It’s truly spectacular.
Some amazing things have been done with emulators. Sometimes, it just goes to running these old games better than even the original hardware could. You can even run mods thanks to them… though the legality of that might be dubious.
but they should probably be arrested anyway.
Well, recently, a mod for the SNES emulator bsnes came along, and it’s done something remarkable. One of the big features of the SNES was something called Mode 7. To put it simply, it’s what made all those crazy rotating backgrounds for a lot of memorable games on the system. It’s famously what made games like Mario Kart and F-Zero impressive, in addition to a number of Squaresoft’s titles that were released later in the console’s life, like Final Fantasy VI, Secret of Mana, and Chrono Trigger, to name a few.
This mod, made by Redditor DerKoun, upscales these Mode 7 backgrounds, bringing out an incredible resolution. Roughly 4 times what the background’s original resolution was.
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Honestly, I’m normally not a fan of sprite upscaling in old games (*cough cough* I’d refuse to pay $16 for this shit, *cough*), but that Pilotwings screenshot almost instantly made a believer out of me. Mode 7 is prevalent enough in SNES games that this is a pretty big deal. While Mario Kart indicates that the mod doesn’t always create a striking change depending on the game, it still makes things look unbelievably crisp. If you grew up playing some of these games, seeing what it’s capable of really is amazing.
The Author of bsnes, byuu, has already stated that he plans on including the mod in future versions of the emulator by default if possible.
As for DerKoun, he’s actually still working on the mod. Notably, checking how some games react to it and tweaking things to make the whole shebang better. Needless to say, I want to see just how many games can be genuinely beautified by it.
Source: PC Gamer
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