3DS Classics "Excitebike"

oRBIT2002 · Post by **oRBIT2002** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 4:19 am

Check out these screenshots for the "remixed" version of Excitebike.
How you think they've done it? Recoded the entire thing from scratch or have they been doing alot of patching?

http://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/rz ... D3PTzDUTG3

koitsu · Post by **koitsu** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 5:22 am

A highly customised/unique emulator, definitely.

Off-topic, sorta:

I'm still of the opinion that Nintendo and all these old-school companies are bringing back classics for two-faced reasons. There's the obvious fact that most present-day video games suck ass (us old codgers tend to prefer fun and good gameplay over fancy graphics; HEY, ANYONE WANT TO PLAY BIG RIGS??), and as such a definite market demographic for classic games. Emulators paved that way for that market. But on the flip side, this "renews" (for lack of better term) copyright lawsuit legitimacy on classic games; companies can now claim, for example, that piracy of a NES game (ROM) made in 1989 has negative impact on their cash flow today. It saddens me how the whole "classic gaming" market is partially driven by ulterior motives.

America, fuck yeah, comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah!

UncleSporky · Post by **UncleSporky** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 5:30 am

I'm pretty sure it's not emulated. See this video (1:28, which it should start at):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds0sP_SqR88#t=1m28s

I've heard that the 3D slider doesn't just control the amount of 3D, but pulls back the camera to give you a wider view like the one seen in the video.

I read a statement earlier that I can't find now that specifically said it was remade from the ground up and only uses similar physics, graphics and sound.

The 3DS update that includes this game for free should come out sometime later today, most people are guessing late in the day, perhaps 12 hours from now.

In reply to koitsu, sure, they can do that now, but do they actually take advantage of it? Has any company made a big deal out of emulated games? Microsoft Game Room, PS1 Classics, Virtual Console...have any of them given trouble to people who emulate, aside from the usual "patching out homebrew," where the blocking of emulation is incidental at best?

oRBIT2002 · Post by **oRBIT2002** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 5:43 am

Wow haven't seen that video before. Seems like almost a different game compared to the original.

qbradq · Post by **qbradq** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 5:55 am

Y'a know, there are ways of enjoying classic games without violating copyright law. The game companies don't like resell shops either tho, because they don't see a dime from them.

Not that I've much room to talk. I'm waiting for my PSX mod chip to come in so I can finish Chrono Cross

UncleSporky · Post by **UncleSporky** » Tue Jun 07, 2011 6:04 am

It's out now.

Pretty fun (as fun as Excitebike is).

oRBIT2002 · Post by **oRBIT2002** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 11:42 pm

Yeah it's nice. But I'm pretty sure now it's a complete rewrite but obviously with ripped graphics/sound effects (which is really loud btw).

Super-Hampster · Post by **Super-Hampster** » Mon Jul 18, 2011 12:14 am

I hope it's the first of many classic games on the 3ds shop for download that has been rewritten to be 3D. It adds a bit more value to the download then just letting me download unmodified Game Boy roms on an emulator. I see how they want to keep the 3ds virtual console all portable games, and the Wii personal console all console games, but I do wish they'd mix both. I'd like to see the GB games on the Wii's virtual console, and the console games on the 3DS virtual console.

Kasumi · Post by **Kasumi** » Mon Jul 18, 2011 2:34 am

Well... the 3DS is mixing both. Excitebike is an NES game, originally. Or do you mean you want unmodified console games as well?

Super-Hampster · Post by **Super-Hampster** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 12:39 am

I mean I'd like them to keep remaking NES (or SuperNES) games in 3D because it adds more value to the traditional virtual console game which is nothing more than a ROM and emulator. But also I notice on the Virtual Console that they only seem to offer Gameboy and Gameboy Color games on the 3DS and Console games on the Wii. I would like it if they would offer games for all systems on both Virtual consoles. For example Gameboy games on the Wii's virtual console and NES, SNES and Genesis games etc. on the 3DS virtual console.

Also for some reason paying to download a Super Metroid rom on my Wii seems more worth the money to me than paying to download a Super Mario Land rom on my 3DS. But if I could play Super Mario Land 2 on my Wii I might download that.

dr_sloppy · Post by **dr_sloppy** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 8:42 am

I got the chance to try out the 3D-version of Ocarina of Time this today, and I must say that I am pleasantly surprised with how the NDS 3D does its thing. If I didn't already have a still perfectly working original NDS, I'd definitely buy the new one along with Ocarina of Time on a whim.

All of this makes me wish that I knew more about how this 2D/3D-trickery really works as it ultimately has made me wondering about whether or not this effect to at least a certain level can be applied to older games, like SNES, NES, etc.

tokumaru · Post by **tokumaru** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 9:54 am

dr_sloppy wrote:All of this makes me wish that I knew more about how this 2D/3D-trickery really works as it ultimately has made me wondering about whether or not this effect to at least a certain level can be applied to older games, like SNES, NES, etc.

You can't automatically create depth where originally there was none. It's like this guy that showed up here saying that his NES emulator would display games in red-blue 3D. Most of these old games don't have any depth information, and the few ones that do don't use a unified format, so there's no way to automatically create 3D images from 2D games.

Conversion to 3D is a game-per-game task, where you have to associate a depth to every on-screen element and use that information to generate 2 2D views slightly displaced from each other. Then you can present these 2 images in various ways (red/blue glasses, polarized glasses, special screens, etc.) that allow peoples' brains to join the 2 images into 1 3D image.

dr_sloppy · Post by **dr_sloppy** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 10:20 am

Thanks for the explanation, tokumaru!

I knew that there would be nothing automatic about this, but thought that perhaps some kind of simple 3D-effect could be applied somewhat easily (in theory only.)
I've never been one to care for such 3D-effects, but after today I can see that it's more than just a gimmick. Better have to search it up and see if I can't learn a little
about it. :-)

Post by **tepples** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 10:31 am

Anything with a 3D projection like Rad Racer or World Runner could fairly easily be ported like this by having the emulated NES generate alternating left and right eye views and then displaying both in 30 fps. Super NES games would be even easier: assign each emulated layer a distance value.

BMF54123 · Post by **BMF54123** » Sat Jul 30, 2011 2:45 pm

Couldn't you get a fakey 3D effect in an NES emulator by rendering the background layer twice: once in blue, shifted a few pixels left, and once in red, shifted a few pixels right?

Yeah, it would look kinda weird in games where sprites are used as background elements (e.g. hitting a ? block in Super Mario Bros.), but for the most part I think it'd look kinda neat. You could even get controversial and hijack an unused OAM bit to specify whether a sprite should be rendered in split red/blue (pushing it into the background) or not, and then people could hack a game's sprite engine to set these bits only for specific "background" sprite types.