Axelay SFC
Image: Nintendo Life

Remember Brazilan coder Vitor Vilela? He's been making it his quest to fix SNES games that are plagued with slowdown, and he's already worked his magic on titles such as Contra III, Super R-Type and Super Mario World.

The issue is that the SNES' Ricoh 5A22 CPU is pretty slow, and the console struggles with certain games when there's a lot happening on-screen. Vilela has employed SA-1 hacks to speed games up (the SA-1 was an accelerator chip with its own CPU that was placed inside some carts) as well as 'FastROM' hacks which speed things up by around a third.

Having recently made the notoriously sluggish Race Drivin' playable, Vilela has now worked wonders on another SNES game that was blighted by occasional bouts of slowdown: Konami's seminal shmup Axelay.

If you've got a flash cart handy and fancy seeing the results for yourself, head here.

[source github.com]