Multijointed Monster Maker

This is good news to me. They took one of my favorite systems and turned it into some totalitarian masturbatory fanboy cult. Now I can finally take my Sega Genesis out of my closet without thinking about those fagots.

I was doing it sarcastically because I was criticizing those kind of people. People keep trying to convince me to start liking RPGs because of stupid technical shit, when no amount of stupid technical shit is going to make me want to play a game if I don't find the game fun.

SMW is a platformer and Chrono Trigger is an RPG... Your point? They are two completely different beasts. From a programming standpoint, a platformer is nowhere near as complicated as an RPG. Think of all the Monster AI that has to be programmed, which is just the tip of the iceberg. I don't want to sound like I have a platformer biased, but how in the world is an RPG more complicated to program than a platformer? RPG's don't have physics, enemy AI, object management, dynamic animation loading schemes, etc, etc.

No. It being an RPG hampers my enjoyment for Chrono Trigger.

I find this very annoying when it came to game reviews. People acting like every classic game was significantly better than the last one in order of release dates. Such as every game made in 1994 had better gameplay, graphics, animation, sound, etc, than every game made in 1993, and 1992 and so on. Every single then-cliched aspect in a game, people pretend like it was the first game that ever done it, even if it was done better in a game 5 years prior to. Everything is some Oh-My-God technical accomplishment that nobody thought was possible despite being already used in 100 games by then. Everytime somebody plays an SNES game and see a screen-filling boss, they are like Oh My God, I didn't know the SNES could do that?, it must've been some technically impressive programming going on. ...Except that having screen-filling bosses was commonplace in the NES era. I'd complain about a game lacking in a graphical aspect "for example lack of boss animation in Chrono Trigger" and the usual response is: "Remember that it was 1995 and that the SNES was only 16-bit. Technology wasn't that advanced yet. It was still the best the developers were capable of under the limited technology they had and bla bla bla!" Dude, ever play Super Mario World? That came out 5 years prior to Chrono Trigger and THAT had animated bosses?

NES color palette vs SMS color palette

What type of video game palette do you prefer for video game systems?

How did you get the video emulated? NES uses data and address ports for PPU loading.

Neither does a 32-bit have any practical advantage over a 16-bit CPU when it comes to 2D sidescrollers. Most 2D game physics rely on object coordinates. The average 2D game uses a resolution of 256x256 pixels. It takes 256 screens for a level to be more than 65536 pixels long. Has there ever been a 2D game with levels that are more than 256 screens long? This is one of the reasons I always thought the 68000 was an highly overhyped and overrated CPU. Another being that 4-cycle memory accesses cancel out the performance advantage of having a 16-bit data bus. The 68000 is easy to program, and can run at adequate speeds off of slower clocked memory chips, but just because it has 16 32-bit registers, doesn't mean it's (16 regs)*(32 bit)/(8 bit)= 64x more powerful than an 8-bit 6502 with 1 register, as some people like to believe.

I'm confused about this artifact color stuff. When people talk about NTSC artifact colors, it sounds like they're refering to using rainbow artifacts to increase the color depth. Usage of B&W dithering patterns to add orange and blue color information to the image. Seeing demos on youtube, I'm a bit disappointed. Instead of using an NTSC composite output, it looks like they're using normal RGB output with just lots and lots of dithering. Is this what the CoCo3 community meant by artifact colors?, or did the people making the videos miss the point entirely?

Anybody notice how SNES games tend to be more formulatic than their Genesis and NES counterparts. "Didn't I just play this same boss last level, only this time he is an aligator instead of a lion and shoots arrows instead of fireballs."

Early 3rd party games ran at 2.68 Mhz.

I did not "forget" the CPU. If all the slowdown is caused by the CPU running at 2.68 Mhz, then explain to me why NES games weren't plagued with slowdown if it ran at 1.79 Mhz? Look into a usual SNES game's source code and you see a ton of: -collision detection with unused sprites -sprite attributes being manipulated multiple times before displaying them onscreen -C written code You don't see this type of stuff in NES, PCE or Genesis games.

This has to do with production time used for 3rd party developers. From playing games, looking at the ASM code and reading random stuff it seems like: -SNES games had a more cramped production schedual -SNES developers had more programmers working on individual games -Genesis games were generally coded raw, while SNES developers tend to use prepackaged commercial engines that were limited and not very optimized

Or how about, how every developer intentionally programmed SNES games to run slow because of perceived limitations, but in reality it always had the ability to run fast gameplay, nobody ever tried. This pisses me off about websites like smwcentral.net where I'd suggest a new idea and they'd dismiss it as impossible, just because it has never been done before.

SNES is pretty hard to program for the following reasons: 65816 ASM annoyingly complicated hardware interrupt system (have to get it right for it to work properly) only 16 kB for sprite patterns only 6 kB of data can be moved CPU > PPU each frame (unless in "widescreen" mode)

video game reviewer: It has huge bosses that take up the entire screen. tech informed gamer: It's called a background layer, duh! video game reviewer: But it was 1994! This was some technical breakthrough back then! tech informed gamer: They've been doing this trick ever since 1986, by 1994 it was nothing new. Another weird thing is they act like EVERY single game was some graphical/technical breakthrough, when most of what was "special" was already common place for games by the time it was released.

I hate those kinds of people, especially when they are hired as journalists for a popular videogame magazines like EGM and GamePro.

That opener is not very nice. Also, there is no waste of money about it. You put a less-than-maxed out game on some hardware, as long as its fun and attractive, kids are going to shove quarters in it, thus making you money at the arcade. That is the big point of arcade machines: sell them to arcade owners with the promise that the games going to result in lots of quarters being jammed in. Kids/Players at large generally don't give two flying shits whats going on inside the machine. What they do care about is how much fun they just had with their quarter. Most arcade games don't actually push the extreme limits of the hardware, and never really have. There is no time for that. The games need to be completed in a timely manner and put out to keep with the current market. Places don't have time for some zealot in a cubicle covered in empty popcans and dorito bags screaming I HAVE TO PUSH THE LIMITS OR WE CAN'T DO THIS GAME. IT NEEDS TO MAKE THE 68K CRY FROM BEING OVERWORKED. The point of having powerful hardware is to accommodate the low-end and the high-end games. Usually everything hits around the middle. The average. When you're competing, or want to get paid, you stick with the average/slightly above average mark and hope your game concept was fun. Tons of flashy bullshit that maximizes the use of the hardware won't matter if the game itself sucks. Its the same concept as games that don't push a home console's limits being released and selling well. It isn't really a waste of money. Sonic 1 < Sonic 3 as far as pushing the sega genesis goes, but that doesn't mean its a waste of money to buy it and that it isn't worth a damn. The entire second half of his post? Yknow, where he talked about PS3 and Xbox 360, etc. Did you even read it? I disagree. I think his post assumes you just want to complain about clunky 90s arcade games (primarily fighters apparently) along with him. As far as that line of discussion goes: MORTAL KOMBAT SUCKS. Cool down a bit. I actually agree with you. Hardware-wise it's better to go over the amount needed than going under the amount. It's a good thing that the average gamer isn't going to count the sprites onscreen or how many layer of parallax just to decide if a game is good, except for the losers on Sega-16.com. What I learned from programming is the closer you are to maxing-out the system, the more prone to glitches your game is, and your spending more time tweaking your engine, than working on the actual gameplay. I got tired of programming the SNES with the people at Sega-16.com insulting me for not having enough sprites, sprites being too small, not enough parallax layers, not enough background animation ect. So much that I found most of my time tweaking my engine to prove that the SNES can handle X amount of sprites and Y amount of background layers at the same time, than focusing on actual gameplay. The more graphical trinkets I added the harder it was to add more important things like gameplay elements. They didn't understand there were more technical limitations than just the usual "not enough CPU power" where you can use any amount of sprites and background layers in any way, and it will work, just with a little slowdown if you do a little too much. The SNES doesn't work that way. There is only a small amount of memory devoted to sprites and backgrounds, with a small amount of time the CPU is allowed to access the PPU. No amount of FX-chips can fix these hardware limitations. Even the programmers of Star Fox and Yoshi's Island still had to deal with a small v-ram and a slow bandwidth. Yes, having 128 sprites animated at 60 fps at 256x224 would be awsome, but I am happy with 96 sprites animated at 30 fps at 256x192, because it actually gives me room for gameplay, instead of constantly tweaking my engine everytime I want to change an enemy's AI.

I can easily tell the frames apart. Maybe I just have very sensitive eyes when it comes to animation. Then again, I'm talking strickly animation, not about how smoothly do the characters scroll when they jump.

I think what made the graphical difference between the CPS1 and CPS2 was more of an art-shift + bigger ROM sizes than the actual hardware running the games. If you compare CPS1 and CPS2 game screenshots, they both run in 384x224 RGB444, but somehow CPS1 games tend to look "blockier" and less colorful. They don't look blockier and less colorful because they were on less powerful hardware, they look like that because they were drawn that way. BTW, I'm a big fan of the Disney-esque look that a lot of Capcom arcade games took after the switch from CPS-1 to CPS-2. I don't like the blocky pillow shading a lot of CPS-1 games had, although some people may prefer the blocky pillow shading more than the more colorful Disney-style cell-shaded look, just as I still prefer CPS-1 graphics over 3D playstation-like graphics.

I'm not complaining about the games. I'm just laughing at how arcade owners had to pay so much money for them. arcade owner - "Oh shit, I have to buy the expensive new CPS2 just to make play Super Street Fighter 2. What was wrong with the old CPS1?"

Yes, that is what I meant.

You're making it sound like they needed all that hardware to play Atari 2600 "Karate". The graphics were sophisticated for the time. They still had a lot of wasted hardware when it came to fighting games. I think SHMUPS took far better use of arcade hardware, since they actually needed the extra sprites and CPU power to run them.

Does anyone find it funny how arcade machines took so much power just to run a simple 1 vs 1 fighting game. They needed a 20 Mhz 68000 and hundreds of hardware sprites just to display 2 guys with jerky movement.