Widescreen Super Mario World. But... why?

On my last post, I asked which project should I work now. If you view the poll results, Star Fox won with 31 votes, followed by Axelay with 18 votes. Widescreen Super Mario World was the least voted option, with 3 votes only.

If you saw the pictures about and my recent tweets however, I've shown that I was rather working with Widescreen for Super Mario World instead of Star Fox or Axelay.

Why?

"Is Vitor fooling everyone?"

Of course, the answer is no.

I felt the need to make this post just to clarify about the poll versus the current proof-of-concept about wide SMW.

Widescreen SNES games aren't a new thing. Actually, around two years ago (May 19 to be specific), bsnes_hd, the bsnes fork that included the known HD mode 7 which smoothly interpolates the 2D matrix present on the Mode 7 scenes, included an experimental  widescreen support.

It was very limited though and being honest, it needed some work before we could make patches that correctly implements widescreen mode without graphical glitches or lacking support from some specific SNES features, such as windowing.

Near and DerKoun presented me about the widescreen mode and requested to me eventually collaborate with the project, by making some ROM hacks which correctly adjusts the games for working on the widescreen resolution. For example, by making sure the camera is correctly positioned and making sure sprites are spawning correctly on the wider screen border.

At that time, I had not much free time and I was focused in improving my existing SA-1 ROM hacks and the SnesLab development. However, I still wanted to work with them since it seemed to have a lot of potential, just like the MSU-1 chip.

Although it does not work on real hardware without completely replacing the S-PPU chip, it's a great addon for PC emulators that has larger, LCD displays which does not display the game in the full resolution as expected. It's something that Nintendo or other companies should have considered doing with some of their classical games, because that would bring them a new life to the games. Playing on full screen, 16:9 screen (which fits much better our eyes compared to 8:7 or 4:3) makes it being an interesting option for who likes retrogames but would like to have a new modern experience taking in consideration the characteristics of a personal computer instead of a complete CRT TV-like experience.

Because of my personal interest and the potential behind widescreen, I have been slowly working on the widescreen Super Mario World patch since around November 2020, before I've started working on Super R-Type SA-1.

I slowly fixed the camera position, sprite spawning, sprite despawning, camera scrolling, overworld scrolling, some broken animations, the title screen border, the overworld border, the overworld internal size, windowing HDMA (keyhole, circle, rectangles, etc.) and at the same time, I was helping the many people behind the widescreen project with ideas and standard proposals for making sure we would eventually get the necessary PPU features working with widescreen and setting up a common configuration so the same technique can be applied on different games without breaking the standard we have been setting it up. That's how I got windowing HDMA working and that's how we have set up the internal 352x224 internal resolution with a custom pixel aspect ratio to approach the original 8:7 PAR.

Everything was already being worked on before the poll and when the poll occurred and saw the interest was low, I decided to finish the remaining details and release a demonstration video of the widescreen system. My plans, once the initial video was released to focus again on Star Fox and Axelay.

I didn't expect there would be so many reactions (over 2.5K likes on Twitter) and seems that a lot of people are interested in me finishing the project and releasing it for everyone.

I personally do not know yet if I should focus on the widescreen patch or bring my attentions back to the Star Fox and Axelay researching process. Inclusive, I have expectations for my first Super FX dev cart (being developed by qwertymodo) reach around April, which will be important for the future Super FX games optimizations. The costs of making the cart was roughly one income month of this patreon page, considering the 80% tax Brazil applies when importing goods (sadly, had to convert from USD -> BRL -> USD back + taxes and shipping includes federal taxes as well).

Either way, what are your thoughts about the modified Super Mario World? Was the widescreen demonstration a good surprise or should the focus stay on the SA-1 and Super FX chips?