Game:

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (1995)

Duration: 9:22

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The Super FX is a coprocessor chip used in select Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) video game cartridges. This custom-made RISC processor was typically programmed to act like a graphics accelerator chip that would draw polygons to a frame buffer in the RAM that sat adjacent to it. For those games, the data in this frame buffer was 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, GSU-1, commonly called the Super FX, is clocked with a 21 MHz signal, but an internal clock speed divider halved it to 10.5 MHz. Some early cartridges of StarFox shipped with a version of this chip that was marked "MARIO Chip 1." Later on, the design was revised to become the GSU-2, known as the Super FX 2. Unlike earlier chips, this version was 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 when creating 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.

The technology behind the SuperFX chip would later become the ARC (Argonaut RISC Core) embedded microprocessor.

Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX

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