Lost Dragon Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 Argonaught programmer Mark Johnston talked about the 3DO hardware whilst Creature Shock was in development-he praised it for it's texture-mapping, but moaned about the ARM chip (CPU) being slowed by lack of disk cache and not being able to generate the more traditonal specical FX and admited in this area, the SNES wiped the floor with 3DO.... RJ Mical also talked of a coder from Elite showing him an effect on a 3DO game he was working on and RJ being amazed by it, as it was 1st instance he'd seen of a coder reaching beyond the logic into the hidden logic in the system (his words :-) ) waiting to be discovered...the underlying zen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 and not being able to generate the more traditonal specical FX and admited in this area" Do you have any idea or clarification as to what he meant by that? I'm sitting here trying to think of what I've seen on the 3DO that was done [visually/graphically] better on an older system (like the SNES), but I can't think of anything. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 Whilst i (try) and find the Creature Shock interview i can give you Bill Heineman's comments (3DO Out Of This World): 'Super Nintendo has Mode 7 where a background image can be rotated and scaled in hardware.All the developer has to do is write to about 6 or 7 registers and instantly the video is altered.On 3DO i have to tell the machine how to draw an image and then it physically has to draw it.The machine is fast enough (almost) to handle just about every effect of SNES Mode 7, but you could still do it a lot faster on the SNES'. That sort of thing i wonder? Oh and Crystal Dynamics Rob Dyer talked of 3DO Crash 'n Burn being developed before the 3DO O/S was finished..(bit more 3Do coding triva :-) ). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 E.A's Frank Gibeau, then E.A USA Product Manager on 3DO Hardware: '3DO have put a lot of effort into producing on OS for their machine....there's always a trade-off between avaiable Ram and that taken up by the OS, it would of been nice to have had more avaiable Ram implemented as linkable libaries, but so far we've been very happy with our use of the memory management capabilities of the machine.' (Early '94). The tech.talk is way over my head, but seems 3DO was 'easy' enough to develop for, from E.A's viewpoint. Hope these quotes go some way to answering questions raised earlier about ease of development on 3DO.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 This too might help give an idea of what coders thought on developing on 3DO: Andy Williams who was at head of Virtuso design team, described the 3DO as a good, if slightly quirky machine to use and warned other coders to think carefully about what they wanted to do with the hardware and not go in thinking it had unlimited power for everything they wanted to do. He praised the 3DO's automatic anti-aliasing, as it allowed him to digitise the pop star and incorporate him into the game with no problems (same routine was used on Twisted). Oh and game was originally planned to be platformer not the 3D wander around it became. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 @Austin:Despite never having played it, is'nt the 3DO version of Super Street Fighter II supposed to be weaker in terms of traditonal special FX, by having more washed out colours in the backdrops than the SNES version and lacking the Parallax Scrolling found in both the Mega Drive /Genesis and SNES versions?. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeoGeoNinja Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 @Austin:Despite never having played it, is'nt the 3DO version of Super Street Fighter II supposed to be weaker in terms of traditonal special FX, by having more washed out colours in the backdrops than the SNES version and lacking the Parallax Scrolling found in both the Mega Drive /Genesis and SNES versions?. Maybe. But, in ALL other aspect, the 3DO version gets everything else absolutely spot on, making it nearly Arcade Perfect. It's difficult to 'remember', but if you compare the MD & SNES versions of SFII onwards today, they're faithful to the arcade counterpart, but nowhere near Arcade Perfect. By contrast, although the parallax scrolling is absent, the rest of Super SF2T on 3DO is absolutely amazing. IMO, Capcom DEFINITELY chose the right thing to drop in order to keep all the more important factors Arcade Perfect (size of sprites, animation, gameplay etc). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 'Super Nintendo has Mode 7 where a background image can be rotated and scaled in hardware.All the developer has to do is write to about 6 or 7 registers and instantly the video is altered.On 3DO i have to tell the machine how to draw an image and then it physically has to draw it.The machine is fast enough (almost) to handle just about every effect of SNES Mode 7, but you could still do it a lot faster on the SNES'. Gotcha, that makes sense then. I have definitely seen that effect on the 3DO (the mini games by WARP, like Rush 'n Fire Megadas, revolve around this effect and it moves at 60fps). So basically it's just a lot more work to get it working on the 3DO. The ease of getting it to work on the SNES makes sense now, that would explain why it's even in games it's not really needed for (for example, Super Adventure Island, or Space Megaforce/Super Aleste). @Austin:Despite never having played it, is'nt the 3DO version of Super Street Fighter II supposed to be weaker in terms of traditonal special FX, by having more washed out colours in the backdrops than the SNES version and lacking the Parallax Scrolling found in both the Mega Drive /Genesis and SNES versions?. The only thing the 3DO version is lacking (as far as I can tell) is the multi-layered background scrolling. Everything else is spot-on with the arcade version. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 :-) Glad the 'replacement' quotes helped explain what the Creature Shock coder could very well of been talking about, i'll keep looking for said interview/feature, but as with all things, can never find it when i'm looking for it. It sounds similar to way coders started grumbling about the PS2 hardware:After telling Sony they wanted to be able to 'code directly to the metal' they were up in arms when they discovered just how long it took to implement basic features like anti-aliasing etc on the hardware and generally get code running without bottlenecks. Sounds like a case of be very careful what you wish for, we'll give you the xtra power you wanted in terms of faster CPU's, texture-mapping support, decent polygon pushing power etc etc, but at a cost elsewhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Posted September 10, 2014 Share Posted September 10, 2014 Sounds like a case of be very careful what you wish for, we'll give you the xtra power you wanted in terms of faster CPU's, texture-mapping support, decent polygon pushing power etc etc, but at a cost elsewhere. Yeah. For mainstream systems that live long lives (like the PS2), the payoff is usually worth it in the end. End of generation games on the PS2 look leagues better than the earlier stuff on the system. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 11, 2014 Share Posted September 11, 2014 :-) Here you go, Austin, the missing part of that Mark Johnston quote: '...Because it's only got a single screen, like a PC, effects like multi-layered parallax scrolling are virtually impossible to get running in a single frame.In this kind of game the SNES wipes the floor with it, which is a bit sad when you consider the price difference'. Mark also said 3do was 'good at texture-mapping, but it's not as fast as a DX2 PC for calculating polygons'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 11, 2014 Share Posted September 11, 2014 And here's someone who found 3DO akward to develop for: Peter Molyneux speaking Autumn'94: 'We had 1 of the 1st 3DO's in the country and it's been a nightmare to develop for it.The compiler has'nt worked, the hardware has'nt worked, there have been all these hardware glitches etc'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sd32 Posted September 12, 2014 Share Posted September 12, 2014 Games like Primal Rage and Gex use multi-layered backgrounds pretty well. I think its a matter of the SNES having those effects done in hardware, and 3DO having to do them in software. About the comparison of 3DO with SNES in the 2d realm: -Make no mistake about it, 3DO SSF2 Turbo destroys the 16 bit ports of plain Super Street Fighter 2, and i dont know were the "washed out colors" thing got started (i have heard it before), the 3DO port is displaying a ton more colors than the SNES port, and looks way better color-wise, and is better in every other way, minus the parallax. I once read that the 3DO port was based on the FMTowns version, which also lacked the parallax, but i cant confirm that. -3DO Samurai Shodown also destroys the 16 bit ports, picture quality-wise, it looks as good as the Neo Geo version, the frame rate is a little lower and it has some missing frames of animation compared with it, though. -Primal Rage also wipes the floor with the SNES port in every graphical way. About this comment: '...Because it's only got a single screen, like a PC, effects like multi-layered parallax scrolling are virtually impossible to get running in a single frame.In this kind of game the SNES wipes the floor with it, which is a bit sad when you consider the price difference'. I dont understand very well what he means, if what he is talking about is the 3DO only having one background layer to display, then i dont see what the problem is, since it can display a ton of sprites and can build extra background layers with sprites, like systems like the Neo Geo, Playstation, FMTowns Marty and even the Jaguar do. So again, those specific 2d effects might be easier to do on SNES, but doesnt mean 3DO cant replicate or surpass them, as it was seen on many titles. Some great quotes Lost Dragon, very interesting, thanks. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sd32 Posted September 12, 2014 Share Posted September 12, 2014 About this comment: "RJ Mical also talked of a coder from Elite showing him an effect on a 3DO game he was working on and RJ being amazed by it, as it was 1st instance he'd seen of a coder reaching beyond the logic into the hidden logic in the system (his words :-) ) waiting to be discovered...the underlying zen." 3DO devs werent allowed to "bang on the hardware" with optimized assembly, 3DO limited devs to using only their libraries to make compatibility with all the hardware revisions, from the diferent manufacturers, easier to do. So that made it easier to code for, but there must be a lot of untapped power still on the 3DO, due to what i just mentioned, and the short life span of the 3DO. So i guess that dev he mentions, was coding straight to the hardware and thus getting very impressive results, i wish i knew what game in particular they are talking about, and weather there was a proto or demo of it, hell, meybe it even got released, hehe. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 12, 2014 Share Posted September 12, 2014 @sd32:Glad you (and others?) liked the 3DO coder quotes, i had feared it might take thread a little too 'off topic', but i hope it has given a balanced viewpoint of the 3DO hardware from a good selection of coders.If i find any more, i'll post them up. Re:RJ Mical:Whilst i've seen him quoted/interviewed several times over the past few years, most recently in Retro Gamer Magazine, it's frustrating that no-one has yet asked him about that mystery game he saw running on 3DO (and with the recent Mev Dinc RG interview, no-one asked about him being approached to work on the Atari Panther...sigh.....). Mark Johnston did say: 'I think the best aspect of the 3DO is probably it's operating system, which is very easy to use, but having all the development based around Apple Macs makes it a very expensive machine to work on'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 12, 2014 Share Posted September 12, 2014 Talking of unreleased 3DO games, Argonaught were also working on Primeval (which would have taken a similar style of play to Creature Shock's 'walking sections, but with more over-layered sprites and different perspectives) on 3DO+PC.Game hit several snags, not least the fact it originally had lots of rendered Dinosaurs, as publisher, Sony, had seen the wow factor Jurassic Park and wanted lots of Dino's, but it took around 18 months to do them, by which time Dino's were 'old hat' so Sony asked for them to be removed from the game! and plot had to be started from scratch as a result!. Argonaught described it as 'a bit like building a house and then having to pull it down to build a hotel'. I only ever saw 1 merge screen shot of it and that was from an early intro screen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 13, 2014 Share Posted September 13, 2014 Bit vague this, but here goes (Quote from Edge regarding 3DO SSFIIX being an 'interesting performance test for 3DO'): 'An experienced 3DO programmer told Edge that it's incredibily hard to get the system to shift graphics at greater than 30 fps (half the arcade game's update)'. Now, see this is why at times i hated Edge, why not just name the god damn programmer and be done?.At times like this i feel a familar name to a lot of us on here and elsewhere would have made an ideal freelancer for Edge back then, all these nameless coders who were 'spoken to...' :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 13, 2014 Share Posted September 13, 2014 Nice 'recent' interview with Mark Cerny HERE: http://www.edge-online.com/features/an-audience-with-mark-cerny-on-three-decades-in-the-games-business-and-the-future-of-ps4/ Opens with his time on 3DO, thought folks might like to read. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zerosquare Posted September 14, 2014 Share Posted September 14, 2014 Now, see this is why at times i hated Edge, why not just name the god damn programmer and be done?When you're working with a manufacturer, you usually don't want your name associated with less-than-positive comments about their products 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted September 14, 2014 Share Posted September 14, 2014 :-) It never seemed to worry UK coders when they'd talk about working on the ST, trying to convert games like Menace, Midnight Resistance, Ghouls 'N' Ghosts etc to the ST, they seemed very vocal about the shortcomings of the St compared to the Amiga and what was lacking in that version and why and how they'd tried to get around issue. I liked the honesty from coders during that era. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zerosquare Posted September 14, 2014 Share Posted September 14, 2014 Sure, but they had no contract with Atari. On consoles, where all games have to be approved by the manufacturer to get released (not to mention the money spent in development kits, royalties...), not stepping on toes is kinda important. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Dangerous Posted September 28, 2014 Author Share Posted September 28, 2014 Why exactly is the 3DO rage better than Jag CD rage? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JagChris Posted September 28, 2014 Share Posted September 28, 2014 Why exactly is the 3DO rage better than Jag CD rage? How or why? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Dangerous Posted September 28, 2014 Author Share Posted September 28, 2014 (edited) How or why? Either? I'm curious myself. Someone said earlier (Austin I think) that the 3DO version was slightly better, so I'm wonder why that is. Edited September 28, 2014 by travistouchdown Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Posted September 28, 2014 Share Posted September 28, 2014 You should play it and find out for yourself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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