Multijointed Monster Maker

Somewhat related to this thread. Man the Super Nintendo homebrew development scene is so boring! They get hundreds of people asking about a spc700 tracker, but nobody ever attempts to make one. They give the excuse of why don't you just use MOD players since it also uses samples? It's not using samples that I want to play with, it's the pitch modulation and the echo delay that I want to play with. I want to make a phasing effect by gradually changing the echo delay time. Show me a MOD tracker that would allow me to do that?

Something I find annoying is when people think that because X game is made by Y company it has to be good. There are a lot of games from Konami and Capcom I like, but there are a lot of Konami and Capcom games I don't. Actually I do prefer Konami over Capcom, but I still prefer MegaManX over Gradius 3.

As a Super Nintendo fan, this annoys me a lot. Back when I was 5 years old, looking in video game stores, there were tons of platformers, with an occassional RPG thrown in. If you google search the Super Nintendo nowadays, it's the complete opposite. The Super Nintendo had a lot of action games, such as Contra, MegaManX, Sparkster, Wild Guns, Axelay, Space Megaforce, Cybernator, etc but everytime you google search action games for the Snes, all that pops up is Gradius 3. People complain about slowdowns in Snes games, yet they've only experienced the tip of the iceberg of Snes games. Beleive me, when you dig deeper down, you'd find it being perfectly capable of running action games and platformers. People just need to look beyond the first page of the search engine.

Finally, a perfect time to spam!!! Let's sing the Bewitched theme song! Bewitched Bewitched This show is called Bewitched. Bewitched Bewitched Samantha's such a b****. Bewitched Bewitched Bee bee ba Bewitched Darron's an idiot. Bewitched Bewitched Bee bee ba bewitched Dadadada dadadada da da da! Bewitched Bewitched Samantha's a b****!

Another problem with Sega-16.com is they often complain about games they never played.

You have some pretty good points Video! I feel people should be aware of the trouble developers had getting release titles finished before the system gets on the market. People beleive that Capcom and Konami are programming Gods who instantly know how to get the most from any system they program for without trial and error.

Why do liscensed developers always get a higher reputation than homebrewers? Everybody always take liscensed developers word for every technical issue, beleiving they somehow have more experience than homebrewers despite how many times they've been debunked by homebrewers.

I find the smaller sprite pattern table + lack of h-blank v-ram accessing + slower dma are big bottlenecks for the Snes.

It's not fun if you were chosen to be their butt monkey.

While I have learned to reconsider the SNES in recent years, I just can't go that far. It invokes that "I'm glad Sega kicked those smug, arrogant, complacent, monopolistic bastards off of their pedestal" reaction in me. And when it doesn't invoke that one, it invokes the, "they had two damn years to improve on the Genesis and this is the best hey can do????" reaction. Army of good games aside, those two reactions will always keep it from having the 'most soul' title for me. It's annoying when people talk about how the Snes had a vastly superior graphics chip than the Sega Genesis. I look at games trying to see the vastly superiorness but I just can't! If you compare spec sheets, the Snes's sPPU apears vastly superior than the Genesis's VDP, but once you check hardware docs you discover that the Genesis's graphical specs are honest, while the Snes's graphical specs are half truths.

Sorry for bumping up an old thread, but isn't there any better Sega fan website besides Sega-16? One that is more intellectual and insightful but more relaxed and more accepting for non-serious posts?

It can update around 6k, but the oam and tile map updating might take some time. Maybe DKC doesn't upload all 128 oam entries, or makes usage of 16x16 pixel tile mode, for quicker tile map updating.

It did have really good animation for a Super Nintendo game. I'm of mixed views on this. On one hand, it's not really 'pushing the hardware' On the other hand, at the time, it was being creative about design methodology. I certainly don't remember that approach to design being done before in a 16-bit game ... and it served its purpose to scare the crap out of Sega, Atari and 3D). I don't find the 3D prerendered graphics impressive, but the high frame count and frame rate is. I find animation extremely annoying to program on the Snes. Only 16kB of sprite pattern RAM at one time, only capable of updating around 4k or 5k of sprite patterns during v-blank. It takes a lot of strategic dma/v-ram usage to make sure every enemy combination is compatible with each other and hiding limitations with level designing. Animation isn't as simple as color usage, where you just fill it up to the max and your done.

It did have really good animation for a Super Nintendo game.

Back in the 80's and 90's we didn't have hardware specifications having an effect on the way we looked at games.

BTW, anybody still have that interview with Treasure?

I beleive that is called advertisement. Here is my take on Gunstar Heroes for the Super Nintendo

Just watched a gameplay video of Mega Man X. I'm wondering why if Mega Man is also made by Capcom, why is Mega Man's animation so much better than the animation in Demon's Crest? I always seemed to notice that all the "kiddy" games on the Super Nintendo (Mega Man, Sparkster, Pocky & Rocky etc) have smoother/faster animation than the more "adult" games like Demon's Crest and Super Ghosts and Gouls. I have fond memories of the Super Nintendo, but I grew up playing the kiddy games, and Demon's Crest doesn't match the Super Nintendo I grew to know and love. Mega Man X is the kind of game I remember playing as a child that I associate with the Super Nintendo.

Eventhough OPL3 is technically an FM synth, I don't categorize it as such. It's the only FM synth that can use square wave carriers and modulators, and that really adds a lot to the harmonic content to the instruments than the other plain vanilla FM synths. The OPL3 should stand on its own because of that. The OPL3 actually sounds like a synth. I can't believe Yamaha never included square waveforms in their fm synths from the start. I always thought of FM synth as a joke as the only alternative to PCM, Yamaha kept milking.

If Snes game ROMs are twice as fast as the cpu, then I guess it would be alright if we just clock the 6309 at 3.58 Mhz while accessing cartridges, unless it is possible to overclock the 6309 at 5.37 Mhz, or use variable ROM accessing speeds between the normal 3.58 Mhz and the overclocked 5.37 Mhz. I've heard people overclocking 6309's at 5 Mhz, I'm not sure about 5.37 Mhz, but it is close. Let me refraise that part about the audio. There is no secondary cpu dedicated to "changing notes" like the Z80 in the Genesis. There is an OPL3 and an extra 4 channel PCM chip. I never said the 4 PCM channels were software controlled.

Here is what I came up with last night. The main cpu is a Hitachi 6309 clocked at 3.58 Mhz when accessing 64kB work ram and audio/video/controller ports, but 1.79 Mhz while accessing cartridge. Using cheaper slower ROMs can boost the ROM sizes ahead of competators without being more expensive. There is no audio cpu or memory, just an OPL3 and a simple 4 channel wave table that plays from the 6309's 64kB work ram. There is a memory mapper to expand the 6309's memory range. There is DMA for v-ram loading at 3.58 MB per second. Even though the 6309 has an 8-bit bus, the cartridge bus is 16 bits wide, so data can be DMAed at 3.58 MB per second dispite having a 1.79 Mhz cartridge bus. The VDP is where most of the money goes to. It is 21 Mhz, with an 8-bit 64kB video-ram. It outputs a pixel every 3 cycles giving a resolution of 336x224. Each line of active display is about 1024 cycles long. Long enough for there to be 4 normal backgrounds, or 3 tile-per-offset backgrounds, or 1 "mode 7" background + 1 tile-per-offset background. The oam holds 256 sprites, each with optional rotation and scaling. Sprite patterns can be accessed during h-blank, letting 640 sprite pixels per line or 320 rotating sprite pixel per line.

You think the ROM hacking community doesn't understand the bottlenecks involved before they optimize? That's a pretty dim view of them, I think. Usually with ROM hacking, any performance issues are solved in the original game, and the hacker just needs to optimize to gain some additional space for the hack code. Even with homebrewers, premature optimization is a mistake. Take the VCS for example, you could optimize the code that draws the scanline by running self-modifying code from ram. Afterward you may find you have unused cycles on the scanline, but desperately need the ram you threw at your optimization. You haven't met the Super Mario World hacking team. They took Super Mario World and butchered it with tons of slowdowns that weren't in the original.

Premature optimization refers to optimizing before you clearly understand where the bottlenecks are... Coding the first whack at a routine in some fast-but-less-maintainable way without knowing its a bottleneck would be one example. In your example you've tested and realized that a bottleneck exists. That's not premature. Man, did the ROM hacking community get that one wrong!

I can never understand why everyone says "premature optimization is the root of all evil?" It's like a million times easier to optimize your code early on than to wait till the end to fix it. The first sign of my game lagging I would unroll a loop or knock a few cycles off a macro. I'm not waiting till the end of development to solve such a simple problem that can be fixed within seconds.

Eh.. annoying? Considering the kind of animation in this game was roughly standard for at least 95% of the rest of the SNES's library, I'd say the visuals in most of the system's games are annoying! More frames of animation would have been nice, but then again, we *are* talking about the SNES here.. Not exactly a power-house, even in its hey-day. You focus on more frames of character animation, you probably end up sacrificing much of the cool, moving/animated background elements (admittedly a big part of the magic in [quality] SNES platformers, IMO). Imagine Demon's Crest with bad-ass character animations slapped on flat, static, boring backgrounds that look like they came out of the Power Rangers cart.. meh, I'll pass! Speaking of Demon's Crest, I just picked this one up today.. A local used shop had a complete one in excellent shape. Paid more than I wanted to, but what the hell.. It's good to have it again. Sadly I already know that. I do homebrew on the Super Nintendo and I find it depressing that the greatest programmers in the day thought this was the best they can do.