/vr/ - Retro Games

It was one of the first four SNES launch titles - I doubt they knew how to get a 2 player simultaneous mode programmed that didn't fucking suck balls.

You have to remember that this mode 7 shit was not easy to program for, especially with the SNES's slow processor. Two-player mode would have probably been at <15 FPS.

>>3527915
>Two-player mode would have probably been at <15 FPS

Explain Mario Kart then

>>3527912
Being a launch game, F-Zero lacks an extra chip that Super Mario Kart had that made multiplayer feasible. Jeremy Parish has a great video on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvrzESikyTw

>>3527931
Well, guess I'm eating crow

>>3527919
Explained

>>3527935
The SNES is such a piece of shit spec wise that the games need special chips.

>>3527915
>>3527935
explain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j18y3sc3fIQ

>>3527946
That's not a launch title and you can hardly see anything.

If it doesn't use a special chip, it's impressive.

>>3527912
It was just a demo to sell the system. I am very disappointed that they never made a sequel on SNES that supported multiplayer.

>>3527945
That was Nintendo's standard business practice back then:

>Sell the hardware to the consumer at a cheap price.

>Once they buy they hardware you've got them in your pocket.

>Elevate the hardware's shortcomings with extra chips or cartridge size.

Nintendo usually absorbed the price of including extra chips or cart size for 1st part games but most 3rd party dev passed the cost through to the consumer.

Huh, I could have sworn I played this two player with my friend back in the day.

>>3529602
Perhaps you're think of F-Zero X? Or some other Mode 7 racer like Mario Kart of Battle Cars?

>>3527912
>>3527919
I think the bigger question is why Mario Kart's single player mode couldn't be full screen.

>>3529605
It's more likely that we just swapped back and forth and that I'm just not remembering right. It was 20 years ago afterall

http://www.zophar.net/snes/fzvs.html

I have played sometime ago and it works fine. The best feature is being able to run practice runs on whatever track you want without having to deal with the tracks in the league or annoying opponents.

I deleted it after a while because I had no one to play with.

>>3529621
>zophar

Jesus that site is still around!?

>>3527935
Top Gear 1 and 2 don't use any chips

>>3529678
Also, not mode7. On the other hand, Street Racer is probably the best looking mode7 racer with up to 4 players and without special chips!
http://www.snescentral.com/article.php?id=0648
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zturPhgEaVo

>>3529621
This is really cool. But now that I have it, I realise I could've played the GBA titles this way all these years.

>>3527919

>Explain Mario Kart then


Two solid years of additional development time.

>>3527912
It's the reason Super Mario Kart is the best racer on the SNES, it's got several characters, way more tracks, it's fun in single player and multiplayer mode, AND the bonus battle mode

>>3527945
Did the N64 use all kinds of chips?
I just kind of assumed N64 emulation was tricky to pin down because of things like cartridge chips.

>>3529776
Not that I'm aware of, the N64 only got this in terms of additional hardware.

>>3527912
Yeah they fucked up. But mario kart is goat if u have 2 people

>>3529787
Man that thing was generally used to make even more ambitious games that the expanded N64 couldn't handle any better. Wish there was some way they could have used that to make games run smoother rather than pointless things like 480i modes that ran even more sluggishly.

>>3527912
They were thinking. "Oh cool. A 6502 that thinks it's 16 bits. Thank God we have this graphics chip that lets us do all kinds of squishy shit with pixels. Let's see if we can squeeze more than 10fps out of it with a single player"

>>3529602
Apparently your "the day" was a generation later.

>no multiplayer

Justify this, Treasurefags.

>>3529812
That doesn't even make sense. How does not remembering something right make it a generation later? I already said we probably just swapped controllers back and forth, because he didn't get an N64 until after the 360 was out so it wasn't F-Zero X.

Another problem is that F-Zero tracks were too big for multiplayer. It has to stream tiles in and out of vram to display the track around your position, and there is not enough vram to fit the tiles required to give a unique view of two separate positions on the map.

It's not perfect for single player either. If you pay close attention to the horizon at each side of the screen you can sometimes spot more track where there shouldn't be when the view reaches past the edge of vram and loops around. Pic related.

Super Mario Kart tracks however are small enough (in tiles) to fit entirely in vram, and so it has no problems displaying any two points on the track at once.

Compare this (F-Zero):
http://www.snesmaps.com/maps/F-Zero/F-ZeroMap11MuteCity3.html

To this (SMK):
http://www.snesmaps.com/maps/SuperMarioKart/SuperMarioKartMapMushroomCup1.html

>>3529792
The Expansion Pak gives you more space but it doesn't give you more speed. Many games didn't even run well at low res, so high res just made things worse.

It worked well for Battle for Naboo and Rayman 2 because they actually ran well at low-res, so when they were bumped up to high-res they still had good frame rates. Conker didn't even use the expansion because they already extracted all of the machine's performance in low-res.

One really good idea was to use the expansion for 24 bit color mode like Quake 2. It's a great idea since you don't actually lose much performance for doing it since the console internally does everything at 24 bit anyway. Half of the N64 blur is caused by dither filtering, which you don't need to do in 24 bit color. So you instantly get less blurry, less dithered games in a color mode that even Voodoo 3 couldn't do.

>>3529602
no, I had that reaction too. hell, I had that reaction too back in the day, when literally all we had was SNES. I had memories of playing it two player, and then we booted it up and it was one player only. confused the shit out of me.

I'm assuming it was a 2P game in the Berenstein universe.

>>3529701
jesus christ that game just looks awful. It looks like those mats with roads on them you would play on with your toy cars. F-zero was so much more convincing than that.

>>3530392
when did we even switch timelines

>>3530409
When Nelson Mandela died the first time.

>>3530310
Are those maps on the same scale?
While digging for more information on FZVS, I found this nesdev post that also discusses the possibility of multiplayer. I don't understand it, but maybe you guys do.
https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=12427&start=15

I think the bigger question would be why some tracks are not available in time trail?

>>3530310
Holy shit, I remember calling Nintendo Hotline about that! They just said it was "for show" or something like that.

Didn't stop me trying to get there with the ramp though.

>>3530310
Was it just me who thought Silence looked like a gun?

>>3527912
I always preferred it to Mario Kart though.
>>3530398
It doesn't look bad at all. Was quite a fun game IIRC. I remember some kid at school thinking it was a SFII spinoff - I can see what he means by some of the characters.

>>3529943
Anyone from that generation would have just let it go knowing they'd made an innocent mistake. By responding like that you've proven you're an underage pretender

There's a multiplayer mod though. It's convoluted but works.

>>3533257
I don't mean the graphics are poorly drawn I mean the racing effect looks horrible it looks like your just driving your little hot wheels cars around on pic related

>>3531136
Its really looks like Florida.

Just been playing this again, first time in years. Christ, the AI is cheap isn't it?

Those stupid orange cars just get in your way on purpose - and they're always in the same place every lap (usually by a hard turn or chicane).

And as for the proper players, it's always the same order. I play as the pink one and it's always Pico I overtake first, then Captain Falcon then, way out in front, Golden Fox.

And, given that I'm the heaviest car in the game, Foxy sure has a real easy time ramming me off course (despite being made of balsa wood).

Still great fun though.

>>3527912
>What were they thinking?

Probably "shit, we gotta finish this by the deadline 4 seconds from now in time for console launch or the bossmen will tear my balls off and kill my whole family.

>>3527945
Wasn't it superior to the Genesis in every way other than CPU clock speed and horizontal resolution?

>>3534462
By today's standards, I'd have to agree, but I would have been blown away by Street Racer's graphics back in the day. It looks like a super-realistic version of Mario Kart.

>>3535708
Genesis has a faster main CPU, a fully programmable second CPU, faster RAM, a larger "normal" resolution mode, more sound channels and faster ROM access.

SNES is better at playing back PCM music files (albeit unable to play back any other type of music), has a higher color limit (when in low-res mode) and has a couple of hardware accelerated features like transparency and background rotation.

So I wouldn't exactly word it the way you did.

>>3530864
So, we could hack multilayer in, if we had the source code of F Zero Vs.
Okay /vr/, let's find that source code!

>>3536021
>we
Top kek kid. You couldn't hack you way out of a wet paper bag. But thanks for playing.

>>3535762
kinda equal in their own ways
they both have their advantages and drawbacks

>>3535742
>a super-realistic version of Mario Kart.
Street Racer is not realistic in any way at all, so that's a huge nope from this "kid" who played it back in the day.

It certainly is well animated though. They tried to go for the intersection SF2 and Mario Kart fans, apparently, and it kinda worked too. Wacky races with a selection of international stereotypes running around.

Battle mode was way better than MK, and the soccer was pretty damn fun as well.

>>3527935
>DSP
Not even once.

Better question. Why are Top Gear and Mario Kart always in full screen. That is even worse!

>>3539164
SMK was never in full screen. Even in single player mode. Hence: >>3529609

>>3535762
You forgot the SNES also had a dedicated GPU with more video RAM and was able to produce more graphical layers than the Genesis. As far as I remember, the Genesis sound chip only had 6 channels, compared to 8 of the SNES. Not to mention its 64KB of sound memory vs 8KB on the Genesis.

Also, worth noting that the SNES CPU isn't much slower when you compare how many instructions per second they're capable of generating. Raw MHz doesn't mean much.

>>3527912
They were thinking the SNES slowdown simulator couldn't handle two players without dropping to 5 fps.

>>3543539
Yeah, here's the thing. You're misinterpreting the specs.

SNES needs more VRAM to store higher color sprites. Not to mention that the SNES sprite format compresses less easily. The net result is that double the VRAM affords less room for sprites than Genesis with half the VRAM.

SNES can't do more graphical layers than Genesis, it's pretty much fixed to 4 max on both systems.

Genesis has 6 channels of FM + 4 channels from a PSG chip. As Genesis doesn't rely much on PCM audio it doesn't need a lot of sound RAM for storing samples. In fact, both Genesis and SNES have 8 KB of RAM per PCM channel.

Assembly experts have compared SNES 65C816 and Genesis 68000 and concluded that in an ideal scenario for the SNES CPU it performs 25% slower than Genesis 68000 at best. In an ideal scenario for the Genesis CPU it performs 300% or more better.

Clock speed might not be a performance rating, but the 65C816 would need over double the IPC of the 68000 to match it at half the clock speed. It isn't.

Problems get worse for the SNES CPU because the 68000 is internally 32 bit and can do SIMD style ops a fuckload faster than an older design like the 65C816. Furthermore, the SNES CPU will have its clock speed go further DOWN while it is accessing RAM or ROM. Absolutely pathetic.

>>3543979
>>3543539
The problem with the 65c816 was that it only had a few registers; it was basically the C64 CPU extended to 16bit.

68k had 3x the amount of registers, they were much more flexible, and all of them 32bit internally. On top of the bigger clockspeed.

The 65c816 may have been able to access RAM twice as fast, but the 68k needed to do it five times less often.

Really the only way the 65c816 makes sense is if you wanted to consider NES backwards compatibility.

>>3527912
an updated F-Zero with multiplayer would have been grand.

>>3527946
what the fuck? are you serious?
>pic related
>can't see shit
>nobody has fun

>>3529820
Alien Soldier is too damn crazy for two players. I'd be constantly confused about which falcon guy I am.

Games that lacked multiplayer that should have had it general?

>>3544141
For what its worth, Mercs also had 3x the single player content. The original mode was awesome and I loved the level design in it.

Really the game only would've needed better graphics and maybe less slowdown, but then it wouldn't have fit in a 1mb cart.

>>3528864
>It was just a demo
I bet you're the guy who called Alien Soldier a tech demo.

>>3544146
Yeah Mercs is a pretty good port despite the lack of co-op, it's not like Final Fight SNES that had fucking tons of problems besides the lack of co-op