A three-and-a-half-minute video released this weekend made an N64 first-person shooter look like it belonged on the Super Nintendo, a 16-bit machine that many grew up with. Bond stands on the Arkhangelsk dam, the gun is in the lower corner of the frame, and the concrete bunkers pass by in chunky polygons while fog eats the far cliffs.
Retroports released a new video on their channel on September 20th. The video is simply titled ‘GoldenEye SNES Test’, and a small but devoted audience of a few hundred subscribers watches to see what they’re up to. The video in question is a live capture from a Mesen emulator, showing the opening and Dam missions from a 2MB Super FX2 cartridge running in polygon rendering mode, with some interesting features like fog and occlusion culling in action. Unfortunately, with such a restricted texture budget, just the first part of the level is rendered. What you may not know is that Claude Opus did the most of the work on the renderer, while ChatGPT Astra addressed a few other bugs.
- BUILD AN ICON – Build the ultimate retro gaming display with the LEGO Game Boy (72046) model kit for adults ages 18 and up
- RELIVE THE EXCITEMENT – Remember powering up your Game Boy for the first time? Experience the thrill again with this authentic of the handheld...
- DISCOVER AUTHENTIC DETAILS – The instantly-recognizable Game Boy features classic button layout, contrast dial, and interchangeable Game Pak and...
For those who can remember back to the 1990s, Super FX2 was the newest generation of Argonaut and Nintendo’s collaboration, a processor that was shoehorned onto a few late SNES carts. Star Fox was the first game to make use of the original Super FX processor, which operated at around 10.7 MHz. On the other side, titles like Yoshi’s Island, DOOM, and Stunt Race FX required the extra horsepower of the Super FX2, which ran at 21.47 MHz, to power through all of the 3D arithmetic that the 65816 CPU alone couldn’t manage. Retroports has been playing with a 2MB Super FX2 cart inside Mesen, and they’ve used the extra power to test out a first-person camera, textured walls, and an animated gun sprite.
The Dam is the only mission that survives the cut, which is logical given how simple it is to texture a large concrete wall in comparison to all the offices and city blocks on the other levels. Then there’s occlusion culling, which helps by hiding geometry that the camera can’t see, and fog, which helps by reducing the draw distance so the chip doesn’t have to paint the entire valley every frame. Still, you can see the 1997 intro to Rare’s GoldenEye, even if it’s running on a device that’s a few generations behind the Nintendo 64.
Following Donkey Kong Country, Nintendo Power reported that Rare was working on GoldenEye for the Super NES, with initial plans to adopt a similar pre-rendered graphic style. However, the team eventually switched to a 64-bit processor, which resulted in the first-person shooter that redefined multiplayer in living rooms for a decade. Anyway, Retroports has managed to recreate some of the latter design on the earlier machine, utilizing the same chip that Nintendo gave for Star Fox plus a handful of language models to improve rendering.
To be totally honest, no one has been able to obtain a ROM for this game because, as far as we know, it has only ever been loaded onto the original hardware by the Retroports team themselves. Until we have a file that other people can run, this clip will have to suffice as proof in the pudding. Retroports describes it as a test to determine if 3D on the SNES may have been a more economically viable idea.
[Source]
