Does Jag Doom run in highcolor mode?

[kool kitty89]

I was comparing a few different versions of Doom and just noticed something about the Jaguar port. (mind you this is in Progct Tempest as I don't own a jaguar)

The Jarguar version seems to use proper gouraud shading with full color, unlike the posterized stuff (I think 8 light levels) found in the PC (or SNES) versions, or complete lack of shading in the 32x port (not sure about 3DO, or PSX/Saturn though)

The logical conclusion would be that the Jaguar is rendering using a 16-bit color display (24-bit would be totally unnecessary).

[Goochman]

I think that was the one big thing for the Jag version was its color shading. But unfort was droped to 160 rez and no in game music

[JagChris]

I do believe the PSX version only uses 256 colors.

[busterm]

The 3do version is by far the worse. even the snes version blows it out of the water. ArtDink or what ever they were called were spotty at best when it came to programing.

[JagChris]

I think that was the one big thing for the Jag version was its color shading. But unfort was droped to 160 rez and no in game music

 

Quick PC port with nearly no optimization.

[jaybird3rd]

The Jaguar version of DOOM definitely used more colors than the PC version, but the frame rate was lower, and of course the music is missing.

 

Though I'm sure you've seen it already, here are a few old posts from John Carmack about the Jaguar:

 

Ah, the Jaguar...

by John Carmack on Saturday March 04, @04:18PM (#1225529)

(User #101025 Info)

I actually dug up all my old jaguar development hardware to give to these guys a year or two ago.

 

Unfortunately, it turned out that I had lost the C compiler that I had retargeted to the jaguar RISC engines, so DOOM was no longer buildable.

 

There is something noble about developing on a dead platform -- it is so completely for the joy of the development, without any commercial motivation.

 

The quick recap on the jaguar:

 

The memory, bus, blitter and video processor were 64 bits wide, but the processors (68k and two custom risc processors) were 32 bit.

 

The blitter could do basic texture mapping of horizontal and vertical spans, but because there wasn't any caching involved, every pixel caused two ram page misses and only used 1/4 of the 64 bit bus. Two 64 bit buffers would have easily trippled texture mapping performance. Unfortunate.

 

It could make better use of the 64 bit bus with Z buffered, shaded triangles, but that didn't make for compelling games.

 

It offered a useful color space option that allowed you to do lighting effects based on a single channel, instead of RGB.

 

The video compositing engine was the most innovative part of the console. All of the characters in Wolf3D were done with just the back end scalar instead of blitting. Still, the experience with the limitations and hard failure cases of that gave me good amunition to rail against microsoft's (thankfully aborted) talisman project.

 

The little risc engines were decent processors. I was surprised that they didn't use off the shelf designs, but they basically worked ok. They had some design hazards (write after write) that didn't get fixed, but the only thing truly wrong with them was that they had scratchpad memory instead of caches, and couldn't execute code from main memory. I had to chunk the DOOM renderer into nine sequentially loaded overlays to get it working (with hindsight, I would have done it differently in about three...).

 

The 68k was slow. This was the primary problem of the system. You options were either taking it easy, running everything on the 68k, and going slow, or sweating over lots of overlayed parallel asm chunks to make something go fast on the risc processors.

 

That is why playstation kicked so much ass for development -- it was programmed like a single serial processor with a single fast accelerator.

 

If the jaguar had dumped the 68k and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony.

 

Now the LYNX, on the other hand, was very much The Right Thing from a programming standpoint. A fast little processor (for its niche), a good color bitmapped display, and a general purpose blitter.

 

Price and form factor weighed too heavily against it.

 

John Carmack

 

Re:Ah, the Jaguar...

by John Carmack on Saturday March 04, @04:55PM (#1225537)

(User #101025 Info)

>Actually, I believe you're referring to Carl Forhan of Songbird Productions

 

Heh, sorry... I just assumed all jaguar development was coming from a single crazy group. :-)

 

Even if the memory controller hadn't been broken, performance would still have sucked really bad without a cache.

 

The jaguar was definately significantly hampered by its technical flaws, which kept me from ever being too big of a jaguar booster. I was proud of my work on Wolf and DOOM (more so than just about any of the other console work Id has been involved in until just recently), but in the end, the better consoles won the war.

 

John Carmack

[JagChris]

There are other quotes from him somewhere as well. regarding the Jagdoom engine being nowhere near optimized etc.

[Hyper_Eye]

There are other quotes from him somewhere as well. regarding the Jagdoom engine being nowhere near optimized etc.

 

Yes I remember reading more from him that went into more detail on the Jagdoom engine and what he might have done differently.

[JagChris]

There are other quotes from him somewhere as well. regarding the Jagdoom engine being nowhere near optimized etc.

 

Yes I remember reading more from him that went into more detail on the Jagdoom engine and what he might have done differently.

 

Looking for that quote I found one from John Matthieson who says JagDoom pushed the Jag to its absolute limit which we all know now is complete BS. How can the actual designer of the Jag have no idea whats going on?

[Hyper_Eye]

Looking for that quote I found one from John Matthieson who says JagDoom pushed the Jag to its absolute limit which we all know now is complete BS. How can the actual designer of the Jag have no idea whats going on?

 

Yeah that is crazy considering even Carmack said that Jagdoom could have been better in many ways with the power that was available in the Jag.

[JagChris]

Looking for that quote I found one from John Matthieson who says JagDoom pushed the Jag to its absolute limit which we all know now is complete BS. How can the actual designer of the Jag have no idea whats going on?

 

Yeah that is crazy considering even Carmack said that Jagdoom could have been better in many ways with the power that was available in the Jag.

 

In the same interview John Matthieson claims tempest 2k is the best game on the Jag or something to that effect. This comes off funny considering Jeff Minters testimony that John pulled him aside after he finished T2k and told him something to the effect that he wasn't impressed at all with t2k and he was really disappointed in Minters work on it or somesuch.

 

Maybe the guy is one of those intelligent idiots.

[Gorf]

What Carmack said is what I've been saying all along. Had he known about the main code work around,

Doom would have been 320 x 240 30+ FPS like the PC with HIGH color...it is using the CRY 16 bit mode.

You can not get smooth gradient light shading like DOOM is doing in anything less than CRY mode on

the Jag or any machine for that matter at that time(not even the PC would handle high color as

well as the Jag could.)

 

The PS1 does t-mapping so well,because like it's PC counter part it uses 256 colors in texturing.

Sure it can use higer color but you will see half the poly count as it tries to do it. If the Jag

coders tried 256 color mode instead of 16 bit CRY texturing, they too would be able to get much

smoother and faster texturing on the Jag. Still not as many polies but no doubt a faster frame

rate and more polies than they got trying to texture with CRY ..for example HoverStrike.

 

HOWEVER, though the frame rate of HS is half or less what the PS1 did, it is by far superior

looking and certainly much more colorful than most of the early PS1 games. Had the HS guys

known about main code tricks they too would have doubled the frame rate, both in the cart and

CD version of HS. Instead they rely heavily on the 1/2 speed 1/4 bus width 68k all too much.

 

This is why DOOM did not achive 30FPS or more at a high rez. This is not because the Jag can't

do it, but because time would not have permited DOOM to be finished in any reasonable time trying

to do everything in GPU modules and also because they did not realize(no one did at that time)

that you could reliably run J-RISC code from main RAM.

 

When you consider the Jag is only 27 megabytes less across its bus per second than PS1, there is

no reason to believe it can't handle much higher frame rates and higher poly counts than it did

using main ram GU code. PS1 = 133MB/sec while Jag was 106MB/sec.

 

The PS1 will always do more polies per second hands down but the JAguar could have done much

better given the right tools in the developers hands.

Edited January 16, 2010 by Gorf

[kool kitty89]

I think that was the one big thing for the Jag version was its color shading. But unfort was droped to 160 rez and no in game music

Yeah, I know, it's 160 pixel wide mode (low detail mode on PC), or rather, each pair of horizonatl pixels are identical (hence on PC it's actuall running in 320x200 regardless of th erendering), 32x also uses this, but in a smaller window (so it's more like 128 width), SNES is even worse and seems to use lower vertical resolution as well, and a smaller window and poor framerate (but also with even less ROM or RAM than the 32x -128 kB and 2 MB ROM, and limited 16-bit custom RISC CPU for rendering), not sure about 3DO, but I'd immagine so. (really not sure about PSX/Saturn though)

 

And PSX/Saturn got amvient sound in place of music, so little better there. (especially in leu of the awesoem 3DO tracks)

 

The 3do version is by far the worse. even the snes version blows it out of the water. ArtDink or what ever they were called were spotty at best when it came to programing.

The SNES version was a bit more optimized for what it was though, it had many maps closer than other ports, more selectively removed levels (thus having more episodes than the 32x), it also has the shading which 32x lacks entirely. (both lack multisided sprites) The difficulty system/level selection and lack of saves sucks on SNES. Framerate and detail level are awful. From what I've seen 3DO plays a lot smoother, even at the large window size. (not the really big one requiring a code though, the 32x sized one) I'm not sure about control ont he 3DO either, that was often a complaint (though sometimes attressed by adjusting the tightness of the screws in the controllers I think) The SNES has horrible lag though, SNES 9x 1.51 mimicks this well, take a look if you don't own the game for SNES. (I find it barely playable, I know someone who finds it more playable than Star Fox, but I most definitely disagree -in fact I find starfox rather unplayable when spe-up on older emulators, liek SNES9x 1.41 -which makes Doom much more playable)

The SFX are also wonky on SNES, they tend to lag and drop out randomly.

 

 

The Jaguar version of DOOM definitely used more colors than the PC version, but the frame rate was lower, and of course the music is missing.

 

Though I'm sure you've seen it already, here are a few old posts from John Carmack about the Jaguar:

 

Faster than what kind of PC . I doubt not a reasonably priced mid-range 486 PC from 1994. (and still many times more expensive than a Jag, of course, many users would be using upgraded older machins, so not an outright total cost -and PCs are good for more than games)

 

What Carmack said is what I've been saying all along. Had he known about the main code work around,

Doom would have been 320 x 240 30+ FPS like the PC with HIGH color...it is using the CRY 16 bit mode.

You can not get smooth gradient light shading like DOOM is doing in anything less than CRY mode on

the Jag or any machine for that matter at that time(not even the PC would handle high color as

well as the Jag could.)

And most games didn't even offer highcolor on PC (higher resolution was more common though, 640x480 started to be offerd for many later DOS games, some higher than that as well -Quake has crazy high resolutions, or at least th efinal DOS release does, as dose Duke Nukem 3D)

 

The PS1 does t-mapping so well,because like it's PC counter part it uses 256 colors in texturing.

Sure it can use higer color but you will see half the poly count as it tries to do it. If the Jag

coders tried 256 color mode instead of 16 bit CRY texturing, they too would be able to get much

smoother and faster texturing on the Jag. Still not as many polies but no doubt a faster frame

rate and more polies than they got trying to texture with CRY ..for example HoverStrike.

Polygons... that wouldn't apply to Doom, would it? (or was the engine modified for PSX to use polygons instead of CPU driven raycasting?)

 

When you consider the Jag is only 27 megabytes less across its bus per second than PS1, there is

no reason to believe it can't handle much higher frame rates and higher poly counts than it did

using main ram GU code. PS1 = 133MB/sec while Jag was 106MB/sec.

But PSX has multiple caches (CPU and GPU -allowing VRAM to be used as both sourse and destination -as Kskunk pointed out before) and 2 busses. (each ~133 MB/s I beleive)

 

The PS1 will always do more polies per second hands down but the JAguar could have done much

better given the right tools in the developers hands.

Yep, get into things that the PSX has to rely on the CPU for (ie non tryangle rasterization -like raycasting or voxel engines) and you start to level the playing feild, and play towards the jag's strengths in flexibility. (albeit it's rather hindered in its current form opposed to what the hardware's full potential might have been with a few modifications -quickest/simplest/most practical & foolproof change being the 68EC020 -still had a lot of other management/marketing/funding problems at Atari that were problematic on top of -and related to- the hardware problems)

Of course, this has almost all coem up before in the 1993 what if thread.

Edited January 16, 2010 by kool kitty89

[Gorf]

Of course, this has almost all coem up before in the 1993 what if thread.

 

The Jag as it is would be powerful enough to do much better games than it has.

BS is plenty proof of that and there is a ton of computing going on. Probabl more

than most PS1 games by far.

 

Even with all the fancy caching of the PS1, the Jaguar is hardly a slouch..just a lot more

of a nightmare to deal with.

Edited January 18, 2010 by Gorf

[Crazyace]

Comparing Jag Doom and PSX doom is actually pretty interesting, as they are both good versions.

The Jag version has really smooth lighting that's much better than the PC 256 colour look, but it is half res.

The PSX version has different coloured lighting - better than the PC version, but not as smooth as the jaguar look. However it's drawing at full res, so it's running twice as much as the Jaguar version.

In terms of frame rate I think the PSX version wins out - but the Jaguar version is still pretty amazing. ( It's far better than the 32X/3D0/SNES versions available at the time )

[JagChris]

What Carmack said is what I've been saying all along. Had he known about the main code work around,

Doom would have been 320 x 240 30+ FPS like the PC with HIGH color...it is using the CRY 16 bit mode.

You can not get smooth gradient light shading like DOOM is doing in anything less than CRY mode on

the Jag or any machine for that matter at that time(not even the PC would handle high color as

well as the Jag could.)

 

Even without the main code workaround it looks like it could of done much better. It seems to use mostly the 68k and Carmack stated it took him 9 flips to get the entire render into the local and he believes now in hindsight he could name that tune in 3.

[jeremysart]

The 3do version is by far the worse. even the snes version blows it out of the water. ArtDink or what ever they were called were spotty at best when it came to programing.

 

Before picking on the SNES port of Doom, consider this:

 

A majority of people give the SNES port of Doom a lot of shit for having 1. such low resolution and slow frame rate, and 2. bitch about no floor textures or monsters always facing forwards, but let me explain this clearly;

 

1. This is running on an SNES, with NO extra hardware! Just the SNES and a Super FX chip! Not a giant mushroom with an extra power supply!

Though the game is a little sluggish, and looks like the Doom marine needs some glasses, this port of Doom is actually the MOST accurate out of ANY console port in existence. They kept all of the original textures, all original architecture and level design, all original secrets, including 3 secret levels, plus managed to keep 22 of the original levels from all three episodes, not to mention the Doom soundtrack sis rockin' on the SNES!

 

2. No floor textures: Are you really staring at the floor while you play Doom? Not such a big deal, sludge is green, lava is red, water is blue, get over it.

Monsters only face forward: Yeah? They only face forward in the 32X version too, but I never hear anyone complain about it. For me, the fact that I can't sneak up on the enemy makes the SNES version more of a challenge, which gives it more replay value imho.

 

The 32X, Saturn, Jag, 3D0 and GBA ports were all abysmal bucherings of Doom.

The only other worthy port is the PSX version, which still changed the level design, textures, sounds, music, and ending of the game, and the GBA port of Doom II is noteworthy for being pretty accurate too.

[JagChris]

The 3do version is by far the worse. even the snes version blows it out of the water. ArtDink or what ever they were called were spotty at best when it came to programing.

 

Before picking on the SNES port of Doom, consider this:

 

A majority of people give the SNES port of Doom a lot of shit for having 1. such low resolution and slow frame rate, and 2. bitch about no floor textures or monsters always facing forwards, but let me explain this clearly;

 

1. This is running on an SNES, with NO extra hardware! Just the SNES and a Super FX chip!

 

I do believe the FX chip counts as extra hardware.

[Gorf]

The 3do version is by far the worse. even the snes version blows it out of the water. ArtDink or what ever they were called were spotty at best when it came to programing.

 

Before picking on the SNES port of Doom, consider this:

 

A majority of people give the SNES port of Doom a lot of shit for having 1. such low resolution and slow frame rate, and 2. bitch about no floor textures or monsters always facing forwards, but let me explain this clearly;

 

1. This is running on an SNES, with NO extra hardware! Just the SNES and a Super FX chip! Not a giant mushroom with an extra power supply!

Though the game is a little sluggish, and looks like the Doom marine needs some glasses, this port of Doom is actually the MOST accurate out of ANY console port in existence. They kept all of the original textures, all original architecture and level design, all original secrets, including 3 secret levels, plus managed to keep 22 of the original levels from all three episodes, not to mention the Doom soundtrack sis rockin' on the SNES!

 

2. No floor textures: Are you really staring at the floor while you play Doom? Not such a big deal, sludge is green, lava is red, water is blue, get over it.

Monsters only face forward: Yeah? They only face forward in the 32X version too, but I never hear anyone complain about it. For me, the fact that I can't sneak up on the enemy makes the SNES version more of a challenge, which gives it more replay value imho.

 

The 32X, Saturn, Jag, 3D0 and GBA ports were all abysmal bucherings of Doom.

The only other worthy port is the PSX version, which still changed the level design, textures, sounds, music, and ending of the game, and the GBA port of Doom II is noteworthy for being pretty accurate too.

 

 

Jag version Butchered?

 

It has all the ORIGINAL game play where as the SNES does'nt yet you say it's butchered and the SNES is'nt?

 

No floor textures, enemies face you which right there screws up the game play mechanics and the

fun of sneaking up on the enemy and the Jaguar version is butchered? It even needs the assitance

of another processor and it still has a horrible frame rate.

 

LOL!

 

This has to be the best chain pulling joke I've heard all year!

 

This is right up there with the two kids in a game store I was in, telling me

how much better the gamecube was then the DC.

 

Nintendo fan boy much?

 

 

Besides, the creator of Doom still says the Jaguar version was the best one for a console

so please get over yourself.

Edited January 18, 2010 by Gorf

[kool kitty89]

Of course, this has almost all coem up before in the 1993 what if thread.

 

The Jag as it is would be powerful enough to do much better games than it has.

BS is plenty proof of that and there is a ton of computing going on. Probabl more

than most PS1 games by far.

 

Even with all the fancy caching of the PS1, the Jaguar is hardly a slouch..just a lot more

of a nightmare to deal with.

Yeah, but it's not at all friendly to work on, especially at the time. (maybe if there were a lot of developers/programmers like id and Carmak out there, things may have been different, but there weren't/aren't) Short of that, there were 2 basic options, Atari could ahve invested in putting out soem decent dev tools to address hardware issues, or they could have switched to the 020 before finalizing the design. (the latter seeming more foolproof given the situation -and actually working out the bugs would have been less likely than either given the situation at the time)

Then again, good tools could have come later as well, but it wasn't until ~mid 1994 (I think) that Atari started benefitting from the Sega lawsuit they won, so they should have had reasonably funds then, but that would have been a tad late. (and regardless they never did release better tools -probably should have tried to licence some of id's work on the Jag -like the compiler)

 

Also, BS may be really impressive to the technically mindided, but how much so woult it to the masses at the time being wowed by the Sony's textured polygon pusher, I'm sure there would be some to take notive of the nice smooth shading (especially when it was applied to textured surfaces like doom), but it might be a bit tougher to appeal to the masses and general gaming media. A game like Phase Zereo probably would have wowed them though, especially anyone who didn't know what voxel rendering was, thinkin it was an extremely detailed polygonal 3D environment instead. Games using such non plygon rasterization would be playing to the consoles strengths though, which is whad was needed for sure. (Doom type raycasters, and voxel engines, possible with soem polygonal models mixed into either -immagine battlemorph or cybermorph with voxel terrain)

Again, with BS specifically, to the average/untrained viewer, how mcuh difference is there between BS and a game like Shadow Squadron on the 32x for example? (sure, gameplay style is a bit different, and actually playing it would give more of that feeling, the but the only obvious visual difference would be the shading/lighting effects in BS, Shadow Squadron even runs in higcolor mode, albeit limited to the 15-bit RGB of the 32x and also to the 128 kB framebuffer size, so the screen is clipped -but tactfully so as to put it mostly into overscan opposed to Virtua Racing Deluxe) BS shines in its amazing game logic/AI (which I can only judge on 2nd hand experiences, but does sound damn impressive), which would generally be harder to show off to the public, especially with only words and pictures. (ie in an article)

 

1. This is running on an SNES, with NO extra hardware! Just the SNES and a Super FX chip! Not a giant mushroom with an extra power supply!

Though the game is a little sluggish, and looks like the Doom marine needs some glasses, this port of Doom is actually the MOST accurate out of ANY console port in existence. They kept all of the original textures, all original architecture and level design, all original secrets, including 3 secret levels, plus managed to keep 22 of the original levels from all three episodes, not to mention the Doom soundtrack sis rockin' on the SNES!

Music is decent on the SNES, the 32x version could have been far better than it was though (stupid GEMS sound engine), as it is it's rarely on par with Adlib on PC doom... SFX are funky on SNES though (odd cutt-out and lag), so sound is somewhat problematic.

 

I already addressed his in my last post, the 21.48 MHz custom RSIC GSU-2 (SuperFX2) was somewhat limited, but probably could have doen a LOT better with fewer other limitations, SNES doom has only 2MB of ROM (2/3 of 32x and 1/2 of Jag) and the GSU only has 128 kB of work ram (not sure about access to SNES DRAM, but that's slow 8-bit DRAM) even 32x has 256 kB while Jag has a nice 2MB chunk. (enough to allow game to be loaded into RAM rather than running from ROM) Both 32x and SNS probably have to decompress/stream a lot of data on the fly with limited ROM and RAM, eating up CPU resourse.

Anyway, the SNES was better suited video wise, it has 256 indexed color modes and a 15-bit RGB palette (which is what 32x doom uses as well), if you were willing to use a 16-color palette indexed from 9-bit RGB -like Atari ST- (or 4 subpalettes, with dynamic palette swapping for optimization, or even more, using separate layers to render enemies/sprites, BG and far BG) then you could do the same on the Genesis with an on-cart processor. (stick one of those SH2s, or even an SH1 on a cart along with a chunk of RAM) The Genesis VDP also has pretty limited DMA bandwidth, so you'd likely need to crop the top and bottom of the screen to get decent perfomance (liek Virtua Racing does).

 

2. No floor textures: Are you really staring at the floor while you play Doom? Not such a big deal, sludge is green, lava is red, water is blue, get over it.

Monsters only face forward: Yeah? They only face forward in the 32X version too, but I never hear anyone complain about it. For me, the fact that I can't sneak up on the enemy makes the SNES version more of a challenge, which gives it more replay value imho.

The lack of floor/ceiling textures is really noticable, the lack of textures scrolling by screws up the feeling of movement. Then again, at least the SNES version has some shading, 32x lacks that.

 

As far as textures though, the SNES does have some additional wall textures that the Jag (and derivatives -32x/PSX/3DO/GBA etc) is missing, albeit at low resolution, and of course there are bosses that the Jag (and derivatives) are missing, and closer maps to the PC original. (all tradeoffs with the graphics, awful framerate, laggy controls, and lack of saves with funky level select system)

 

The 32X, Saturn, Jag, 3D0 and GBA ports were all abysmal bucherings of Doom.

The only other worthy port is the PSX version, which still changed the level design, textures, sounds, music, and ending of the game, and the GBA port of Doom II is noteworthy for being pretty accurate too.

I think GBA is decent for a handheld, too bad they censored it for the Teen rating. (and I don't theink the SNES version was even censored so much as just had a lot of animation cut out to save space in that preacious 2MB of ROM)

The origianl PSX version, like 3DO uses a similar level set as Jag Doom, and also replaces the music with stupid ambient sound, changing the unique feel of the game.

Jag doom is perfectly playable and only lacks in-game music. (I'd assume due to lack of available resourses available for the DSP -they did put the tracks in there though -in the transitions) With 6 MB of ROM they might have been able to fit the entire game with proper maps, textures, and bosses onto the Jag. (but may have pushed the price unnecessarily high) That would also have meant that subsequent ports (most of which being derived from the Jag version) would have those features as well. (PSX ultimate doom went beyond that, though I don't remember if the maps and textures were revised to be more like PC or not -I'm pretty sure they weren't -the telltale sign being the lack of pillars near the staircase in E1M1)

 

SNES doom is barely playable though, the framerate might be tolerable if the control wasn't so laggy and if circle strafing was possible. I'd say 3DO doom is probably more playable. (not sure about controls though, bur framerate is better in the mid window size, an dmuch better in the small window -cloer to Jag, but really small) 32x is definitely more playble.

[kool kitty89]

I totally forgot to mention Wolf3D on the SNES, now that IS pretty impressive, no added hardware, just the slow 8-bit 128 kB of DRAM and 3.58 MHz 65816 derivative.

Now it's been butchered to hell with cencorship, but looking past that it's pretty damn impressive, really low res, but smooth and quite playable. (more than doom IMO) and single sided sprites are a bit less important for Wolf3D, albeit a drawback nonetheless. (one the Jag/3DO ports had as well though)

 

Interesting to note that that game runds in mode 7, and in an unconventional manner as a fixed game window. (only the status bar characters and weapons are on th esprite layer) The game window uses a 14x12 tile (112x96 pixel) display scaled to exactly 2x vertically and horizontally (double wide and tall pixels), that scaling to a large window adn the fact that it's the only chunky pixel mode on SNES are probably why they used mode 7. (all other modes are planar, including Mode 3 which doom uses)

[sd32]

I love to read your posts koolkitty, you always bring up interesting stuff.

[Hyper_Eye]

Monsters only face forward: Yeah? They only face forward in the 32X version too, but I never hear anyone complain about it. For me, the fact that I can't sneak up on the enemy makes the SNES version more of a challenge, which gives it more replay value imho.

 

I'm not going to bother with your whole post because it is such a joke and I don't have the kind of time it would deserve should it actually be taken seriously. But I have to laugh particularly hard at the part I quoted. You actually believe that having all the enemies face forward adds replay value? Not only does it remove the aspect of sneaking up on enemies but it also removes one of the most revolutionary and important aspects of Doom which is the ability for the enemies to get angry or confused and kill each other. This was a hugely exploitable feature in Doom that allowed you to set up situations where you can get by when you don't have near enough ammo and health and are facing huge numbers of enemies. To say that removing this adds to the replay value is borderline mental. The fact is that the snes port of Doom is unplayable at best. The controls are awful and anything further away than a couple of feet is a mish-mash of color blobs. It has some redeeming qualities but not enough to actually sit through all three episodes of the game they managed to cram in there.

 

Oh yeah... both the SNES and the Jaguar are missing five of the original levels (each missing a different five than the other.) But the Jaguar has 24 levels in total compared to the 22 on SNES because the Jaguar has 2 levels that aren't in the original Doom.

[Gorf]

Also, BS may be really impressive to the technically mindided, but how much so woult it to the masses at the time being wowed by the Sony's textured polygon pusher, I'm sure there would be some to take notive of the nice smooth shading (especially when it was applied to textured surfaces like doom), but it might be a bit tougher to appeal to the masses and general gaming media. A game like Phase Zereo probably would have wowed them though, especially anyone who didn't know what voxel rendering was, thinkin it was an extremely detailed polygonal 3D environment instead. Games using such non plygon rasterization would be playing to the consoles strengths though, which is whad was needed for sure. (Doom type raycasters, and voxel engines, possible with soem polygonal models mixed into either -immagine battlemorph or cybermorph with voxel terrain)

Again, with BS specifically, to the average/untrained viewer, how mcuh difference is there between BS and a game like Shadow Squadron on the 32x for example? (sure, gameplay style is a bit different, and actually playing it would give more of that feeling, the but the only obvious visual difference would be the shading/lighting effects in BS, Shadow Squadron even runs in higcolor mode, albeit limited to the 15-bit RGB of the 32x and also to the 128 kB framebuffer size, so the screen is clipped -but tactfully so as to put it mostly into overscan opposed to Virtua Racing Deluxe) BS shines in its amazing game logic/AI (which I can only judge on 2nd hand experiences, but does sound damn impressive), which would generally be harder to show off to the public, especially with only words and pictures. (ie in an article)

 

 

 

BattleSphere for one is a networking game. The first console to ever allow 32 players

connected. The only console to actually improve the speed of the game every node you add.

Aside fromthe networking, just in single play mode, Shadow Squadron as cool as the game

might be does not have the replay value of BS on it's best day. Not then , not now , not

ever. It's clear you never played BS, because the high level of insult you commit even

comparing it to a game like SS.

 

Graphically, in action, SS does not even come close and that one bit of color the CRY mode

of the Jaguar has over the 15 bit mode garbage is not only twice the colors but CRY is a special

mode of the Jaguar in that it comes closer to looking like TRUE color because if the way the

palette and color logic work. SS is a neat game but the frame rate is a dog. You never see BS

drop under 60 unless you have over 256 models on the screen at one time and even then it drops

no lower than 30. That is single player mode only. Once you network the game, it never drops

below 30.

 

 

Until you play BS, it is best not to compare it to inferior hacks like SS. It is truly and

painfully insulting.....no ...really.Believe me, you have not lived as a gamer until the

pilot's with jet packs of BS hand you your ass. SS cant shine BS's shoes.

 

If it were one of the first games out for Jaguar, it would have rocked the gaming world

and the PS1 would never be able to generate such a AI and game logic monster. One MIPS

can not compete on it's best day against dual J-RISC chips. The best you could hope for

on the PS1 is a texture mapped wanna be.

 

PS1 to this day can't network past two consoles that I know of. It would choke painfully

trying to use a voxel engine and you'd never see a landscape like that of PZ on PS1.

Not on it's best day. Polygons yeah, voxels, not a chance.

Edited January 19, 2010 by Gorf

[kool kitty89]

BattleSphere for one is a networking game. The first console to ever allow 32 players

connected. The only console to actually improve the speed of the game every node you add.

Aside fromthe networking, just in single play mode, Shadow Squadron as cool as the game

might be does not have the replay value of BS on it's best day. Not then , not now , not

ever. It's clear you never played BS, because the high level of insult you commit even

comparing it to a game like SS.

Got it, I wasn't thinking about framerate so much when I wrote that, and I only have video capture uploads (obviously not fully demonstrating the framerate or graphical detail), I'll defeinitely try to check it out in persone some day. As rare as it is, probably most likely at a convention, unless I somehow meet someone locally who owns it personally.

The networking thing is certainly cool, but to be honest, I don't think that would have caught on too well for the masses durring the Jag's life. (I think Xbox was the first to have any kind of popularity with local networking -outside of PCs of course) I'm sure it would have been popular for hardcore fans though. (modem play would have been interesting though, fairly limited at that time though -but Doom in particular could have befitted from that -even the SNES and Genesis had breif online services)

 

Graphically, in action, SS does not even come close and that one bit of color the CRY mode

of the Jaguar has over the 15 bit mode garbage is not only twice the colors but CRY is a special

mode of the Jaguar in that it comes closer to looking like TRUE color because if the way the

palette and color logic work. SS is a neat game but the frame rate is a dog. You never see BS

drop under 60 unless you have over 256 models on the screen at one time and even then it drops

no lower than 30. That is single player mode only. Once you network the game, it never drops

below 30.

OK, SS was definitely a weak comparison, it's a far simpler and more arcade style game, I was more talking about if from the really average consumer's perspective (no big time/hardcore gamer types), although they'd at least notice the drtail difference to some degree and the framerate, even if soem wouldn't epreciate the more complex/rich gameplay. This came up before, but other games (like the X-wing series) would definitely be closer to BS in that respect (non arcade style, complex space sims), not that I'm arguing those would be comparable in AI complexity and such. (I can't) I mean, SS would be more comprable than Star Wars arcade and stuf like that, but that wasn't even the issue... I mean SS doesn't even really have proper dogfighting (AI seems pretty simple)

 

And what exactly is 16-bit CRY mode, I've read a bit of the Jag's hardware summary online (not any proper hardware doccuments though -and the FAQ on AA isn't too much to go by -and I can't seem to find soem articles on Jag sector which were there a year ago). I'd assume it was an indexted 16-bit color mode (so a selected palette from the full 24-bitmaster palette rather than a fixed RGB palette as with the 32x obviously), but does the Jag even work from an RGB palette or use soemthing else, like YCbCr colorspace? And from the sound of it, CRY is more than just a normal 16-bit indexed palette. (as in, more than just 65,536 entries seleced from a 24-bit palette)

 

Until you play BS, it is best not to compare it to inferior hacks like SS. It is truly and

painfully insulting.....no ...really.Believe me, you have not lived as a gamer until the

pilot's with jet packs of BS hand you your ass. SS cant shine BS's shoes.

OK, this really interests me, especially as a flight/space sim fan, but again, the oppertunities are limited. I think you already know I don't have a jaguar (though that's not so bad, you can find OK deals still occasionally for basic units ~$30 -nothing like some of the deals ~3-4 years ago though, before I got more into the retro electronics stuff), but anyway, th emain barrier is the cost and rarity of that game, again, possibly at a convention if its available for play, otherwise all I can do is hope I make freinds with someone locally who owns it. That or it somehow gets ported to another platform. (but that would need a custom embedded emulator to really be accurate I'd think, and I don't think that's likely to happen)

 

If it were one of the first games out for Jaguar, it would have rocked the gaming world

and the PS1 would never be able to generate such a AI and game logic monster. One MIPS

can not compete on it's best day against dual J-RISC chips. The best you could hope for

on the PS1 is a texture mapped wanna be.

This is getting more off topic, but, how about the saturn for comparison? I think this did come up before and you mentioned it could be closer at least (outside of networking -I'd immagine the Saturn would have used the cartridge port for any kind of network adaptor though -it did get a modem supported by the nelink/seganet service). Anyway, you've got the dual SH2s, plus a 11.3 MHz 68EC000 which was intended mainly for controllign the audio subsystem, but I beleive it wasn't limited to that. (it does work on its own bus though, the dedicated 512 kB of used for audio) There's also the SH1, but I think that's completely dedicated to controlling the CDROM drive. (and a DSP coprocessor intended to help with 3D math)

 

 

But again, I mean no disrespect to battleSphere or Scatologic for that matter, that really was an oversimplified comparison (albeit intended to be considdering the perspective of a relatively simple audience), and I definitely hope I eventually get a chance to play it. I doubt I'll be dissapointed.