Remember all those amazing effects on the Super Nintendo (SNES) that blew you away in the 90’s? Remember the first time you saw the wireframe effects in Mega Man X2, watched your car turn on a 3D plain in Super Mario Kart, or laid eyes on Star Fox? They weren’t just the SNES. They did it all with the help of some fancy technology. These pieces of hardware revolutionized the SNES and made it the great console it was. What was that hardware? Well, there’s some information, but some hardware is more well known than others.

Mode 7

First off we have Mode 7. Mode 7 was something that allowed the SNES to turn backgrounds, which could give off the impression that you were in a 3D environment. Some examples include the entirety of F-Zero and Super Mario Kart.

Example of Mode 7 from the game Super Mario Kart.

CX4 Chip

The CX4 chip was a chip produced by Capcom and was used in two games: Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3. It allowed for three-dimensional wireframe graphics.

The CX4 chip in action in Mega Man X2.

Super FX

The most well known of all the chips, the Super FX Chip (code named Super Mario FX) was a chip that could allow the SNES to display fully 3D polygons. The SNES could display polygons on it’s own (as seen in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past), but it could not compare to the Super FX Chip. The most noticeable game to use this chip was Star Fox. Nintendo later released a Super FX 2 Chip that was used in a few games, and would have been used in Star Fox 2 had it not been cancelled.

The Super FX chip doing its thing in the game Star Fox.