WOULD YOU LIKE CHIPS WITH THAT?

THE ENHANCEMENTS THAT PUSHED GAMES BEYONE THE LIMITS OF THE SNES

This digital signal processor was the first of the SNES enhancement chips, introduced with Pilotwings in 1990. It was used in 15 games – all of them Mode 7 games like Super Mario Kart, where it helps with the required 3D mathematical calculations. The most famous SNES enhancement chip was only used in eight games. Most of them used it primarily for drawing polygonal graphics, but Yoshi’s Island also used the updated Super FX 2 for sprite operations including rotation and scaling. Capcom introduced this custom hardware in 1994 with

Mega Man X2. The chip is best known for its role in helping the game to display wireframe graphics. After its second appearance in Mega Man X3, it was never used again.

The ‘Super Accelerator’ was introduced in 1995 and was the most used enhancement chip, appearing in games such as Kirby’s Fun Pak and Super Mario RPG. It houses a 65C816 CPU core running at 1074MHZ – triple the speed of the 5A22. This chip was introduced in 1996, and only used for two games – Star Ocean and Street Fighter Alpha 2. Both games had to heavily compress sprite data to fit onto their cartridges, and this chip was used to alleviate the burden of data decompression.

» [SNES] By the end of the system’s life, the SNES was hard-pushed even with conversions of 2D arcade games. » [SNES] Even Nintendo faced the limitations of the SNES, though Mario Kart was hardly an unwelcome result of that.