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Tangentially, here's an explainer on how the original SNES Mode7 actually worked, with excellent animations demonstrating the input, settings, and output:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FVN_Ze7bzw

(I highly recommend the entire channel, Retro Game Mechanics Explained, https://www.youtube.com/@RGMechEx, for top-notch content)

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The quality of these videos are absurdly high: technically very deep and well illustrated. I'd love to know what tools he uses to create them.

My bet is that they used native code and an emulator for a lot of the effects.

Emulator with Lua capability.

He actually did a video about part of the process, in this case importing memory data from the game into After Effects to annotate sprites with 1:1 tracking. It's pretty impressive and seems like a lot of work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuVx4QI6fIM

I can also recommend these blog posts about mode 7 (2 parts)

https://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/mode7.htm https://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/mode7ex.htm

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