Game of Tobi Builds Super Mario FX and Plays It on Real SNES Hardware

Game of Tobi spent the last stretch of September proving that Super Mario 64 can move on a Super Nintendo if the cartridge carries a Super FX chip. His video, titled Fine, I made Super Mario FX, shows the result on original hardware, with Mario jumping through low, blocky versions of rooms that still read as Peach’s Castle, Bob-omb Battlefield, and Jolly Roger Bay.

It was difficult to install the demo onto a real console since Tobi needed to find a flash cart that could communicate with the Super FX chip. He ordered an FX Pack Pro from Zumi (which is the type of board they sell) and transferred the build to it. The console hardware was completely stock and unaltered; all of the extra math is stored in the cartridge, much like the chip that Argonaut delivered to Nintendo when Star Fox first arrived in 1993.

Tobi created a new engine for the chip and fed in the original Super Mario 64 assets. To his surprise, the animations and moves continue to operate, and the Chain Chomps and Piranha Plants appear in the expected locations. He has said the current build is already recognizable as Mario 64, even if the polygons look chunky and the frame rate still has room to climb. Textures turned out to be one of the slower jobs on the FX chip, so he borrowed methods from the Game Boy Advance ports he has been finishing at the same time.

Tobi has difficulty with memory, though, because he’s trying to keep the entire build under 2 MB, which is the maximum capacity of a GSU-2 Super FX cartridge. A couple of the levels are currently operational, but the larger ones must be reduced in size so that the geometry, objects, and textures all fit inside the space allowed. Frames are drawn from back to front since the processor cannot arrange them like a modern GPU. That’s why it moves slowly, and why distant landscape sometimes disappears before Mario can reach it.

The Super FX was conceived in the early 1990s as a small RISC processor that lived on the game pak and handled polygon math that the SNES CPU couldn’t handle. Nintendo originally called it the MARIO chip, which stands for Mathematical Argonaut Rotation I/O, before settling on Super FX. It may be seen in action in games such as Star Fox, Stunt Race FX, and, subsequently, Yoshi’s Island, which all employed variations of it. According to rumors, Nintendo had planned a 3D Mario game for this chip as well, but they had to abandon it because the technology couldn’t keep up. Some suggest it was called the Super Mario FX, the chip’s internal codename, but others disagree. Whatever the reality, no such game was ever released. Tobi’s demo is only one man’s homebrew attempt to explore how far he can push an outdated chip.
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