Old games and consoles never cease to amaze, even decades after their official death. All thanks to the homebrew scene, which tirelessly works to keep the legacy of those adorable gadgets alive, whether by creating new games or making fun modifications to their hardware. But this... this leaves us speechless. A super hacker managed to get a Super Nintendo game running on an NES. It looks like magic, but it isn't.
Tom Murphy (also known as Tom7) is a programmer and maker. In other words, a very clever handyman. So clever that he managed to run a game from Super Nintendo on an unmodified NES. Don't think it's possible? Well, it is. To see, with your own eyes, the exceptional feat, you just have to go to his YouTube channel (or watch the video below, where he explains how he did it).
The trick is in the "cartridge" that contains the SNES game, which is not a normal cartridge but a Raspberry Pi 3 fully modified. The Raspberry replaces the Image Processing Unit (PPU) of the cartridge, and takes care of translating all the game information into something the NES can understand, connecting to the NES via a custom-programmed EEPROM chip. To understand the magic behind it: Tom Murphy managed to make an 8-bit console run a 16-bit game.
The emulated game is a classic: Super Mario World, the launch title for Nintendo's 16-bit console. It's true that, as you can see in the video, the emulation is not perfect. Besides the constant flickering and annoying lines across the screen, the NES is unable to display the more than 56,000 colors of the SNES. That's why the game looks as if it were "faded". And it's because Tom had to program a "table of close colors" so that the Raspberry Pi could replace the colors of the 16-bit console with the closest one available on the 8-bit console. Another problem with the emulation? Well, there is no sound. Remember that the Super Nintendo has "CD quality" sound, thanks to a chip created by Sony, which was one of its best features. For now, and only for now, Murphy hasn't managed to get the NES to handle that audio quality with its mere four channels.
But, hey, the hack is completely playable and uses the NES controls, since Tom was also able to modify the input of the controllers. Although the 8-bit console's gamepad doesn't have the same number of buttons, it has enough to enjoy the game without major issues.
Want more information? We finish, then, with a guided walkthrough of the modification, step by step, by the very creator himself (see video above). Many congratulations to Tom for the feat. And thank you for so much magic!
