The Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 tech was impressive as hell in the early 90s, but all that spinning came at the cost of visual fidelity, with the backgrounds on games like Mario Kart and F-Zero looking like pixellated puke. Two decades on, a mod is trying to clean that up.
Made by DerKoun, HD Mode 7 “performs Mode 7 transformations (incl. HDMA) at up to 4 times the horizontal and vertical resolution”. The effects are remarkable.
Look at that! Those spinning maps/backgrounds were a mess, and this mod cleans ‘em right up.
And it’s not just Nintendo games benefiting. Obviously any game using Mode 7 now looks a lot sharper, like Dragon Quest 3:
Dragon Quest III: pic.twitter.com/A0qUCCcBPb
— byuu (@byuu_san) April 16, 2019
This is magic.
You can download and try it out here. Now if you excuse me, I’ve got to track down a copy of Jurassic Park…
Comments
2 responses to “SNES Mod Performs Black Magic On Mode 7’s Barfy Resolution”
What manner of wizardry is this? Looks awesome.
This article went into much greater explanation of the wizardry afoot.
What I love most about this is that it doesn’t compromise the original graphics in any way by smoothing them over or making them look less ‘natural’ for the SNES. Just by increasing the resolution you get a huge increase in visual fidelity, but it all still looks like a SNES game.
Fantastic.