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/vr/ - Retro Games


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5163337 No.5163337 [Reply] [Original]

>An Amiga, Deluxe Paint and a mouse. From the late 80s to the early 90s, these 3 tools were at the core of numerous graphic designers’ workstations in the West. It took years for the Japanese industry to start adopting commercial engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine, most of those companies were used to develop their own engines before that. This home-made approach wasn’t exclusive to game engines; at a time when most Western companies used the same sound engine on Mega Drive -GEMS-, Japanese developers often produced their own. Regarding graphic design, it was pretty much the same: there was almost one kind of setting per company in Japan.

I] Designing graphics with a computer

1) The hexadecimal era
When personal computers started to appear on the market in the late 70s, the vast majority of developers were programmers, which implied that they also often took charge of both the visual and audio aspects of their games. However, in the late 70s a few companies started hiring designers and animators in order to create their game graphics, a task often combined with the creation of logos and illustrations. Such was the case with Hiroshi Ono who designed graphics and logos for many Namco games since 1979: Galaxian, Mappy, Xevious, Pac-Man, Dig Dug and many more.

>> No.5163339
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Computers from the old days were designed in such a way that they were de facto intended for people who were knowledgeable about programming and mathematics. You could draw with a computer, but saving what was displayed on the screen wasn’t without its problems, hence the fact that the Japanese industry would start to use graphic editors only years later.
The people in charge of graphic design in those days needed 3 things: grid paper, a computer with a keyboard and basic knowledge of hexadecimal. Michitaka Tsuruta, who studied animation in school and later designed Solomon’s Key, joined Tehkan in 1982 and used that system in the early years of his career: “You would color in the squares on graph paper. And then after you coloured those individual squares, you would convert them in to numbers, and then you would key in the numbers in hexadecimal using a ROM writer”.
It’s only after passing these steps that the designer could see his work displayed on the screen and sometimes feel the need to reiterate the whole process in case of mistake or unsatisfying rendering.
Using the hexadecimal system contributed to save ROM space by minimizing the size of the graphical data at a time when it was very expensive. Although many graphic designers have fond memories of the 2D era, few of them seem to regret the transition to a more direct approach: “I was the main background designer for T.A.N.K (SNK, 1985), recalls Toshiyuki Nakai. We also started using specialized graphic tools at this time: no more drawing on graph paper! Now you sat at a monitor and used a keyboard to change colors and so forth. Again, it’s very close to how we do things today. I can still remember what a relief it was switching to those new systems… it was so much easier than before!”

>> No.5163340

2) Direct interaction between the graphic designer and the computer
When the Famicom hit the shelves in July 1983, the concept of third publisher was known of only a few people in Japan -the Atari 2600 launched about the same time as Nintendo’s console on this market and didn’t make a big splash there. While every developer was free to commercialize games on computer, Nintendo originally had the intent of being the sole publisher on its console. Its president Hiroshi Yamauchi revised its plans when he realized that his company whouldn’t be able to produce enough titles to sustain the demand and that a growing number of publishers were already showing interest in developing for the Famicom.

>> No.5163342
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Hudson Soft was one of the first companies to show such interest and to appeal to Nintendo which took charge of the publishing of Family Basic, the first title developed by Hudson to be released on Famicom. The deal between the two enterprises wasn’t exclusive to the red and white console though, the company founded by the Kudo brothers obtained the rights to use Nintendo licences on computer (Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong 3, Golf, etc.). However, Hudson Soft didn’t wait the signature of this agreement to familiarize its employees with the machine and produce its own development kit. A team of two people designed the tools that would be used by their company: Setsuo Okada who took charge of the hardware part during Fall 1983, while the software part was developed by Shinichi Nakamoto (who later programmed the Famicom versions of Bomberman and Lode Runner). The kit was operational as of Winter 1983, about 6 months after the launch of the console. It featured a graphic editor which ran on X1 (a computer produced by Sharp and for which Hudson Soft developed the BIOS), a ROM simulator (which allowed the developer to previsualize the graphics he designed on a CRT among other things) and a hard disk drive. Although NEC put the first PC-9801 on the market in 1982, this model wasn’t compatible with the Assembler program Hudson Soft used at the time, so the company waited until the release of the PC-9801VM in 1985 to replace its workstations.

On a related note, since Hudson designed the PC Engine and its official development kit -the Hu7-, the companies who wanted to use that kit had to be equipped with the same kind of computer as those used by Hudson’s developers, namely computers from the PC-98 series.

>> No.5163343

—–The preview function—–
Once the industry switched from hexadecimal to graphic editors, it wasn’t rare for graphic designers to have not one but two screens on their desk: a computer monitor and a CRT, the second one being used to display the result of the work made on the first one. It’s hard to tell whether this was a standardized practice or not, but we know that many developers, graphic designers as well as programmers, used that technique, from Kazuko Shibuya (Square) and Akira Yasuda (Capcom) to the developers behind Thunder Force IV (1992) who used many CRTs to take into account the specifities of each kind of screen. Masato Nishimura, graphic designer in charge of the backgrounds from Sonic CD, mentioned something he had been told about the first Sonic the Hedgehog (1991): the developers used up to 3 CRTs to previsualize the game and see how were rendered the scrolling and blur effects.

This practice can be explained by at least 3 reasons. The first one is related to the differences in rendering between a computer screen and a CRT, the pixels look generally sharper on a monitor. The second one lies in the specificities of each machine: display resolution, shape of the pixels (rarely as square as one would expect), rendering of the colors -the red color bleeded on the others on Mega Drive, it was recommanded to add neutral colors around to compensate. The third reason is related to the second one but also concerns programmers: a workstation doesn’t necessary simulate every aspect of the machine for which a game is being developed. For example, the parallax scrolling effect featured in the Mega Drive game Thunder Force IV couldn’t be tested on X68000.

>> No.5163345
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Some graphic designers toyed with these specificities and mastered the 0.5 dot technique. The word “pixel” translates in Japanese to “ドット” (”dot”). It seems that Hiroshi Ono (AKA Mr Dotman) was the first to use that word to describe his work, talking about dot-e (ドット絵, the “e” is the same as in “Ukiyo-e” and means picture) and dot character (ドットキャラクター or ドットキャラ) in the February 1983 issue of Namco NG.
“It’s a technique where by slightly changing the color of surrounding pixels, to the human eye it looks like the pixels move by around 0.5 pixels.” explains Kazuhiro Tanaka, graphic designer on Metal Slug (1996). His colleague Yasuyuki Oda adds that “Back in the old days, we’d say [to our artists] “add 0.5 of a pixel”, and have them draw in the pixels by taking scanlines into account. But with the modern Full HD monitor, the pixels comes out too clearly and too perfectly that you can’t have that same taste.“
Ayano Koshiro (Streets of Rage 2), Eiji Koyama (Galaxy Fight), Yoshinori Yamamoto (Marvel Vs Capcom) as well as some people who worked with Nobuyuki Kuroki at SNK said that they used this half pixel technique back in the day. Tatsuro Iwamoto, graphic designer on the first episodes of the Phoenix Wright / Gyakuten Saiban series released on Game Boy Advance, explained that he took account of that (sometimes unwanted) effect on Nintendo’s portable console.
The Famicom version Wizardry (1987), a famous example to illustrate the differences in rendering between an old CRT (scanlines, blur, colors) and an HD monitor from nowadays. These sprites have been created on and with a certain kind of screen in mind

>> No.5163346
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Having an additional screen on his desk proved to be very useful when developing arcade or console games, but it also was convenient for computer games since the size of the screens was pretty small by today’s stantards (around 14) and the screen itself was quickly filled with windows. As with the other kinds of machine, the second screen gave the designer a global vision of the graphical element he was working on.

3) Scanner
Having a scanner was pretty much optional in the 80s. Hard disk drives were sold at an exorbitant price and their limited capacity meant that you couldn’t stock everything in them; the rendering of the scanned picture was poor due to the low resolution and the limited number of colors the machine could handle. A few companies equipped themselves with scanners though, but the digitized picture couldn’t be used as it and had to be touched up and even colorized with a graphic tool.
Yoshimiru used this device when he worked on the Famicom game Metal Slader Glory (1991): ”Before drawing the graphics, before even laying down the basic outline (on computer) I’d always put it down on paper like this (see below). Then I’d take this drawing and although they aren’t as high resolution as the scanners of today, we had something called a Digitiser which you would feed it into. It was a pretty terrible recreation but it would be displayed in the drawing tool so I could use it as a base to draw the pixel art.“

>> No.5163347
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Yoshinori Yamamoto, graphic designer who animated many fighting game characters at Capcom in the late 90s, applied a similar process to create sprites: “Draw a frame on grid paper, scan the drawing, draw pixels on the line art, then colorize the sprite”. Drawing every frame on paper gave the designer the possibility to check that his animation cycle worked fine before doing any pixel art.
Walk cycle animation for Ingrid from Capcom Fighting Jam (2004). Each frame is drawn on grid paper then rendered on computer

Regarding SNK, Yoshihiro Nakanishi explains that the paper phase was optional there. While he drew every frame on paper when he worked on games such as Super Tag Battle and The Last Blade, some of his colleagues chose to draw directly on computer.

Scanners were generally used for relatively complex drawings, be it logos such as the one from Ys (1987), drawn on paper then retouched on computer by Tomō Yamane, illustrations scanned in black and white (Gandhara, 1987) or in color (Tengai Makyō: Ziria, 1989), or even photographs.

>> No.5163349
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Surprisingly, the graphic designers who worked at Nintendo in the 80s had to use an odd digitizing tool for relatively simple sprites, including those from Super Mario Bros. (1985). They followed the same process one year prior when developing the arcade game Punch-Out!! (1984), a game for which former Toei animator Takao Kōzai painted the game characters on cels. These characters were way bigger than those appearing in Super Mario Bros. and had to be redrawn on grid paper in their sprite form by Nintendo’s graphic designers, as recalls Shigeru Miyamoto: ”The tool for importing pictures as they were drawn by an animator wasn’t remotely useable. […] That’s why we printed giant, desk-sized sheets of graph paper and drew everything by hand. […] importing that as data just made it easier for the programmer, but not for the designer. […] Because we had to draw giant pixel images, all by hand. It was just a process that automated inputting the pixel images we drew with a scanner. […] But I couldn’t do all of it alone, so I drew the outline and a woman who was assisting me colored it.“

>> No.5163353
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Yoshio Sakamoto, director of the Famicom Disk System game Metroid (1986), explains how this digitizer worked: ”Regarding the program environment, we didn’t understand it well, but as regards the image drawing environment, with the Disk System, we had to draw lots of pictures. In the old days they were really made by hand, using equipment consisting of rows of 16x16 LEDs, and we would light this up to match what had been put on graph paper, and draw it by filling the grid up one box at a time, thinking “this is green,” “this is brown”.”
“This was done with a Famicom controller, adds Kid Icarus designer Toru Osawa. A Famicom controller came out for that kind of device, but it was really one controller. It could only draw pictures, and the second controller was a microphone! (Laughs) Because of that, the cursor matched the graph paper, you would sense the color, and naturally you could fill the boxes one at a time.”
Device used by Nintendo to digitize sprite sheets. In the early years of the Famicom era, sprites rarely exceeded 16 pixels or a multiple of 16. In Super Mario Bros.1, little Mario is 16 pixels tall but he doubles his height when he eat a mushroom

The end of the hexadecimal era didn’t make the developers and the grid paper makers terminate their relationship. In order not to stretch their drawings, some graphic designers used custom grid paper with the same ratio as the pixels displayed by this or that machine. Tose, a company specialized in developing games for other entreprises, resorted to this technique on Famicom, as did Capcom with its arcade games and Hiroshi Makabe (Seiken Densetsu 1 and 2) when he worked on MSX.

>> No.5163356
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4) Designing a sprite from a 3D model
In the mid-90s, numerous developers were caught short by the success of Virtua Fighter and the advent of 3D. Some missed the bandwagon while others took unusual paths. SNK practiced multi-track drifting, using 3D in a traditional way with the games produced for the Hyper Neo-Geo 64 and in an uncommon way with Art of Fighting 3, a 2D fighting game with a somewhat difficult gestation, as Nobuyuki Kuroki recently recounted: “For Art of Fighting 3 the plan was to use both motion capture tech and 2D animation style graphics. Some of the staff went to the US and worked on motion capture for about a month. We obviously needed to put other key parts of development on hold until we received the motion data. Most of them could not be rendered directly from the motion captured data and the designers ended up with a lot more work than they expected.”
Naoto Abe added that SNK didn’t have the necessary equipment for motion capture in Osaka, hence this one-to-two month trip to the USA.
This experience didn’t discourage SNK to use 3D models for another 2D fighting game -The King of Fighters XII- more than a decade later (2009), although there were differences in the creation process. As detailed on the official website of the game, the graphic designers started by creating sprites, then shaped 3D models based on each of these sprites. They animated these models and traced some frames with pixels, resulting in a total of 400-600 2D frames per character.

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5) The particular case of the LCD-based games

Although I tend to think that the Game & Watch games and their slightly less famous cousins should be seen as video games, partly because of their game mechanics and controls, they don’t display pixels but are made of crystals which go from transparent to opaque in reaction to electric fields. The development process of the Game & Watch games shares some similarities with that of a traditional video game, but the use of computers is totally optional, be it for designing graphics or testing the games. If you want to learn more about the Game & Watch, here are a few sources:
1) Iwata asks - Game & Watch
2) The History of Nintendo, volume 2 (Florent Gorges, Omake Books)
3) 未来が生まれたとき~世界に誇る大衆文化の仕掛け人~ ゲーム編, a documentary aired on History Channel in Japan on February 20, 2016


II] Hardware interface

>> No.5163359

1) Keyboard
The mouse is one of those tools that quickly became standard in the West with computers surch as the Macintosh (1984), the Amiga and the ST (1985), but that took long to get a foothold in Japan. While the X68000 was bundled with a mouse since its launch in 1987, NEC, which dominated the local market at the time, did the same thing with its PC-88 and PC-98 series only years later, meaning that in the 80s, the keyboard was the most common tool for the graphic designers and some of them still used it as their sole hardware interface in the late 90s.
That longevity wasn’t the result of this only factor though; the habits of some developers, the speed of execution, the ease of use (in comparison with other devices) are some of the reasons that have been cited to explain that phenomenom. To draw an analogy to video games, take the character select screens from various fighting games and you’ll notice that, while some let you move the cursor freely (Capcom vs SNK 2, Guilty Gear XX), you can only move slot by slot in most of them. Regarding pixel art, the graphic designers work on a grid and only need 4 directions. The infinity of directions offered by analog supports (mouse, graphic tablet), may seem redundant, if not counterproductive, to them.

At both SNK and Capcom, the keyboard had its longtime followers. Kōichi Yotsui designed the main character from Strider with a keyboard, Akira Yasuda used the same kind of device on the opening animations of Street Fighter II and Vampire / Darkstalkers and mice started to be used at SNK sometimes around 1993, during the development of games such as Art of Fighting 2 and The King of Fighters ‘94.

>> No.5163360
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Among the hybrid input devices used by some graphic designers, there is control panel photographed in 1992 by Nekosenpai / Tonya_Plan who worked on Viewpoint around that time:

>> No.5163361
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2) Joystick
Although I don’t know who had the idea of using a joystick to draw sprites and backgrounds in the first place, we know that the use of this tool wasn’t limited to one or two companies and that, as with the keyboard, it was sometimes used until the end of the 90s. One of the first companies to produce workstations controlled by joysticks was Taito.
“By the time of Metal Soldier Isaac II (1985), we had a device that could save data, explains Masayuki Suzuki. We used these big 8-inch floppy disks. It was not like a regular personal computer. It was Taito’s own proprietary system. They created graphics workstations by modifying circuit boards from unsold arcade cabinets for the game Qix (1981). The monitors were salvaged from old cocktail arcade cabinets. Computer mice weren’t available back then, so we operated these graphics workstations with a custom control box that incorporated a joystick and about 20 buttons, almost like a keyboard. […] For every four machines, we had one device for saving our data.”
Years later, Taito replaced its workstations with X68000 computers. They were compatible with its joysticks and you could save data on 5.25-inch floppy disks. Arcade games such as Kaiser Knuckle (1994) and Kirameki Star Road (1997) were developed with these tools.

>> No.5163362

Contrary to what may suggest the official pictures and videos in which you can see employees using keyboards, sometimes coupled with mice, many developers (not always affiliated to the company) mentioned that SNK’s graphic designers also used joysticks, especially during the development of the first Art of Fighting (1992). One of them told that the graphic designers were rotating between these 2 configurations: some worked on traditional workstations while other designed sprites on arcade cabinets. He added that this was due to financial reasons but I haven’t been able to find anything to corroborate this so far.
A few years ago, Spoon, a member of The Madman’s Cafe, posted a message in which he recounted a story he had been told by one of his co-workers:
“The sprite editor used by artists for a number of SNK fighting games was written for the Neo-Geo, and uses the Neo-Geo as the interface. As in, you would use the joystick and the buttons to draw the sprite. He didn’t believe this when he started there, until one of the higher ups showed him by firing up one of the machines and drawing a kickass sprite of Robert Garcia in like 10 minutes”.
During the development of the arcade game Mahou Daisakusen (1993), Raizing used devices similar in description to those from SNK: the graphic editor ran on a machine connected to an arcade control panel (1 joystick + 6 buttons). It was subject to static electricity which explains why it often crashed, it took about 30 minutes to load or save data, there was no rotate function and you couldn’t plug a scanner into the device so you had to draw everything with the joystick.

>> No.5163364
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Many other companies used joysticks in various eras, including Capcom during the development of Street Fighter II (1991), NMK during the production of one of its two Macross games (~1992-1993), Toaplan, Data East, Seta and Technos.
Hiroyuki Maeda (Chip-Chan Kick!, Elemental Tale), used a keyboard coupled with a joystick when he developed games on X1 in the 80s.

If hearing the rattling sound of a joystick during long days of work doesn’t frighten you, you’ll be glad to read that many Taito employees mentioned rumors of people from an unnamed company using twin sticks to design graphics. It turns out that there’s a picture taken in 1990 at Toaplan in which two graphic designers -Yuko Tataka and Sanae Nito- use a device equipped with 2 joysticks each. The function assigned to the second joystick remains unknown.

>> No.5163367
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3) Light pen
It was not uncommon to find light pens in US labs and universities in the 60-70s with computers such as the IBM 2250 and the PLATO system -the first version of Shanghai was entirely made with a light pen on a PLATO IV terminal. From the early 80s, you could find this kind of tool on sale in the West as well as in Japan and it’s no surprise that some video game companies such as Tehkan (rechristened Tecmo in 1986) and Dempa (which used one to develop the X1 version of Xevious in 1984) adopted this device at a time when, as with the scanner, its usefulness was still questionable.
It was around 1983 that Sega started using the first version of its Digitizer System, a machine composed of two screens originally intended for developing arcade games. The first screen displayed the end result with pixels in their real size while the second was connected to a light pen with which you could draw pixels.
The Digitizer System, with which Ryuichi Nishizawa and his company developed Wonder Boy (1986) and its sequel after Sega lended them a unit, had no floppy disk drive, which means that saving data was a rather tedious task to say the least. “The external device was a ROM writer, explains Nishizawa. So the ROM is connected to a ROM socket, and then you clip it down. Then you push save, and writing begins. For loading, likewise, you have to connect a ROM device. It was very inefficient! […] You don’t make small changes! Because it’s too much of a hassle. […] Each ROM chip was priced around 500 yen. ROM is a one-off device, you can’t re-use it. Well, you can delete the content, but there’s a separate device called an eraser, to erase what’s there. I think a tape would have been a faster option.”
For the third episode of the Wonder Boy series, Westone decided to go with its own development tools.

>> No.5163368
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Many details remain uncertain regarding the Digitizer System. The first one is related to the light pen itself, still featured in pictures of the system taken in 1988 but not in later photographs. During the 2018 Game developers conference, Naoto Ohshima talked about Sonic (1991), saying that he designed the graphics by drawing pixels one by one with a light pen. If his memory serves him right, it would mean that the Digitizer System could be controlled by two kind of devices in 1990-91.

Another unanswered question: when did Sega start using the Digitizer System to develop console games? Apart from the first Sonic, we know that Moonwalker (1990) and Golden Axe II (1991) were developed with this tool but I haven’t find anything regarding earlier Mega Drive games.

>> No.5163370
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4) Mouse
In 1991, Sega was equipped with the third version of its Digitizer System. According to AGE43, graphic designer on the arcade version of Shadow Dancer, its architecture was based on the System 16B (an arcade system similar to the Mega Drive hardware) and was attached to a PC-98 which allowed to save data on 3.5-inch disks. The designer used a drafting mouse connected to a tablet which calculated the absolute position of the mouse (instead of its relative position as it’s the case with traditional mices). In other words, if the mouse was on square 2-F on the tablet, then the cursor was on square 2-F on the screen.
Working with a mouse could be less tiring than with a light pen that you had to hold in front of you, an arm in the air, but the Digitizer System had at least one major drawback according to one of its former users: it often froze.
Sometimes around 1994, when the first Saturn and 32X games entered production, Sega stored its Digitizer System and replaced them with Macintosh systems. It seems that the company didn’t keep any unit in its archives. However, a picture published in the April 1996 issue of Next Generation features a Digitizer System in one of SEGA Technical Institute’s development rooms, a US studio in which many Japanese developers came to work during the development of Sonic 2 and 3. Tom Payne, one of the graphic designers who worked there at the time, remembers that he used one of these units with a drafting mouse.
Other graphic designers used more traditional mice, be it Satoshi Nakai during the development of Last Armageddon (1988), Right Stuff’s employees on Alshark (1992) or some SNK developers during the production of Art of fighting 2 (1994) and The King of Fighters ‘94.

>> No.5163372
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5) Graphic tablet
Although it produced a domestic version compatible with both the SG-1000 and the SC-3000 -the Telebi Oekaki- in 1985, it seems that Sega didn’t have any graphic tablet in its development rooms in the 80s. However, there are a few known examples of professional use in companies such as Konami and Namco. The former used graphic tablets in 1986 during the development of the Famicom version of Gradius and still had that kind of device in its studios in 1995. Regarding the later, Takashi Oda, a designer who worked on Splatterhouse (1988), drew the sprite of the main character with a tablet.

>> No.5163374

III] Softwares and workstations

Unless they chose softwares such as Dezaemon or RPG Maker which offered little flexibility, the developers couldn’t work without a computer. Before Windows 95 and its sequels became synonymous with PC, the computers people used to play weren’t necessary the same as those used for developing games; each task could be carried out by a dedicated computer. Such was the case with Streets of Rage 2 (1992) whose graphics were designed on a PC-9801 while the music was created on a PC-88 with an FM module. According to Takashi Oda, Splatterhouse’s graphics were designed both on PC-98 (especially for the monsters) and on SMC-777 (a computer he used to draw the main character).
The SMC-777 was a workstation designed by Sony originally targeted at professionals from the audiovisual industry. It didn’t prevent companies such as SNK and Video System to adopt it in the second half of the 80s (the MSX2 version of Ikari Warriors was developed by SNK on an SMC-777). This computer featured its own editor and was an enhanced version of the SMC-70 with which Capcom was equipped until 1990.

>> No.5163378

During the development of Street Fighter II (1991), Capcom stored its SMC-70 custom and replaced them with computers from the X68000 series. Like the PC-98, the X68000 was a workstation originally developed for professional use (unlike the PC-88 which was marketed towards hobbyists). Its longevity within the Japanese industry can be explained by many factors, including the fact that it took years for many companies to fully transition from 2D to 3D. The X68000 was a powerful computer for everything related to 2D and the companies that still used it already had all the necessary development tools to work. The graphic data of games such as Galaxy Fight and Far East of Eden: Kabuki Klash / Tengai Makyō Shinden, two Neo-Geo games released in 1995, made on Sharp’s computer. ZackmannX, a former Taito employee, sent a mail to one of Sharp’s higher ups in the late 90s, asking him to change his mind after the company announced that it would no longer produce its decade old workstation.
Regarding the Hewlett Packard 64000, it was used for programming in the 80s by companies such as Nintendo, Konami and Namco (Yoshihiro Kishimoto used one to develop the MSX version of Mappy in 1984).

Akira Yasuda talked several times about the graphic editor used by Capcom, saying that it was based on Konami’s own graphic tool (it’s unclear whether it has something to do with Yoshiki Okamoto who left Konami to join Capcom in 1984). TCE (for Tiny Character Editor) originally ran on an SMC-70 Custom with which was equipped Capcom when Yasuda joined the company in 1985. He used a keyboard to interact with this tool -he has never been fond of drawing with a mouse- and it seems that this tool was later converted to X68000 when Capcom decided to replace its workstations in 1990.

>> No.5163379
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The X68000 was naturally adopted at Technosoft. The company was at the cutting edge of technology in the 80s and Thunder Force II was originally exclusive to Sharp’s computer. Developing that game implied to get several X68000 which have later been used to create Mega Drive and arcade games. The development tools used by Technosoft were all created internally and ran on X68000. Two editors were used in parallel during the development of Thunder Force IV: one for the logos and in-game illustrations, the other for the sprites and backgrounds.
Depending on the game, Konami and Taito designed their 2D graphics either on X68000 or on PC-98 in the early 90s. Both systems could run their respective graphic editor -Konami PIGS and Taito Animator.
Taito’s graphic editor was later ported to Windows. It had one major drawback though: you couldn’t visualize an animation cycle and had to manually scroll each from to simulate the animation. It’s unclear whether this issue was eventually patched or not.
A few last words on Taito: a former graphic designer mentioned the exercice submited to the newcomers, saying that they were asked to draw marbles in a given time period.

Dempa Micomsoft, a company known for its accessories and conversions of arcade games on X68000 and Mega Drive, also produced its own graphic editor on Sharp’s computer: Object Editor. This mouse-controlled software, programmed by a developer called Tonbe, was used during the production of the X68000 version of Ys.

>> No.5163381
File: 26 KB, 774x576, tumblr_inline_phix3nzW3B1w169t0_1280.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5163381

While some companies had the financial capacities to develop their own tools, freelance artists couldn’t afford that and had to rely on commercial softwares. Such was the case with Satoshi Nakai (Gynoug, Valken) who designed graphics on an X68000 with a mouse and a copy of Z'Graff. Another example is one of the graphic designers who worked on Thunder Force IV and trained himself on PCG Editor, a commercial graphic tool that was available on X1 and MSX.

>> No.5163382
File: 25 KB, 242x384, tumblr_inline_phix4fgAE81w169t0_1280.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5163382

Art Box, the graphic editor used by SNK during the development of the first Samurai Shodown (1993). Mitsuo Kodama and his colleagues used the same tool one year before, during the production of Last Resort (1992). SNK started to use Windows during the development of Art of Fighting 3 (1996)
Graphic tool used by Sega in the early 90s, featuring Moon walker (Mega Drive, 1990), Title Fight (Arcade, 1991) + a third, unidentified game. While he was satisfied with the Digitizer System, Tōru Yoshida, graphic and character designer on Phantasy Star II and IV, didn’t praise the editor that was used at Sega at the time

>> No.5163383

IV] Machine specificities

Apart from the differences in rendering from one screen to another, each machine had its own specifities that conscientious graphic designers took into account. Let’s take the Mega Drive/Genesis as an example: besides the usual non-square pixels issue (less marked than on other machines though), red and blue were problematic colors. The red color bleeded on the adjacent colors, a phenomenom that, on the other hand, could be used to simulate new colors. This specificity was less marked on TeraDrive, a computer bundled with its own monitor and capable of running Mega Drive games, but it sold so poorly that some graphic designers weren’t even aware of its existence.
People who developed games for the Mega Drive had to deal with a number of restrictions such as the lack of transparency effect and the fact that it could only display 64 colors at one time from a total palette of 512 colors. However, even the most colorful games rarely displayed more than thirty colors simultaneously.
The Mega Drive’s biggest drawback, according to numerous graphic designers, was that you had to juggle with 4 palettes of 16 colors each. You could create more palettes for your game but you could only use 4 of them at one time.
Imagine a game in which you want to simultaneously display 2 playable characters, 3-4 enemies, one background and a user interface (life bar, timer, etc.); that makes it a total of 7 to 8 elements to display on the screen with only 4 palettes. You can choose to allocate 2 palettes to the playable characters at a rate of one each. It doesn’t matter if you have hundreds of playable characters as long as only 2 of them appear simultaneously on the screen.

>> No.5163385
File: 22 KB, 440x274, tumblr_inline_phixdv8I0Y1w169t0_1280.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5163385

Unless they are directly drawn in the backgrounds (as in Final Fight for example), the non-playable characters are sprites that can’t exceed 16 colors each, knowing that one of these colors is used for transparency -as a green screen in cinema, sprites are stored on a colored background (generally green, blue or pink); that color doesn’t appear on screen in the game, thus letting other elements such as backgrounds, items and characters appear behind the sprite.
The colors of the user interface generally stay the same during the whole game which constitutes an additional constraint. You can allocate a palette to the UI or use colors common to every playable character.
Depending on your choices, there’s only one or two palettes left for the backgrounds and the enemies. Using the same palette(s) for both can be very useful, the enemies can reappear further in the game with different colors.
Backgrounds and sprites are made of tiles, a tile is a block made of pixels that you can apply as a clone stamp (since you can’t store an infinite quantity of data, tiles are very often displayed several times on the same screen). If you have chosen to allocate 2 palettes to the backgrounds, it may be necessary to incorporate some colors in both palettes in order to make the tiles fit.

Techniques such as dithering could be used to simulate more colors by alternating pixels of 2 different colors, as if you were painting a chessboard.

>> No.5163386

V] Tips and tricks

Before finishing up this article, some tips shared by graphic designers. It’s common for computers and video game consoles to have many resolutions and display modes, each of them had its benefits and drawbacks. Apart from the famous Mode 7, the Super Famicom had 7 other graphics modes. Due to the visual complexity of its ideograms, Japan felt the need to use higher resolutions than those used in the West at the same time in order to display kanji properly and the Super Famicom had a few games, especially some of Square’s latter games, in which a part of the screen uses a higher resolution to display text.

Depending on the machine for which they were created, sprites have specific limitations (height, number of colors), but you can get around some of them by putting together a character made of many sprites. It’s a widespread practice for big characters such as Sagat from the first Street Fighter (1987; the upper part is detached from the lower part) and Sentinel from X-Men: Children of the Atom (1994). If that’s still not enough, you can display a character as a background layer, as was the case with some of the bosses from Mega Man 2 (1988) .

>> No.5163389

Developers such as Tose sometimes used the same color for both transparency and the contours of the sprites (in the present case: black) in order to maximise the number of colors from each palette, thus obtaining Famicom sprites with 4 colors instead of 3.

http://videogamesdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/180100803290/designing-2d-graphics-in-the-japanese-industry

>> No.5163512

nice article with a lot to take in, seems like the companies that folded didn't update their systems and it was interesting how snk used 3d rendering

>> No.5163525

>>5163345
this picture is now gonna be a trump card in any discussion by crtfags and filterfags isn't it

>> No.5163535

>>5163525
If anything it should be used as a reference by filter programmers.

>> No.5163553

>>5163345
Left side looks like total shit. CRT fags btfo once again

>> No.5163556 [DELETED] 

>>5163525
Doesn’t matter. CRTs are shitty, dying tech.

>> No.5163561

>>5163345
A dot is a dot. You can't say it's only a half.

>> No.5163563

>>5163561
Kek

>> No.5163650

Well this is interesting.

>> No.5163697

>>5163345
>(ドット絵, the “e” is the same as in “Ukiyo-e” and means picture)
Or the e in emoji.

>> No.5163758

>5163553
Interesting perspective you have there champ

>> No.5163761

>>5163525
>>5163553
>>5163556
>>5163561
>>5163758
This place would be great if it wasn’t for the people who post here.
OP, thanks for the good read

>> No.5163769

>>5163761
Last I heard this was still a place where discussion could take place.

Would you rather it were a blog with comments disabled? If so, please go elsewhere or refrain on commenting.

>> No.5163774

>>5163553
Stupid faggot.

>> No.5163778

Thanks OP

>> No.5163850

Thanks op

>> No.5163875
File: 245 KB, 1831x504, CRT.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5163875

>>5163345
Nice. Saved.

>> No.5163919

>>5163561
>OH YEAH? WHERE'S YOUR PIXEL ART THEN?

>> No.5163950

>>5163345
>His colleague Yasuyuki Oda adds that “Back in the old days, we’d say [to our artists] “add 0.5 of a pixel”, and have them draw in the pixels by taking scanlines into account. But with the modern Full HD monitor, the pixels comes out too clearly and too perfectly that you can’t have that same taste.“

Anon was right. THE WAY IS MEANT TO BE PRAYED IN COMPOSITE VIDYA!

>> No.5163969

>>5163337
>at a time when most Western companies used the same sound engine on Mega Drive -GEMS-
Europeans always programmed their own stuff.

>> No.5163984
File: 1.58 MB, 360x328, 5B098828-61CC-4802-8F75-134A8B37C88B.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5163984

>>5163769
>hd zoomer posting
>adding to discussion

>> No.5164192

>>5163342
What a terribly inefficient waste of memory.

>> No.5164220

>>5163337
Did you originally write this OP? If so, could you post more sources to quotes from the developers you paraphrased in your first 20 or so posts?

>> No.5164432

And now we have all those self-entitled internet geniuses with their shitty tutorials telling how people should draw pixel art and how there's something called "pillow shading" and how it's really bad.

>> No.5164618

Thats why JP games are shit now
They stopped using their own engines

>> No.5164703

>>5163337
>An Amiga, Deluxe Paint and a mouse. From the late 80s to the early 90s, these 3 tools were at the core of numerous graphic designers’ workstations in the West. It took years for the Japanese industry to start adopting commercial engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine
The fuck kind of comparison is this? No one in the west was using Unity or Unreal Engine yet either, neither one was available until after 2000. And the JP re-used engines all the fucking time. SMB2 was the first game with some minor addons, Whomp'em and Saiyūki World just re-used the engine from Wonderboy in Monster Land, and TMNT used the engine from Getsu Fuuma Den. What sort of weeaboo actually thought the JP created a new game engine with every title, and what made them believe that? I refuse to read the rest of this shit if the author can't even get facts straight in the first fucking paragraph.

>> No.5164735

>>5164703
>The fuck kind of comparison is this? I refuse to read the rest of this shit if the author can't even get facts straight in the first fucking paragraph.

I was going to say the same thing, this is pretty basic stuff

>> No.5164772

Capcom actually used Sharp X68000 PC's as development and prototyping kits for their CPS arcade games. I always thought that was pretty awesome.

http://arcadehacker.blogspot.com/2015/05/capcom-cps1-part-2.html

>> No.5164797

>>5164618

DUDE, i hate this fucking UNREAL engine so much. Its either unreal or fucking unity. ANd in the end the games all look and feel the same.

>> No.5164805

>>5163337

Awesome info. Thanks a lot Anon!

>> No.5164808

>>5163337
japanese had great computers back then.

>> No.5164812

Thank you op

>> No.5164835
File: 901 KB, 743x585, Capcom R&D room where Street Fighter 2 coin-op was created.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5164835

>>5164772
Amazing how there isn't a single X68000 in this picture.

>> No.5164854

>>5164835
Doesn’t seem to be a PVMeme either. Trinifags btfo once again

>> No.5164861
File: 130 KB, 1007x678, 1541813565057.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5164861

>>5164854
Sure, but

>> No.5164885

>>5164861
Those PVMs are showing the pre-rendered FMV and backgrounds though, Thats not game footage, that is SG workstation visuals. That is a whole other kettle of fish than anything else in this thread.

>> No.5164892

I rather believe Juan Gotoh.
https://togetter.com/li/1096816

>> No.5164898

>>5164618
RPGMaker2000 is nippons

>> No.5164928

>>5164220
see>>5163389

>> No.5165043

>>5163337
It's bad enough you blog your ignorant shit on tumblr. Keep it there.

>> No.5165062

>>5163525
Everybody already knows that consumer CRT televisions and high resolution CRT monitors produce different images. And it's not a big secret how graphics are represented programmatically on retro consoles. So I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. Did you think they drew the sprites directly on a CRT television? The way composite video affects the image is well known, they could design sprites around it just fine from a PC workstation.

>> No.5165086
File: 769 KB, 449x382, Tumblr_og9dkv5Jkd1vis8oeo1_500.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5165086

>>5164898
RPGMaker is god tier it gave us Yume Nikki. I think limited engines allow for more creativity

>> No.5165105

>>5164928
I was asking for more sourceS, I already saw that link. This also doesn't answer my earlier question on whether that guy actually wrote it himself or plagiarized/copypasted someone else's work.

>> No.5165112

>>5165105
but his post gave all the source at the end.

>> No.5165114

>>5165112
We want real Japanese interviews, not some inaccessible tumblr shit.

>> No.5165116
File: 39 KB, 570x526, Doublenigger.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5165116

>>5165114
Sources:
Intro
Mega Drive sound engines:
http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Mega_Drive/Genesis_Sound_Engine_List

Designing graphics with a computer
The hexadecimal era
Hiroshi Ono :
http://videogamesdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/151291912650/hiroshi-ono-%E5%B0%8F%E9%87%8E%E6%B5%A9-aka-mr-dotman-mr%E3%83%89%E3%83%83%E3%83%88%E3%83%9E%E3%83%B3-part
Michitaka Tsuruta :
The untold History of Japanese game developers Vol.2 p146, 223
http://www.nesblog.com/tsuruta-michitaka-interview/
Ryuichi Nishizawa :
https://twitter.com/WonderBoyWild/status/797335106092298240
https://twitter.com/WonderBoyWild/status/797348042164711424
Pac-Man :
https://web.archive.org/web/20170328095401/http://hrnabi.com/2015/12/29/9621/
https://twitter.com/sahoobb/status/696977496873381888
Toshiyuki Nakai :
http://shmuplations.com/snkorigins/

Direct interaction between the graphic designer and the computer
Hudson Soft:
https://twitter.com/snapwith/status/887587978083672064
http://www.highriskrevolution.com/gamelife/index.php?e=190
Seiryū Densetsu Monbit :
http://www.chrismcovell.com/secret/PCE_1989Q4.html#pcedev
The Preview function
preview function - Square:
https://twitter.com/Skazuko/status/871660804021661697
preview function - Akiman:
https://twitter.com/akiman7/status/904275001531969536
preview function - Thunder force IV:
https://twitter.com/UMMO_CHAN/status/889293714362781696
https://twitter.com/UMMO_CHAN/status/1043699686861762560
preview function - Sonic 1
https://twitter.com/Mazin__/status/331967458992877568
Thunder Force IV and X68000:
https://twitter.com/TFIV_25th_Anniv/status/1058510513976467457
bleeding sprites:
https://twitter.com/MOG4791/status/886921323095629824
Bleeding on Mega Drive:
https://twitter.com/Mazin__/status/332065800955510785
https://twitter.com/UMMO_CHAN/status/1043698793139433473
Dot-e / ドット絵
https://twitter.com/Area51_zek/status/1017725988786995201
Half pixel / 半ドット, 0.5 ドット

>> No.5165120

>>5165086
amen anon, i love (some) rpgmaker crap

>> No.5165127

>>5163345
>nuage zoomer "pixel art" fags utterly BTFO

>> No.5165130

>>5165116
Any English or French source is worthless.
Tumblr is out of question:
>続行する前に、更新内容をご確認ください
>Tumblrは Oathファミリーの子会社になりました。この変更に伴い、最新版の 利用規約および欧州版プライバシーポリシーを確認してください。欧州個人データ保護規則により、弊社(Oath)、弊社ベンダー、およびパートナー企業は、ユーザーの興味をより適切に理解し、弊社製品をパーソナライズすることで製品の広告をよりよいものにするため、検索、位置情報、ブラウジングデータを使用するためユーザーのデバイスにクッキーを保存しています。このクッキーの保存に関して、ユーザーの同意が必要となります。Oathでは、パートナーの製品においてもパーソナライズされた広告を提供しています。下にスクロールしてプライバシーに関する更新内容を確認し、設定を変更することができます。
>ヒント: アカウントにログインしてから実行すると他のデバイスでこの操作を繰り返さなくてすみます。
データによる利用体験の改善について
>弊社製品で最高の体験をしていただくのが私たちの使命です。時々、弊社ではサイトや製品でのユーザーの操作などを通じてユーザーの興味を知的に推測してパーソナライズされた広告を表示しています。このデータをOathがどう使用しているかについては詳細をご覧ください。
>信頼のおけるパートナーによるパーソナライズされたコンテンツと広告を受け取る
>これは広告が増えるという意味ではありません。広告がユーザーの好みに合ったものになるという意味です。弊社サイトで使用するのと同様のデータクッキーをパートナーが使用することを許可することにより、パートナーは、ユーザーが好きな製品やインタラクションしたいと思うような個人の興味に合ったコンテンツや広告を表示することができるようになります。また、それらの広告とのインタラクションを測定、報告、分析できるようになります。パートナーがどのようにこのデータを使用するかについてご確認ください。また「オプションの管理」で、パートナーに共有するデータのオプションを設定しましょう。
ブロガーとユーザーのデータ
>Tumblrのネットワークにあるブログにアクセスする時、そのブログはTumblrで収集しているデータ以上のデータを収集する場合があります。また広告主など、Tumblrでは関知していないサードパーティーに情報を提供している場合もあります。弊社では情報の収集および個別のブログやブロガーの実際の行動には一切の責任を負いません。
>Tumblrの使用を続行するには「承諾」を選択します。これを選択しない限り、Tumblrのサイトやアプリは使用できません。「オプションの管理」を選択して、パートナーとのデータ共有設定を選択してください。詳細と設定についてはプライバシーダッシュボードにアクセスしてください。

>> No.5165148

>>5163875
>>5163345
Stop pretending that this proves that "old games were designed with CRT scanlines in mind".

It only proves that some games were, which we always knew, it doesn't mean that they all were. The quote specifically talk about some specific people, meaning it's not a general thing.

>> No.5165151

>>5165148
The Wizardry post in particular is just one random dude on Twitter.

>> No.5165162 [DELETED] 

Are there any good documentaries of TV programs on making games in Japan during the 80s and 90s? It can be subbed or not subbed.

I've searched all over NicoNicoDouga and Youtube and haven't found anything except old gaming variety shows and such...

The only such thing I've seen was a documentary on making Metal Gear Solid 4, but that is too recent.

Thanks.

>> No.5165163

Are there any good documentaries or TV programs on making games in Japan during the 80s and 90s? It can be subbed or not subbed.

I've searched all over NicoNicoDouga and Youtube and haven't found anything except old gaming variety shows and such...

The only such thing I've seen was a documentary on making Metal Gear Solid 4, but that is too recent.

Thanks.

>> No.5165178

>>5165163
I should specify I'm looking for something in-depth recorded while making the game, like this MGS4 documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nM7TLbs6fE

The only things I've found are generally after-the-fact interviews with the game creators and little snippets of videos of production, but nothing like in the MGS4 video series above. This part at the start of this video about making Bomberman 3 is the closest I've found, but it's barely anything:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaqXPOoI_I4

>> No.5165184

>>5165130
No one give a shit about Tumblr. Those sources are interview with Japanese developers or direct translations of old interviews. How the hell is the language relevant?

The main takeaway about all those interviews is that nobody in the Japanese industry had a standardized way of doing 2D graphics at that time. Nothing really surprising.

>> No.5165190

>>5165184
>How the hell is the language relevant?
Because translations tend to fuck things up and invent content.

>> No.5165337

>>5165190
Oh shut up weeb

>> No.5165340

>>5165190
I can smell your BO all the way from here, you disgusting creature.

>> No.5165351
File: 1.37 MB, 3004x3377, crtvlcdcomparison.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5165351

>>5163345
>tumblr only has some pathetic thumb nail version of the original pictures
sad

>> No.5165373

>>5163345
>>5165351
is the left supposed to be better somehow?
it's just dark and muddy, right is way better unless you zoom all the way in

>> No.5165508

>>5165373
You're supposed to zoom out to what it would look like at eye level.

>> No.5165606

>>5165148
They all were back in the day mate. Nobody had LCD monitors or TV's.

>> No.5166834

This thread is pure gold. Thank you so much for all the information! Some of the guys, doing pixel art are geniuses. It was hugely advanced even in late 80s already.

>> No.5166852

Kaori is LOVE <3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrFRUGItrE0
I wish I suki-suki her in the 80s. Damn I love Japanese artists, they are geniuses. All this pixel art makes me cry. It's the same experience as visiting Louvre for the first time.

>> No.5166994

>>5166834
>my thread is pure gold
>thank me so much for all the disinformation
the literal state of OP newsamefaggotry in your degeneration

>> No.5167028

>>5166994
What is actually wrong with you? Do you need to be on some sort of medication?

>> No.5167359

>>5164835
what a retard

>> No.5167423
File: 109 KB, 852x1136, BuXHVuQCIAILZKy.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5167423

As an addition to the graph paper thing, Capcom's arcade spriters actually used specially-developed graph paper that kept their arcade systems' unusual pixel aspect ratio in mind. You can see here that the cels are rectangular rather than square. There are also thicker lines that define each 16x16 pixel tile.

>> No.5167439
File: 34 KB, 318x400, norimaro-mshvssf-2.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5167439

>>5165163
There is one variety show that gives a bit of a behind the scenes look at mid 90s arcade Capcom. It's the episodes about the creation of Norimaro in Marvel Super Heroes VS Street Fighter:
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8616718 Part 1-1
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8619185 Part 1-2
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8621001 Part 1-3
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8627095 Part 2-1
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8630698 Part 2-2
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8630906 Part 2-3
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8639109 Part 3-1
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8640270 Part 3-2
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8640480 Part 3-3
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8642322 Part 4

You get to see some cut content here, including Norimaro's infamous kanchou throw.

>> No.5167772

It's amost as if highly intelligent graphic designers and directors of the 80s and 90s were aware how CRTs work and designed their graphics with them in mind. Wow, who woulda thunk it!

>> No.5167823

>>5167772
>thunk
It's thinked, you uneducated gamer.

>> No.5170067
File: 163 KB, 382x452, 1538777830022.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5170067

>>5163337
I could have sworn OPs post had a youtube link with the video? Where is it?

>> No.5170402

>>5163553
Imagine being this wrong.

>> No.5170405

>>5164892
The hentai guy?

>> No.5170538

>>5164192
It was probably how the hardware was set up. 16x16 sprites with 2bits per pixel for 3 colours plus transparent. You could shave a couple of bytes off storage and unpack for vram IF your target hardware had vram, but most arcade hardware back then and even the venerable NES mapped tiles from the ROM so the tile data had to be stored in graphics chip native format.

>> No.5170539

>>5164797
Couldn't agree more. Unity games are jank mess by indie studios. Unreal games are lumbering, laggy messes by big studios. The studio that uses their own engines give us Hitman 2. There's no comparison.

>> No.5170542

>>5165337
>>5165340
Given the sizable levels of invention and false equivalence in the OP posts it wouldn't be sensible to take that hard line. The whole blog post smacks of a person with only a tiny knowledge of 80s and 90s game design using this shallow knowledge to infer details about the process gleaned from a few translated statements by developers not going into detail at all.

>> No.5170548

>>5170539
Is hitman 2 good?

>> No.5170591

>>5170548
A technical marvel. Gameplay is good if you like approaching a problem from multiple angles. Short and disappointing if you don't. It does have homing briefcases though...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zlpRO6oiL4

>> No.5171816

Nothing in this thread makes any sense to me, but it's fucking fascinating.

>> No.5172323

>>5170542
>only a tiny knowledge
You're being too generous

>> No.5172521

>/vr/ has better threads about old tech than /g/

TO THE SURPRISE OF NO ONE

>> No.5172531

>>5170542
hold on gamers, we have an expert here!

>> No.5173343

>>5165606
This, except LCD monitors did exist. They were tiny and monochrome.

>> No.5173754

>>5173343
Tons of "modern" tech goes back DECADES.

>> No.5174004

>>5164703
>What sort of weeaboo actually thought the JP created a new game engine with every title, and what made them believe that?
Certainly not the writer of this article since nowhere is that stated.

>> No.5174089

>>5172531
Compared to OP anyone is an "expert"

>> No.5174436

>>5165148
>Stop pretending that this proves that "old games were designed with CRT scanlines in mind".
only proves that some games were
what a retard. no idea how televisions work, no idea how the past, no idea about video graphics techniques. how and why do you even fucking live? boggles the mind.

>> No.5174490

>>5170539
right. and the studios which used their own engines also gave us Gothic and Daggerfall, both which are buggy as hell and unrefined messes

>> No.5176239

>>5172521
Making posts about videogames would rightfully get you pointed towards >>>/v/

>> No.5176242

>>5170067
If you think so, go double check on desuarchive.

>> No.5177814

>>5163337
Good read, thanks for the post anon!

>> No.5178860

>>5177814
Sure thing OP