it is somewhat annoying to us when people refer to star fox as the pinnacle of mode 7, because it's not mode 7 at all, mode 7 can't do anything close to that
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@Felthry ... Wait... Mode 7 is like... The flying map screen in final fantasy 6/5 and secret of mana right?
@Nine yeah, it was also capable of some more impressive stuff like the rotating cylinder room in super castlevania iv though
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@Felthry more mundanely I think they used it for things like Bowser's clown ship in smb spinning around and falling into the background, and the pendulum on the title screen of chrono trigger if memory serves too
@Nine yeah those are both also mode 7, just less impressive examples of it
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@Felthry I dunno, they're pretty impressive to me how they managed to fake a moving, scaling sprite so well with little tricks like that ^^
@Felthry but yeah those are straight up polygons the SNES and superFX chip are throwing around in Starfox
@Felthry Which would actually make it one of the very first consumer GPUs. 3dfx would not be founded until the year following Star Fox's release.
@terrana Mega Man X had its graphics coprocessor, the Cx4, though we don't know if that was before or after star fox
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@Felthry Close enough that they would have been developed in parallel, so I think they can share credit.
star fox was literally a tech demo for the superfx coprocessor, basically a gpu on the game cartridge
the snes was not capable of 3d rendering on its own, all mode 7 could do was rotate and scale a single flat background layer--it couldn't even do 3d rotations on it, those map screens with the perspective view were using a trick to change the scaling on every scanline
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