Is it possible to upres SuperFX 3D graphics?

[Josh]

Is it possible to upres Super NES SuperFX-based 3D games, like Star Fox? Most good emulators of 3D consoles are able to render games in higher resolutions than they would be rendered on the actual hardware, but is this theoretically possible for SuperFX games running in a Super NES emulator?

 

[I.S.T.]

Is it possible to upres Super NES SuperFX-based 3D games, like Star Fox? Most good emulators of 3D consoles are able to render games in higher resolutions than they would be rendered on the actual hardware, but is this theoretically possible for SuperFX games running in a Super NES emulator?

You can upres(To use your term) any video output. Pretty much all SNES emulators that don't suck can render at resolutions higher than the original console did.

FYI, the way 3D emulators are doing that is to run the video portion of the game on the 3D chip, not actually emulating the game.

 

[Josh]

Well, I want to make clear what I mean:

upscale: to take an image of a lower resolution and use an interpolation algorithm to convert it to a higher resolution (for example, blowing up a 640 x 480 image to 1280 x 960 pixels, but not actually adding any more information to the image -- the number of original pixels is still just 307,200).

upres: to actually render the image in a higher resolution (the original image is rendered directly at 1280 x 960 -- the number of pixels in the original image is 1,228,800; we've added more information to the image by rendering it at a higher resolution).

Maybe I should use the term "re-render at a higher resolution" instead of "upres"...



Anyway, it's only possible to upres a game with 3D graphics (or 2D vector graphics).


Basically, if you upscale Star Fox it's still very jaggy looking. If it would be possible to upres it, polygon edges would be sharp and clean looking.


Soooo, would it be theoretically possible to upres SuperFX 3D games?

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Yes, its theoretically possible to render SuperFX 3d games at higher resolutions...

 

[Josh]

Oh wow, which emulators can do it? I've never seen any screenshots of anything like this before...

 

[Josh]

Strangely enough, I can't find a way to edit my post, so...


Whoops, I read that wrong, Ostepop.


Anyway, has any emulator done this yet? Or has anyone tried?

 

[I.S.T.]

You do not understand my post. All SNES emulators that do not suck do this. ZSNES, SneSE, SNESGT, SNES9X, BSNES all do it.

 

[Josh]

First of all, bsnes does not even emulate the SuperFX chip yet. Secondly, I just tried looking through every setting I could find in Snes9x, and could not find any way to render Star Fox/SuperFX games in a higher resolution. Here's the game playing fullscreen on Snes9x at 1024 x 768 with the setting to stretch the image to match the fullscreen screen resolution checked on:

http://www.tcnj.edu/~milewsk2/images/StarFoxNoUpres.png

This game is most definitely not rendering in a higher resolution than it would on an actual Super NES.

 

[rounin]

You might want to ask the same question on a more emulation-oriented forum : www.emuforums.com

 

[TapamN]

This game is most definitely not rendering in a higher resolution than it would on an actual Super NES.

It's not possible to have SuperFX games run at a higher resolution. The SuperFX chip is a RISC CPU with some instructions and cache optimized for drawing stuff like polygons, meaning a game like Starfox or Vortex uses software rendering. The N64 and PlayStation, for example, have dedicated drawing hardware, and the emulator can look at the drawing commands send to the hardware and scale them to a different resolution. Since the SuperFX draws in software to a framebuffer, there aren't any dedicated drawing commands to scale, you'd have to rewrite the SuperFX code to support a higher resolution. The best you can do is scale and filter the framebuffer.

 

[Josh]

It's not possible to have SuperFX games run at a higher resolution. The SuperFX chip is a RISC CPU with some instructions and cache optimized for drawing stuff like polygons, meaning a game like Starfox or Vortex uses software rendering. The N64 and PlayStation, for example, have dedicated drawing hardware, and the emulator can look at the drawing commands send to the hardware and scale them to a different resolution. Since the SuperFX draws in software to a framebuffer, there aren't any dedicated drawing commands to scale, you'd have to rewrite the SuperFX code to support a higher resolution. The best you can do is scale and filter the framebuffer.

Understood, thank you.

 

[DeanoC]

It's not possible to have SuperFX games run at a higher resolution.

It is possible to do, just difficult. What you have to do is write a run-timecode inspector/decompiler, that identifies the rasterisor and replaces it with a higher resolution one.

Easy its not but possible it is. Decompiling, identifying and replacing is generally much harder than just emulating the instruction stream. But given the few SuperFX games available, its probably not out of the world impossible.