Since launching the Virtual Console in 2006, Nintendo has officially re-released dozens of Super NES games for play on modern consoles. As that emulated library has grown, though, many have noted an important gap: Nintendo hasn’t re-released any SNES games that made use of the 3D-focused Super FX chip (or the improved Super FX2 follow-up).
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That streak of Super FX disrespect will finally end in September when Yoshi’s Island and Star Fox will show up on the Super NES Classic Edition. They’ll be joined by the previously unreleased, Super FX2-powered Star Fox 2, which was completed in the mid-’90s but cancelled to avoid the shadow of more powerful 3D games on the likes of PlayStation and Nintendo 64.
While it’s nice to see the Super FX getting some official attention, the question remains: what took so long? Why has Nintendo ignored the Super FX corner of its history all these years?
It turns out that this story is a lot more intricate – and mysterious – than I thought. Since I’ve been using snes9x for ages to play SNES games, it never dawned on me that Nintendo’s own later consoles did not get any SuperFX-powered games.
What makes even less sense, is why Star Fox 2 wasn’t released when it was ‘finished’. I know the reasoning is that Nintendo didn’t want SNES competing with N64, but Sony has overlapped generations for every iteration of their consoles, and I don’t think that it really hurt them. If anything, it has created an incentive to invest in the newer tech – a company who supports consoles past their ‘time’, etc.
Keep in mind that this was at a time in which Nintendo could do no wrong.
The weirder part is, Star Fox 2 was due to be released a year before the N64 was due to be out.
It was mostly internal politics at the time between Nintendo and Argonaut. Shigeru Miyamoto was a bit of an arsehole apparently.
Alledgely he stole the code and assets and used them for star fox 64.
http://www.shacknews.com/article/80104/why-super-mario-64-owes-croc…
However like most things there are quite a few accounts of what happened.
Edited 2017-07-09 08:54 UTC
The most likely answer is Economy of Scale. Super-FX games are called that because they have a Super-FX (2) chip in them. This chip isn’t free, or even all that cheap. You need to sell a metric sh-t-tonne of games to pay for those chips. With the N64 right around the corner, the Osborn Effect was firmly in place, and Nintendo couldn’t justify making enough SFX2 chips for the lesser number of carts they’d sell as people saved up for the N64.
The N64 being cartridge based too, they could always have tried to find a way to put those chips into N64 games as well. N64 Super-FX2 powered Super Mario, your eyes won’t believe it is not real.
*remember 3dfx Voodoo ads*
It would have required another chip to make the SFX2 work in an N64 cart. The N64 cart was designed to operate more like a device than a cart – you send the cart a command and then read a packet of data of varying length. It works well with DMA, but it’s not very familiar to people expecting a regular cart.
I know you were just joking, but in case anyone is taking it seriously, there’s very little an SFX2 chip can add to the N64, especially from inside the cart.
I wonder how long until somebody extracts the Star Fox 2 ROM from the SNES Classic and puts it up on the internet.
I give it one week.
Why would they? It is all over the Internet already
Supposedly, the builds that have been made available on the Internet for years are not a final build. This SNES mini classic will have a finalized build. Expect it to be slightly different.