Would it be possible to remake a game like Super Mario 64 on the SNES? What are the technical limitations of remaking a game like that for a non-3D and limited console?
Would it be possible to remake a game like Super Mario 64 on the SNES...
Eli Cruz
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Ryder Wright
The SNES had its Super FX chip coprocessor for rudimentary 3D capabilities. During an interview by Nintendo Power magazine, Miyamoto stated that he had the idea for a Mario 3D game during Star Fox's development. This led to a rumor that there was a prototype for a 3D Mario Game called Super Mario FX for the SNES, using the Super FX chip.
Julian Russell
It's too complex. Star Fox is comparatively simple, and it runs at a very low framerate. Although you can theoretically generate 3D graphics with any computer with which you can draw pixels, it'll be very slow. On top of that, you'll run into a hard limit in terms of memory. A level in Super Mario 64 probably contains more data than you could fit into the SNES's RAM.
Daniel Price
So the Super FX2 chip came out in 1993 with the release of Star Fox, and the N64 came out in 1996, so the hardware technology difference isn't that huge when it comes to rendering polygons.
An SNES cartridge could theoretically have up to 4 Super FX2 chips each rendering 50,000 Polygons per second & running at 21 MHz, theoretically rendering 200,000 polygons per second (in comparison the N64 could render 150,000 polygons). In reality, cartridges were only manufactured with at most 2 chips for games like SNES DOOM. Realistically, a 3D Mario game for SNES with 2 SuperFX2 chips would have 2/3 the polygons of the N64 game per frame.
The bottleneck though is the rest of the console. Expect low frame rate. The SNES itself is told to periodically stop the Super FX in its tracks and read the finished image. This is then shown on your TV until the next is ready. Another limit is the size of the image the SuperFX can draw to: at most, 192 lines high, which is less than the SNES itself displays. Consequently, most SuperFX games have a black border around the screen.
Zachary Ramirez
Don't waste time.
Brandon Lee
Could carts add RAM as well because it's not going to be able to fit all of that into 128kb. Lets not even bring up what a slow piece of shit the SNES CPU was compared to the industry standard 68000 at the time.
Nicholas Davis
People keep commenting about the Super FX. The thing about that is that the SNES and all cartridge-based systems have an advantage in that the cartridge can be used to enhance the system itself. There's nothing stopping you from adding an even more powerful graphics chip to a cart. In fact, you could go so far as to have the cart be an interface to a more powerful machine entirely (like a Raspberry Pi), which just uses the SNES as a display device. What I don't know is if the power supply to a SNES cart is sufficient to power a Pi, or if it would need to be powered separately.
Dylan Sanders
One other thing to keep in mind (though the same is somewhat true of the N64's MIPS-based RSP) is that SuperFX wasn't actually a 3D acceleration ASIC, but general purpose RISC CPU.
Oliver Wilson
Pick one, that CPU is a ugly blight if this is true.
Would it be possible to use the sound card for calculations to ease the burden on the CPU at the expense of sound quality?
Nicholas Taylor
Having a reduced instruction set literally makes it more general purpose since it doesn't have any specialized instructions.
James Powell
Not him. But it doesn't really make it any more or less general purpose vs CISC. Its just a different way of going about it. RISC is better for high level development while CISC is better at low-level development. Modern RISC designs are more CISC-like nowadays anyways with their piles of SIMD instructions added on top. Conversely modern CISC designs also take pages from RISC' book with reduced instruction set cores and CISC-like execution units
Xavier Hernandez
This was the pinnacle of 3d on 16-bit machine. Wot if you had $30,000 to blow on hardware? This was it. Mario would have been six conjoined cubes floating through space. You can daydream all you want. Nothing resembling SuperMario64 would have been possible on any 16-bit machine.
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Xavier Young
Absolutely not possible. Most of a sound card is analog parts designed to oscillate at a program-defined frequency in order to emit waveforms, which does not help you with 3d polygon rendering.
Adam Phillips
Game audio hardware has basically always been digital. The SNES was a pretty typical example of the approach used from the early '80s to the early '00s, with a simple general purpose CPU (Motorola 6800-compatible) driving a (quite powerful, for the time) Sony DSP. The only actual analog audio component is a 16-bit 32kHz stereo PCM DAC.
Brody Anderson
The SNES audio chip was quite a bit more sophisticated than a simple DSP/General processing unit IIRC. it had its own firmware as well
Mason Carter
Prepare to have your mind blown then because it is indeed possible to offload calculations to it in some fashion. See archive.fo
With enough programming autism, super mario 64 would indeed be possible on the SNES. Why has no one done this yet?
Nathan Watson
That's interesting, I didn't know that was the case. So old sound cards were basically microcontrollers with a DAC attached?
John Jackson
Not just old sound cards, but new, and by extension cheap, ones too.
Julian Miller
I guess that has to be the case, otherwise the CPU would have to manage sending stuff to the sound card at 96kHz or whatever sampling frequency the audio uses.
Connor Russell
That is exactly what we do now. Modern soundcards (since the mid-2000s) don't have DSP offload anymore. They just slurp up PCM bitstream from RAM/CPU and pour it into the DAC.
This is part of the reason for a MASSIVE downgrade in PC game audio from its peak at Aureal 3D 2 in the late '90s, tumbling down to the termination of EAX 5 & DS3D with Windows Vista, abandoning us since then to a swamp of gamedevs incompetently reinventing the wheel for software game audio in every game, sometimes slightly assisted by middleware like FMOD & Miles.
Things have very slowly picked up since then, due to middleware vendors gradually realizing how wholly unacceptable their shit is in the VR era, but even the best VR games still haven't caught up to where we were in 1998.
Jaxson Jenkins
Doesn't that mean that sound cards of this nature without FOSS and secure software could be botnets? Let stuff hide in the microcontroller of modern cards at runtime and store somewhere else during poweroff?
Christopher Foster
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Matthew Lee
Look, I realize what board this is, but can you people control your 'tism for even one minute? Yes, of course audio interfaces have microcontrollers in them. Everything from individual DIMMs of RAM, to each port and bus on your mobo, to your mouse, keyboard, and monitor, all have a Z80 or something with a flash ROM in them.
Brody Barnes
Sound cards can't really be botnet. Yes, they could theoretically record audio from either the microphone or the speakers, but to really qualify as "botnet" they would have to send the recordings to (((someone))). I'm pretty sure that the sound card has no way of communicating with the network card, and even if it were theoretically possible it would be much easier for (((them))) to just code some malware which uses software methods to send any audio across the network.
Christian Smith
Also the sound card would have to have drivers installed for every conceivable type of ethernet and wifi card. Since most wifi cards require firmware, everyone who says "LE SOUND CARD 96KHZ ULTRASOUND BOTNET" is a retard who doesn't know what they're saying.
Hudson Hughes
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Eli Long
Why not? Wouldn't they be able to DMA the same adress spaces in the DRAM?
>and even if it were theoretically possible it would be much easier for (((them))) to just code some malware which uses software methods to send any audio across the network.
I am not even thinking about recording audio via a soundcard botnet. But more like a persistent rootkit for the OS itself. Have the rootkit stored in the buffer that is the soundcard's R/W memory of the microcontroller and then install to OS on boot and remove on power off. That would set up a way to install a even better botnet such as one that could actually record audio and record over the network. But only if someone knew about the backdoor created in memory from the audio card botnet.
Dominic Torres
Yea because with a persistent rootkit you would only need to code remote access for something using three different OS's, mac, windows, and linux. Along with generic network function calls to open the backdoor. It would be preety simple actually. The only tricky part is studying the microcontroller and implementing the botnet in the first place. Assuming that audio companies, such as intel, didn't implement a rootkit on it already.
Jacob Richardson
Yes, there are attack vectors through every part of your computer. And don't imagine this is new, even back in the 8-bit era, your serial card, modem, floppy controller, floppy drive, keyboard, etc. all had a microcontroller with about the same or more power as the computer's CPU itself (often the exact same chip!). Even inkjet printers in the '80s had more CPU power AND RAM than most of the computers they were being "driven" by.
Mason Richardson
By definition is a botnet.
It's like (((they))) have been planning this since forever. Secure computers when? Super mario 64 on SNES before or after secure computers?
Robert Collins
I don't know much about the workings of DMA so I'm just going to assume you're correct for the sake of the argument. As I said in , most network cards can't do anything without firmware or at least proper drivers. Jewtel is not going to add drivers and firmware for 20 different network cards into their fucking SOUND CARD CONTROLLER for fuck's sake. The sound card controller is physically very small. It would be expensive to have that much memory in it.
The sound card also can't control the network card properly while the OS was also using it, without causing denial of service to the OS (which would be noticed).
No. They use (((Intel Management Extensions))) for that, it's way easier.
Jason Torres
Cool demo, though keep in mind none of those are actually games being executed in realtime, but at most prerecorded "tile" output being played back.
It's slowly dawned on me that this is probably Poe's Law trolling. 9/10, would shitpost again. Board quality is starting to improve.
Jackson Sanders
Nathan Ortiz
In another thread we already went over the nonissue of IOMMU security.
Internet access was a step up from the '80/'90s status quo: Services like AOL, Compuserve, GEnie, Prodigy, etc.
Wyatt Barnes
Why are you saging?
Mason Torres
This thread isn't worth a thing.
Gabriel Harris
amazing how fast this thread devolved into an explosion of autisticated retardation
John Howard
This is why you wipe the data after you are done with your shit.
this doesn't come in handy for pedos but whatever
Noah Walker
>get sued by (((Creative)))
>get bought out by (((Creative)))
>DS3D and EAX shoa'd with the release of Wangblows Vista just prior to the (((financial crisis)))
I don't want this to be a coincidence.
Easton Jackson
Creative being such blatant oppressive corporate monopolists that gamers and the entire rest of the PC industry pulled a collective murder-suicide to get rid of them was one of the most kekworthy events in the history of the platform. I'm still not sure who was the victim in that episode.
Liam Baker
N-nani?
Creative are still around as far as I know.
Mason Jackson
In much diminished form. It used to be that a Sound Blaster card was mandatory to the point of ubiquity among gamers, and their APIs were universally built into games. Whereas now they're a total footnote, Sound Blaster is an obscure luxury item, and their current API (OpenAL) is barely supported even on its original platform of Linux. Compare now:
en.wikipedia.org
With 2005, already a big step down from their peak years:
en.wikipedia.org
Jeremiah Moore
Why would you need a SNES when SuperMario64 could run on the NES? it sounds like you're just a lazy programmer.
Juan Price
I think I once heard of some bootleg cartridge that has GBA hardware inside.
Austin Rivera
Seriously though, an a highly abstract "cubes and triangles" Mario 64 "demake" like says would be pretty cool. Although if such a game were actually being made at the time, it probably would've just used polygons for large level geometry, and done everything else with sprites.
Chase Richardson
People forget that Super Mario 64 actually had a fair number of sprites.
Blake Price
The sound card doesn't need to be explicitly botnet in itself. As a matter of fact no system component needs to. There's the Intel ME botnet subsystem which can transparently control every system component out-of-band and send encrypted data via the network. The components themselves are puppets in the hands of the ME. No need to botnet each and every component when you can have "one ME to rule them all and in the botnet bind them".
Eli Wilson
Creative is to sound cards what Nvidia is to graphics cards, what Intel is to CPUs, and what Seagate is to HDDs. No surprise there.
Chase Wright
Rare was making Dream for the SNES but that became Banjo Kazooie.
Argonaut also was making a prototype 3D engine, which was seen in the cancelled Star Fox 2 and would also eventually be stolen by Nintendo to make Super Mario 64. After Nintendo severed ties with Argonaut after stealing their work, because how they were jealous a foreigner could make 3D games better than them, among other reasons, Argonaut would go on to make Croc.
Nintendo fucked over a lot of developers in the 90s. Another example is DMA Design, also known as modern day Rockstar, almost went bankrupt and almost never released their game Body Harvest because of Nintendo and their constant indecisive meddling. And how about Rare's last second party Nintendo game Dinosaur Planet becoming Star Fox Adventures. I could go on but you might as well read the articles on this stuff.
Isaiah Campbell
Note that Dream (like the SNES version of Goldeneye) wasn't 3D in its SNES incarnation, but a DKC-style sidescroller.
Jordan Ortiz
gas them all