SNES hackers speed up games that originally ran at 4 frames per second

The Atari Race Drivin 'arcade game was sent to the Atari ST in the summer of 1991, and then moved to SNES again a year later. It's the sequel to 1989's Hard Drivin, and while it's got a lot of improvements over its predecessor - it can replicate a four-wheel drive as opposed to Hard Drivin's two wheels, but it's still not particularly fast.SNES console port operates at slideshow-y 4 frames per second. And when the Genesis port arrived in 1993, Electronic Gaming Monthly's January 1994 issue provided a review of the capsule game.Read the full review:

This is another cool entry in the ทดลองเล่นสล็อตฟรี driving scene where the truly inventive titles (Chase H.Q. II and Rock & Roll Racing) tend to stand out, while others like this get lost in the crowd. The scrolling is choppy.Most of them received four and five (out of 10) awards from the magazine's staff. (This is the issue in an editor's letter to the California attorney general threatening to do something about video game violence! The Night Trap was terrifying at that time!)However, the Race Drivin runs at 4 frames per second on the original Atari ST hardware.Software engineer Vitor Vilela thought that wasn't good enough and decided to do something about it using contemporary hardware - the Nintendo SA-1 processor, according to the report. Kotaku, the test results show how powerful the SA-1 chip is.

Vilela was able to achieve speeds of around 30 frames per second using a specially developed transformation. This is what it looks like in real use.In the description of the YouTube video, Vilela writes a little bit about how they managed to achieve this honestly impressive performance. On the SA-1 side and moving most of the compute to the SA-1 CPU side, ”they wrote.“ With all the optimizations, games run up to 1,000% faster than the original game. All the code that Vilela wrote for this hack is available on Github, along with the source code for the other hacks they pulled out. It's a shame that EGM is unable to get hands on this version of the game, it looks like it has something straight from another future.