from Hacker News

Man Rewrites SNES Racing Game to Improve Its Framerate Sevenfold

by DrinkWater on 2/23/21, 8:48 AM with 15 comments

• by qayxc on 2/23/21, 12:50 PM

  That headline is very misleading.

  The guy didn't just "rewrite" the game, he ported it to a completely different hardware!

  The rewrite takes advantage of a separate CPU (the SA-1), so while the original was rendered entirely in software, his version is hardware accelerated. That hardly counts as a "rewrite" (which would imply that his code changes led to the speed-up), but an actual port to a different platform.

  So it wasn't his code changes that are responsible for the performance increase, it's the use of additional dedicated hardware...

• by CM30 on 2/23/21, 1:48 PM

  Oh hey it's Victor Viela. He's known in the Super Mario World ROM hacking community on a patch that adds SA-1 functionality to that game too, with some truly insane effects:

  https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=104830

• by 40four on 2/23/21, 12:46 PM

  Seeing that game gives me some nostalgia. I remember playing it as a little boy. There was one in the corner of the local department store that got it’s fair share of quarters from me.

  For as great as the SNES was, it’s kind of disappointing Nintendo out of such a poor quality port. Cool to see folks still working on these old games.

• by blackrock on 2/24/21, 8:59 AM

  I wonder if he can improve on F-Zero?

• by Boltgolt on 2/23/21, 7:19 PM

  TLDR: Adding an extra co-processor makes the game run faster