Mario Kart Super Circuit NES PoC

A 'chasing the beam' NES prototype covering the 40 tracks from Mario Kart: Super Circuit on the Game Boy Advance. The aim was to combine several classic raster techniques—Altered Beast-style parallax backgrounds, Axelay-style mid-scanline interrupts, and Crisis Force-style vertically scrolling tile animation—to see whether Mario Kart’s freedom of movement could be squeezed into something approaching Rad Racer’s remarkable fluidity. The result is a resounding 'not yet', however it is colorful, fast, occasionally psychedelic, and still technically unresolved in places—particularly where the near- and far-track renderers meet. It is an experiment rather than a finished port, but it demonstrates a number of promising ways to fake affine-style movement on the NES. At 1.8 MB, it is also an unusually large NES cartridge image. MMC3 can address up to 1 MB of CHR-ROM, although the largest commercial examples used roughly half that amount. The project was built with extensive AI assistance, alongside a lot of testing, tuning and failed approaches. There are many more experiments in the same vein. If anyone in the NES development community would like to investigate the renderer or improve the transition between its layers, I’ll finally package and publish the repository.