THE BORE

General => Video Game Bored => Topic started by: benjipwns on September 21, 2017, 03:37:25 AM

Title: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: benjipwns on September 21, 2017, 03:37:25 AM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=784MUbDoLjQ
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: Joe Molotov on September 21, 2017, 08:44:49 AM: Already posted in the NSFW thread.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: a slime appears on September 22, 2017, 09:56:43 AM: SNES version is my favorite because that game frankly should not be able to run on that system.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: Joe Molotov on September 22, 2017, 10:26:37 AM: Quote from: a slime appears on September 22, 2017, 09:56:43 AM
SNES version is my favorite because that game frankly should not be able to run on that system.

The power of the Super FX 2 chip. :lawd
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: Tasty on September 22, 2017, 11:27:20 AM: No Doom on the SNES Classic :goty2
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: benjipwns on September 22, 2017, 01:18:44 PM: Quote from: Joe Molotov on September 22, 2017, 10:26:37 AM
Quote from: a slime appears on September 22, 2017, 09:56:43 AM
SNES version is my favorite because that game frankly should not be able to run on that system.

The power of the Super FX 2 chip. :lawd
Slow CPU in your console? Just stick a whole new one inside the cartridge and use that instead!

What do you mean "third parties are complaining about unfair cartridge practices"? What's a "third party" and why should I care?
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: agrajag on September 23, 2017, 10:23:10 AM: Doesn't have the Switch port

:ufup
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: Joe Molotov on September 23, 2017, 10:39:26 AM: Quote from: agrajag on September 23, 2017, 10:23:10 AM
Doesn't have the Switch port

:ufup

Switch port doesn't count because it runs at an unplayable 30fps and isn't even 1080p because of the lazy devs at id Software.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: tiesto on September 23, 2017, 11:23:54 AM: The story behind the 3do port is hilarious, I remember reading this big post on GAF one day about all the clusterfucks made by the port team. Was interesting to learn how Doom was developed to the strengths of the PCs of that era, which the consoles lacked (being much stronger in background manipulation and sprite scrolling). And the Super FX 2 was pretty fast for those days! Didn't know that the Jaguar was considered one of the best early ports of Doom though... I was so lucky to have a friend who had a 486 back in 1993 :P (and then in 95 I got my Pentium 1 and a copy of Ultimate Doom)
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: benjipwns on September 25, 2017, 02:12:15 AM: That's why the Jaguar has the "best" version, the Jaguar was most similar to a PC of all the consoles at the time. So Carmack agreed to do the port. But he ran into waiting for an art guy or something to convert files so he did the entire Jaguar Wolf3D port in like two days or something and was like "hey you want this too?" to Atari. I think he did the initial version of both in two weeks?

Atari sat on Doom to try and sell more copies of Wolf 3D and Alien v. Predator first. That's how the 32X version made it out first even though Sega did that on their own and Atari had a full Carmack port sitting around. Atari was suddenly like o shit mang.

This was the same Atari management that said it was going to sue Sony if the Playstation retailed for under $500 as a violating of anti-dumping laws that were in place against the Japanese since the 1980s. But that the Playstation was only "slightly" more powerful than the Jaguar because it had a "tiny bit more memory." (They actually have the same amount of main RAM and Jaguar technically has more total if you include the cartridges not needing to store things in RAM as often as CD-ROM.)

IIRC, Carmack later wrote a .plan where he apologized to anyone who bought a Jaguar because of his ports. :lol

John (of DFRetro) already did them, but Carmack considered Quake impossible to port down despite the move to 3D and Quake II even more so, and yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUZ436FXB4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFYjSkUdfb4

This, along with the flood of Doom source ports and id's growing engine business, led to him rethinking things and while id didn't do it inhouse he did sign off on the Q3A DC port. The PS2 port interestingly was the last game ever done by Bullfrog.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: benjipwns on September 25, 2017, 02:32:36 AM: As for the SuperFX.

The SNES has an infamously slow single CPU at 3.6 Mhz for a total of 1.5 MIPS (the console was basically finished design-wise two years before they released it...same as N64), the Genesis and Neo-Geo both have two as they have a Z80 included at roughly 4Mhz to handle basic traffic management, they have the same main CPU but the Genesis is clocked at 7.7 Mhz (for 1.4 MIPS by itself) and NG's at 12 Mhz (2.1 MIPS). This is why early and many SNES games slowdown massively when they hit what should be no problem sprite limits.

The "solution" for this were three separate CPU's put inside the cartridges themselves.

To boost anything that used Mode 7 along with a few other games they included the DSP which ran at 8 Mhz. This basically works more like a GPU add-on.

There's the two models of the SuperFX, both of which run at 21.5 Mhz but the first model is clock halved, and do 10 MIPS and 21 MIPS respectively. The SuperFX2 actually does not have any extra features other than it runs at the full clock and I think there might be some manufacturing-related savings. People have removed the clock limiter on Star Fox and Stunt Race FX cartridges which let their FX run at the full speed. IIRC, you only have to remove a couple pins or something.

Then there's the SA-1. This is basically the same base CPU that's in the SNES with three years of enhancements plus it's clocked at 10.8 Mhz and it also has improved compression methods along with a tiny bit of internal RAM cache. Super Mario RPG uses this.

In the case of both of the latter two, the original SNES CPU is either ignored or used like the Z80 in the Genesis/Neo-Geo, the in-cart CPU basically does everything otherwise. If you remember the old ZSNES vs. Snes9x days, this was the big fight over emulating games with these, especially the SA-1. IIRC, they never did, it's all hacks and SA-1 was assumed to be some kind of enhancement chip like DSP. Then Byuu came along trying to do cycle-accurate emulation and confirmed that it's actually used as the main CPU like the FX, which is part of why the Snes9x developers came back to release a new version after years of nothing last year.

Oddly enough, Sega only ever did this for Virtua Racing and like over did it which is why they never did it again, as the SVP runs at 23 Mhz for 25 MIPS but cost Sega a shit load since it wasn't a simple little chip like the SA-1 and FX are and it runs alongside the CPU. The SegaCD has the same CPU as Genesis just clocked up to 12.5 Mhz, but as DFRetro showed in their 32X video, almost none of the games use both CPUs (or in the case of 32X CD all the CPUs) but pick one or the other.

Which when you think about, that image of the Sega Tower where someone has plugged in everything including 32X, game genie, sonic and knuckles, etc. and it works, probably only like one part of the hardware is actually being used the rest is all pass through data. :lol
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: benjipwns on September 25, 2017, 03:37:34 AM: Talking about the Nintendo cart stuff, David Perry of Shiny had a story regarding Earthworm Jim and Donkey Kong Country. They crammed Earthworm Jim into a 2MB (16 Meg) cart for the SNES and cut stuff for Nintendo's approval, then two weeks later Nintendo released DKC on a 4MB (32 Meg) cart with special compression and sold the game to retailers for $10 less. (And Playmates/Virgin had to purchase all the EWJ carts upfront at $35 a piece, three months ahead of release.)

So you can see why so many developers flocked to Sony who were initially offering $7 a copy (then down to $3 and I think only $1 later when the PS2 was near and those $10 PS1 games started) with a three week turn around time on supply.

Of course when the install base got bigger we saw how fairly easily a number of those third parties were able to cram their games into N64 carts.

A lot of people know about the Atari 2600 cart landfill. But Capcom (and Acclaim) got hit similarly near the end of the 16-bit era. Capcom had more copies of Super Street Fighter II sitting in warehouses than they actually sold iirc, and for both platforms they were expensive carts requiring special compression chips which is why the games that did make it to retail were expensive. Acclaim also had warehouses full of all their garbage movie games and extra runs of Mortal Kombat, etc.

One reason that Resident Evil 1 and 2 got so many re-releases on PS1 is because Capcom became very conservative for a while on their ordering despite the cheaper costs.

The lesson Acclaim learned was apparently WE JUST DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH SUPPLY OF GARBAGE TO DRIVE THE DEMAND!
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: Joe Molotov on September 25, 2017, 10:12:02 AM: I watched that Quake 2 DF video last night. I loved Q2 on the N64 back in the dya, it was a lot of fun.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: archie4208 on September 25, 2017, 10:21:42 AM: Quote from: Tasty Meat on September 22, 2017, 11:27:20 AM
No Doom on the SNES Classic :goty2

Just play the Switch version of Doom '16. It'll have similar performance.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: agrajag on September 25, 2017, 12:56:38 PM: I find it odd that 3DO struggled with Doom so much when it ran a rather playable version of Need For Speed with polygonal graphics.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: Positive Touch on September 25, 2017, 02:06:37 PM: I'm mad the n64 emulators suck with quake 64. they used loads of colored lighting to make that version look weird as fuck.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: chronovore on September 25, 2017, 06:30:35 PM: Quote from: Joe Molotov on September 21, 2017, 08:44:49 AM
Already posted in the NSFW thread.

That was DP Retro…
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: tiesto on September 25, 2017, 07:14:52 PM: Quote from: agrajag on September 25, 2017, 12:56:38 PM
I find it odd that 3DO struggled with Doom so much when it ran a rather playable version of Need For Speed with polygonal graphics.

It seems so many of these ports save the Jaguar and PS1 version were super-rushed and compromised, I'd be curious, if we had Carmack or someone approaching his caliber doing a 3DO or a Saturn port, to see how good they would turn out.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: benjipwns on September 25, 2017, 11:01:45 PM: John touches on it, but I'm going to really go out on a limb and suggest that Saturn Doom is not actually using all the multiple processors. I wonder if one of the emulators shows this information.

Third parties, especially some random team grabbed to do a port in a couple months, would often not use the second CPU or VDP2. This wouldn't save the port necessarily but it's hard to believe Saturn Doom vs. 32X Doom even with the screen size reduction. The 32X is basically literally half of a Saturn, the same two CPUs just clocked slightly slower and with none of the graphics chips. And Sega upped the clocks on the Saturn iirc so when the game was being made it may have even been literally half the Saturn.

The Saturn version is a port of the Playstation version, when they had the 32X version sitting there to work with. And the people they hired to do the Saturn port are the guys behind Striker soccer games and the home ports of Revolution X, yes, the rail shooter starring Aerosmith. When again, they already had a port! I have to imagine it would have been far more prudent to build on the 32X version and port the PS1 assets rather than port the whole game.

The source code for the 3DO version actually has been uploaded by the woman who had to program it: https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do
Quote
Yes, this is the infamous port of DOOM for the 3DO. Firstly, this was the product of ten intense weeks of work due to the fact that I was misled about the state of the port when I was offered the project. I was told that there was a version in existance with new levels, weapons and features and it only needed "polishing" and optimization to hit the market. After numerous requests for this version, I found out that there was no such thing and that Art Data Interactive was under the false impression that all anyone needed to do to port a game from one platform to another was just to compile the code and adding weapons was as simple as dropping in the art.

Uh... No...

My friends at 3DO were begging for DOOM to be on their platform and with christmas 1995 coming soon (I took this job in August of 1995, with a mid October golden master date),

As an aside, the Saturn has long been bashed as a machine made for 2D that they made work in 3D, but the Saturn actually really just needed more power as we were never going to be talking major amounts of polygons in the first place and dropping in the second CPU mostly helped with that for those who bothered to use it, though it was never going to compete with the PS1's totally innovative idea of dedicating hardware purely to producing polygons. (The PS1 can legitimately output more than the N64 in games, much like the PS2 can similarly fill rate destroy the Xbox. Not saying it'll look great, but if you want to count polygons...)

The 3DO actually despite its name has arguably nothing that programmers would come to associate with as necessary to produce 3D. Like the Saturn it doesn't really do polygons as we've come to know them and it was based around drawing "cells" that would be swapped in and out. Which made so little sense the M2 never incorporated backcompat for it, it would have just run on the 3DO hardware.

Pretty much all 3D on the 3DO is arguably incredibly impressive. But some. PO'ed, Starfighter and Blade Force used some goddamn voodoo magic or something. Even if the first two have better PS1 versions. (PO'ed's version is mostly better because they had more time to work on the game and add more textures and lighting and stuff, the 3DO version is seriously some magic. And that game was made with like five dudes in a garage or something. Like Zeno Clash decades later.)
Quote
The vertical walls were drawn with strips using the cell engine. However, the cell engine can't handle 3D perspective so the floors and ceilings were drawn with software rendering. I simply ran out of time to translate the code to use the cell engine because the implementation I had caused texture tearing.

I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.

This game used Burgerlib 2. My first "C" version of Burgerlib because Burgerlib was originally written in 65816 for the SNES and the Apple IIgs. If you check out Burgerlib 5 (The current version, also on github), you'd notice that some code is still in use.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: benjipwns on September 25, 2017, 11:08:06 PM: Dude speedrunning PO'ed on the 3DO, look how fast this thing is even when he's jetpacking over the levels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwH8J4CPh0Y

Since that's kinda hard to understand watching it as he's pushing through wall gaps, exploiting loads and skipping whole sections and such, those two former 3DO devs playing it at a more normal pace:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_m4wZLqk2M

Them doing Need for Speed for agrajag:
spoiler (click to show/hide)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psCpOZC2RUI
[close]
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: agrajag on September 26, 2017, 12:25:01 AM: Damn, those videos look pretty impressive for the 3DO, benji.

Meanwhile, 3D games on the Jaguar looked like absolute ass.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Doom, all the ports.
Post by: chronovore on September 26, 2017, 01:11:08 AM: God DAMN, between the Star Trek thread and this one, who put a fuckin' quarter in Benji?
Title: Re: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: benjipwns on December 20, 2017, 02:14:50 AM: John didn't just look at the games this month, he actually did some interviews with Rare guys who worked on DKC and Killer Instinct* about how they pulled off stuff on the SNES:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ7qtqqgTlo

Most shocking part is the suggestion that we almost didn't get the DKC soundtrack, the best part of the game easily, as they considered it placeholder that Nintendo of Japan would replace.

R.I.P. in peace Oscar for taking history's biggest L over DKC.

*In restrospect it's funny to me how this and Crusin' USA were the "ULTRA 64" showcase arcade games to counter the Japanese release of the PS1 and Saturn...then one they put out a year later on SNES without really compromising it, while Midway did such a bad port of Crusin' to the N64 that it runs at like 10fps and has crazy draw in despite there being like ten polygons onscreen and everything moving made of sprites.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: agrajag on December 20, 2017, 01:09:39 PM: Quote from: benjipwns on December 20, 2017, 02:14:50 AM
John didn't just look at the games this month, he actually did some interviews with Rare guys who worked on DKC and Killer Instinct* about how they pulled off stuff on the SNES:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ7qtqqgTlo

Most shocking part is the suggestion that we almost didn't get the DKC soundtrack, the best part of the game easily, as they considered it placeholder that Nintendo of Japan would replace.

R.I.P. in peace Oscar for taking history's biggest L over DKC.

*In restrospect it's funny to me how this and Crusin' USA were the "ULTRA 64" showcase arcade games to counter the Japanese release of the PS1 and Saturn...then one they put out a year later on SNES without really compromising it, while Midway did such a bad port of Crusin' to the N64 that it runs at like 10fps and has crazy draw in despite there being like ten polygons onscreen and everything moving made of sprites.

Are you talking about Killer Instinct and Cruising USA? Because they compromised the fuck out of it on SNES. Gameplay is the same, but visually it might as well be a different game.

Anyhow, that was a great episode. DKC being my favorite game franchise of all time, this brought me great joy. I played the fuck out of KI and Cruising USA in the arcade. KI had a great sound track also, the main riff is fun to play on geetar

What's the Oscar story and why did he die over DKC?
Title: Re: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: benjipwns on December 20, 2017, 02:01:28 PM: Oscar said DKC was kinda lame, KevinCow debunked his lies point by point tirelessly for days, then Oscar ran off crying saying HE WAS NEVER POSTING ON MEAN SITES LIKE NEOGAF.COM AGAIN and the Fukushima disaster happened.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: kingv on December 20, 2017, 05:25:13 PM: I don’t think there was a cruis’n USA port for SNES, was there? I’d love to see screenshots of such a monstrosity.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: agrajag on December 23, 2017, 02:15:12 AM: Quote from: kingv on December 20, 2017, 05:25:13 PM
I don’t think there was a cruis’n USA port for SNES, was there? I’d love to see screenshots of such a monstrosity.

(http://i.imgur.com/wKTsRsG.jpg)
Title: Re: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: kingv on December 24, 2017, 09:47:52 AM: that looks surprisingly decent.

would almost certainly be the most graphically impressive 3d snes game... are you sure that is not the arcade version or the N64 though? Google only seems to return N64 results for me... did it have a different name?
Title: Re: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: tiesto on December 24, 2017, 12:17:41 PM: Quote from: kingv on December 24, 2017, 09:47:52 AM
that looks surprisingly decent.

would almost certainly be the most graphically impressive 3d snes game... are you sure that is not the arcade version or the N64 though? Google only seems to return N64 results for me... did it have a different name?

That's a Cruisin game for the Wii, to my knowledge there was never a SNES Cruisin game in the works.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: Tasty on December 24, 2017, 02:49:34 PM: LOL that's a shot of Cruisin USA for Wii, lol.
Title: Re: DF Retro: Come for John's videos, leave when benji starts posting text
Post by: chronovore on December 24, 2017, 11:05:54 PM: Quote from: agrajag on December 20, 2017, 01:09:39 PM
Quote from: benjipwns on December 20, 2017, 02:14:50 AM
John didn't just look at the games this month, he actually did some interviews with Rare guys who worked on DKC and Killer Instinct* about how they pulled off stuff on the SNES:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ7qtqqgTlo

Most shocking part is the suggestion that we almost didn't get the DKC soundtrack, the best part of the game easily, as they considered it placeholder that Nintendo of Japan would replace.

R.I.P. in peace Oscar for taking history's biggest L over DKC.

*In restrospect it's funny to me how this and Crusin' USA were the "ULTRA 64" showcase arcade games to counter the Japanese release of the PS1 and Saturn...then one they put out a year later on SNES without really compromising it, while Midway did such a bad port of Crusin' to the N64 that it runs at like 10fps and has crazy draw in despite there being like ten polygons onscreen and everything moving made of sprites.

Are you talking about Killer Instinct and Cruising USA? Because they compromised the fuck out of it on SNES. Gameplay is the same, but visually it might as well be a different game.

Anyhow, that was a great episode. DKC being my favorite game franchise of all time, this brought me great joy. I played the fuck out of KI and Cruising USA in the arcade. KI had a great sound track also, the main riff is fun to play on geetar

What's the Oscar story and why did he die over DKC?

Midway (West) was built around individual teams, completely silo’d from each other to prevent poaching ideas, tech, and personnel. I’ve never seen a less cooperatively constructed work environment. It’s unsurprising that they were able to address new technical challenges effectively.

Or generational hardware changes, for that matter.