Keeping Nintendo Competitive

Argonaut designed the 3D accelerator chip that powers Starfox,
a space-based dogfight game that has been a huge seller
for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

By Bob Johnstone
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Long famous for its pop musicians, the UK has become a fertile breeding ground for game programmers as well. Most big US game houses have British subsidiaries, and others subcontract game development to the UK because its programmers are creative and they cost less to hire than their US counterparts. But UK game shops also generate ideas of their own. One of Nintendo's runaway hits last year was made possible by Argonaut Software, an independent London-based firm.

Argonaut's specialty is the kind of 3-D graphics used in flight simulator games. The company has been developing 3-D games for a variety of platforms since 1983. Past hits include Starglider - one of the first color 3-D games for the Amiga and PC.

Argonaut was founded by managing director Jez San when he was just 16. By then he already had four years of experience in computer gaming, having bought his first computer at age 12. That was also the year he sold his first piece of code, an anti-piracy program, to the manufacturer of the best-selling BBC personal computer.

Though his tastes favor Star Trek, The Simpsons, pop music, and gory movies, Jez (short for Jeremy) San is by no means your classic game geek. Rather, he's a thoughtful individual who weighs his words carefully, and he is obviously determined: With 60 employees, Argonaut is now one of the biggest game houses in Europe. Asked why the UK has so many good game programmers, San gives three reasons: "Computers [like the BBC micro] were cheap, so there was a good incentive to learn assembler and machine code; the weather's not very good in Britain, so you can't go to out the beach very often; and, we're very eccentric."

While Argonaut started out as a software developer, the company's ability to develop hardware differentiates it from most other game houses. Argonaut designed the 3-D graphics accelerator chip that powers Starfox, a space- based dogfight game that has been a huge seller for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Argonaut's chip - a RISC-based processor known as Super FX - is an elegant way around some of the graphic limitations of the 16-bit Nintendo system.

All game cartridges contain chips. For the most part, they support read- only memories suitable for storing the game software. To add extra oomph, game makers started incorporating processor chips in cartridges, such as the digital signal processor chip in Nintendo's Pilot-wings, but such chips are typically the standard, off-the-shelf variety. Argonaut's is the first processor specifically tailored for use in a cartridge. And in the brutal world of consumer electronics, custom cannot mean expensive, so the Super FX chip costs just a few bucks a pop. That has made it possible for the ultraconservative Nintendo to extend the life cycle of its 16-bit SNES system, which is considerably less risky than moving to a completely new platform like CD-ROM.

Conventional game machines deal with the screen in chunks. This makes it easy to scroll characters and backgrounds to and fro, but the effect is two-dimensional, much like moving scenery on a stage. The Super FX makes it possible to address the screen pixel by pixel, which in turn enables 3-D effects.

Another limitation of conventional games is that objects are not scalable, so they have to be drawn in several sizes and from every possible angle. Working in concert with Nintendo's built-in graphics processor, the Super FX chip gets around this by generating polygons to represent objects such as spaceships - complete with realistic texture-mapped surfaces - and then rotating and scaling them in real-time as they zoom about the screen.

Argonaut had been kicking around ways of boosting Nintendo's hardware for several years. Historically, Nintendo has had its chips designed for no charge by big Japanese suppliers like Ricoh and Sharp, which do the work in return for fat manufacturing contracts. Prior to Nintendo's recent partnership with Silicon Graphics, Argonaut was the only non-Japanese company Nintendo had ever turned to for hardware design. And, since Argonaut had no interest in manufacturing, Nintendo was obliged to pay for the privilege of using Argonaut's design - a major coup by any standard, and even more so for a small British start-up.

On the day Starfox was released last year, the Super FX became the best- selling RISC processor ever, instantly outstripping years of cumulative sales of workstation-based processors such as the MIPS chips used by Silicon Graphics. To date, Starfox and the chip inside it have sold more than three million copies.

Not bad for a first effort. Alhough Argonaut receives just one percent of royalties on game sales, that's still big bucks for a small company. Last year, Argonaut had sales of US$2 million; this year, thanks to its relationship with Nintendo, that figure is expected to double.

In fact, as San-san (as they call him in Japan) explains, Super FX was the second chip his company designed. (The first was a debugger for a Nintendo development system.) When the English upstart first approached Nintendo with its 3-D technology at the 1990 summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, the Nintendo folks were sufficiently impressed to hand Argonaut a pre-release version of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The Nintendo folks were even more impressed a week later when San and company came back with a 3-D game they'd written for the machine - without the aid of a Nintendo software development system.

San then suggested that he could achieve much more if he had a custom chip to handle 3-D polygons and sprite rotation. Nintendo of America gave Argonaut the funding to develop that chip. But in the Nintendo empire, Kyoto calls the shots, and Nintendo of Japan took a lot of convincing. Company president Hiroshi Yamauchi is a notorious techno-phobe (he is often quoted in the Japanese press as saying he sees no reason to go beyond 16- bit machines). But Yamauchi saw the advantage of the Super FX, and he gave the project the go-ahead, even assigning the company's star designer, Super Mario creator Sigeru Miyamoto, to work on Starfox.

A close relationship between the two firms has since developed, with several Argonaut folks dispatched on long-term assignment to Kyoto. Argonaut has already designed other versions of the Super FX chip for Nintendo to incorporate into future titles: FX Trax, a driving game that features a bouncing buggy with a tendency to disintegrate, is due out in time to catch the Christmas market.

But even with chips on the cartridges, there is only so much you can do with antiquated architecture like Nintendo's 16-bit SNES. As San readily admits, the graphics that Super FX produces look crude when compared to what 3DO and others have been showing lately. Looking to the future, Argonaut has branched out to other platforms and developed software-based graphics routines that enable workstation-level effects like Gouraud shading (which smoothes the rough edges off all those polygons) and Phong shading (which adds glinting highlights), as well as real-time decompression of full-motion video. To catch this stuff in action, watch for Creature Shock, Argonaut's first interactive game on compact disc, to be published in '94 by Virgin for the PC, Sega, and 3DO machines. Should Nintendo ever commit to a CD platform, you may see it there as well.

Argonaut Software:
+44 81 200 5777, fax +44 81 343 089, jez@argonaut.com
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Bob Johnstone is WIRED's contributing editor in Japan.
Copyright © 1994 HotWired, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Updated January 25, 1997