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09/12/2015

☆ Door 9 - Christmas Retro Gaming Advent Calendar ☆ #Retrogaming #GamersUnite

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The 9th Door on my Retro Gaming Advent Calendar &
Behind Today's Door Is the 'SUPER FX CHIP'


"The Super FX Chip is legendary amongst those who experienced the SNES first time round.

It was proudly emblazoned on the boxes of the video games that contained the SUPER FX chip and it was a sure fire sign that the games graphics were going to be that little bit more special than the average SNES game.

So What Was It All About Then?

The Super FX chip is a graphics chip that was added to selected SNES video games.
The key purpose of the Super FX Chip was to provide advanced 2D and 3D graphics effects.

The Super chip itself was actually designed by Argonaut Games, who co-developed with Nintendo the outstanding Star Fox. Star Fox acted as a Super FX flag ship and demonstrated clearly in its graphics style the additional polygon rendering capabilities that the chip had introduced to the SNES armoury.

The chip was actually codenamed "Super Mario FX" and "MARIO", which was an acronym for "Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotation & Input/Output"

If you open up a Super FX Chip game you will see "MARIO" is printed on the face of the chip.

The chip was used in games like Star Fox where it assisted in scaled bitmaps for lasers, asteroids, and other obstacles. The ships are rendered with polygons.

In Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island the chip was used for advanced graphics effects like sprite scaling and stretching, for huge sprites. This enabled end of level boss characters to take up the whole screen, and for multiple foreground and background parallax layers to give a greater illusion of depth.

Interestingly the game cartridges that contained a Super FX chip had additional contacts at the bottom of the cartridge and therefore Super FX games could not be plugged into cartridge game adapters such as the Game Genie.

Here's a nice list of the Super FX games that were released just for you.......

Super FX games
  • Dirt Racer
  • Dirt Trax FX
  • Star Fox (US/Japan) / Starwing (Europe)
  • Stunt Race FX (US/Europe) / Wild Trax (Japan)
  • Vortex
Super FX 2 games
  • Doom
  • Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
  • Winter Gold
Due to the higher costs of production there actually weren't many games created using the Super FX Chip..."


What Was Your Favourite Super FX Chip Game?

Let Me Know In The Comments Box Below



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