smoreon

Interesting to see that the Evercade standard has actually taken off- when's the last time we saw a unique game platform successfully join the fray? Everything else I can think of has been self-contained (NES Classic Mini), a flop (Ouya), or just vapour (Amico).

@Jol You joke, but there is already a ray tracing demo on SNES!

As with the Super FX 3, it's bottlenecked by the SNES's bandwidth: the console simply can't update its tiles fast enough to ever do full-screen high framerate video passthrough, but within that limitation, you really can basically use anything as a source.

@marsilies Oh, I'm very aware- even the same overall architecture can get varying results, due to a whole range of factors! (I remember getting a Core 2 Duo and discovering that even its single-core performance was twice as fast per cycle as a Pentium 4.)

I recall one SNES homebrew dev claiming that the Genesis had about 40% greater real-world performance, and I'd say that checks out, going by the actual games. SNES is noticeably more prone to slowdown, but then, a lot of that comes down to underclocking, with the SlowROM issue that has gained a lot of notoriety lately.
The difference wasn't on an order of magnitude, but it was there (again, accentuated by SlowROM), and that's not flattering to a console that's two years newer (and otherwise a fair bit more advanced) than its rival.

@avcrypt In that it's mimicking the behaviour of the SFX, minus the performance cap, sure.

Can you elaborate on "static recomp on die"? If it's on die, then I'd expect that to be JIT (handled in real-time by the chip), not a static/ahead-of-time recomp.

@Martin_H Yeah, I'm not about to argue that Nintendo should have followed any of its competitors' strategies around hardware evolution!

But there's so much more to the console market than the hardware strategy. If we shuffled the game libraries around so NEC had Nintendo's library and Sega had SNK's, how would that turn out? Or if Nintendo had been the one with the edgy marketing, instead of Sega?

Had Nintendo gone with a high-end CPU, it could have killed their chances if it raised the price too much. But what about something in-between? If Sega could afford a CPU that was clocked twice as fast as Nintendo's (in 1988, at that!), then couldn't Nintendo have done the same? Put an 8 MHz CPU in the base SNES (and stop underclocking it to half speed!), and now we've eliminated one of the main sore spots: its reputation for slowdown and not keeping up with Sega's machine. It would still need a Super FX chip in order to run really fancy stuff like Doom, but at least Nintendo wouldn't have to put an enhancement chip in one of their launch games (Pilotwings) to make it run!

And yeah, I know it's really easy to talk about this stuff, 35+ years after it happened. But still, I'm not convinced that Nintendo's approach was optimal- unless you count that it was usually other companies that had to foot the bill for cartridge enhancements of any kind, so Nintendo didn't lose out financially. (Just maybe in reputation.)

@marsilies @BulkSlash From the description, it doesn't sound like it's doing actual emulation, per se. It is at least running the original Super FX code, recompiled for modern CPUs, so it should be faithful to the original game, but the potential capabilities of the chip are much higher than the SFX2.

Think of N64 recompilations running on PC: they're still the original games (until you mod them!), but they now have insanely powerful host hardware that can run them much faster than the N64 ever could.

So it is arguably "cheating", but they had the restraint to keep more or less within Super FX capabilities, and not just pump Doom 64 graphics straight into the SNES's display (albeit at 200p resolution and 20fps)!

@Martin_H Wouldn't it have been much more practical to just spend $10-20 more on the hardware itself, rather than having to spend potentially that same amount on every single enhanced cartridge? (Remember that games like Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, and Mega Man X2 all had special chips as well. It wasn't just the Super FX.)

"Plus you can push all of the extra cost onto the consumer!"

...and there's the key point. Avoid making your system look overpriced, while tricking your consumers into paying for the upgrade several times over!

@BulkSlash Considering that it runs at 150 MHz (whereas the actual Super FX was what, 20 MHz?), it's safe to say that it's cheating!

Chips as fast as this existed back then, but it would have been prohibitively expensive and impractical to include one in the cart.

@GravyThief "I really don’t like transparent cases"
The late '90s must have been rough for you, then!

But seriously, the shell shown in the picture above is a little too transparent for my liking as well. A semi-transparent red, or maybe even black, would look a lot cooler. I like the aesthetic in general, but not this specific implementation.

EDIT: Damo listed the cut levels in the article. The original SNES version had levels and features that the other ports lacked, but it still missed out on a few levels itself.

Super Contra already looks and runs great on the NES, but TMNT and Contra Force have unusually rough performance for NES games (especially by Konami)!

Does this mean we could eventually see TMNT running at 60fps? Contra Force with no slowdown seems like a given, at least.

Most localization prototypes aren't especially interesting, since they were made after the final Japanese build, but JSR is an unusual case: it has two new levels that were added for the North American version, which is why they can be seen in an incomplete form here.

"Non-textured 3D"... so it would have looked like Viewpoint or Silpheed, then?

I understand that full English translations would be costly, but it's a shame that they're not at least doing multi-platform releases. Not all of their potential audience is on Switch!

@845H The main draw so far is that this appears to properly support 60fps and widescreen. Both of those were possible on emulators, but 60fps had certain objects (like the penguins) moving too quickly, and the widescreen mode stretched the HUD instead of repositioning everything properly.

Why do I suspect that this show is mainly going to give the middle finger to Duke Nukem fans?

@marciolsf Oh, I'm aware that enterprise-grade stuff is expensive- and potentially a headache (having had some rather nightmarish experiences in the past, involving an aging server with a RAID 10 array).

In cases like this, though, anything is better than nothing. If someone had just gone around and stashed a bunch of stuff on consumer-grade media, companies like Square might have had an easier time now. (Obviously, that carries its own reliability risks, but we're talking about data that otherwise had a 0% chance of surviving.)

I know it does no good to go, "they should have done this and that" now, with the benefit of hindsight. But it's still a shame.

@Blofse I get that things were expensive back then, but I'm talking specifically about a major company (with a budget) developing a game in 1997 (1990 tech would be a whole other beast!), and about the possibility of using cheap storage.

SCSI drives have always been very expensive per GB, and the cost of that 500 MB drive could have bought a stack of consumer HDDs, which could affordably offer a couple of gigabytes each in 1997.
Of course, the reliability isn't on the same level, but I'd personally take the redundancy any day. Plenty of consumer HDDs from over 20 years ago still work, too, so chances are good that the data would survive.

And then there are tapes. I never personally dealt with those, but I understand that they offered multiple GB each, even back then, and at a relatively cheap price for the time.

Or even burned CDs! They're not known for their longevity, but I still have burned CDs which are almost that old, and they still work flawlessly. I didn't even keep them stored in a cool environment or anything.

TL;DR: My point is that there were plenty of ways to store a couple gigabytes' worth of data in 1997 (besides high-end servers and SCSI disks), and not all of them were expensive, especially for a major company. Other companies pulled it off, but Square apparently didn't consider it important.

@Tasuki Makes sense- the best time to buy is when the games are "old" and "outdated", but not yet "vintage". For NES, that was around 2000, when games were going for $2-3 CAD. For PS2, it started around 2010 and continued for quite a while.

But I'm still a little surprised that NES (etc.) games have come down at all. Your reasoning is solid, but I had always just assumed that prices would only ever go in one direction, once a game/console passed into that "vintage" status and was in demand again. Oh, well, I'm not complaining!

@Tasuki I recently noticed a bit of that stabilization as well. All those $3 games on systems like the PS2 and Xbox 360 have had a bit of a price hike, but a lot of older games, which had been getting pricey, seem to have come down a bit.

Not sure the top-end ones like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound have come down, though, as I'm not looking at those!

@MARl0 Neo Turf Masters has been on modern platforms for years now, under its Japanese name: Big Tournament Golf.

@marciolsf A server would be expensive, sure, but what was stopping them from just buying a few 2 GB hard drives, stashing everything on there, and sticking them in a vault? Not sure that'd be enough to hold all of the raw asset files*, but it'd at least keep the source code safe.

*Obviously, the team's project files would be much, much bigger in total than the final game's 500 MB or so, but I don't have much of a reference point to go on. I seem to recall Factor 5 saying a Rogue Squadron game (2 or 3) on GameCube produced almost 1 TB of files, but that game was a massive leap in fidelity over FFT. Taking a wild guess, maybe FFT could have used 10-20 GB, depending on how things were managed?

EDIT: Also, fairly high-capacity tapes were an option, and may have made things more feasible.

Not personally interested in picking up another copy, but I'm glad more people can play this!

Though I should probably mention that the PC version has been available on GOG for quite some time, often goes on sale for about $2, and should run perfectly on even very old laptops.

Nice! I still prefer this one over the N64, DS, and Wii versions. (Haven't played New Leaf or New Horizons.)

I wonder what kinds of enhancements people will cook up for this, whether for GameCube or any hypothetical ports.

Ouch, the irony of deciding to bring Duke Nukem Forever to the PS2, after a different Duke project ran into development troubles.

Anyway, the time-travelling premise sounds like it could have been fun (and probably just a tiny bit stupid!), assuming the story and game design really leaned into the absurdity of it all.

This definitely would have been cool to see, though I'm not sure that a Tenacious D soundtrack would have fit. Seems like it would have been too much of a departure from the game's tone.

@Goj Not really- the Switch 1 is an absolute potato. Nintendo got Super Mario Sunshine running pretty well, but my understanding there is that the code was recompiled (effectively translated) in advance, making it a hybrid of native and emulation.

If you try running even an older, faster version of Dolphin on an old PC, you'll see that just emulating 6th gen consoles on an Xbox One or PS4 is already a huge undertaking, and those are well ahead of the Switch.

@ArcadeRacingCENTRAL Great to finally have some confirmation as to where that stutter came from, so thanks!

The GameCube and especially PS2 (probably Xbox as well) slowed down considerably whenever there was a lot of dust/smoke being kicked up, like when starting a race. I had always assumed that the jittery appearance while turning was caused by the smaller amount of smoke coming from the tires at those times (i.e., just enough to slow the game down to around 55-58fps, causing little stutters).

But then I ran it in Dolphin with overclocking, and the juddery turning was still there. I don't recall looking into it further, but I was a bit confused after seeing that.

Looks great on PC, but the lack of the Dreamcast (+GCN/PS2/Xbox) features makes this arcade-based port of 2049 somewhat less appealing by comparison.

Should be easily the best way to play SF Rush 1/The Rock, though!

I like the ridiculous Arabian Fight (I think that's the one) scaling they've got here, where it's a little exaggerated, but still looks really cool in a '90s way.

If the Dragon Ball IP is eventually being removed, then does that mean a commercial release is being considered?

Where do they get "over 40 years of experience in the videogame industry"? I assume they're counting their mechanical games without video displays, but that's a stretch! They could just call it "the games industry" and technically be telling the truth.

Looks pretty impressive, based on those screenshots. That beach one literally looks like a scene from a 3DS game! And assuming the overlay at the top is accurate, then their claim of "high framerates of at least 30+ FPS" is understating it a fair bit.

@PrivateCat Better get on that, then!
Ape Escape 1 and 2 are about $10 each on modern PlayStation consoles, if you have one.

@gingerbeardman Looks like the author(s) scrubbed the whole thing instead of correcting the errors: no tweet, no article on their site. Seems really fishy.

I don't even know what they got wrong. There is indeed a Mario Kart 64 decompilation on GitHub, and it just reached 100.0% in the last couple of days, apparently.

I would have assumed that Nintendo put a gun to the writer's head, but that same X account still mentions the Mario Party 4 decomp, so I really don't get it.

Quite the milestone, even if Mario Party 4 wouldn't have been my first choice!
This game already runs beautifully on original hardware and emulators, but one enhancement that it could benefit from is added geometry outside the camera bounds, allowing for wide/ultra-wide display modes.
Most of the environments were built with a fixed camera in mind, and only the bare minimum was modelled. (Actually, I think there's at least one place where you can see just past the edges of the map, even without hacks.)

Great stuff! PC port or not, it'll be great if someone cleans up the timings: there is already a 60fps code for emulators, but certain elements are too fast. (This game's whole way of handling speed/timings is really janky.)

And HD texture packs also already exist, but maybe we'll be able to get 3D models for the characters now?

This could be my excuse to finally get around to playing Driver 2, if all goes well!

@MegaManFan What would the correct order be, then?

A full decompilation would make it way easier to actually fix the bugs, add new content (if necessary), and finish the game. A recompilation like this also helps a lot (even if it isn't quite as thorough or as easy to work with), and to my understanding, the recomp can act as a sort of reference point that makes a proper decomp easier to do.

Once the game has been improved/completed, compiling it again into a PC executable or N64 ROM is relatively simple, as opposed to trying to poke at addresses by hand and cram new data into a tightly-packed 64MB ROM.

"I'm interested in this."

-Alucard

@MysticWangForce Arcade (from GT3 onward?) is just a quick race mode, with the same sort-of-realistic handling as the sim mode.

Simulation mode is named for the aspects of saving up money, making purchases, and tweaking your cars between races, but the core gameplay during races is exactly the same, as far as I could tell during my time playing GT3.

The visual spectacle there is something else- not even F-Zero GX's track designs were quite that wild!

I wonder if this actually plays well, though. That footage looks a little chaotic and hard to parse at times, even in 1080p60. So much stuff flying around, and at a low framerate to boot.

@BulkSlash I had no idea that this worked on real hardware now! It seems that modders found ways to optimize the game considerably. It's far from a true 60fps, from what I'm seeing, but it stays above 30 most/all of the time, which is an accomplishment in itself.

Note that this optimization most likely took a lot of work. Removing a 30fps cap is simple, but making the game engine fast enough to actually run at 60 on real hardware is not!

The 60fps code itself is, as with many games, just changing a single number. Some games immediately work flawlessly with this (at least on emulation), whereas others need a ton of manual work to fix everything. DKR was in-between: its 60fps hack needed a few tweaks, but it's possible that the people behind the N64 optimization have fixed that, or are going to.

It's rare that a game is capable of considerably better performance, but simply doesn't enable it- that'd be a huge oversight! There's almost always a reason for the limitations. Though I will say that some games, such as Tomb Raider Legend on GameCube, or the Sonic Storybook games on Wii, run quite well at 60fps. It would seem that the devs couldn't get it stable enough for their liking, and made a judgement call to cap it at 30 for a more consistent experience.

@MG4M3R It looks like he's saying that Linda's design was approved immediately, but Amiga had to go through 30-40 different designs before the orthodox one was accepted.

Naka: "Do you think people will assume I'm interested in genderless characters like this, given the fact that I'm not married?"

I don't think this would have occurred to anyone, had he simply not brought it up!

@Aiden_Warren I think we all know about emulation here!

Decompilations, and especially native PC ports, allow for all kinds of enhancements that aren't possible through emulation. For example, there's a hack that makes the N64 version Diddy Kong Racing run at 60fps, but it has a few bugs, as all it does is change a single number. A decomp would make it easier for someone to go through the code and tweak any of the timings that aren't working properly.

And imagine all of the new content that modders could add to a PC release: new characters, new tracks, etc.!

@slider1983 I thought it seemed like that, too. It might be because old games could only move things (objects as well as the screen itself) around by whole pixels, with no in-between.
So if the screen is scrolling very slowly, like 30 pixels per second, it can only shift over by one pixel on every second frame: effectively resulting in 30fps scrolling, even while the characters are moving smoothly!
That might be what's giving the impression of choppier motion in the original (which scrolls very slowly at times) compared to the faster scrolling seen in this remake.

@slider1983 This is 60fps, the same as the arcade and Genesis/Mega Drive versions.

@Andee I'm just imagining the clickbait that could come from this:
"You won't believe what Skeleton #1 from King's Field looks like now!"
"Skeleton #2 is all grown up now, and he's mind-bogglingly gorgeous!"

Wait a minute- does this mean they already got the original PS2 textures working on Dreamcast, and are now trying to go beyond even that?
Last I saw, the textures were all scaled down by half, due to the Dreamcast's RAM limitations.

Nice! This is still available on PS3, but it's great that it's available for a wider audience now, and with higher resolutions!

I've never played Breath of Fire, but I've heard it's quite good... and quite weird.

Kudos to them for releasing all of these materials of their own volition!