Why can't the 7800 handle a StreetFighter 2 style game?

[A Sprite]

Looking over the old threads, everyone agrees it's impossible. Why?

 

It's been done on C64, Gameboy, (Takara's ports of SNK games), and even the ZX Spectrum.

 

 

Is the Atari 7800 hardware really so crippled by it's rendering methods that it can't compete with similiar systems?

[DracIsBack]

Looking over the old threads, everyone agrees it's impossible. Why?

 

It's been done on C64, Gameboy, (Takara's ports of SNK games), and even the ZX Spectrum.

 

 

Is the Atari 7800 hardware really so crippled by it's rendering methods that it can't compete with similiar systems?

 

 

Were people comparing it to those ports or the arcade/SNES/Genesis versions? I'm sure it could do some form of looser translation (similar to above systems) but asking it to do a pixel perfect rendition of the SNES version is asking too much.

 

I don't recall those old threads thinking about it in such a way.

[Atari5200]

i bet it could be a bare bone version of maybe the gameboy version with Color, not sure how well it would run though, would probably be pretty choppy. Might be one of those hypotheticals , would you sacrifice graphics for gameplay?

[Atarifever]

i bet it could be a bare bone version of maybe the gameboy version with Color, not sure how well it would run though, would probably be pretty choppy. Might be one of those hypotheticals , would you sacrifice graphics for gameplay?

Well, it's got to beat the

, and I have to admit, even that looks fun.

[supercat]

Is the Atari 7800 hardware really so crippled by it's rendering methods that it can't compete with similiar systems?

 

With modern hardware, the game could probably be done pretty easily on the 7800, actually, though the hardware would have cost too much back in the day.

 

Street Fighter 2 needs many frames of animation, which in turn require huge amounts of ROM (well over 64K). A conventional bank-switch cart would be inadequate, since it's doubtful that the graphics required for any given frame could be expected to all fit within 64K (since there may be nearly any combination of two opponents).

 

What I would think would be most helpful would be a cart which had two 4K areas of memory, in each of which the pages would be divided into four 64-byte sections. So the first banking area would be addresses $4000-$403F, $4100-$413F, ..., $4F00-$4F3F, the second from $4040-$407F, $4140-$417F, etc. So the bottom 8K of address space would contain eight banking areas.

 

Setting things up in this fashion should make it possible to draw both players and one projectile for each of them, all from separate areas of memory (display-list interrupts would be required every eight scan lines to adjust banking pointers).

 

If one were trying to save ROM, one could run the lower address pins as well as all the data pins through the memory controller; each of the banked areas would include an option to invert the lower five address bits, and to rearrange the data bits. This would cut the ROM requirement for storing player shapes roughly in half, since it would make it possible to flip players left to right.

[thomasholzer]

have you ever tried playing the C64, GB, and Spectrum versions? I own all three and i would say 'why did they bother'?

Edited June 10, 2007 by thomasholzer

[Shawn]

have you ever tried playing the C64, GB, and Spectrum versions? I own all three and i would say 'why did they bother'?

 

 

At the same time though, the MK ports to the gameboy B\W where good for what they where and if they where on the 7800 with color and a bit better gfx I would buy it.

[A Sprite]

have you ever tried playing the C64, GB, and Spectrum versions? I own all three and i would say 'why did they bother'?

 

 

I've never played the Spectrum and C64 versions, but the Gameboy version was a bait and switch. The character graphics aren't sprites - they're part of the background. It looks great on the back of the box, but it plays close to an LCD game.

 

Have you played Samurai Shodown, or the import games King of Fighters 96 and Zankurou Musouken?

Edited June 11, 2007 by A Sprite

[DracIsBack]

have you ever tried playing the C64, GB, and Spectrum versions? I own all three and i would say 'why did they bother'?

 

 

Heh -- kind of like MORTAL KOMBAT on the Sega Master System. It's a pretty cool technical achievement, but not all that much fun.

[Atari5200]

have you ever tried playing the C64, GB, and Spectrum versions? I own all three and i would say 'why did they bother'?

 

 

At the same time though, the MK ports to the gameboy B\W where good for what they where and if they where on the 7800 with color and a bit better gfx I would buy it.

 

Mortalk Kombat 1 on Gameboy was bad, extremely bad and almost unplayable. But MK2 was fantastic on the gameboy considering the hardware limitions and such. The old gameboy never ceased to amaze me when it came to quality, it had some pretty amazing games for a weak b/w system.

[EricBall]

I agree with supercat - the biggest difficulty in making a "big sprite" fighter for the 7800 is going to be the ROM size needed to store all of the pre-rendered sprites. (Though you might be able to cheat a little bit my having the sprite selection be part of the bankswitching instead of part of the display lists. Though I'm not sure how well that would map to up & down movement. Probably need to play with the display lists anyway for shots etc.)

 

It will also be difficult to reproduce the backgrounds, again due to ROM size and DMA limitations.

 

Assume 320B mode (3 colors per sprite, 4 color background), which is 2 bits per pixel, 4 pixels per byte. So the background would be 80 bytes wide and span three 4 byte headers. Each player would be a single 4 byte header (max 124 pixels wide), and then two more 4 byte headers for shots or other non-player sprites.

 

415 available GPU cycles per line - 264 cycles for the background leaves almost 10 bytes (40 pixels) per sprite, probably not wide enough.

 

Hmm.. go to 320D (4 colors/1 bit per pixel) for the background and 5 byte headers for background & sprites... only need two headers for the background. Sprites could be 18 bytes (72 pixels wide), much more reasonable.

 

That's assuming that you can live with the 4 color graphics (versus 1024 in the original), no 6 button controls, and no voice unless you do some kind of custom cart-based APU. (Well, you're gonna need a custom bankswitch anyway...)

[Shawn]

I agree with supercat - the biggest difficulty in making a "big sprite" fighter for the 7800 is going to be the ROM size needed to store all of the pre-rendered sprites. (Though you might be able to cheat a little bit my having the sprite selection be part of the bankswitching instead of part of the display lists. Though I'm not sure how well that would map to up & down movement. Probably need to play with the display lists anyway for shots etc.)

 

It will also be difficult to reproduce the backgrounds, again due to ROM size and DMA limitations.

 

Assume 320B mode (3 colors per sprite, 4 color background), which is 2 bits per pixel, 4 pixels per byte. So the background would be 80 bytes wide and span three 4 byte headers. Each player would be a single 4 byte header (max 124 pixels wide), and then two more 4 byte headers for shots or other non-player sprites.

 

415 available GPU cycles per line - 264 cycles for the background leaves almost 10 bytes (40 pixels) per sprite, probably not wide enough.

 

Hmm.. go to 320D (4 colors/1 bit per pixel) for the background and 5 byte headers for background & sprites... only need two headers for the background. Sprites could be 18 bytes (72 pixels wide), much more reasonable.

 

That's assuming that you can live with the 4 color graphics (versus 1024 in the original), no 6 button controls, and no voice unless you do some kind of custom cart-based APU. (Well, you're gonna need a custom bankswitch anyway...)

 

Limit the number of backgrounds, the player standards you have described are acceptable IMO, map the moves as punch is fire 1, kick is fire 2. Alt kick is foward+fire 1, alt. kick is foward+fire 2. One (maybe 2 for some dudes) special moves. Like Honda would have the crazy fists move, Blanka would have the shocker, Ken & Ryu the tiger uppercut and haboken,ect,ect. Heck you could even cut out some of the shitty players. I think a pole to decide what dudes to use would be best. I think the staple dudes and the 2 bosses would be enough myself. Heck you might be able to keep it down to 4megabits.

[Schmutzpuppe]

I think you can make a decent version in 160B mode which is basically the resolution of the c64 version.

Trying to make it in 320 mode isn’t the way to go I guess.

[Bakasama]

I don't about Street Fighter II, I do really think that Yier Kung Fu is quite doable on the 7800 however.

[8th lutz]

Nothing against Street fighter 2 but, Yie Ar Kung-Fu would be better for the fit for the 7800 towards head to head fighting games. Nothing against Street fighter 2, but the rom size of the 7800 concerns me for a good arcade port of street fighter 2.

Edited June 12, 2007 by 8th lutz

[Atarifever]

Nothing against Street fighter 2 but, Yie Ar Kung-Fu would be better for the fit for the 7800 towards head to head fighting games. Nothing against Street fighter 2, but the rom size of the 7800 concerns me for a good arcade port of street fighter 2.

Yie Ar Kung Fu would also be a better choice in fitting with the overall 7800 classics library.

Edited June 12, 2007 by Atarifever

[Shawn]

I think you can make a decent version in 160B mode which is basically the resolution of the c64 version.

Trying to make it in 320 mode isn’t the way to go I guess.

 

 

Stop talking it and start writing it (please )

[supercat]

I think you can make a decent version in 160B mode which is basically the resolution of the c64 version. Trying to make it in 320 mode isn’t the way to go I guess.

 

Any objects requiring transparency on the 7800 are effectively limited to 160-dot resolution, even in 320 mode. Sometimes it may be possible to improve the game's appearance with a 320-mode background (e.g. One on One) but in an SF2 clone that would just be a waste.

 

The best design approach would probably be for each display list to be padded out to ~48 bytes. Five bytes for the first player, four each for the other player and the missiles, and 31 bytes for display lists to handle the background (using 16-color mode for the whole screen would probably use too much bandwidth; using a mix of modes should be better).

[Atari060]

Hi,

 

I think that street fighter can be done. If you look at fight night, it has nice, big characters. If someone could do a hack, so that the player could use the special moves, and/or change the player sprites and draw some nice backgrounds, we could have a really nice sf clone...

 

Just a thought...

[A Sprite]

It's not so simple as that. A simple graphics hack would give us a Street Fighter with one frame of animation per attack, no counters, no combos, no air game, and an AI that....can I swear in here?

 

Never mind. Your intentions are good, but Streetfighter isn't as simple a back and forth slapfight. At it's heart it's Rock, Paper, Scissors. In the unlikely event anyone is good enough to be realistically considering doing this (consider their jobs and families), half the trouble is going to be just balancing the beast and perfecting the AI to where it dosen't need to cheat to compete wiith a human player...

 

I don't envy them. We might be talking 4 minute mile here.

Edited June 12, 2007 by A Sprite

[Trip_Cannon]

A Street Fighter game could never make it on to any Atari game console.... Because Atari is too cheap to buy the rights...

 

Anyway, Street Fighter made it on to almost all 8-bit machines. One thing needs to be mentioned... they all pretty much suck... gameplay is awful... Most only include SOME characters... Got to say, I was impressed by the Speccy's approach... probably plays a heck of a lot better than the C64 version.

 

There was also a NES hack and an official Sega Master version. The sega version looks great but is a bit choppy. There are tons of videos on youtube for the NES versions. Even found an alpha hack for NES.

[A Sprite]

Anyway, Street Fighter made it on to almost all 8-bit machines. One thing needs to be mentioned... they all pretty much suck... gameplay is awful...

 

How much of that is due to their trying to run 16 bit sprites on 8 bit hardware? The GBC ran a very playable Street Fighter Alpha.

[Trip_Cannon]

Anyway, Street Fighter made it on to almost all 8-bit machines. One thing needs to be mentioned... they all pretty much suck... gameplay is awful...

 

How much of that is due to their trying to run 16 bit sprites on 8 bit hardware? The GBC ran a very playable Street Fighter Alpha.

 

You mean like the brilliant C64 version?

 

I'm no tech guru when it comes to stuff like this, but the Gameboy Color was far more powerful than it's counterpart. And I'm going to go as far to say that it was far more powerful than a 7800. I mean, it even got a full conversion of Dragon's Lair. Can the 7800 do that?

[Atarifever]

Anyway, Street Fighter made it on to almost all 8-bit machines. One thing needs to be mentioned... they all pretty much suck... gameplay is awful...

 

How much of that is due to their trying to run 16 bit sprites on 8 bit hardware? The GBC ran a very playable Street Fighter Alpha.

 

You mean like the brilliant C64 version?

 

I'm no tech guru when it comes to stuff like this, but the Gameboy Color was far more powerful than it's counterpart. And I'm going to go as far to say that it was far more powerful than a 7800. I mean, it even got a full conversion of Dragon's Lair. Can the 7800 do that?

Wait, so the computer Street Fighters suck, but you're using the terrible Dragon's Lair GBC as proof of how powerful it was? Right.

Edited June 13, 2007 by Atarifever

[DracIsBack]

I'm no tech guru when it comes to stuff like this, but the Gameboy Color was far more powerful than it's counterpart. And I'm going to go as far to say that it was far more powerful than a 7800. I mean, it even got a full conversion of Dragon's Lair. Can the 7800 do that?

 

It had more memory and colors. In terms of "power", both were still powered by 8-bit processors.