/vr/ - Retro Games

Thexder for reference. Not as smooth scrolling, but 5 years older.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrMRLmbeW5Q

I grew up playing aladdin, zool, jaz jackrabbit, jill of the jungle, raptor call of the shadows and that claim made no sense to me either.

>>5084042
Most of those are post-keen games though.

>>5084050
Sure but only 2-3 years late. Just like every programmer collectively figured out how to do first person shooter engines at the same time.
I don't get it.

>>5084042
first one is a genesis port, second one is an amiga port

>>5084039

That's not smooth scrolling through, it's scrolling one tile at a time.

>>5084056
It's just amusing that the PC was barely catching up to sonic the hedgehog in 1994 with jazz jackrabbit, in a year where that same PC could play elder scrolls: arena, doom 2, or warcraft.

They feel like games from a different area but the shift from crude mario clones to doom took barely 2 years for that same small design team.

>>5084060
We know.

>>5084039
He doesn't know they remade thexder on psp or hadn't it come out yet at the time that video was made?

>>5084075
so why did you list them as standards for PC scrolling

also
>we

>>5084082
Video was july 2009.
PSP remake of thexder was october 2009 (for NA).

>>5084083
Because they are games on DOS in 1993 with smooth scrolling. Get it together anon this is not rocket science

John carmack also assisted on the early development of Duke nukem (1991)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkfmwsLpLG0

Those early 90s side scrolling action games were mostly unpolished shit sadly. If you had a console of any kind there was almost no reason to play them, besides their low cost.

Japan pioneered scrolling then America quickly caught up and beat them in their own game.
Just like Hiroshima.

>>5084072
pcs still had too high a price point to realistically compete with dedicated video game consoles so vidya programming took a backseat.

>>5084118
Doom really was the turning point in PC gaming. They were laggign behind consoles in most thigns that didnt have to do with flight sims and turn based strategy. Then doom happened, and then PC master race pulled way, way ahead for the rest of the decade.

>>5084112
And Pearl Harbor. God bless this country.

>>5084035
The thing you're missing here is how retarded PC devs were. Carmack had the genius to use the capabilities PC graphics cards had had for years to make games using the methods programmers on other systems had been using since even before they were available on the PC. Impossibruuu! His bosses didn't like it because it wouldn't work on a 10 year old graphics card. You needed at most a 7 year old one that was already obsolete. But I guess there were actually people still using CGA in 1990 because most PC users were are retarded as the devs. AT least when it came to gaming.

>>5084329
What the FUCK are you babbling about.

>>5084482
Those are just facts. Irreverent to redditots looking to shitpost funnies. Just ignore.

Here's what you're missing OP:
>Western devs needed a tool to sell to idiots who only had a PC
>Carmack made it, it ran at 17FPS
>PC gamers bought it up, smugly pretending it compared to even 5 year old console games
>their nostalgia led to them forcing an undeserved legacy of an utterly forgettable game on the industry to insist their relevance
>rinse and repeat with jazz jackrabbit, jill of the jungle, duke nukem, etc.

>>5084329
Interesting points, which reminds me of PC games in the 90s - since the hardware was advancing so rapidly, big games were developed for computers with 2x times the memory than was commonly available, and 2x the CPU clockspeed. I remember not 1 year after upgrading to a new high-end PC, games started to come out that i couldn't play. After 2-3 years you needed a new PC to keep up with new minimum system requirements.

I was too young for playing games in the late 80's so i'm not sure - could this fast paced hardware cycling have been a reason for slow adoption of PC gaming by game devs? I mean, starting to develop for hardware that doesnt exist yet surely poses unique challenges.

>>5084997
I remember that. When PC gaming took off the spec required to play a new game moved incredibly fast. I think the problem in the 80's is that people were using things for years and were used to it. This put the software houses in a sort of a chicken and egg situation. They didn't want to to make games that required people to upgrade and people didn't need to upgrade so they didn't.

>>5084056
I don't think you understand it, game industry - especially PC game industry - was different back then. People weren't so tight-lipped about techniques they used. Devs were fond of describing their brilliant solutions publically, making them real easy to reverse engineer.

And even if not, remember that you can decompile the code to reverse engineer it, too.

>>5084329
English isn't my first language so apologies if I misunderstand, but are you saying how devs (or at least their bosses) want games developed for much older/weaker hardware than what was available? If so it definitely was the case, but as a third-worlder myself the "people still using CGA in 1990" definitely hits home. The prices for newer hardware pieces were ridiculous, even for enthusiasts. Then again the games themselves usually didn't come the way they were supposed to.

>>5085427
and then there's stuff like Skunny Kart.

>>5084035
For an explanation of what Carmack did, take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh#Technical_details .

Consoles like the NES, by comparison, have very simple architecture, but they are built specifically for games.

The NES has hardware registers (ie, actual pins on the graphic chip) that the game and write to to set the X and Y scroll offset. So it's literally just writing a number to a specific location in memory and the graphic hardware draws the background with the correct scroll offset for you.

The NES has hardware sprites, again, you literally just write to specific memory locations to set the X and Y positions of your sprites. The NES was capable of 64 sprites. If you read the wikipedia page, id software was manually storing the background region behind the sprite, erasing the sprite by redrawing the background, then taking a copy of the background where the new position of the sprite was going to be, then drawing the sprite there. For the NES, it's all done by the hardware.

Another point, the BG tiles are also drawn by hardware on the NES. You just put values in a specific location in memory and load the tile data into the video memory. So you have this big grid of numbers in memory and the graphics hardware just comes along and sees "Ok, this says tile 27, so I'll lookup tile 27 from the video memory and draw that here." The PC had nothing like that.

Further to all this, as other said, even though EGA was old hardware at the time, the install base of that hardware was likely to be much lower than the total install base of PCs. On the other hand, every NES was exactly a NES and everyone who had a NES had the full capabilities of a NES. So developers were empowered to push the NES to the limit, but PC developers had to target the lowest common denominator of capability to a degree.

>>5085448
The bosses wanted to sell as many games as possible. They figured the easiest way to do that was to target a spec so low everyone was guaranteed to have it. I had VGA in 88 but I was still selling thousands of entry level VGA cards a week well into the 90's. But yeah, mostly to the 3rd world, like southern Europe.

>>5085448
Fuckin' Skunny. I had a collection of skunny games and boy did they fucking suck, yet somehow i still have a weird nostalgia for them.

Pic related had some stupid difficulty spikes, and just beyond a triumphant success the fucking game crashes on me. I learned what rage-quitting was that day.

commander keen is capable of running smooth on a 8086 pc with ega from about 1986 so its impressive from that standpoint. Dangerous dave despite being 16 colours total has some pretty detailed tiles in areas, a lot of 16 bit console games repeated tiles too much.

The sad part with this era and genre of pc gaming was that dev's never managed go make an actual polished game that stood the test of time. Keen, jackrabbit and 2d nukes were at best "milons secret castle" tier products. The games were not polished to the way that megaman or super Mario, or sonic were. The technical skills were there but the actual gameplay and design of the levels themselves seemed almost phoned in.

I know the pc dev's in that era shit out several games a month, especially if they were developing for shareware or magazines like ID was, so maybe this was why nothing iconic or memorable emerged?

>>5084035
Y'all need some guimo
https://youtu.be/xwzUxPlaLHc

>>5085931
Fuck I don't miss those menus that were used in PC games from 1995-1997.

>>5085496
>>5084329
>>5084035
I think y'all giving too much credit to Carmack is the real answer here. Carmack was simply a very talented programmer and he was a genius at one thing - first person perspective engines and games on old hardware. He was a programmer. By his own account he didn't even like playing his own games that much. John Romero and others were imo probably a lot more on the actual design of the games. Carmack was more the technical side of it. There is no real reason why Commander Keen would be very good or technically impressive as it's a completely different game, apples and oranges. Carmack was a bright guy with the right talent at the right place and the right time for leading the way in FPS games and lucky enough to have great designers that around. Thing is that technical challenges eventually get overcome or brute-forced over time while it's game design that lasts forever. People like John Romero should be more famous, Carmack is over, a trivial point in computer game history.

>>5085897
Keen 4 is a total classic, though perhaps a couple years later than you're referring to. I always thought duke nukem 2 had great level design, but i havent played it in >20 years so i may be suffering from poor (childhood) recall.

>>5085964
Romero was famous for his toolkits and for making things accessible to the modding community, and for that he has his fanbase of loyal autists, but ID was sick of him before Quake was even finished and they forced him out as soon as possible.

Romero then joined a series of other software companies and either ran them into the ground or accomplished nothing for the rest of his career.

>>5085897
The original Duke Nukem is decent. But who could forget pic related? Jill of the Jungle is also memorable. Then there's biohazard. The market wasn't as big asbut there were some memorable games.

>>5085964
I don't think I was giving Carmack excessive credit, the wikipedia page just describes how scrolling was implemented in Commander Keen. It's clearly more work than implementing scrolling on a console, which is one reason why the PC didn't have lots of great 2d games in the late 80s and early 90s.

>>5084035
Deep into TRS-80 Thexder at Radio Shack was another place a teenage girl squeezed my 9 year old junk

>>5085964
>a genius at games on old hardware
>had to leave softdisk because his games wouldn't run on old hardware
Sounds like you might be retarded

>>5086656
Jill of the Jungle is memorable, like Xargon, however they both seem fairly low-budget. Pic related seemed much more polished.

>>5087053
>"did you forget to attach an image?"

>>5086656
Pic related also seemed quite polished.

Oh great, is Carmack getting /vr/-syndromed now too? Will you fags ever stop hating things that are popular?

>>5087371
>unironically liking things that are popular
go back to /r/eddit, normie