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14-475: The Super FX chip design team included engineers Ben Cheese , Rob Macaulay, and James Hakewill. While in development, the Super FX chip was codenamed "Super Mario FX" and " MARIO ". "MARIO", a backronym for "Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotation, & Input/Output", is printed on the face of the final production chip. The chip's name would lead to an urban legend that "Super Mario FX" was a video game in development for

28-509: A graphics accelerator chip that draws polygons to a frame buffer in the RAM that sits adjacent to it. The data in this frame buffer is periodically transferred to the main video memory inside of the console using DMA in order to show up on the television display. The first version of the chip, commonly referred to as simply "Super FX", is clocked with a 21.4  MHz signal, but an internal clock speed divider halves it to 10.7 MHz. Later on,

42-507: A technology-demonstrator system called Flare One . The Flare One was intended as a home computer or games console with extensive audio and video capabilities. Related to the Loki project they had worked on previously at Sinclair Research, which in turn was derived from the ZX Spectrum home computer, Flare One was based around a Zilog Z80B CPU (working as an 8-bit-per-pixel blitter and

56-495: A video controller) and a custom 16-bit DSP chip (responsible for 8 channel sound and 3D computation), 1 MB or RAM, with a display resolution of 256 x 256 with 256 colors or 512 x 256 with 16 colors, and an expected price of £200 in 1988. Flare One was used in some arcade game cabinets including a line of video quiz machines produced by Bellfruit ( A Question of Sport , Beeline , Every Second Counts , Inquizitor , Quizvaders   and Treble Top ). The Flare One chipset

70-516: The Game Genie . Ben Cheese Ben Cheese (1955 – 21 January 2001) was a British engineer who worked on Sinclair 's ZX Microdrives . Authors Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy, in their book Sinclair and the "Sunrise" Technology , write that "it seems only fair to note that it was the tenacity and imagination of R&D staffer Ben Cheese that got the product [i.e., the Microdrive] to

84-679: The TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine . Shortly after the 1990 Consumer Electronics Show held in Chicago, Illinois , Argonaut ported the NES version of Starglider to the Super Famicom, a process which took roughly one week according to San. The Super FX chip is used to render 3D polygons and to assist the SNES in rendering advanced 2D effects. This custom-made RISC processor is typically programmed to act like

98-454: The GSU-2, more external pins were available and assigned for addressing. As a result, a larger amount of external ROM or RAM can be accessed. Star Fox uses the chip for the rendering of hundreds of simultaneous 3D polygons. It uses scaled 2D bitmaps for lasers, asteroids, and other obstacles, but other objects such as ships are rendered with 3D polygons. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island uses

112-574: The SNES. Because of high manufacturing costs and increased development time, few Super FX based games were made compared to the rest of the SNES library. Due to these increased costs, Super FX games often retailed at a higher MSRP compared to other SNES games. According to Argonaut Games founder Jez San , Argonaut had initially intended to develop the Super FX chip for the Nintendo Entertainment System . The team programmed an NES version of

126-581: The Sinclair in-house newsletter called WHAM! , or What's Happening At Milton . Ben Cheese died from cancer at age 46. Flare Technology Flare Technology was a computer hardware company based in Cambridge , United Kingdom . It was founded in 1986 by Martin Brennan , Ben Cheese , and John Mathieson , former engineers at Sinclair Research . Flare Technology first worked for Amstrad before developing

140-416: The chip for 2D graphics effects like sprite scaling and stretching. Game cartridges that contain a Super FX chip have additional contacts at the bottom of the cartridge that connect to the extra slots in the cartridge port that are not otherwise typically used. Therefore, Super FX games cannot be plugged into cartridge adapters which predate the release of Super FX games. This includes cheat devices, such as

154-474: The design was revised to become the Super FX GSU (Graphics Support Unit); this, unlike the first Super FX chip revision, is able to reach 21 MHz. All versions of the Super FX chip are functionally compatible in terms of their instruction set. The differences arise in how they are packaged , their pinout , and their internal clock speed. As a result of changing the package from 100 to 112 pins when creating

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168-530: The first-person combat flight simulator Starglider , which Argonaut had developed for the Atari ST and other home computers a few years earlier, and showed it to Nintendo in 1990. The prototype impressed the company, but they suggested that they develop games for the then-unreleased Super Famicom due to the NES's hardware becoming outdated in light of newer systems such as the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and

182-701: The market". When Sinclair was sold, Cheese formed a company called Flare Technology with two other former Sinclair engineers, John Mathieson and Martin Brennan . Brennan and Mathieson went on to form Flare II, and to develop the Atari Jaguar console. Meanwhile, Cheese worked with Argonaut Software and Nintendo to develop the Super FX chip used in Super Nintendo Entertainment System games such as Star Fox . Besides his engineering work, Ben Cheese also drew some mildly subversive cartoons for

196-519: Was further developed into the Konix Multisystem Slipstream prototype. In 1989 Martin Brennan was contracted by Atari Corp. to complete and implement the chip design of the unreleased Atari Panther . Martin Brennan and John Mathieson went on to design the Flare II , which was purchased by Atari and became Atari Jaguar . This article about a technological corporation or company

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