Latest version of bsnes emulator allows for "HD" Mode 7 upscaling
Remember the days of the Super Nintendo and its at the time stunning Mode 7 capabilities? Games like F-Zero, Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario Kart, and dozens more all made use of Mode 7 to enhance how the games looked. These days, however, it can look a little dated, and it's a bit difficult to make out specific details, visually. That's where a modder named DerKoun enters the picture, with the release of his "HD Mode 7 Mod" for the Super Nintendo emulator bsnes. According to the release notes, this is a patch for version 107.1 of bsnes that emulates Mode 7 scenes at "up to 4x" the resolution that the original hardware could output. As seen in some of the comparison screenshots, it makes for a drastic difference, smoothing things out to make for a much more visually appealing experience.
This is a mod of bsnes 107.1 by byuu (high-level emulation for co-processors came right on time for this).
It performs Mode 7 transformations (incl. HDMA) at up to 4 times the horizontal and vertical resolution.
Optionally, for games with pseudo 3D perspectives, some limitations of the integer math used by the SNES can be avoided by more aggressive averaging.
This can be disabled in Settings/Emulator/Experimental, where you can also change the scale or disable this feature.
For best performance try different output modes in Settings/Driver/Video. (For me Direct3D performs best.)
Shortly after its release, byuu, developer of bsnes, incorporated the patch into his latest official revision of the emulator. v107r2 is now available to download, taking the patch and adding a few new features and fixes, which are notated below. If you're interested, you can grab the emulator at the source link and check it out for yourself.
Added DerKoun's HD mode 7 (up to 2160p), ~100fps boost for fast forwarding, configurable latency settings for waveOut (please configure this yourself), cubic interpolation for audio, filename case insensitivity, and a few other things.
I corrected some of the issues with the HD mode 7 (such as mosaic in Contra 3, etc), and allowed you to increase the multiplier up to 9x for true 4K resolution. Friendly reminder that this mode has to render 81 times as many pixels with lots of divisions for all five million pixels per frame at 60fps. Hope you have a Threadripper.
Also, this is a beta, so there are bound to be issues. Please wait for v108 if you want something stable.
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