F-Zero On The Genesis Looks Surprisingly Impressive

F-Zero was a flagship game for the Nintendo’s Mode 7 graphics option for the SNES, a game that should be impossible to replicate on a Genesis. Of course, riches888pg intrepid fans have found a way. In case you’ve forgotten, Mode 7 allowed developers to scale and rotate backgrounds layers to create a jinda44 psuedo-3D effect. It’s what allowed F-Zero and Super Mario Kart to exist before we’d developed proper 3D video games. Essentially, Mode 7 deploys a very effective visual trick.(new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c&cid=872d12ce-453b-4870-845f-955919887e1b'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c" }).render("79703296e5134c75a2db6e1b64762017"); }); Here’s what F-Zero looked like on the SNES: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlN1eUHWabI It remains a pretty impressive-looking game, right? Sega 156 user e19 gasega68k is the one who developed pseudo-Mode 7 under the Genesis hardware limitations, and he explained how he managed to pull it off in a forum thread from a while back: Hi, this is a demo of rotation and scaling better known by the name of “Mode 7”. I’m using the external Ram 64Kb in Word mode, to use as a “virtual map” of 256 x 256 8bit (256 colors “simulated” as in Wolf3D), the idea is that when we move on the map, it will uploading new “tiles” (a size of 8 x 8 = 64 bytes), similar to what is done for normal scroll, but as “tiles” of 64 bytes. Unfortunately, this will not work with flashcarts, since they do not support word-wide in Sram. In practice, here’s what it looks like: It’s not quite F-Zero on the SNES, but it’s surprisingly close! You can reach the author of this post at [email protected] or on Twitter at @patrickklepek