Brazilian software engineer Vitor Vilela has praised Nintendo’s SA-1 enhancement chip for almost a decade, but never before have the benefits of the Super Nintendo processor been more obvious than when applied to Race Drivin ‘, the dull SNES port of 1992 from the Atari Games ‘ 3D arcade racer that originally worked at a single digit frame rate on the home console.
In a video released yesterday, Vilela shows how powerful the relatively common SA-1 chip could be compared to the footage of the original Race Drivin ‘ for a conversion that they developed for use with the most powerful coprocessor. The updated hardware increases the game from about 4 frames per second to over 30, making it more like a real video game and less like a slide show.
Unlike recent attempts to add ray-tracing to SNES games, however, these improvements do not come from modern technology, but from a chip that already existed in some cartridges at the time. A total of 34 SNES games used the SA-1 “Super Accelerator” chip, which features much faster clock and RAM speedsbetween 1995 and 1997, including classics such as Kirby Super Star and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.
Vilela has spent the past few years showing how the SA-1 chip can benefit games that have not yet included it in their cartridges, implementing equally impressive performance upgrades for Gradius III, Against III, and Super R-Type. Each conversion, says Vilela, assumes one hundred hours of work reverse engineer existing code, remap the RAM and adjust the game to ensure it doesn’t run too fast on SA-1. In this case, Vilela estimates they played about 90% of the game code.
All of Vilela’s work so far is available via Github, compatible with several SNES emulators and also with real hardware, if you can get the hacked code into a cartridge.