Brazilian software engineer Vitor Vilela has been praising Nintendo’s SA-1 enhancement chip for almost a decade, but the benefits of the staged Super Nintendo processor have never been more obvious than when it was applied. Race Drivin ‘, the faint SNES port of Atari Game from 1992s’ 3D arcade racer that originally ran on a single digit frame on the home console.
In a video released yesterday, Vilela shows how powerful the relatively common SA-1 disc can be by comparing footage of the original. Race Drivin ‘ on a conversion they developed for use with the more powerful co-processor. The upgraded hardware increases the gameplay from about 4 frames per second to over 30, making it look more like an actual video game and less like a slideshow.
Unlike recent attempts to add ray tracing to SNES gameshowever, these improvements do not come from modern technology, but from a chip that already exists in a few patterns of the era. A total of 34 SNES games used the SA-1 “Super Accelerator” chip, which has much faster clock speeds and RAM, between 1995 and 1997, including classics such as Kirby Super Star and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.
Vilela has shown over the past few years how the SA-1 disc can benefit games that have not yet been included in their patterns, and with the same impressive performance upgrade Grade III, Contra III, en Super R-type. Every conversion, says Vilela, takes over one hundred hours of work to flip existing code, map RAM and adjust the game to make sure it’s not running too fast on the SA-1. In this case, Vilela estimates they touched about 90% of the game code.
All the work of Vilela to date is available via Github, compatible with multiple SNES emulators as well as real hardware if you manage to get the hacked code on a pattern.