@CocktailCabinet well considering there was 2 32 bit machines that were actually 16bit x2 processors working in tandem (Saturn & Jaguar), also I'm confidently sure that the NeoGeo was also duel 16bit chips working in tandem also.

The thing is Nintendo lost their drive to set the pace (system spec) afterwards from the SNES. Many of the n64s games were buggy messes granted it was Nintendos 1st time doing 3d mainly.... same with all the devs working on that machine.

I strongly believe and it would be difficult to sway my opinion here, Nintendo screwed up leaning to Philips CDi, they burned the biggest bridge they could have had with Sony due to that. (It's well documented of this relationship gone bad). Sony would have refined the SNES-Cd a lot before consumers got their hands on it. The spec on the prototype wasn't bad, at all. Basically bolting a PS1 to a SNES would've been industry changing, even when compared to the SegaCd or the 32x (which wasn't out yet). Ultimately making the SNES handle all the midi music, the 2d graphics with the availability to tap Mode7 graphics (taking the brunt of those operations) while passing off geomitry, special and spacial effects off on the SNES-Cd unit with the ability of Mov, CD audio extra graphics RAM, additional system memory and storage between cart & CdRom. The other thing is the PS1 put a hell of a fight up to both the Saturn and Dreamcast!!! Just think of that!

In that we wouldn't have lost SEGA consoles, we might not have gotten the PS2 or newer. I'd like to think that Sega is still making consoles in some parallel universe somewhere

@RejectedAng3L What on earth are you talking about? The Jag has a 68k, sure, but Tom and Jerry are 32-bit, the Saturn is almost all 32-bit CPUs excluding the sound coprocessor, and the Neo-Geo is 16-bit with an 8-bit co-processor. Nintendo absolutely cared about tech at that point as well, the N64 is very powerful for its time, and the GameCube was one of the best-engineered consoles they ever put together.
The SNES CD would have failed for the same reason the Sega CD did, it would be too expensive and still held back by the machine it's attached to. Better to go with a clean design.