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@Hexapus It's actually linked to a couple times in the article. Once for Christopher Columbus, another for one of the books, "Video Games You Will Never Play."

@Azuris

Not really? Checking Mobygames, Epic/Sony published something like 17 titles, where Sony ImageSoft and their derivatives published something like 66.

Seeing a Sony name before the PSX was actually pretty common.

It's a fun novelty, in hindsight, but not really noteworthy.

This is cute and all, but it's not wise to include Nintendo's name or wordmark on there. Nothing says "Please DMCA me," more than those two things.

Is anyone else seeing a red-eyed Ferengi in the art, or is it just me?

Seriously, it's uncanny. About the only thing different is the nose.

Honestly, I don't have issue with the picture of the SNES. It'll never be crystal clear, but I don't regard it as the system's biggest problem.

The biggest problem, at least for US-made consoles, is the fragile power supply jack. That's also proprietary. I have an SNES that still needs fixing, because the center pin gave out on it.

@KingMike John Draper, or Captain Crunch! He's still alive, FWIW, and is a legend among the phone phreaking community.

The whistle provided in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes produced a 2600 Hz tone, which was the exact tone needed to hijack a phone call, in ELI5 terms. The magazine, 2600, is named after this tone, and is still active to this day.

Would it surprise you that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple's founders, started off as phone phreakers as well, with the Blue Box?

WaterMelon games never seemed like it was professionally run, but I still can't believe they haven't delivered their copies of Paprium, at all, in the past few years.

Honestly, it's been so long I've forgotten about it. I just genuinely feel bad for all those affected.

@Daggot Odds are it was a demo based off of one of the 2D games, and even then, Dragon Quest itself didn't go full 3D until Dragon Quest VIII, which would be a bit late for the Saturn.

@Spider-Kev I'm genuinely sorry that Fallout 4 was your first Fallout game. Go try 2 or New Vegas, depending on if you like isometric Computer RPGs or open world 3D games.

Hard call. I have vague memories of playing my parents' VCS in the late 80's when I was just turning 3, but my first true system was the NES just after I turned 3.
I vaguely remember, we had a choice between the SMS or NES and we chose the NES.
Played a lot of Super Mario Bros. with my dad, and Cool Spot with everyone.
What's funny is, I have a huge soft spot for the SMS nowadays.

@RetroGames Same, if you don't see the issue with comparing a GameMaker prototype of a game against one running on real hardware.

I don't believe in misleading people. It's a neat idea, but SNES-like doesn't mean actually SNES until the code's there to make it work on the system. It just means it's a piece of art, a game, made within the constraints of the SNES' limitations.

I've followed the SOTN Genesis port development for awhile, and they've already detailed all the hiccups with memory issues and other Fun Technical Stuff not readily present in a mockup running on a Windows/x86 compatible machine.

Stuff that a real SNES port would have to go through, too, as the project figures out good ways to decompress or stream assets on the fly.

In other words, how will memory be mapped? Will the visuals look this good once you have to load in HUD assets? How about when music being loaded in as well? Memory and CPU have a finite limit on the SNES, an issue on any other electronic device but even more so on the SNES, and there needs to be some mix of compressed and decompressed assets.

The amount of compressed assets directly affects load times, so if you choose to stream in everything, it will load faster, but it might not even fit on a cart at the end of the day.

A GameMaker mockup won't show all the compromises made to work on the hardware, as it doesn't need to in order to run. It also won't show how fast the game will truly draw at, once it's limited by the hardware. The SNES CPU is powerful and perform lots of instructions per cycle, but it's not the fastest CPU out there.

I fully believe that you optimized the background and character art assets and determined what works best hypothetically, but that's only one step in the process of game development.

And if any of this scares people off, I'm only scaring them off from game development, not developing for the SNES. No game made has had an easy development, and each game or platform has choices to make. We're somewhat blessed now that cross-compilers exist, and that modern day systems are somewhat similar to each other, but even a cross-compiler won't optimize a game fully, and it WILL need QA and fine tuning.

After all, my problem is only with the video being a GameMaker mockup presented as SNES gameplay against a game running on a Genesis/Mega Drive, not with the SNES hardware itself.

@RetroGames Imagine wanting an example of something running on hardware to represent the hardware.

The fact is that what is posted is a GameMaker simulation against something that is already running on Genesis/MD compatible code. End of, that's why it's a bad example.

I learned Z80 ASM for GameBoy and SMS stuff back in the day, from the late 90's to the mid 00's. However, I'd never think to take one of my ClickTeam mockups and claim it perfectly represents the Game Boy. It doesn't and can never possibly represent the Game Boy, just a Game Boy-like simulation. That's not snobbish, that's just choosing to not misrepresent the hardware I'm working towards.

Let me know when you have a version compatible with the SNES. I'm never against SNES development, and none of my prior posts have ever implied it.

The system is just better served with examples of code running on hardware, not unimplemented mockups, especially when those mockups are comparing against other examples running on real hardware.

@RetroGames Again, you're ignoring my point. The YouTube video you linked to isn't actually running on SNES hardware- or even high level/cycle accurate emulation!- so it's a bad example of what the SNES can do.

Even if it's perfectly designed in limitations as a good simulation, it's not implemented or running on the system. Which is why I pointed out already known releases that do the exact same things, running on actual hardware.

Once it's been ported to hardware, it'd be a good example, but as long as its running on GameMaker, it's not a fair or valid example. It's just SNES-like in execution.

@RetroGames With all due respect, my dude, I'm wondering if you've read my posts at all now. I acknowledge might've been a bit short, but I don't feel like you even took the time to read them fully.

My primary concern wasn't the SNES' abilities, but your use of bad examples- i.e. using a Game Maker simulated presentation instead of an actual game of the many that contain the same capabilities as that demo- and why the team would take so long on an SNES version, in regards to fully utilizing the SNES to its full ability and making it prettier.

In regards to bad examples and similarly specced games that looked nice on the SNES, all the Donkey Kong Country games come to mind. Really nice use of high resolution graphics with many layers of parallax scrolling, and were even released during the hardware's commercial life.

I'm also a huge sucker for pretty console RPGs like Phantasia. Both of these used enhancement chips, but that's precisely why the SNES is better than the Genesis in this case. It was always designed for expansion, from the word go.

There are Genesis/Mega Drive games with similar enhancement chips, but those are rare and were expensive even at that time.

Virtua Racing comes to mind, and I remember that being expensive back then. Didn't have the Genesis, still saw it shopping for games.

But there have been so many exciting homebrew expansions to the SNES that they could also be working with any of those. A physical MSU-1 with short video segments would be nice. Not expected, a pipe dream of mine, but really nice.

Just please, I'm not even disagreeing with you, but it feels to me like you're being defensive to the point where you can't see that I largely agree with you on the SNES' capabilities.

@RetroGames Sorry, my dude. Came back and reread my posts and yikes...

Well, just going to delete those now.

Again, I deeply apologize to you for being a pain.

We sure the original was Japanese only?

Because I bought a black Hori GameBoy Player Controller, back in the day, from our local Walmart.

Just dug it up for NSO stuff last week, too.