smoreon

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!

@Andee And the Omega Collection, while they're at it!

It's strange and unfortunate how limited/quiet the Wipeout series has been lately. Is there a tangled legal situation, or something? I'd love to see Wipeout come to more platforms. Not sure if Sony would have to give permission for the Omega Collection specifically, but some previous games have been on competing consoles like the Saturn and N64, so it's not like it's exclusively their series.

@Quick_Man I didn't say anything about this agenda or that.
Is it not objectively true that:
1. Many Japanese/anime-ish games have been blocked or censored* in the past decade or so.
2. Other games have gotten away with the same stuff on a T or M rating.

*Using "censored" in this context to mean something was provably toned down or removed, regardless of whether it was caused by governments, ratings boards, company standards, etc.

@Zedecks Video games themselves probably wouldn't be able to exist if companies had to fully appease both Californians and Texans!

@MSaturn It's a Japanese/anime game thing. Significantly stricter standards when games have "anime" looking characters, regardless of the characters' ages.

I thought Sony was the most zealous about anime character censorship, followed by Nintendo.
But now there's stuff that even they are okay with, that Xbox won't allow?

@SpaceChurro Thanks for this! It's what I had suspected, but it's good to finally have confirmation of the translation's status.

Wonder how long it'll take for modders to put the original script back in, so we can have our Tootsie Pop references and whatnot.

@slider1983 They go for deep discounts fairly often, at least!

@Daniel36 I assume "wizard" refers to those step-by-step setup/installation programs?
It sounds like there's a modern- and somewhat sketchy- Unity engine app which launches first, allowing you to change some settings or something, before it launches the actual game.

@KingMike All true! I noticed a mention of "puzzle shooter" on the box.
I have played it, and the connection to Tetris is pretty flimsy. (I was only being half-serious about counting it.)
Though it technically is a puzzle, and it involves falling blocks, so...

@-wc- Columns is older than Dr. Mario, at least. That's the only one I can think of, but there must be others. (Does Quarth count?)

Just want to point out that the second of the two embedded videos is using PiStorm, which is basically a modern CPU replacement for the Amiga, and this produces impossibly good performance.

The first video shows it running on real hardware at ~5fps.

@sdelfin This is a good point! There's overlap between the PC/console and US/UK/EU issues, but they're not synonymous.

I've come across '90s PC gamers- many of them American- who feel that console-only gamers overstate the importance of titles like Goldeneye. And of course, the console gamers can fire back with their own rebuttals. But anyway, it really is reminiscent of the regional debate, with two often isolated groups emphasizing the things they know, and downplaying anything outside that.

@dunk I was specifically thinking of games journalists saying that gamers are losers, but yeah, gamers themselves saying "gamers are losers" has also become more common since then!

@axelhander This games journalist was doing the whole "gamers are losers" take, some 20+ years before it became popular. Truly ahead of his time!

@JohnnyMind Yeah, even if there isn't a full decompilation to analyze yet, there would still be various ways of testing this, like using an emulator with save states (and maybe both "players" managed by a single controller). Not sure why no one did this, if this was such a longstanding mystery.

@-wc- Judging by the HUD's proportions, this game seems to already be optimized for 16:9 displays!
I don't remember seeing a widescreen mode in the options, but maybe it's a system-level setting. Plus, I haven't played GT3 in a while.

@-wc- Too true, unfortunately. Even the good ones arguably take more liberties with the source material than they need to.

That said, I find Anderson's Resident Evil movies to be cheesy fun, and some of them (particularly the second and... was it the fourth or fifth?) do make an effort to draw from and connect to the games. It is really weird that he's seemingly trying to make HotD legitimately scary, but I'm not going to completely write it off just yet.

"It’s going to be immersive and very, very scary."
"it reflects the experience of playing the video game"
These two lines are contradictory. Does he know what The House of the Dead is?

@Zenszulu How many games in 1998 or later were still in mono?
As far as I'm aware, almost everything was in stereo by then (even a majority of Game Boy and GBC games, if you plugged in external speakers), and many games also offered an option to choose.

@AJB83 I'm glad that Xbox 360 and Nintendo 64 were some of the first systems chosen for this recomp technique, as they both have so many potentially great games... and such poor technical performance holding those games back!

@N00BiSH Check out PCGamingWiki. Looks like Generations is known to have issues on Windows 11, on top of the other stutters we were talking about, but there are unofficial patches that can fix these things!

@N00BiSH Not surprised that the remaster changed something for the worse, however small it was (it's basically inevitable). Wonder if anyone has reverted things using mods.

I did experience a single, noticeable, inexplicable framerate drop in modern Chemical Plant, and this is a known issue, but it was otherwise perfect, as far as I recall. (This was with a GTX 960 on Win7.) I wasn't aware that some PCs/OSes had worse issues.

@N00BiSH When someone recompiles Generations?
That game has had a native PC version for a long time. It's a little harder to get in its original form now, as the remaster with Shadow's campaign has replaced it, but that should be an equally good experience if your computer isn't too old.

Or were you just hoping for easier mod support? I'd assume there's a decent selection of mods already, but haven't looked into it.

PS: Series X doesn't run Unleashed smoothly? I saw a video showing that it powers through even the infamous problem spots in the Adabat level... albeit at the original game's sub-HD resolution. Does it have issues elsewhere?

As much as I usually like Yuzo Koshiro's work, most of the good tracks in SoR3 were Motohiro Kawashima's!

Interesting to see that Kawashima worked on Amazing Island. I've tried the game briefly, but never looked into the soundtrack.

@RetroMasters I wouldn't say Nintendo in general is overlooked, but yeah, the SNES modding/homebrew scene is still maturing. It will be interesting to see if/how it grows, and what these talented homebrew devs come up with in the future.
The SNES is a pretty powerful piece of hardware in the right hands... especially when it's not being underclocked and running a game from a teensy 1 MB cartridge.
Give it 8 MB (64 Mb) or so of FastROM, and it'll really shine!

@RetroGames Not at all! My comment on the price was based on it being an emulated SNES ROM (contrast this to how much Ninja Five-O, an emulated GBA ROM, is going for!), and the bit about the box art was regarding any promotional art with the game, including the box art view on Steam.
I wouldn't expect a physical SNES game to go for less than $50-ish.

I'm not familiar with this game, though I will say it looks good- and the price is reasonable as well.

But with such an authentically '90s localization, they need to have some bad American box art to go with it!

@Zoinkity So basically, they're dynamically mapping 12 MB worth of addresses into 8 MB of physical RAM (which works fine because it's a simple game that never needs all of that memory at once)?

Interesting about the 4 MB of extra RAM... I assume the modders patched the game to reroute the higher addresses to the Expansion Pak? (The Pak adds 4 MB of memory to the N64, putting it on par with an Aleck64.)

It's one thing to take issue with violence in video games, but when you're the owner of an action movie franchise full of all kinds of violence, it comes across as hypocritical, or at least hilariously out-of-touch.

And the movies don't even come with a giant "16" age label on the front, the way the games do! How do we know they aren't falling into children's hands? (Think of the children!)

There are more people using audio cassettes and VHS tapes than playing on old consoles?

@PinballBuzzbro $60 each, or $140 for the two (go figure).
I hate to think of what this would cost in Canada, once you factor in taxes, shipping, and exchange rate. Well over $200 for sure. Probably around $250.
And these aren't even good games!
(I actually would be interested in playing these, partially as a curiosity, and partially because of the music. But that's more in $5-10 Steam release territory. There are much better things I could be spending my money on!)

From what I've read, the memory card slot maxes out around 3 MB/s, which is faster than reading the inner edge of a DVD, but slower than reading the outer edge (which is just over 5 MB/s). That sounds bad, but might not matter so much in reality.

The memory card doesn't have moving parts, which means no seek times- removing a major factor that caused some games to load slowly. Well-optimized games tend to load from the outer edge of the disc with minimal seeking, so that would probably perform worse from a memory card, but those games can probably afford a small increase in loading time without becoming unbearable.

The PS2's DVD drive is 4x speed, so it's several times faster than it needs to be in order to play DVD-quality video, and dozens of times faster than it would take to play audio, so that's no issue under normal circumstances.

@markran Thanks for the detailed response!

It's frustrating how the current system is stacked so heavily in favour of both the "big guy" as well as... let's say the "aggressor" in general, as- like you touched on- it's not necessarily the actual rights holder, but potentially an overzealous legal team or even an outright troll. If they so much as growl, it's often deemed safest to just give in, even if they really don't have much of a case on their hands.

And yeah, it's a fair point to distinguish between the actual rights holder and their lawyers who advocate for them (and who are incentivized to be aggressive). Though when a company like Nintendo (just as the most infamous example) is so widely known to have consistently overzealous lawyers, they should be able to rein them in a bit to save their reputation- and a bit of money as well!

About the fair use angle, I wonder if the focus on a single franchise weakens that a bit. Not that this explains every recent case of legal threats against these books, but a Final Fight book might be riskier than, say, a general look at '80s arcade games, or 2D beat-em-ups.