Super Mario 64 on SNES Is Making the Super FX Chip Question Its Career Choices

Homebrew coder Game of Tobi pushes the Super Nintendo's Super FX chip to its absolute limits by recreating 3D polygonal environments from Super Mario 64.

Homebrewer Game of Tobi is attempting something that sounds like an argument invented specifically to annoy hardware engineers: getting Super Mario 64 running on the Super Nintendo. The experimental project uses Super FX technology — apparently pushing into Super FX 2 territory — to render polygonal environments complete with vertical terrain and textures on hardware designed years before Nintendo's 64-bit console appeared.

Current demonstrations already include recognisable versions of Peach's Castle, Bob-omb Battlefield and Shifting Sand Land. Tobi built the underlying engine from scratch while using models, animations and other assets derived from the original Super Mario 64 source material. Performance remains understandably rough, and there is currently no public SNES release, so this should be considered a technical project rather than tomorrow's new cartridge purchase.

Even so, it belongs to a fascinating modern homebrew tradition in which programmers revisit supposedly fixed hardware limits with tools and knowledge that commercial developers of the era simply did not possess. Super FX famously allowed games such as Star Fox and Yoshi's Island to perform tricks the base SNES could never manage alone, while Super FX 2 pushed things further in titles including Doom and the eventually released Star Fox 2. Nobody in 1996 seriously expected the machine to compete with Mario's Nintendo 64 debut. Thirty years later, apparently nobody remembered to tell homebrew programmers that. Frame rate may be negotiable; stubbornness certainly isn't.