You can now play the original Star Fox on PC at 60 frames per second

Developer Kandowontu has released Star Fox Enhanced, a native Windows PC port of the 1993 Super Nintendo space shooter. Available today, the open-source project rebuilds the original game's engine to support modern widescreen displays and unlocked frame rates up to 480 FPS.

When Star Fox launched 33 years ago, it was a technical miracle that barely ran. Nintendo EAD and Argonaut Software crammed the Super FX coprocessor chip into the cartridge to render flat-shaded 3D polygons on a 16-bit console. Argonaut founder Jez San and his team in London essentially designed a custom 3D accelerator just to make Shigeru Miyamoto and Katsuya Eguchi's puppet-inspired space shooter a reality. It worked, but the hardware strain meant the game frequently chugged along at 10 to 15 frames per second. The low framerate was just the cost of doing 3D business in 1993.

The framerate is fixed

The Star Fox Enhanced port fixes that performance bottleneck entirely. Built from the open-source UltraStarFox codebase, the native Windows port defaults to a smooth 60 FPS and can scale up to 480 FPS if you have a monitor that can handle it.

The developer achieved this using presentation-only camera interpolation. The underlying game logic still ticks at the original 20 Hz simulation rate, so the physics, hit detection, and enemy behavior remain identical to the SNES release. The visuals just update much faster. It also adds native widescreen support, expanding the field of view so you can see more of Corneria without stretching the original geometry.

Bring your own v1.2 ROM

Like most modern decompilation and native port projects, this is a bring-your-own-assets situation. The GitHub repository only provides the engine code. You need to supply a legally dumped, unmodified Star Fox USA v1.2 ROM for the builder to extract the original models, textures, and audio.

The setup process currently requires compiling the build yourself from the source code, which takes a bit of command-line navigation. It works, which is the nicest thing I can say about compiling code. Once built, the executable runs directly in Windows without needing an emulator like Snes9x or RetroArch.

Bundled with Star Fox EX

The download also includes built-in integration for Star Fox EX. If you missed it, EX is a massive ROM hack that adds new levels, custom bosses, and a ridiculous amount of hidden content to the base game.

Having it supported natively out of the box means you can play the expanded campaign with the same widescreen and high-framerate benefits as the vanilla game. The port handles the memory management required to run the larger EX payload without the constraints of original SNES hardware limits.

Native PC ports of Nintendo 64 games like Super Mario 64 and Star Fox 64 have been circulating for a few years now. Getting the Super FX catalog running natively on Windows is the logical next step. The original Star Fox is a historically important game that is genuinely hard to go back to because of its original frame rate. Playing it at 60 frames per second makes the 1993 geometry feel surprisingly modern.