A new ROM hack adds full 60FPS support to the GBA classic Mario Kart: Super Circuit. While the game has always rendered at 60FPS, Nintendo originally updated the track rotation at only 30FPS, causing a mismatch between the sprites, backgrounds, and the Mode-7-style track.

This new hack updates the track rotation to 60FPS as well, creating a fully cohesive gameplay experience with no extra performance hit.

This patch modifies the map rendering code in mksc to update at 60fps. This has no impact on performance as the map scaling parameters were already being updated at 60fps, but were only being read at 30fps.

Please apply the patch corresponding to the region your ROM is from.

Source

 

[VinsCool]

This is like old news buddy

This is a week and a half old, and it was last updated 4 days ago, hardly "old news" there mate.

I know in current year it is expected to everyone to consume all media and be wired to the latest news within seconds, but there is also a concept called having a life outside of internet, and checking the news every few days to catch up with the hot stuff.

 

[NitroShell]

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This is a week and a half old, and it was last updated 4 days ago, hardly "old news" there mate.

I know in current year it is expected to everyone to consume all media and be wired to the latest news within seconds, but there is also a concept called having a life outside of internet, and checking the news every few days to catch up with the hot stuff.

2 months ago:


Also this has the 60FPS patch included so I recommend using this as the definitive way to play, they are planning to add the USA Mario Kart 64 voices and fix the colors to be more normal since the GBA at the time had no backlight

 

[VinsCool]

2 months ago:

Yet the romhacking page says otherwise, your point?

You can't go blame the news post to be old if its literal source isn't much older itself, that's just being a dick for the sake of feeling superior if you somehow knew about it but didn't feel like telling everyone else, then act like it's old news because literally no one else knew about it until a few days ago at most.

Heck, myself I did learn about the patch maybe 1-2 days earlier than this thread being created, so again, you can't assume everyone knows about stuff unless they were directly in the know of it, or stumbled on it by chance like you might have done and kept it secret for everyone else

Ok I am being cynical for the sake of it now, I admit, but still, it's unfair to accuse someone posting news as they come like they are late to the party when it's obviously not really the case here.

Also users should remember they are free to post User Submited News when they do have news to share if it wasn't already posted to the front page, this is encouraged, and more productive over criticising the staff for not having been part of the exclusive romhacking club to know the exact moment something is released.

I think you get the point I am making here, and also sorry everyone else for the tangent, back to 60FPS Mario Kart!

 

[RunTheCoins]

Yet the romhacking page says otherwise, your point?

You can't go blame the news post to be old if its literal source isn't much older itself, that's just being a dick for the sake of feeling superior if you somehow knew about it but didn't feel like telling everyone else, then act like it's old news because literally no one else knew about it until a few days ago at most.

Heck, myself I did learn about the patch maybe 1-2 days earlier than this thread being created, so again, you can't assume everyone knows about stuff unless they were directly in the know of it, or stumbled on it by chance like you might have done and kept it secret for everyone else

Ok I am being cynical for the sake of it now, I admit, but still, it's unfair to accuse someone posting news as they come like they are late to the party when it's obviously not really the case here.

Also users should remember they are free to post User Submited News when they do have news to share if it wasn't already posted to the front page, this is encouraged, and more productive over criticising the staff for not having been part of the exclusive romhacking club to know the exact moment something is released.

I think you get the point I am making here, and also sorry everyone else for the tangent, back to 60FPS Mario Kart!

I'm honestly partially to blame for some of this nonsense, not gonna lie

So back in the beginning of the month (Nov 4th) I released a super circuit romhack that increased the mixrate of the game's sound engine to 22khz, and replaced the game's OG samples with uncompressed, original source samples



With this though, I bundled the 60FPS patch antimattur made two months prior with permission, and gave credit. I ended up getting comments on my YouTube channel that the 60FPS hack should be it's own standalone hack as well, as at the time it hadn't been released outside of my own hack

So I ended up telling antimattur he should make a page on romhack.ing for the hack, and the rest is history...

I'm honestly really happy to see antimattur finally get the attention he deserves, he's even made a W.I.P track editor for super circuit called AdvancedEdit on github

 

[raxadian]

The GBA has hardware acceleration for sprite scaling and the "mode 7" effect that is used in Super Circuit. It can render those graphics really fast.

Makes you wonder why the original GBA game didn't use it to go to 60 fps.

 

[Rahkeesh]

Makes you wonder why the original GBA game didn't use it to go to 60 fps.

Hard to see the difference on the original smeary displays.

 

[Latiodile]

Hard to see the difference on the original smeary displays.

very easy to see the difference on an AGS-101 display

 

[Desconocido90]

Okay but those are in 2D, how the heck you get a faux 3D to 60 fps in original GBA hardware? That must have required a whole lot of optimisation.

It's not so unusual for this console: Actually, there were several "mode-7" racing games that runs at 60fps, for example the F-Zero saga or The Simpsons Road Rage.

What you call faux 3D ("mode 7"-like graphics) is actually 2D graphics altered to create the illusion of perspective... and GBA has 2D accelerated HW to make it faster.

Plus, GBA's CPU is, in most areas, faster than SNES+Enhanced Chips and can bruteforce its way into crazy graphics (like the Tomb Raider and Mario 64 ports for GBA)

 

[Xdqwerty]

Game still is mediocre nonetheless

 

[NitroShell]

Game still is mediocre nonetheless

I guess but it’s better now

 

[SuperYoshi93]

The best Mario Kart just receveid the best rom hack ever.

 

[ChronoCrossfangirl2002]

Can the GBA even run anything at 60FPS?

a good chunk of it's library runs at 60

 

[raxadian]

the Tomb Raider and Mario 64 ports for GBA)

Both ports are incomplete.

Although in Tom Raider case is because is impossible to fit the entire game with the GBA rom size limit

 

[granville]

Can the GBA even run anything at 60FPS?

The majority of GBA games run at 60fps, including ones with these mode7-like rotation/scaling effects. It's actually better at doing this sort of thing than the SNES was in fact. On SNES, only a single background layer using the system's Mode 7 could be rotated and scaled. It had no hardware support for doing so with other backgrounds or the sprite layer and required enhancement chips like the SuperFX to do so (though I have seen a couple of examples brute forcing this with sprites using software, one homebrew and another being a retail release from Factor 5). GBA could apply these rotation/scaling effects on either 1 or 2 background layers depending on the graphics mode, and you could also do it on the sprite layer as well.

And there are plenty of GBA games that made copious use of these effects and maintain a solid 60fps. Simpsons Road Rage is a good example, it even uses some interesting tricks often unseen in these sorts of mode7-like racers to fake the appearance of hills and such.



Then there's Gunstar Super Heroes, a semi remake of the original Genesis game by the same developer Treasure. The game makes copious use of a lot of rotation/scaling tricks and maintains a very smooth framerate with surprisingly little slowdown. The beginning of level 2 is at least as impressive as Sega's 80s/90s arcade superscaler games, if not moreso.



I could not tell you why Nintendo decided to make the tracks of MK run at a 30fps cap. Considering the rest of the visuals (such as the distant background) still run at 60, and it seems that it was something they disabled either intentionally or accidentally. It wasn't a performance related choice clearly, disabling it didn't even save any performance as the game still effectively renders the track at 60 and uses the same amount of CPU power to do so, even if it doesn't actually show it to the player.

Both ports are incomplete.

Although in Tom Raider case is because is impossible to fit the entire game with the GBA rom size limit

Their completion is irrelevant. It's what sort of visuals they can pull off that is the purpose of their existence. There are also a number of commercial 3D games that did release on the system that are highly impressive too. Vddev in particular made a number of insane genuine 3D games on the GBA. Like Asterix & Obelix XXL and Driver 3.

 

[LoggerMan]

Makes you wonder why the original GBA game didn't use it to go to 60 fps.

If the background is running at half the frame rates, it'll feel like it's moving twice as fast, makes it look slightly blurred, it could have been a deliberate choice by the game director.

 

[raxadian]

Asterix & Obelix XXL and Driver 3.

Really impressive 3d for a GBA game.

 

[Chellarina]

Thanks for the news and all the cool technical discussion in the comments. We all love games here so it's cool when we can come together as a community. I really love the reminder of what a powerhouse the GBA was.

 

[raxadian]

powerhouse

Eh, it had problems, it had too few buttons to have good conversions of several Super Nintendo games, the cardridge size limit got so bad it later years that Golden Sun had to be split in two games and most of the GBA titles people cares about are ports.

Not to mention the lack of backlight for the original GBA.

 

[Hutch3G]

I just tried the patch, it feels so smooth! Though i tried testing Single-Pak link play, and it doesn't work, the other GBA just white-screens. I wonder if it can be fixed...

 

[RunTheCoins]

I just tried the patch, it feels so smooth! Though i tried testing Single-Pak link play, and it doesn't work, the other GBA just white-screens. I wonder if it can be fixed...

I can talk to the creator and see if we can get it working on the single pak side

(Gonna be honest, single-pak is one of the most undocumented parts of the game, so it might be awhile until we can get 60FPS working on that side, or have single-pak still working with the patch)