Star Fox on Genesis

[Dark Jaguar]

Why go light years beyond when you can WELCOMETOTHENEXTLEVEL?

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2023/...ve-genesis

This is astonishing, mainly because this doesn't involve the 32X or SVP addon chip at all.  It's all being run directly off Sega Genesis original hardware.  There's no sound effects, and the music is a scratchy recording of the original music done in a loop, AND the frame rate isn't any better than what you got off the SNES, but it's still impressive it's performing as well as it is.  Near as I can tell, this is a port of the original reverse engineered code so it should control as well as that game.  I'm sure down the line sound effects will be worked into it and the music will likely get converted to FM synthesis at some point, but it's amazing how well modern designers can make these old systems run.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, the 68K is a pretty great CPU, because of its power Genesis games and homebrew almost never use addon chips.

[Dark Jaguar]

Well, it's more accurate to say that the 68K was clocked high enough that they rarely had to worry about slowdown issues from too many sprites on screen specifically.  Sega themselves clearly didn't believe the chip was capable of pushing polygons like this or they wouldn't have bothered with the SVP chip, the 32X addon, or the additional enhancement chips that granted the Mega CD addon something equivalent to "Mode 7".

What this is does celebrate what the hardware was truly capable of, but it's only possible decades later after extensive breaking down and understanding of the hardware that not even Sega themselves had.