A lot of modern gaming PCs aren't equipped to handle ray tracing, but the 30-year-old Super Nintendo is tracing rays all over the place without missing a frame. Of course, that's not without the help of developer Shironeko Labs, which used a homebrew catridge expansion chip to give the Super Nintendo ray tracing capabilities.

Amazingly, the Super Nintendo itself (technically a Super Famicom) wasn't modded for the experiment - aside from having its case removed to make room for cabling - just the game cartridge. The game Shironeko Labs used to test was "an awful Pachinko game" found at a second-hand shop. Anyway, check out the Super Nintendo running a game with real-time ray tracing, something even the most high-end PCs struggle with. Notice the realistic shadows and reflections around the moving parts.

"What I wanted to try and do was something akin to the Super FX chip used in titles such as Star Fox, where the SNES runs the game logic and hands off a scene description to a chip in the cartridge to generate the visuals," Shironeko writes. "To that end I've deliberately tried to restrict myself to just using a single custom chip for the design, not making use of the ARM core available on the DE10 board or any other external processing resources."

Posted: Dec 18, 2020 12:18 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.gamesradar.com/uk/heres-what-ray-tracing-looks-like-on-a-super-nintendo/