Man Rewrites SNES Racing Game to Improve Its Framerate Sevenfold

That headline is <i>very</i> misleading.<p>The guy didn&#x27;t just &quot;rewrite&quot; the game, he ported it to a completely different hardware!<p>The rewrite takes advantage of a separate CPU (the SA-1), so while the original was rendered entirely in software, his version is hardware accelerated. That hardly counts as a &quot;rewrite&quot; (which would imply that his code changes led to the speed-up), but an actual port to a different platform.<p>So it wasn&#x27;t his code changes that are responsible for the performance increase, it&#x27;s the use of additional dedicated hardware...

Oh hey it&#x27;s Victor Viela. He&#x27;s known in the Super Mario World ROM hacking community on a patch that adds SA-1 functionality to that game too, with some truly insane effects:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smwcentral.net&#x2F;?p=viewthread&amp;t=104830" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smwcentral.net&#x2F;?p=viewthread&amp;t=104830</a>

Seeing that game gives me some nostalgia. I remember playing it as a little boy. There was one in the corner of the local department store that got it’s fair share of quarters from me.<p>For as great as the SNES was, it’s kind of disappointing Nintendo out of such a poor quality port. Cool to see folks still working on these old games.

I wonder if he can improve on F-Zero?

TLDR: Adding an extra co-processor makes the game run faster