Nintendo and Sega were locked in something of a hardware enhancement arms race in the 1990s as each company worked to bolster their respective consoles against the competition. One of the add-ons that Nintendo created was the Super FX chip used in popular games such as Star Fox, Stunt Race FX, and Yoshi's Island, and while Sega countered with its own version of the technology dubbed the SVP chip, the company never used it for anything approaching how the competition applied it. Sega never knew the joys of Star Fox, but now a 16-bit enthusiast by the name of Stef has managed to bring a small piece of Fox McCloud's debut adventure for the Super NES to the Sega Genesis. RetroCollect has the news.
Before you get too excited about taking down Andross with a Mega Drive control pad in hand, we'd like to bring you back down to Corneria earth with the fact that this is very much a proof of concept.While developer Stef - from the ROMHacking.net forums - has managed to convert a snippet of playable Star Fox code over to the Sega Mega Drive, at this point in time it is only running around 9 frames per second on stock hardware. To further burst your bubble, audio is currently missing, as are many other key elements to the game.
This Genesis demo of Star Fox is running on pure blast processing. No SVP chip or other enhancements are in play here. It's an impressive feat that shows yet another Super NES classic running in a stripped down format on the Genesis. Given enough time and effort, I wonder just how much of the original game can be successfully ported to the Genesis. There's really no reason for this project to happen other than "because we can", but speaking as someone who came of age during the 16-bit console wars, I have to admit that seeing this demo running makes me smile. It's as if this were a small step towards cultural understanding and world peace if such things depended on a twenty-year-old video game being ported across competing platforms.
