Real-time beam tracking is gaining momentum into the gaming world. However, few would have thought that one of the beam-supporting platforms would be the Super Nintendo console.

Ben Carter, who runs Shironeko Labs, has been working on his own beam tracking accelerator for the Cyclone V FPGA circuit DE 10 – Nano development platform. The FPGA implements three parallel 50 MHz CISC-based beam tracking accelerators

. Simply put, however, the accelerator turned into a more special project when he got his head to implement that beam tracking on the Super Nintendo game console. Carter’s idea borrows the familiar idea of ​​Star Fox, which adds a separate SuperFX chip to the game module itself to provide technology that was beyond the reach of SNES alone.

The accelerator, dubbed SuperRT, works on a pair of completely unmodified Super Nintendo. The game module, from which the ROM chip itself has been removed, acts as an intermediate piece. The SuperRT is wired to the ROM chip slot and feeds data through the game module like any SNES game. The beam tracking application built by Carter renders the screen with 200 × 160 resolution at its best 30 At FPS speed. It works internally with 30 bit colors, but due to SNES limitations, the result is dithered to 256 color.

Source: Shironeko Labs