Mockups of games from other platforms

[Drag]

I like this. This is my favorite.

[thefox]

The down side is that we haven't codified exactly what's going on with the 2C07's weird chroma shift on alternating scanlines, so it's not clear exactly what color the regions of alternating scanlines would look like.

It is interesting that PAL C64 has the same "problem", probably for a slightly different reason though: http://www.larshaugseth.com/c64/colmix.html

[OneCrudeDude]

Here's a potentially tricky one. Road Rash on the NES. I don't understand what the hell the game is doing that warrants the allegedly superior Genesis to chug at 20FPS, when the NES has had plenty of similar racing games that consistently hit 60FPS.

[jayminer]

Wow, some great posts here since I last posted, that Batman mockup looks really great, gonna try it on my PAL NES and take a picture if I can just find my CF-reader, so I can copy it to my PowerPak.

That rogue-like looks like a game I want to play aswell! Speaking of that and going a little off-topic here, are there any rogue-likes for the NES?

[tepples]

Here's a potentially tricky one. Road Rash on the NES. I don't understand what the hell the game is doing that warrants the allegedly superior Genesis to chug at 20FPS, when the NES has had plenty of similar racing games that consistently hit 60FPS.

The ground in Road Rash on Genesis is texture mapped in software, unlike NES racing games. It'd take Cosmic Epsilon levels of CHRsturbation to match that.

[jayminer]

Here's my take on Shantae.



Once again, there are loads and loads of room for improvements on this one, it was all fairly quickly thrown together just to get a sense of how it could look. All "grass" had to be done using with the "brownish" palette so i opted for a dark green/brownish color instead of black, to get a little sense of the grass being green.

[Shonumi]

Given the difficulties with Shantae mentioned earlier, I think it is great even for a quickly done starting point. Though it needs more work on the "look", it definitely captures the "feel" quite accurately. I'm not an artist, that's just my gaming gut talking. Great stuff all the same

[Sik]

Here's a potentially tricky one. Road Rash on the NES. I don't understand what the hell the game is doing that warrants the allegedly superior Genesis to chug at 20FPS, when the NES has had plenty of similar racing games that consistently hit 60FPS.

Road Rash is scaling every sprite in software, that's what's causing the slow down (and it tends to be around 12FPS - ouch). There's the Master System port which doesn't scale sprites in real-time, but it has to render the floor in software (it can't do mid-screen vscroll changes) so that's what slows it down there, although it's still faster than its 16-bit counterpart...

You'd still be right to criticize racing games on the console though. Like, why the hell is OutRun at 20FPS? =| Granted, there's a lot more going on there (you'd be surprised at how much the second plane gets abused to render sprites) but still.

[OneCrudeDude]

The ground in Road Rash on Genesis is texture mapped in software, unlike NES racing games. It'd take Cosmic Epsilon levels of CHRsturbation to match that.

Despite that, it STILL looks like an NES game racing floor, and very rarely does the ground have interesting patterns that couldn't be done on the NES. Fucking hell, the SNES could probably handle Road Rash better with a Mode 7 engine. Speaking of Cosmic Epsilon, it was developed by the same company that made Tetra Star, also on the Famicom, right? Why do both games have such below average music? Are the composers just incompetent, or did music have to be compromised to make the games work?

Road Rash is scaling every sprite in software, that's what's causing the slow down (and it tends to be around 12FPS - ouch).

Given the game's already low framerate, it might as well be drawing new sprites as opposed to scaling them.

[Sik]

Except because that'd take up much more space in the ROM =P (and the difference is still pretty huge, especially for big objects)

And yes, the floor is nothing spectacular, it's using only one plane from what I gather, so it's literally NES level in that sense.

[tepples]

The Genesis has far more bandwidth to video memory than the NES. On the NTSC NES, you can't realistically get away with more than 160 bytes plus OAM DMA in a single vblank unless you do like Battletoads and extend vblank. The Genesis VDP has not only DMA to VRAM during vblank (the "blast processing" that it shares with the Super NES) but also a (slower) FIFO queue for the CPU to write to VRAM during draw time.

[Sik]

Yeah but huh, the slow down comes from scaling the sprite graphics in software (i.e. it's entirely the 68000's fault here), the video hardware has absolutely nothing to do with the slow down (unlike in the Master System version, where the rendering of the floor is required to work around a hardware limitation).

Also "blast processing" doesn't refer to the DMA, it just refers to using a higher clock speed for its main CPU <.< (which we all know is completely pointless, though the 68000 is still better overall for completely different reasons)

[OneCrudeDude]

Actually tepples was referencing the origin of Blast Processing, which was a way a programmer used to describe the DMA. He said you could just 'blast DAC to the processor' or something to that extent. What Sega meant was the fact that the Genesis had a faster CPU that allowed it to do things the SNES couldn't quite do. That said, I fail to see how Sonic proves any technical superiority over the SNES. It doesn't do anything spectacular besides scroll quickly, which I'm certain the SNES could do just as well.

Regarding Shantae, I'm pretty sure she'd share some palettes with some enemies. For example, I'm certain her body use the same palette the generic bad guys use, which is black/yellow/red, but I'm not sure where her skin tone, hair, and eye color comes from. The GBC can display far more colors on screen, but as a wise man once said, if there's a will, there's a way.

[Sik]

Don't forget Shantae can transform and there are many palette effects going on her sprite (e.g. when going into shadows her sprite becomes dark). I would imagine she has unique palettes assigned to her in practice, although I never bothered to actually check.

[tokumaru]

That said, I fail to see how Sonic proves any technical superiority over the SNES.

It really doesn't.

It doesn't do anything spectacular besides scroll quickly, which I'm certain the SNES could do just as well.

Sure it could. even the NES can scroll as fast as Sonic 1 and 2 did (16 pixels per frame IIRC, I think Sonic 3 allowed for more, but that would hardly happen) without problems. You just have to design the engine around that.

The thing is that normal people don't understand the real meaning of "speed" when it comes to computers, so as long as affects happen at a fast pace on the screen, players will get the impression that the machine is fast.