Star Fox Unleashed - Silky Smooth Gameplay!

Star Fox Unleashed by Ensign Salt - [email protected] - https://www.youtube.com/@EnsignSalt

The classic SNES Star Fox, now with silky smooth gameplay!

The original Star Fox was limited by the hardware of the time to a max of 20fps, but often crawled at single-digit framerates. Since gameplay was designed around the framerate, efforts to overclock the SNES and Super FX chip resulted in 20fps gameplay that was too fast, and a subpar experience.

Star Fox Unleashed attempts to have it both ways.

The framerate cap has been lifted to a solid 30fps, and game speeds have been modified to account for the increased framerate, approximately double the original on average.

This is an initial preview that's a thrill to play, but still has plenty of bugs and oversights.

To play this release, you MUST run in an emulator that has options to overclock both the SNES CPU and Super FX chip! Without it, you will experience unplayable graphical glitches...or worse: lower framerate!

The goal of this hack:

1. Play Star Fox
2. Increase the framerate of gameplay and game objects. Since objects in the game are animated based on the number of frames that come out, this requires retiming and recoreographing many elements of the game. I've already retimed enough to successfully and enjoyably play through the main difficulty level of the game.
3. Have fun

There's much left to be done:

1. Difficulty levels 2 and 3 have not been fully playtested.
2. Many objects still need to be slowed down and/or have "inbetween" frames of animation made to smooth out motion. The robots on Corneria are a good example of this.
3. Some special cinematics later in the game are very broken and need more TLC.
4. Perfect the "feel" of all the little things for those that know the game like the back of their hand.

INSTRUCTIONS: Patch Star Fox (USA) (Rev 2) with the included .bps file Overclock your SNES CPU and Super FX chip in your emulator as far as you can. See below for some emulator setting examples that have been known to work.

FAQ: Q: Does this work on Real Hardware? A: Sort of. This specific build does NOT. But a build will be provided in the future that can (if you have the ability to overclock your Super FX chip), though the SNES CPU is now the bottleneck. I plan to release a build that supports the "new" Super FX 3 chip, coupled with FastROM support that will help with bottlenecks and provide the best on-hardware experience.

Q: Why 30fps and not 60fps? A: Since so much of Star Fox's logic is based on counting frames and not tied to time itself, increasing the framerate increases game speeds. Retiming is complicated and certain game sequences don't take kindly to it. A rock-solid 30fps provides an experience that's lightyears better, while suppressing the jank that un-retimed assets would demonstrate. It's not out of the question, but something to be tackled later.

Q: I don't like this. Star Fox was perfect and this is not. A: That's not a question.

Emulation Examples: RetroArch Mesen-S core: Overclock: Very High Overclock Type: After NMI Super FX Clock Speed: 1000%

RetroArch Snes9X core: SuperFX Overclocking: 500% Reduce Slowdown (Unsafe): Max

MesenCE PPU Vertical Blank Configuration Additional Scanlines before NMI: 600 Additional Scanlines after NMI: 600 Super FX Clock Speed: 1000%

Credits: Special thanks to Kandowontu and Sunlit and more for the Star Fox hacking scene Based on UltraStarFox 2.2. Rebasing on the main UltraStarFox trunk and forking on GitHub coming soon.

Known issues (so far):

• Opening cinematic goes slightly too fast
• SCRAMBLE choreography at the end is subpar
• Door in Training (and elsewhere) has a bugged animation
• Robots drop their towers too quickly
• 1-3 final base has ridiculous animation when it reappears in-camera
• 1-3 final boss rotation is terrible
• that 4-legged thing in 1-5 doesn’t attack properly
• 1-6 cinematics are so broken
• Andross cube moves too fast
• Post-game cinematics are weird and broken, but at least don’t soft-lock anymore.
• Various animations play at 15fps. Can/should be inbetweened. Many have.
• Wingman chase sequences are performed at double speed.

Unknown issues: You tell me! [email protected]