Commander Keen - only 40fps?! - how about 60 then

[maiki]

I was surfing through the net when I came across a special tiles technique done by Carmack with Commander Keen around 1990. Well, given the amount of hype on Wikipedia I honestly expected a syncing 60 Hz engine. But my experienced eye, from the very first moment, recognized this is not a NES, Master System, Genesis class rendering at all.

 

This is from the enclosed manual:

 

Never before has the shareware market seen a game of the quality of

Commander Keen. Ultra-high speed EGA scrolling graphics and animation

at 40 frames per second! (Cartoons are animated at just 24 frames/second.)

You will need 640 RAM, with at least 530 free RAM to play Commander Keen.

In other words, don't have too many RAM resident (TSR) programs running

while you attempt to play Commander Keen. You will also need an EGA or

VGA system. CGA is not supported, sorry.

So here you have it. 40 frames per second means it is not smooth enough to perfectly sync to screen refresh.

So the reason I am posting this: which game for the IBM PC managed first to scroll at 60fps? Thank you.

Edited December 12, 2013 by maiki

[Robot2600]

My guess is Doom. And yes, it's just a guess.

[Austin]

My guess is Doom. And yes, it's just a guess.

I think he means a 2D sidescroller. Wolfenstein 3D runs at 60fps on the right hardware, and I am sure other games did prior as well. 2D platformers on the PC back then had a tendency to run at lower framerates for some reason.

[+nanochess]

Wolfenstein 3-D runs at 70hz frame rate, it's a thing that troubled Carmack of ID Software when porting it to iPhone.

 

http://www.idsoftware.com/iphone-games/wolfenstein-3d-classic-platinum/wolfdevelopment.htm

[desiv]

Probably not (I'm guessing there was something sooner), but Jazz Jackrabbit comes to mind..

No idea how fast it was, but it felt fast..

 

desiv

[youki]

the first duke nukem (not the 3D one) was quite fast. but i'm not sure about the frame rate .

[maiki]

Probably not (I'm guessing there was something sooner), but Jazz Jackrabbit comes to mind..

No idea how fast it was, but it felt fast..

 

desiv

 

Yes. That game seems to be 60 fps.It comes from 1994 so I guess in that year they already had powerfull PCs. The game reminds me of Sonic on Mega Drive, although it does not seem to be using second scrolling layer as the original and feels a bit slim. But the scrolling is really smooth and fast and sound is also done well. Apparently they were sort of trying to match the 16-bit consoles of the time.

 

 

 

the first duke nukem (not the 3D one) was quite fast. but i'm not sure about the frame rate .

 

That game is definitely lower than 60 fps.

 

 

 

In conclusion, it seems that IBM PC quite struggled to get decent smooth side-scrolling games especially in the late 80s and early 90s. Now I can see clearly why the game consoles like Sega Genesis were so succesfull. PCs just could not match those.

[Osgeld]

Jazz may seem faster but its pretty lurchy as well if you really pay attention to it, seems to be the norm for pc side scrollers, until I saw Abuse

 

back to 40 hz, keen would run on a CGA system, I used to play it all the time on my XT with a green screen CGA compatible screen, CGA also has some screwball refresh rates since it also supported composite output, 48-62 Hz 54.something being common with older TTLRGB monitors. Add in the overhead of running on a 8086 and other voodo maybe that was a limiting factor to the engine's core design.

 

but the only ones who really know are the authors

[Great Hierophant]

All IBM PC graphics adapters use a refresh rate of 50Hz to 70Hz. The MDA and Hercules Graphics Card used 50Hz refresh rate and connected to a digital TTL monochrome monitor. The CGA, the PCjr. and Tandy Graphics Adapter connected to a TV, a color or monochrome composite monitor or a digital RGBI TTL color monitor, but they always used a 60Hz refresh rate. EGA can connect to an RGBI TTL color monitor or a 6-bit digital RGB monitor, but it still uses a 60Hz refresh rate. MCGA and VGA could connect to monochrome or color analog 31.5KHz RGB monitors and used 70Hz refresh rates for all modes by default, except that VGA would use a 60Hz refresh rate for the 640x480x16 mode. Later SVGA and VESA cards would support higher resolutions and default to 60Hz in DOS but often could handle 70, 72, 75 or 85Hz in Windows.

 

Commander Keen 1-3 and Keen Dreams does not run on CGA, Keen 4-6 did have separate conversions to CGA. Commander Keen was considered a marvel in its day because it used smooth scrolling. This is because the EGA did support smooth scrolling in hardware, but it was not the easiest thing to get working right. If the EGA had supported hardware sprites as well, then it probably would have ran at 60Hz. However, the game was intended to work on fast 8088 XT class machines, so 40Hz was the tradeoff between performance and gameplay speed.

[Great Hierophant]

I made one mistake in the previous post, there was a separate version of Keen Dreams for CGA cards. I also believe that the Keen games on a CGA or EGA card can hit frame rates close to 60 frames a second. However, some engines just simply do not have sufficient activity going on to hit 60 frames per second.