A problem with this whole thing is the tiling of graphics and the reuse of tiles. Often you'll see backgrounds that rely heavily on the tiles having a certain resolution, a certain amount of pixels in the right places, to somewhat seamlessly fit together and make a nice picture (while still allowing reusability of tiles in the same scene). At a higher resolution with supposedly more gradience and non-aliased lines, the seams are going to stand out a
lot more. Coupled with the fact that an increased resolution will do nothing against the tiled look of levels as opposed to backgrounds in more modern 2D games that are composed of larger pieces, or simply of one large single drawn picture, it'll all look very ugly indeed.
A possible solution? Drop the SNES graphics engine alltogether, just have it output some values that are normally passed to the GPU (I'm just assumming it's actually that simple*), and write a new one that will allow to show anything that one's graphics API of choice is able to do. You could have fully handdrawn backgrounds without tiling. Or prerendered ones, hell, you could even have 3D (though that wouldn't be my preference). Add bump mapping and pixel shaders, extra effects on cue with certain events, wherever the hell you want.
You wouldn't have to worry about anything on the SNES' GPU side of things, which would be the case if you were to simply replace tiles. And you wouldn't have to worry about what goes on in the bowels of the gameplay engine, which would be the case if you were to do a remake from scratch.
*(if anything gives you trouble you could just leave the GPU running, it's not like it would matter much on today's PC's. Jeez, even I could probably write such a thing if I were to just make a frontend that spies on, say, Super Metroid's variables and makes changes to the graphics overlay accordingly. Though I don't really have the Windows knowledge to even make a frontend. Hey, anyone want to team up? :p)
Jikmo wrote:and what do you mean by reanimated? i thought animation in snes was achieved by just swapping sprites/tiles. so you just keep all of the highres pics to the same aspects of the original, and you've already got the animations
I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word "animation."