Of course many games shipped with mappers, but if you're willing to put no limit to the amount of hardware you put on said mapper you might as well interface a full high end PC and play Cyberpunk 2077 on "standard SNES hardware".
Basically once you've figured out how to best use the SNES hardware to output fullscreen, decent FPS video from the cartridge port to the TV you can do whatever you want.
It's still a very cool hack but I was hoping for some ultra-optimized software-only SNES raytracer when I read the title.
Bruh. It's in the third paragraph.
> Of course many games shipped with mappers
No. You're thinking of the NES. The SNES handled memory mapping natively. The SNES chips had specific calculation functions, or ended up being co-processors, or both.
> It's still a very cool hack but I was hoping for some ultra-optimized software-only SNES raytracer when I read the title.
Not even the SNES games in the 90s did 3d without an expansion chip. You can't do any raytracing, or any 3d for that matter (without SEVERE compromises) with 3.5 Mhz.
If you read the article, the guy designed his own 3 core chip at 50Mhz... Yes it's more powerful than any chip that was in an SNES, but, it's not entirely period-incorrect.
It was not uncommon to have expansion chips: even early games such as Super Mario Kart had a (DSP-1) chip to help with 3d calculations. Later chips such as Super FX 1/2 (Star Fox, Doom, Yoshi's Island), Cx4 (Megaman X2/X3), and SA-1 (Kirby's Super Star, Mario RPG) were used in a significant portion of the library.
The SA-1 was basically an additional 10Mhz SNES CPU (which was a 65c816 at about 4Mhz)