The idea originated when I was trying to think of an interesting idea for a project to help me learn Verilog and FPGA design, and the notion of building a simple raytracer came to mind (partly inspired by a scarily smart friend of mine who is building his own GPU). A bit later - because sometimes my brain hates me and delights in coming up with silly things to do - this turned into “wouldn’t it be interesting to try making a SNES do raytracing?”, and thus the SuperRT chip idea was born.
What I wanted to try and do was something akin to the Super FX chip used in titles such as Star Fox, where the SNES runs the game logic and hands off a scene description to a chip in the cartridge to generate the visuals. To that end I’ve deliberately tried to restrict myself to just using a single custom chip for the design, not making use of the ARM core available on the DE10 board or any other external processing resources.
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