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Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

Yes I was thinking about that too, it's more like using the SNES itself as a video adapter.

I find this kind of dismissiveness boring to start with.

But even beyond that, this isn't the case - the core logic for scene creation runs on the SNES and then the instruction opcodes are shipped to the expansion chip. So it's a GPU for the SNES, and a perfect analog to the SuperFX chip from which it takes its name.

A far cry from simply "using the SNES as a video adapter" as the full SNES hardware is still running the "game logic" to accept input and set up the scene.

I mean ok but then it should be like "Building an external GPU for the SNES".. people are being "dismissive" because of the title's initial expectation- that it was done on a vanilla SNES that you may have laying around at home.

It's all about expectations...

The SNES is totally unmodified. Apart from the fact that what should be housed in a cartridge is instead exploded across breadboards, nothing here is anything but vanilla by SNES standards.

There is no such thing as a game that runs on a vanilla SNES. Every SNES game comes in a cartridge that includes additional technology built into it. You can take the technology that the author created, package it up into a cartridge and plug it into a vanilla SNES as would be required by any other SNES game.

The inherent limitations of an SNES cartridge are the power consumption (although some cartridges actually included batteries) and the memory bandwidth (it's a 16 bit system so the cartridges have 16 pins).

Ok that makes more sense, so in theory a GPU for the SNES.

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