Can you believe that it's been over 30 years since Virtua Fighter came out for the 32X? Did you even remember that the 32X still exists? Well, there's a project underway right now to create an HD version of the game running at 60fps, and the footage is looking great!
This work-in-progress project is coming to us from Sega Model King(WangDrum), who, after working on initial upscale rendering and discovering problems with the 32X's structural limitations, has moved on to pulling some amazing wizardry.
I intercepted the camera-space floating-point vertices, matrices, bones, and camera data during the SH-2 interpreter's vertex/part transformation phase. I then reconstructed the coordinate space and re-rendered the 3D geometry extracted from the ROM using a custom-built renderer operating in pure floating-point space, completely free from the pixel grid. The video you're looking at was rendered using this engine—the Mega Drive handles the 2D elements, while the custom renderer handles the 3D.
According to our friends at Renpou.com, the project is going through the process of extracting the 'internal 3D data' and redrawing it in a high-resolution 3D space via a 3D rendering program. What's more, the devs behind the project are using frame interpolation to upscale the original animations from 30fps to 60fps.
The result - a HD version of a game that still looks super retro but plays smoothly, if the video above is anything to go by. Obviously, as this is a work in progress, there's still a way to go, with some screen artifacts appearing in places where they don't belong. But the project looks as though it's heading in the right direction and I'm looking forward to following it over the coming weeks and months!
Make sure to follow the project on YouTube for more updates!
