Brazilian software engineer Vitor Vilela, for nearly a decade, sang the praises of Nintendo’s SA-1 upgrade chip, but never before have the benefits of the subjected Super Nintendo processor been more obvious than when they were applied to Drivin ‘Race, Atari’s 1992 SNES lightless porte 3D arcade racer that initially runs with a single digit frequency on the home console.
In a video released yesterday, Vilela shows how strong the relatively common SA-1 chip could be by comparing footage from the original Drivin ‘Race to a conversion they developed for use with the more powerful coprocessor. The updated hardware increases the game from about 4 frames per second to over 30, making it look more like a real video game and less like a slide show.
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 cartridges from the era. A total of 34 SNES games used the SA-1 “Super Accelerator” chip, which has much higher 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 spent the past few years showing how the SA-1 chip can benefit from games that have not already included it in their cartridges, implementing similarly impressive performance improvements for Gradius III, Against III, and Super type R. Every conversion, says Vilela, takes over one hundred hours of work Reverse existing code engineering, RAM remapping and game adjustment to make sure it doesn’t run too fast on SA-1. In this case, Vilela appraisal they have reached about 90% of the game code.
All Vilela works so far are available through Github, compatible with many SNES emulators, as well as real hardware, if you can get the pirated code on a cartridge.