The Super Nintendo hardware, designed in the late 1980s in Japan, was a system primarily designed to generate sprites on the screen in two dimensions. At that time, 3D machines were expensive and experimental, not yet available to the public in the form of home video games.
In 1989, Argonaut Games started a project to develop a special chip capable of improving the graphics and computational capabilities of the 8-bit Nintendo. According to its founder, Jez San, Argonaut intended to release this special hardware, along with a Nes version of the first-person flight simulator Starglider, developed for personal computers a few years earlier. He showed the prototype to Nintendo in 1990, and the project impressed some on the Japanese side. So Jez suggested that Argonaut develop a game with this special chip for the new system that the Big N would soon release, the Super Famicom.
The Super FX chip is a 16-bit RISC processor intended for 3D. It works as a graphics accelerator, which models and renders polygons, sprites and advanced 2D effects, to a frame buffer in RAM, which it uses to later send to the main architecture of the Super Nes to be displayed on the game screen. The chip has a variety of effects at its disposal, such as:
Objects that can be rotated in 3D.
Scaling and stretching sprites on 3D backgrounds.
2D parallax layers aiding the Super Nes in advanced effects.
Basic texture mapping for polygonal models during rendering.
In the second version of the Super FX chip, access to ROM and RAM has been improved through an improved design and the fact that more pins have been added to the cartridge board. This version became known as Super FX GSU (Graphics Support Unit), which unlike the first version of the Super FX chip, is capable of reaching 21 MHz. All versions of the Super FX chip are functionally compatible in terms of their instruction set. Argonaut also co-developed the 3D space shooter Star Fox with Nintendo, with the aim of demonstrating the additional polygon rendering capabilities the chip would provide on the Super NES. Star Fox uses the chip to render hundreds of simultaneous 3D polygons. The game also uses scaled 2D bitmaps for the lasers, asteroids and other on-screen obstacles, but other objects such as ships and robots are rendered as 3D polygons. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island uses the GSU-2-SP1 version for 2D graphical effects such as sprite scaling and stretching.
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