/vr/ - Retro Games

Just another Nintendo gimmick, like the wiimote or the DS's touchscreen/mic. Heavily over used in the first few years then mostly forgotten/actually used where it makes sense.

Mode 7 is a graphics mode within the SNES ppu that can rotate and distort a single background layer in a 3D perspective by manipulating the scanlines. It is pretty basic, as it cannot scale individual sprites. But some games managed to use it well to create some neat effects.

Some SNES games did also incorporate some additional co-processors in the system to add some additional functionality to Mode 7.

Hello. 1986 baby here. Mode 7 was incredible, and anyone who disagrees is a literal underage who needs to go fuck themselves.

>>4875447
Fuck you, it was fucking cringe in Castlevania IV. Oh look, the whole level SLOOOWLY does a 90, only the SNES, be amazed!

Mega CD did Mode 7 better.

>>4875461
Imagine being a console warrior.... 30 years after the fact.

>>4875476
So did Atari Lynx

Before mode 7 racing games used per line warping of fixed tracks. Fine for simulating curves of various types, you could even get fancy and do hills and bumps, but you couldn't get a feel for the layout of the track, nothing coming up on the horizon or visible off to the side. Mode 7 gave you a chance to easily make small gokart sized tracks where you could learn the track layout and drive properly with simple physics following vectors instead of reacting to a series of kinks.

And yes, yes, stunt car racer and race drivin' had real 3D tracks, but they were tech demos, not much fun.

>>4875537
The lynx had sprite scaling. "Mode 7" would have been hard work manually warping all those scaled sprites into position. All I can find is this guy's tech demo that's a bit too slow to be practical. A tech demo that can be used in a game really needs to be so fast you can easily put in the rest of the game around it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVcbyWj3V5k

>>4875447
> incredible
it was good for a home console. there were much better effects being done in arcades at the time.

>>4875543
i still remember getting fzero at launch and seeing it as nothing more than a tech demo. it was really fresh for the time seeing this in your living room. now, not so fresh :)

>>4875548
low framerate but still very nice. i wonder if it can be made to run faster

It was good enough that I didn't understand the hype for 3D systems because in my mind, the SNES could already do "3D" games.

>>4875549
>i still remember getting fzero at launch and seeing it as nothing more than a tech demo.
Oh, totally. But it was the right kind of tech demo. See, the way mode 7 worked was it let you scale and rotate a 2D background. That's ALL! You could zoom in, you could zoom out. You can spin it around...
If you want perspective you have to calculate the scaling and rotation per line on the screen and use the raster interrupt to set the values as the screen is drawn.
Without F-Zero I guarantee you 99% of snes developers never thought for a minute you could use mode 7 to do something like that. Game developers are notorious for not seeing the forest for the trees.

F zero did mode 7 right. Probably the best example of the tech.

>>4875387
On the SNES, only racing games and maps could get any good use out of it.
If it also had sprite scaling, we would've seen much more amazing stuff.

>>4875607
Something I always wondered though was why mode 7 games didn't use scaled sprites? Yes, the hardware didn't do it, so you had to use multiple copies of your artwork at different sizes and pick the right one based on distance, but the sprites in mario kart looked wrong. Too hand edited. What I'd have done is take the reference sprite and scaled them to 16 different sizes using a software scaler to RAM at the start of the race. They wouldn't look as good as the hand edited ones, but they would fit the backdrop much better.
Wolf3D had scaled sprites, but that was Carmack being Carmack, let's not hold everyone to that standard.

>>4875607
Maps and racers were the workhorses, but there are plenty of other clever uses of mode 7: Super Metroid has a number before you even leave Ceres (gunship, ridley escaping, tilting room).

>>4875634
Scaling a sprite is FAAAAAR too computationally expensive for the SNES, which ran between ~ 2.5 and 3.5 MHz, which lacked dedicated multiplication hardware (it had fast multiply that was unusable while using mode7, and slow multiply which took many clock cycles to compute a result), and lacked a frame buffer to make it easy to rasterize images (it was tile based). Since every pixel requires 4 multiplication and 4 additions to transform (or 2 mults and 2 adds if you constrain sprites to not shear or rotate), even for modestly sized sprites, you'd blow your frame budget in no time (unless you had an on-cart co-processor to back you up)

What I want to know is, what made the psychedelic backgrounds for the battles in Earthbound?

>>4875706
liberal use of HDMA (horizontal direct memory access) to update background scroll registers and windowing every frame. HDMA allows graphics registers to be updated per scanline (during the period the electron gun is off/pointed off screen, and the console is not drawing)

>>4875387
sorry anon, im a half-nintendofag and everything that SNES did besides a few titles wasn't interesting at all, and arcades and PC games were doing better.

While nintendo Struggled to run early 3d titles. Genesis/Megadrive could run without needing the Super-FX chip, hence why Sega got good shit like F-15 Strike Eagle 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhKVj43AcQI

and we could had got Falcon 3 Gold if it wasn't for sega's fuckery

>>4875737
Never played Strike Eagle, but even though StarFox needed the FX, it looked a lot better because of it.

Looks horrible

>>4875748
both this and F22 Interceptor were the proof that you don't need SuperFX to run good 3d graphics on a early console, only know how to fucking program it.
i love big N, but there were things that sega back then did it better with their hardware.

also the soundtrack was fucking sick, since the original DOS game had none
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPHQLPGpn7Q

>>4875737
Star Cruiser looked good
https://youtu.be/yND5V85iPHc

>>4875549
I still remember getting fzero at launch and being amazed to discover that a racing game could be so fun. F-zero was fast, responsive, had great controls, and was designed with well-balanced challenge and creative maps.

The only thing it seemed to be missing was multiplayer.

>>4875927
replace all your past tense with present tense and that assessment still stands

>>4875461

Well aren't you hard to impress.

>>4875756
>you don't need SuperFX to run good 3d graphics on a early console
Surely you don't, but you must work against 2D hardware to get polygonal 3D, and I don't think SNES was fast enough to get results as good as Genesis. Genesis does, yeah.

>>4875461
Super Castlevania Bros... was a fucking mistake.