3D Games on the Super Nintendo Without the Super FX Chip

[@tripdefect87]

Really wish Nintendo had done more with the Stunt Race series as a whole. Would have loved to see a modern version of it replicating the original box art with the clay models

[@heavysystemsinc.]

I feel like I was one of 3 people that played that game as much as I did when it came out. Got the secret tracks and everything. And I feel like there was still more...like possibly being able to drive as the semi truck from the bonus stage on regular stages....

[@sloppynyuszi]

I wouldn’t mind if it just got Virtua Racer style upgrade that game got on Switch. Just improved the frame rate to 60fps, draw distance is no issue as the whole track is loaded and up res the polygons. And don’t charge $60 and we are good. A $10 cover charge will cover development costs

[@alopexau]

@@heavysystemsinc. I loved the hell out of Stunt Race, never got to own it but rented it many times, unlocked everything in it as well. That final demolition derby game was so much fun.

[@zapa47]

​@@heavysystemsinc.Looks like it was at least 4 or 5 of us. The game was way under rated because everyone shat on the framerate. The racing was top notch and I would have enjoyed it if that was the only thing the game offered. But there was all the stunt modes too that made it one of the most replayed in my collection back then.

[@megavolt67]

@@zapa47 Make that 5 or 6 of us then who had an appreciation for the game. What I'll add that hasn't been said is that the soundtrack was memorable too. My favorites were Aqua Tunnel, Sunset Valley, and Night Owl.

[@leoismaking]

I loved Stafleet Academy growing up. The Interplay era of Trek games gave us a lot of good stuff.

[@pex_the_unalivedrunk6785]

yeah, for real. I had the PC version though. it really felt like being in Starfleet Academy, the cutscenes were so terrible they were good!

[@rod980]

When I read the title I immediately thought of the Triforce in Zelda A Link to the Past.

[@snoxeri]

Super Mario World's Bowser fight

[@rod980]

@snoxeri Actually, that fight was made with Mode 7, it's a pseudo 3D effect but not real 3D, it's like the tracks in F-Zero or Super Mario Kart.

[@joshfacio9379]

Smw bowsers fight is using mode 7 tho, the bowser clowncopter is actually a scaled and rotated background, as the snes was only able to scale n rotate backgrounds and not sprites, thats why the battles background is a black screen as it IS using animated background instead of sprites.

[@happyspaceinvader508]

Pretty sure the Triforce in the opening of Zelda Link to the Past is 3 animated sprites, not polygons.

[@rod980]

​@@happyspaceinvader508 I've encountered two explanations: one claims that the SNES used basic 3D polygons for the Triforce, and the other suggests that it was composed of animated sprites, much like a GIF. Each frame of this animation is a single image, displayed sequentially, and drawn by a sprite artist to mimic a 3D appearance. However, I have yet to find a definitive answer to confirm either explanation.

[@axtrifonov]

7:52 "turn-based racing" 😜

[@happyspaceinvader508]

I totally misunderstood the title… I thought this was going to be SuperFX games, but with the SuperFX boost disabled to show how badly they would perform.

[@TanookiSuit]

Star Trek there was one of the best Trek games of the 90s, totally understated and underrated on the SNES. I've had that one ever since it came out and still do as it's just well done. And if you don't want to meddle with being a good officer, you can just jump into non-stop combat simulation which gets pretty interesting more harder you crank it up and the more of a handicap you lay down.

[@pex_the_unalivedrunk6785]

lol, be an Oberth class vs a refit Connie or Klingon K'tinga class battlecruiser... Welcome aboard the Redshirt Express!

[@richbuilds_com]

I really enjoy these old school deep dives. I'm currently "disassembling" (Into English) the original Football Manager for the ZX Spectrum. I've already spotted a few place things can be tweaked and improved :)

[@RobertoLeo3]

Will you add 3D graphics to the game?

[@freddiejohnson6137]

I was a big fan of Starfleet Academy at the time because it actually was something I was interested in. It was slow at times but I still played it through multiple times. I think with some kind of co-processor it could have been a lot closer to the 32X version. I'm actually more surprised it never got an Amiga port since it would have been way more suited to that as a flight sim.

[@BalancedSpirit79]

Drakkhen was an SNES open word RPG with 3D environments.

[@Stefan-jo1sz]

I was thinking about that and of course the very cool sequel dragon view.

[@Draigarial]

@@Stefan-jo1sz I'm happy to see Dragon View get some appreciation! Is one of my favorite games ever!

[@Stefan-jo1sz]

@@Draigarial it is great! I discovered it a few years back. Definitely gets not the attention it deserves. This, Drakken and a weird dos game called eternam shared this kind of 3d open world. environment.

[@theblah12]

Fun fact - the animated triforce pieces in the Link to the Past intro are 3D polygon models.

[@dfloper]

Yes i knew that 34 years ago as a kid what they where. At that time i was trying to make 3d graphics as well in turbo pascal.

[@jhoughjr1]

I still temember first time i saw thst.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

10:42 Latency might be a problem with 3D games of you have to spend 5 frames for every frame just cleaning, drawing, copying and encoding each real frame. 10-12 fps would be your hard limit with 5 frames per frame. And that's fields too, PAL and NTSC are only 25 and 30 FPS when taken progressively.

[@retro-resolution]

Thanks Sharopolis - still the finest tech channel on KZbin

[@riccamutt]

Yes

[@Cade_The_Squirrel]

The SNES is like having the features of a sports car with a mopehead engine.

[@SullySadface]

Is Powermonger really just Populous but with a laggy map? That's nutty.

[@summerlaverdure]

excellent video and great explanations of the technical side, also every game i expected to show up in here did, phenomenal job!

[@Dinosaur_News_Center]

Thanks for bringing up the Triforce. I've been wonder for years on whether it was done with polygons.

[@Geekeh_UK]

It's pretty crazy to me, how much they charge for the console, yet can afford to include a 3D graphics processor inside a game cart. They could have designed the SuperFX to be an add-on, or a lock-on cart. I guess that would have basically made it the 32X.

[@clebbington]

SNES was released in 1990, meaning it was developed in the late 80s. Tech was developing faster back then, so chip pricing had fallen a lot by 1993

[@benholroyd5221]

Yes, I don't know why they didn't do like they did with sonic, and have a pass through, so if you bought the game, you could use the processor with other games.

[@MaxAbramson3]

The SVP and SH2 were each $20, but they needed another $20-30 in RAM and ROM to do anything useful.

[@freddiejohnson6137]

You have to take into account that back then simply putting a co-processor in the cartridges was more expensive for third party publisher's back then and often in order to actually get a higher profit margin on what they sold they would try and keep the production costs as low as possible. Now publishers probably get a lot more back even on physical games because the production costs are less and you don't have to source all of the different chips from different places. I believe the publishers also had to take a risk in advance on how many units they wanted to order from Nintendo. A lot of these co-processors were also designed years later after new technology had become available so it's not really a simple case of including it from the start when that tech didn't exist yet.

[@jasonblalock4429]

Console add-ons just didn't sell. Various companies had tried things like that, but afaik none of them did particularly well. For whatever reason, people were happier paying $80-$100 for individual games stuffed full of extra chips rather than an add-on with the same tech.

[@Jabjabs]

The era of 'Too hell with the frame rate, we have a vision!'. I do love seeing these things running on over clocked emulators, it at least shows what could have been. This is also during the era when the PC could do 3D moderately well but sucked at 2D and the consoles were the opposite. It all came down to CPU speed really.

[@Alfred-Neuman]

Can you imagine if Nintendo were still including a GPU in their 3D games today? I think their games would be slightly more expensive. lol

[@ristopoho824]

SNES drawing the polygons into the tiles just, makes me feel that computers are damn fast. It counts all the vertexes and indexes them into the right places. And then arranges the tiles on the screen ti make the polygons. And all that happens multiple times a second. Yea modern chips do it way faster. But it's so much faster that you really can't comprehend it. Seeing it happen on the tilemap just feels so very concrete. Dang those things do math so very fast. And draw so fast.

[@mleolv426]

Damn, you played Race Drivin pretty well

[@MostlyPennyCat]

The SNES has a 6502 derivative for its CPU. And whereas the original 6502 has no multiply and divide which must be fun for 3D (it's not) I dunno whether the SNES has more features. It probably doesn't though, it's a tile shifter. So, yeah, oof, can't be fun. But then again the 6502 ran Elite? 🤷‍♂️

[@MostlyPennyCat]

OK, the derivative is actually the Ricoh 5A22, an extension of the WDC 65C816. Most importantly it includes: 1) DMA Engine 2) Multiplication and Division registers 3) 24-bit Addressing 4) 16-bit Processing 5) H-Blank, V-Blank and Configurable-Calculated-Blank interrupts So it's not super fast but it is extra functional

[@joolsstoo3085]

A few of the 3D genesis flight sim games are pretty impressive graphically

[@rzeka]

Honestly I'm amazed that I can tell what's going on in Race Drivin' at all

[@jasonblalock4429]

It's also interesting to compare the SNES Steel Talon to its Lynx counterpart - another rare case of a handheld beating a console. The framerate is similar, but the Lynx's environments have more detail and objects. Plus its first-person mode doesn't nerf the graphics. Also, that Pebble Beach game is actually really impressive for a SNES title.

[@sabin10]

the Lynx was a surprisingly powerful system. I ran a variant of the mos 6502, the same chip the NES was based on but clocked much higher. On top of that, the Lynx had an equally powerful graphics processor that could do some effects that weren't possible even on newer consoles. It also helped that is was pushing less than a third the number of pixels that a console would.

[@RobertoLeo3]

Sorry but Lynx port is lower resolution and uses more AA batteries

[@Badspot]

PGA Tour 96 is an SA-1 accelerated golf game that was released in the states.

[@BeefJerkey]

When it comes to Race Drivin', I think part of the problem was the development team. Seems that even the GameBoy version ran better.

[@soviut303]

The first game's geometry rendering technique could be made more efficient if it was able to do some basic culling. You can see how much overdraw it does, using the "painter's technique" to first paint distant objects, then immediately paint nearer objects on top. If you know something is occluded you can avoid drawing it, but I wonder if a culling would be more expensive than simply overdrawing?

[@Roxor128]

Sounds plausible to me. It could well be the case that until you start doing texture mapping, any attempt at culling ends up more expensive than the overdraw. If conditional branches needed for the culling are expensive enough, or there are enough of them, it could well end up adding up to more CPU cycles than just going ahead with the overdraw. Of course, just because it sounds plausible doesn't mean it's right, and I'm just speculating here.

[@RobertoLeo3]

@@Roxor128 You could be right. Plus how much time did they have to develop this game? It was hardly going to be a big seller so I guess - "not much". Just get it out the door

[@inceptional]

To be fair to SNES when it comes to Race Drivin' vs the Genesis version, the SNES version is stuck running in SlowROM at 2.68 MHz and only 70% of the system's full CPU speed, definitely isn't optimized very well, and doesn't have about 1/4 of the screen of forced blank that can be used for extra processing time like on the Genesis version (the thick black bars at the top and bottom of the screen). Still, yeah, the SNES version is crap.

[@JimLeonard]

Now cover this subject again but with the Megadrive! Lots of 3-D there. The Lynx had a math-coprocessor that was used for some 3-D games as well if you'd like to expand into a series.

[@keaton718]

Share's accent is so distinctive, he sounds like he should be 10x bigger than he is. Guess retro gaming is kinda niche, not many of us as deep into this as we are.

[@joesshows6793]

Good stuff as always my friend

[@Sharopolis]

Much appreciated

[@mleolv426]

Drakken uses some polygons in the outside environments.

[@atgn-0088]

My 90s kid brain: The games would run better if Super Nintendo had Blast Processing like Sega!!!

[@atmaweapon2803]

The best console version of Star Trek Bridge Simulator is of course the 32X version, which to my memory fixes any of the slowdown issues that the SNES had.

[@lm4278]

Very cool and interesting video. Amazing what had to be done back in the day.

[@shjsj-bc2cj]

I always love 3d graphics as a topic!

[@robtek3592]

HAH damn if Race driving would have been like that back then I would be in heaven! i loved that series!

[@SybilGrace]

Was in stiches over the bridge simulator joke.

[@Draigarial]

I came to this video only thinking about one of my favorite game of all time, Dragon View, that has first person 3D movement on the overworld map without having any special chip

[@themadmallard]

No faceball?

[@DissociatedWomenIncorporated]

Live long and prosper, Sharopolis 🖖 _”The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”_ - Mr. Spock, Marxist icon _”Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”_ - Grand Nagus Rom, a union man

[@tsuikagura]

7:03 They did an amazing job faithfully porting the Atari Lynx game down to the frame rate!

[@turbinegraphics16]

Its good for little bits of the game as a break from the main game. Even some gameboy games use polygons pretty well in some golf games.

[@goranisacson2502]

As a not very technically minded person I had to rewind some of these sections just to wrap my head around them, but I can at least say that I know of a few more games on the SNES I didn't before, even if among them it feels like the Star Trek and the final Golf game were the only ones worth knowing as games, rather than experiments. For some reason I got stuck on Powermonger the most, even if Race Drivin' seems undoubtedly worse. I guess Powermonger seems like the cool map and RTS concept at least seems fun enough that I'd want to try and keep playing it, while Race Drivin' I'd abandon in a heartbeat.

[@Retrovibes]

I never understood why games like Steel Talons or even Robocop on the Amiga needed to have everything in 3D. Wouldn't it make more sense to restrict 3D to the enviroment and use scaling sprites for things like cars and characters? The NPC's in Robocop could have been fully colored sprites instead of black 3D faceless figures. That would improve the framerate by a bit at least.

[@jsr734]

Early 3d was a noveltyb back in the day. Even if too simplified or with bad fps, the fact that you could explore and move in this primitive 3d environments was so amazing for people back in the day.

[@artemusprine]

The Amiga was limited in that it used bitplanes versus "chunky" pixels. Games like Doom were hard to port because while the Amiga could compute fast enough it couldn't read/write to the fast enough to update the full screen at a good framerate. Games like Robocop tended to use 16 color mode to reduce the number of bitplanes needing read/writes. And bitmap scaling/rotation is more CPU intensive than 3D without dedicated sprite scaling/rotation hardware, which only the Neo-Geo had.

[@RobertoLeo3]

Probably didn't have enough development time to optimize everything like that. Amiga is a bit of a nightmare with it's zillion custom chips that all need to be working in sync just to get a basic arcade game running

[@OrangeHarrisonRB3]

Race Driving reminds me of trying to navigate Lego Island with whatever crackerjack graphics were in my parents' Windows 95 PC.

[@Captain_Char]

Jurassic park, top down and doom shooter... im glad someone covered Star trek bridge sim just cause I was always under the impression it used a cheaper version of the FX chip, my big question is games that dont use the Fx chip if you ran an overclocked SNES, since im pretty sure some people have toggle turbo switches, on a side note for bridge sim, it does have 2 player and it beleive it is possible to get out of rendor range of each other, now the 32X version is a different beast entirely, with textures even

[@dacealksne]

What's that "DS retro?" channel he mentions in intro? I couldn't find it

[@gwishart]

Sounded like "DF Retro" to me, which is a series of videos by Digital Foundry. kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZyugZKpnLJ3q9Esi=-lLMfkiP949Qz8Oz

[@dacealksne]

@@gwishart Thank you!

[@timothydahlin5321]

Always wondered why several SuperFX games would still run with a game genie which didn't have paths for the extra connector conductors.

[@ZXSpectrum128K]

What happens if you combine an overcl9kked super fx with the faster processor? Texture mapped polygons? Doom?

[@jonathan2950]

A ‘silky’ 10 frames per second 😂

[@JohnnyWednesday]

Still my favorite channel on youtube - you speak my language!

[@MaxAbramson3]

What an epic channel! The best.

[@CSLucasEpic]

Two words: Faceball 2000

[@anon_y_mousse]

I'd like to see you do a video on Sega Genesis 3D games. There were some really good ones for the system. There was also a Star Trek game similar to the one you show for the SNES, but it didn't have 3D space battles, they were on a 2D field instead as well as 2D away missions. I can't remember what the subtitle for the game was and I'd have to go find the box to remember, but it had a full ops center allowing you to control how many resources went towards fixing the various ship systems and a full library computer with info on all the ships, alien and human. Even though it wasn't 3D, I'd like to know if anyone else ever played it and liked that game.

[@ugarit5]

Can you do a vid on ngpc and how it pushes all those sprites without flicker or Slowdown? There is very little material abt this on internet...

[@RobertoLeo3]

Probably is good hardware but sometimes on handheld screens they take advantage of "persistance" to double the number of sprites on screen. e.g. it takes a few frames for a sprite's image to fade completely.

[@ugarit5]

@@RobertoLeo3 never seen this when emulating games

[@RobertoLeo3]

@@ugarit5 They probably emulate it. I knwo R-Type on the mono gameboy uses this technique. I'm sure other games would too. Maybe the NGPC has too good a screen to use it?

[@Veylon]

Damn, they actually ported Powermonger to the SNES? That's crazy.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

9:13 Holy CRAP could you imagine if they'd released that?? 😮 They probably would have added loads more details and tanked the frame rate! 😂

[@SeijuroHiko-vx3lw]

Vortex and Winter Gold are magnificents.

[@MousePotato]

You could have had Jurassic Park for the Snes on there in the 3D fps parts. It didn't use the Super FX Chip but tried to emulate it.

[@GreenAppelPie]

You can count the number of polygons using your definition digits. Would putting an FX chip in the console really cost that much??

[@MammaApa]

Thing is, the Super FX chip didn't exist when the console was released in late 1990 (japan), they would have had to wait all the way to 1993 to even have a Super FX chip to put in them and Nintendo did not have time for this as the Sega Mega Drive had already been out two years in 1990. There was a console war to fight.

[@RobertoLeo3]

They already took a planned chip out of the SNES for cost reasons. It does maths calculations and is found in Pilotwings (one of the first carts)

[@Mr.1.i]

Stunt racer fx and starfox are the very limits of the snes...,the snes had a vector graphics mode......it was just a question of putting in the assembly on the Rico variant.......unlike the mega drive that didn't have such modes as standard

[@RobertoLeo3]

They are not the limits - they were early games on Super FX.

[@joesshows6793]

7:06 Pitfigher is worse

[@Sharopolis]

You see the thing is... I said I didn't want to know what was worse and now I do!

[@Fools_Requiem]

by far It might ACTUALLY be the worst game of all time. There are lots of games out there that are considered worst of all time, but Pit Fighter on the SNES might be the worst. The way it is designed, it is almost impossible to play.

[@josephpurdy8390]

Now imagine taking the time out of your life to beat it.

[@sonicboove4865]

Sega would still be here in the console market if they had utilised the SVP chip...;

[@Jupiter_Rsabbit]

Guh Star Fox 2 is one of the best games on the SNES

[@thecunninlynguist]

My fave era

[@skeleton_craftGaming]

Didn't alttp use the superfx chip for its transitions? [I actually wrote this before you brought it up in the video] If so, I would assume the 3D triforce at the beginning was More of a " we have it anyway might as well use it to its fullest to extent" thing

[@gwalla]

A Link To The Past was IIRC a pretty early SNES game, and the Super FX chip didn't exist yet. AIUI the transitions were done with the mode 7/HDMA combo everybody used for pseudo-3D perspective effects on the system.

[@skeleton_craftGaming]

@gwalla I thought that A Link to the past and Star Fox released in the same Christmas season.. though that was a good 20 years before my time so I may be wrong

[@gwalla]

@@skeleton_craftGaming I just checked and Link to the Past came out in the US in '92 (Japan in '91) while Star Fox was '93. So I was right about the order but inflating the length of time between them. I guess when you're a kid years seem like a more significant amount of time than when you're in your 40s!

[@skeleton_craftGaming]

@gwalla That was still longer than I thought

[@S.M.Jean-Mahmoud_Ier]

Imagine Mario Kart 2 used this. Just imagine.

[@jeremys6387]

Anyone here into emulation? I mean, like into editing code for one? I need a SNES emulator to display 2 screens, one with the layers offset by a few pixels. Guess what that would do. SN 3-D.

[@snoxeri]

Not bridge the card game? And not BRIDGE the corporate initiative? There is still some hope that game will be good!

[@belcherno.1b638]

lol. I played a lot of Race Drivin' back in teh day. Purely because I part exchanged for it, and back then, that means you're stuck with it so make the best of it. Haha, what a ....game i guess?

[@NoxmilesDe]

Racedriving for the GB 👍🏻

[@Larry]

What about Another World?

[@cube2fox]

Surely it only counts as 2D

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@cube2foxit used polygons, so technically, it should be included.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Didn't it effectively lower the resolution from 256x224 to 224x160... use DMA registers to draw a scanline of polygon data, in order to increase the frame rate?

[@cube2fox]

@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Polygons doesn't mean it's 3D. It could be 2D vector graphics.

[@tiberiusbrain]

Hey perun has a new video... oh no its race drivin on snes... 😅

[@turrican4d599]

17:56 No transparent HUD though.

[@Ciytheprotogen]

12:43 sounds like hes saying, ...-re flat shaded, their color changing as the S**t moves as if they're...

[@josephpurdy8390]

Star Voyager on the NES.

[@gravious]

who is DSRetro ? i'd like to see that vid too

[@gwishart]

Pretty sure it's actually "DFRetro", which is a series of videos by Digital Foundry: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZyugZKpnLJ3q9Esi=-lLMfkiP949Qz8Oz

[@DDRmails]

i remember i had argue with one, he says that "bcuz SMD CPU was ACTUALLY 32bit - that why it could make a 3D, and thats why supernintendont"

[@Cooe.]

The MD/Genesis' Motorola 68000 absolutely STOMPS on the SNES' souped up 8-bit CPU (16-bit internally w/ an 8-bit data bus vs 32-bit internally w/ a 16-bit data bus for the 68000) in terms of raw performance. 🤷 Like it's not even close. The SNES was all about its custom PPU not the crap CPU. This is a major reason why the MD was much better at doing real 3D.

[@SeijuroHiko-vx3lw]

No word of Wolfenstein 3D on SNES. Disapointing.

[@iversondiegocosta3503]

🙂👍

[@james42519]

Would think you would say fzero instead of whatever that racing game was. Fzero is what I think supee fx

[@pauljones3017]

F-Zero was released before the Super-FX chip existed.

[@james42519]

@pauljones3017 forgot fzero mode 7. I don't think there are any super fx games i played and like I guess.

[@benholroyd5221]

What about wolfenstein 3d?

[@AfterBurnerTeirusu128]

Wolf3D uses a combination of BSP and Mode 7.

[@jasonblalock4429]

Also, Wolf3D was never polygonal. It used a system called raycasting which allowed for fake 3D without having to actually do many 3D calculations. The one I'm wondering about was Faceball 2000. If it wasn't using polygons, what was it doing?

[@Optimus6128]

@@jasonblalock4429 Well, faceball 2000 seems also to have the simple geometry of a wolfenstein map, just without texture.

[@benholroyd5221]

@@jasonblalock4429 but the title is "3d games" not polygon games. You could argue that Wolfenstein doesn't have a height component you can actually interact with, thus the 2.5d moniker. But then Doom doesn't really do height either. And I'm sure there's plenty of '3d' polygon games that only make use of 2 dimensions. Then you've got things like zaxxon, where you do interact in 3 dimensions, but they aren't classed as 3d. Then there's the open question of what is a polygon. I think excluding Wolfenstein on that count is more convention, than mathematical correctness.

[@herrheynaerklarts1607]

2 FPS max

[@liamh1982]

No dodgy sponsorship this time - I hope you've learnt your lesson on that one.

[@ceticobr]

What did he endorse?

[@liamh1982]

@@ceticobr Betterhelp - the fact that after numerous comments were allegedly deleted on his Game Gear video about how shady their practices were, he apparently said nothing on his KZbin feed or his social media to try and diffuse the situation, suggesting that he took the money and ran. I really hope he's become a bit more contrite since then.

[@cube2fox]

So many always claim that Betterhelp is so bad but never give any proof of the allegations. Reading the Wikipedia page, the whole thing (alleged customer data sharing) seems to be hugely blown out of proportion.

[@ceticobr]

@liamh1982 that sucks. I am disappointed.

[@cube2fox]

What are the allegations against them?

[@WalterdasTrevas]

Without the FX chip, SNES was a slightly more colorful Megadrive with a lower resolution.

[@ceticobr]

Much more colorful IMO.