This is a short demonstration of a homebrew SNES expansion chip designed to add raytracing capabilities to the system. More technical details: • SuperRT - Realtime ray... (video) www.shironekol... (text)
@@xNothing2Lose chuckles and laughs hysterically.... how have I not foreseen that you would respond in such a manner when i wrote my reply :::::::::: :::: :::::::::: :::: :::::::::: :::: :::: :::: :::::::::: :::: :::::::::: :::: :::::::::: :::: ::::
this really does have every bit of the feeling of an old "computer graphics demonstration" video from the 70s/80s... with a demoscene flair. it's incredible...
That's why the dude made this I think. A lot of people will pay a decent pricetag for a remastered RT StarFox cartrigde they can plug into their OEM SNES.
@@luicifiero I like games that have g a m e p l a y. TF2, for instance, is a game of simple graphics. BSP accelerated, cuz Source. The game is what I care about.
@@user-hp7kk4gq6t you are just asking too much, just because modern computers are more powerful does not mean they can be asked to do everything. Run the same program as was done in this video. Then most likely you may get higher resolutions than this in the video.
There's an eerie nostalgia to this, it's almost exactly like what I remember games being like, before I go back and realize they don't look half as good as I remember them
@@lol-ih1tl Almost certainly impossible on gamecube and above without looking something like this instead of a game for that system, as from that point onward, we stopped using the old cartridge system that allowed for them to do anything beyond supply software data. DS, 3DS, and Switch cartridges work quite differently from NES, SNES, N64, and Gameboy ones, while discs obviously can't do anything more.
@@AdmiralTails Modern carts are more like SD cards these days, yes. Though I'm not sure if there is a total lack of bus access for strapping extra acceleration to it. Would still be pretty funny to see a 3090 duct taped to a Switch via some mad arrangement of bridging chippery.
It's possible because SNES cartridge is not just a digital medium. It may contain arbitrary electronics giving SNES more capabilities and computing power. It's a bit like PC expansion cards.
@@brainwashalpha5495 The demos you would see like that on home computers in the 80s weren’t really ray tracing, more like videos that had realistic lighting, it wasn’t done in real time
@Gatemak15 there really isn’t any space to make any upgrades beyond the sprites themselves. You could remake the whole thing and add light-sources to which the characters could make *strong shadows* but it’ll just add layers of visual noise. Tbh I wouldn’t like it with “ray tracing” any better.
Still upset Chrono Trigger Resurrection got C&D'd. SE have done absolutely nothing with the IP since then. Could've just contracted the folks to make the game, but noooo. Ruined something so special... then again that seems to be SE's motto if the last half a decade is anything to go by.
Your hardware can almost certainly do ray tracing, it just won't do it very well. I just watched a video of raytraced minecraft running on an i7-3770+RX480 rig. Actually, go check out Neon Noir, it's a RT benchmark that will run on whatever
Ray tracing is a really vague term because there’s multiple qualities of it. This is really simple and you have a lot of flat faces and there aren’t many light bounces also the resolution is really low. If you want Raytracing with more faces and more pixels and more light bounces it gets much harder to run.
blender have a preview mode and it does ray tracing on realtime on any x86 machine it may not be fast but i is ray tracing and realtime like on the video you may also do a game with it.
I mean, quite many snes games did use coprocessors in some way or the other to assist with Gameplay. Sf2 alpha used it to decompress huge rom data, super fx and super fx2 were used for their stuff and so on
@@topshelf5711 then again the chip he used is a slow af 3 core 50 mhz cpu , not all that fast compared to what all we can get now. Still faster than super fx, I'll admit
@@millenzerom532 Because in my opinion, its a better game mechanically, well it was built by the same Argonaut Sofware who did Starfox, but the MBS was definitely more versatile than the Arwing, the only problem was the game was stretching over the limitatons of SNES, those terrible slowdowns are a menace...
@@karensmith7118 Yes I know. I'm just saying that it's a jump to hardware, while still leaving the core SNES unmodified. While it is questionable how feasible it would have been to develop such a chip at the time, it's still a constraint to go through the SNES hardware (also noting that he refused to use the ARM as this would have gone from, only possible at the time with massive, non-commercialiable R&D, to completely beyond). Otherwise, expansion chips were a thing, and that's the spirit here. Edit: I feel it is also worth noting the last (cartridge) game for the SNES went up to 2000 (I was feeling 1996, but looked it up), so it isn't like it must have been the tech available at first release. Edit 2: Oops, 2000 would have been for the Super Famicom, SNES was 1998 for release outside of Japan.
It could also be said that the video was cut together, using a musical track outside of the system, so it isn't self contained either. Really I just said it in jest.
The only thing that could be crazier if someone developed a peripheral that connects a snes and genesis together and make a demo that utilises their combined power
This is bloody incredible... imagine something like this on the Nintendo 64, gosh DANG Edit: Having looked it up, turns out people have indeed pulled off something similar on the N64. I'm not exactly sure of what I had in mind when I wrote this comment, but whatever the case, for some reason I didn't bother to look up whether it had been accomplished. Thanks for the responses!
@@SnipeDude500 Unpopular opinion, I like Sunshine more than 64 personally, so I myself would love to see it moreso on gamecube, but n64 would be so cool too (oh, and that's not to say that I don't like 64 btw, I still love it to death)
people in the comments really dont be understanding that ray tracing =//= path tracing ray traced lighting and reflections are not global illumination, refraction and caustics this is still impressive though considering the hardware 👀
"3 execution cores at 50MHz" Ok, you might as well stick an RTX 3090 inside a SNES cartridge if you are going to see what's possible with hardware that was unobtainable in 1995.
@@myh6274 That's _raycasting,_ totally different thing from raytracing. It's the same method of drawing pseudo-3D graphics as in Wolfenstein 3D, for example. 2D game (data-wise, since there only ever 2 axis), but portrayed in a way that gives the impression of a 3D space. Still, really impressive for a 2600 to pull that off.
This is one of the few true benefits of cartridges. The fact that developers could include their own hardware expansions inside of the games themselves, is still incredible to me.
Now this is Peak 90’s ray tracing: The hyper-reflective metallic surfaces The untextured primitives The shadows from a singular light source. I freaking love it all!
I love how basically the entire processing power is on the cartridge, like imagine how expensive the games with this expansion must've been back in the day
I think what’s fascinating about this is how surreal it looks. When you have raytracing in a modern game it’s like eh, just making a realistic game look slightly more realistic. This, however, is completely changing the way it looks.
@@bd90492 The custom hardware is doing almost all the work. The only thing SNES is doing is copying the finalized data from the custom hardware into VRAM to display.
From the creator's web: Apologies for the poor screenshot quality, incidentally - for some reason my capture card produces terrible results when capturing from my SNES, so I had to resort to the good old “photograph the screen in a darkened room” approach. www.shironekolabs.com/posts/superrt/
@@BernoSour I knew there was probably some explanation. I just wanted to point out the irony of the situation. I'm not trying to insult the creator or anything.
@@lol-ih1tl it's only impossible if you believe it isn't, that's the difference between you and a visionary. For you have to see it for yourself here you go. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qBD6svULNlI.html
It's running on an FPGA so I don't know if engineered a chip is the right word. The super fx chip used in Star Fox did have to be custom designed and manufactured though so I'm not sure what is allowed by your standards (:
@@deoxal7947 Considering a multi-core, 50 MHz chip would've been utterly insane by 1993 standards, I'd say it's 100% cheating. And yes, using an FPGA counts as engineering a chip.
Little suggestion, you might want to try to port your code as a firmware for the sd2snes/fxpak platform. This would allow many people to easily run this code. shouldn’t need any hardware mod as long as your code fits in their FPGA, I think it should
Yeah, that's something I've been thinking about - there would definitely need to be some trimming done for it to fit, but that aside in theory it should work fine.
@@Nikku4211 Exactly! The regular SD2SNES is what most of us have :) Many thanks and congratulations Shironeko! This is the most beautiful thing I have seen in so long!!
Wow, that's stunning. Does this use up all of the resources on the FPGA? Or could you use this with a stripped down SNES core from the Mister repositories?
The version in this video is basically using the entire chip with very little slack, but it can be cut down significantly by reducing the number of ray/exec engines (at the cost of some speed). I haven't looked at how big the Mister cores are but I'd imagine a version with 1/2 ray engines would stand a reasonable chance of fitting, given that there is clearly enough space left on the Mister side for other custom chips.
@@shironekolabs5647 This is a pretty cool design you've made. From my understanding the SNES core has several of the expansion chips included so it's taking up a fair amount of the FPGA but maybe someone could produce a slimmed down version at some point with the basic support and this. It would be pretty cool to show off. I hope people can make some neat homebrew with your Ray Tracing core. :)
@@shironekolabs5647 Please also consider sharing this with the developers from the SD2SNES/FXPAK Pro, if you think about making it compatible with Mister.
unbelievable stuff! curious though, how scalable are these techniques and systems for new hardware and 3d engines? could these lead to a breakthrough on current tech as well?
The only "breakthrough" here is doing it on a coprocessor in a SNES cartridge. Otherwise it's the same raytracing tech that's been around forever. Neat, but not revolutionary.
Well it runs at 20-30 fps with a resolution of 200x160. Modern hardware can likely max out TV/monitor refresh rates at that resolution. Look at Quake 2 RTX. At 1080p (1920x1080) an RTX 3070 (mid range current gen card) can do 80+ frames per second of raytracing.
@@jasperaura Really?? You don’t see a difference from that games graphics to this tech demo? (See a optometrist, you may need your eyes checked) you see jasper I’m old enough to remember the launch of Star fox, and yes it was impressive. Just not quite like this. Thanks for the reminder though.
this is absolutely incredible don't get me wrong, but 50mhz? there is no way an actual snes expansion chip would've had that kind of clockrate at the time right?
This isn't finding a new thing, it's using a modified cartridge with added RT processing cores, essentially using the cartridge slot as an expansion slot, much like PCIe slots on a PC
