Super FX

[Seaquest]

I have been pondering this for a while and I wanted to know what others thought about it. As you know the Super FX chip was found in various snes game to allow polygons in the gameplay. If the Super FX chip had come packed inside every snes would it have affected it's sales and game quality in a good way or bad way?:villagepeople:

[Richter Belmount]

Bad way

[buzz_n64]

I'd like to think in a good way, but I know developers would be trying to use polygons on the snes with shitty results. Take a look at the GBA, it's basically a snes with the FX chip built in, and it does great, but it came out years after the snes had been tried and proven. We would have seen a few great titles making use of it, but a lot of polygon crap like Ballz.

[tomaitheous]

I have been pondering this for a while and I wanted to know what others thought about it. As you know the Super FX chip was found in various snes game to allow polygons in the gameplay. If the Super FX chip had come packed inside every snes would it have affected it's sales and game quality in a good way or bad way?:villagepeople:

It would mean paying for something that you wouldn't see used all the time in a SNES game. I think being on cart was the better option overall. Not to mention there were other addon cart chips besides the just the FX chip. Having it on the system might have meant some more polygon games, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Starfox was great because it was a Nintendo title. I could just imagine "lesser" polygon titles for the system. No good.

[Oldskool]

I'd like to think in a good way, but I know developers would be trying to use polygons on the snes with shitty results. Take a look at the GBA, it's basically a snes with the FX chip built in, and it does great, but it came out years after the snes had been tried and proven. We would have seen a few great titles making use of it, but a lot of polygon crap like Ballz.

Ballz is not even polygons. It's just scaling and rotation similar to Afterburner's title screen.

I like Ballz. :embarrassed:

[Arkhan]

I like Ballz. :embarrassed:


I bet you do!
:onfire:


:)



Just imagine LJN w/ access to polygons from the getgo. Sweet jesus.

[dreamcaster]

It would mean paying for something that you wouldn't see used all the time in a SNES game. I think being on cart was the better option overall. Not to mention there were other addon cart chips besides the just the FX chip. Having it on the system might have meant some more polygon games, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Starfox was great because it was a Nintendo title. I could just imagine "lesser" polygon titles for the system. No good.

Dirt Trax FX is a prime example of this. Boring and barely playable.

[badinsults]

The Super FX chip was not just for polygon rendering. It could also do morphing (like in Yoshi's Island) and other graphics effects. I imagine the cost of the Super FX would prohibit it from being in the SNES, and in fact it was the reasoning why the DSP1 chip never found its way into the console.

[Ed Oscuro]

This is an economic question that was last relevant in 1989 (or 1992, depending on your point of view).

First off, the topic-kill most obvious observation: Including the Super FX chip with every SNES from the start was not an option because it didn't exist in 1989. But, hey, "what if..."

Every console's design and pricing is the result of compromises.

If they had developed it in 1989, it might have been in a larger IC package, would have been more expensive as a component to give the same functionality (and at the same clock speed), and certainly would have added expense to each console unit. They might have been able to create a hybrid chip that had the functionality of the SNES's custom video hardware, as well as the Super FX; maybe they could have replaced the CPU in the SNES with the Super FX (though it would have had more housework to do, limiting its performance in some situations I suppose, but not a big deal during gameplay I suppose). Still, this seems unlikely given how Nintendo cheaped out on the actual "main" CPU of the SNES! The original version of the Super FX was a ~10.5MHz chip when actual professional RISC chips meant to be the sole CPU in a system (like the SPARC) were maybe 20-40 MHz. (Not a very good indication of the price because the Super FX was probably produced in if anything a higher volume, would have had fewer transistors, simpler development costs, and so on, but I think it gives the general idea.) It's worth remembering that the SNES already had great graphics for its era considering that it was released at a relatively competitive price. Namco's Assault arcade game from 1988 is basically doing what the SNES did a year later - a pretty quick turnaround for that level of technology to come home.

About the gameplay / graphics impact: I think that we would have lost the "SNES feel" in many games because programmers would have had more prolonged development as a result - needing to learn yet another chip and its way of interfacing through the SNES. Even if it wasn't really difficult to understand and interface with the rest of the SNES (my understanding is that using the SNES graphical capabilities is relatively easy), you'd have developers trying to factor in 3D gimmicks, which would have all looked like Star Fox, even not when appropriate - flat-shaded, limp, clashing with 2D art, boring outside of specific genres. Discounting 1994-era addon chip developments, my favorite SNES titles, and certainly the best-looking ones, are all 2D-only ones (the lot of Natsume developed games, for instance) which only use 3D graphics sparingly (and generated inside the SNES, not by outside hardware). Paper Mario (and I believe its own version of the Super FX chip dates from 1994 or 1995) looks decent; I imagine that hardware would have been pretty flexible - but that was again later than the original Super FX, and thus again still more expensive to produce, and less feasibly a development for 1989.

Remember also the plans for backwards compatibility with the NES - dropped for the reason that it would have inflated the price. That wouldn't have been the most meaningful feature for people who already had an NES library and the systems to play them on (toploader & toaster quirks aside), just as the Super FX chip would have been no meaningful addition to games which didn't make special use of its abilities. It's kind of like asking whether you want a special module or connector for your modern console - Feature X sounds nice but you don't want to pay more for it. If the price differential was around $60 (I think NP might have said it was...but I could be totally making this up), it would have been the difference between going home and playing the pack-in and your old NES games "in stereo," or in bringing home the SNES with the pack-in, and another game in a totally different genre to keep you happy...with the NES on standby for when you wanted to play that, too.

Back to the Super FX:

Including it from 1992 on in new SNESes was not a feasible option because it would have left original non-Super FX-included SNES buyers out of the game.

Doing it as an addon cartridge (between the system and the game pak) ala the Aladdin Deck Enhancer also wouldn't have worked for Nintendo because then they would have had more pressure to follow up Star Fox with other games using the exact same hardware to make such a peripheral "worth it." And such a peripheral would have been easy to lose or damage - it would have been a liability. It would been another plastic enclosure, requiring more expense to create, a bigger box, less space on shelves for other Nintendo products, etc. You'd also need to pack them with every single game or else sell them separately, so the whole idea of the "Deck Enhancer" concept is meaningless unless you specifically intend to use the new capability for a substantial number of new releases going forward (the CD-ROM addon for the PC-Engine is a good example of this idea actually working, but it's to support a totally new media format).

Today, these sorts of decisions are still being made with console releases - now I bet that the new incarnations of these "what if?" questions will be in relation to "what if console X was created in a 3D version?" For the 2005 generation of television consoles, the question was mainly just "how much power for the price," since the hardware really had just evolved from the PlayStation era - probably the most stable period for gaming hardware development so far. With the SNES, every little feature added changed what you could do significantly, but also added to the price, significantly. With modern GPUs and scaling, you simply get slightly more fluid graphics, or more detail, but nothing that looks unrecognizable compared to an "ideal" version.

[Compute]

Indeed. Think of the first time you saw Mode 7 scaling and rotation, that shit blew your mind for sure (or you are 12). SuperFX is neat, but imo would have been too much. Jump right from Super Mario 3 to polygons? I think it would have been too much. May not have killed the system, but we weren't ready for polygons in 1990. Might as well have built in a modem and a cd drive.