/vr/ - Retro Games

Little RAM to work with and limited storage from cartridges.
Controls limited to 4 directions and 4 buttons.
User intelligence limited to small children.

Yes we've already established that the Speccy is superior to the NES, why have this theead again

PC games are unplayable excel tables and tech demos, while console games are actual games.

>>6464918
Are you retarded? PCs couldn't even scroll graphics smoothly at that time. This shit is barely comparable the design philosophies are so different. Yes, elite is a deeper game than let's say Super Mario Bros but it better be, because it has NO graphics. The latter is much more organic to play.

>>6465040
It has 3D graphics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZT6ItqZ2xc

>>6465040
C64 sidescrolling games scroll just fine.

>>6465094
Wow, you ARE retarded. It has fucking lines and dots. Nothing more.

>>6465104
Smooth as butter baby.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCRYe3W2No4


You have console devs to thank for figuring out how to scroll graphics at a smooth 60 fps around 85-ish. End of story.

>>6465115
Consoles could only scroll in one direction and there was nothing particularly smooth about it.

>>6465120
>and there was nothing particularly smooth about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLl9XBg7wSs
Motherfucker, skip to 8:00 and tell me that's not smooth compared to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCRYe3W2No4

>>6465115
Nah it scrolls just fine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNAkBxNt0Dc

>>6465128
Is that the only C64 game you know?
How about something from 1985.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEam-zQgWcU

>>6465128
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDDkxfJCB9Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8teXm6723-g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldo2ewLBt3Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK82X9VlE38
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqVXuBfEW-g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIaabMWupmQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDAhixO2t5w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT3kmm8B_FE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYr_QA1748U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bft5BhWIzTU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU2NYljlnJo

>>6465181
Parallax was made in 1986 and it's way more advanced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbksq8PF71s

>>6465181
Dude, I don't think you have an eye for this sort of stuff. So that's the C64 showpiece game you pick? This is the hill you want die on? Do I REALLY need to point out the various ways in which that game is technically inferior to Super Mario Bros? Okay...

- Significantly lower framerate
- Significantly fewer colors
- Significantly lower sprite resolution
- Significantly lower sprite count on screen
- Actually scrolling gameplay graphics are not fullscreen
- It has no music during gameplay

>>6465197
>Giana Sisters
To be fair, doesn't that predate Mario?

>>6465215
And yet it scrolls significantly better than SMB.
Maybe you should claim that it took console devs to give us high frame rate, many colors, high res sprites, high sprite count, fullscreen graphics or music but you probably wouldn't be able to accept replies to that with that either.

>>6465197
Jesus that Armalyte intro song FUCKS!

>>6465237
>And yet it scrolls significantly better than SMB.
You mean because it's multidirectional? I can't think of a NES game that has it. Is there one?

>>6465246
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2LTcQwmOV4

Used extra hardware on the cart. Still has artifacts on new tiles.

>>6465278
Oh yeah, the map screen at least does.

>>6464926
>haha console game for dumb baby
>muh big brained text adventures
Yeah those visual novels without the anime girls are right classics pcbro

>>6465353
The ones with as well.

I think its more along the lines of PCs in those days were viewed more as a spreadsheet machine to help with your homework than as a legitimate medium for gaming. Thats why if you wanted to play the best port of an arcade game, you went on the NES or sega genesis. It wasnt until the 90s when Wolfenstein 3D and Doom was released that PC gaming really started to kick off.

>>6464918
Audio.

PCs could get more ram use by not using audio as much, which left a lot of room to do more with everything else.

You'll notice early PC games like to be very quiet except for the intro screens or on player deaths.

>>6465397
You need to distinguish between IBM compatibles and other personal computers.

>>6465397
And when doom came out it pretty much started the whole PC having the best graphic meme because at the time Doom had some of the best graphics made at the time, better than what The SNES or Genesis or even the first Playstation (actually I think quake proved that for playstation) could do at the time.

>>6465413
What is the difference though? Im not really that much of an expert on those times so please correct me if you want because I would like to know. Please forgive me.

>>6465013
Hi, Phil. When's FEZ II coming out?

>>6465417
Completely different hardware and architecture.
People mainly got Amiga or C64 for games. Doing other things was seen as a side benefit.
No kid would ask his parents to buy him an IBM PC so he could do his homework, he asked for a Commodore.

>>6465432
Ah ok. Makes sense

>>6465237
>And yet it scrolls significantly better than SMB.
How?

>>6465013
>PC tech demo
Lol no, Amiga was the tech demo system
>amazing demo, what are the games like?
>Hi res Zniggy with half the screen covered by a rainbow status bar and Zniggy! logo, janky scrolling, and you can't have music and sound effects at the same time becuase they needed the extra sound channel for the "z-z-z-zniggy" vocal sample

>>6465115
Congrats dickwad, that's what 3D was during the 80's.

>>6465531
more like znigger LOL

>>6465494
Dunno about that one but C64 was capable of parallax scrolling, unlike the NES, so it technically has better scrolling.

PCs would be better for strategy, adventure, and RPG games as those are memory intensive and tend to need a keyboard. A PC of that time would not be very good at arcade games. The NES was specifically optimized for that since jump and run stuff like SMB needs little memory, but it does need hardware graphics acceleration since a 1Mhz CPU couldn't move all that stuff around by itself.

I mean, yeah, all the attempts at porting CRPGs to the NES like Ultima and Bard's Tale were pretty bad because those games need the keyboard and memory capacity of a PC.

>>6465115
Lots of NES games scroll at lower speeds to avoid NTSC dot crawl. SMB does scroll at 60 fps and it has horrible dot crawl.

>>6465206
>>6467247
The NES can do parallax scrolling alright, it's just that you need a VRC6 or MMC5 because it doesn't have scanline IRQs out of the box, just counters.

>>6464926
>Little RAM to work with
The NES has 2k of RAM and 40k ROM space (32k for the program code and 8k for the graphics data). Along with the 2k VRAM, that makes for 44k total memory space only a small part of which is rewritable. The Spectrum has 48k memory, all of which is rewritable and you can do things like self-modifying code that wouldn't be possible on a ROM cartridge.

And you could make your own games whilst only professionals at a big budget studio got to make NES games.

>>6464918
Couldn't do Neuromancer or Project: Firestart on the NES because among other thing they wouldn't pass Nintendo's censorship rules.

What can you do with 2k of memory and no keyboard?

>>6465128
The C64 has a slower CPU than the NES and it takes a lot more cycles to scroll the screen around due to how the scroll registers work. Don't forget that they mainly intended them to do something like scroll a banner of text across the screen while the NES was modeled on the latest arcade hardware in the early 80s which used tile map smooth scrolling.

>>6464918
the NES (1983) was a very weak system, the only thing that made it capable of running games at all was the PPU (graphics chip), it could do some things like scrolling and sprites in hardware, as well as a usable sound chip
besides that, it was very minimal

a 1983 IBM PC XT had a 4.77MHz 16bit cpu (8bit bus), with at least 128K of ram, 360K floppy and a 10M hdd
while the nes had an 8bit <2MHz cpu, 2K ram (carts could be read as fast as ram, so not directly comparable, since you don't necessarily need to load something into ram to use it), game carts were typically around the 128K mark, though they vary up to 1M

while pc's started off with shit graphics (cga) and audio (pc speaker), they still had more complex games due to additional storage, additional ram, and faster cpus

I am very happy that nintendo kids are standing corrected on this forum.
I, as a proud user of superiour electronic devices made for adult (and far more intelligence having) people, am happy to announce that this battle's outcome is declared as a victory for the glorious micro computational squadron. Cheers, chaps.

>>6467761
The thing didn't even have scanline IRQs or any actual way to generate an IRQ outside a hax trick that used up one sprite--you needed add-on cartridge chips for that. You also have to program everything carefully and in the proper sequence to even display anything on screen, and all game logic and graphics access have to be wrapped around the 5000 or so cycle VBLANK.

>>6467765
it's not like it should have been a surprise
we're comparing a $180 console with a $4,000+ microcomputer
the target audiences alone would have been a factor for sure

>>6467761
The Master System was better in every way but the weak sound. Had 8k RAM and an IRQ timer out of the box, scanline IRQs, and a bigger color palette.

>>6467778
that's why they added FM to later master system units
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf69Hqqri0

>>6465115
>Essentially referring to vector graphics like it's Morse code
Aha, yeah you're deficient

>>6467778
It better be, it was released in 1985.

>>6467770
Scanline IRQs also weren't available on the Famicom until advanced late period mappers like VRC6.

>>6467784
MSX2?

>>6467790
so was the NES

>>6467792
Batman: Return of the Joker (NES)

>>6467761
King's Quest definitely wouldn't be possible on the NES since (even putting the lack of a keyboard aside) the AGI engine needed 128k of memory, the C64 couldn't do it either and 128k Apple II models could just barely pull off a cut-down version with missing content due to space limitations.

>>6467798
Yeah this game came out in 1992 and it used Sunsoft's FME-7 mapper which provided scanline IRQs. You see how this wasn't available on the NES at all until it was near the end of its commercial lifespan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cl2yizTrgQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrMk9RyCWKI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFMcvOpPuy8

Lyl.

>>6467796
NES is just the famicom, from 1983
Sega released the SG-1000 that year

>>6467812
the SG-1000 unfortunately was just a clone of the Colecovision using a 1979 chipset, 1k RAM, and no ability to add external cartridge RAM so the Famicom made it look silly.

When will nintendos kids learn?
Adults are adults. Kids are kids. I am an adult, you are a kids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG_MC-H8zzA

>>6467818
This used the FG-07 mapper it doesn't count spectrum and master system is better

>>6467826
>FG-07 mapper
What, nigga? Recca runs on MMC3, pretty standard mapper (doesn't have audio expansions), and I haven't heard of something like "FG-07".

>>6467778
One nice thing about the NES is that the CHR ROM means the graphics are instantly available on power-on and can be switched out instantly. The Master System and basically every other console has to move the graphics data from the main cartridge ROM into video RAM in a slow copy loop. So when you start a new level of a game, there's a noticeable pause as it's copying the graphics data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf2IO7P5DVA

41:06. Watch as Link goes into the cave and there's about 1.5 seconds of blank screen. That's because it's loading the set of graphics data for the cave.

>>6467826
>Mimimi, mapper doesn't count mimimi...
It's very enjoyable trigging this autist. Do you think anyone else but you cares. It's part of the NES library.

>>6467838
This gif shows off the NES' biggest weakness, flickering. There was no way to bypass the miniscule 8 sprites per scanline limit, and as time went on the console's age started to show.

>>6467943
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpV4BIHbseM

Go to 29:33 The NES can't do that huge-ass bird sprite but the C64 can.

>>6467967
No flicker either. C64 graphics are generally very clean and stable, they don't flicker or display unsightly scroll artifacts.

>>6467943
Mario riding on a dinosaur was originally pitched for SMB3 but the NES just couldn't do it.

>>6467967
The NES has hardware sprite multiplexing which the C64 doesn't, but then its sprites are also tiny and lack the C64's "double size" feature.

>>6467327
That would make the cartridge way too expensive, not a good thing.

>>6467943
>and as time went on the console's age started to show.
Yes, you figured it out. Things get older! This is the exact kind of high level analysis I expect from a PC gamer.

>>6467742
>The C64 has a slower CPU than the NES
The C64 CPU had slower clock cycle on paper but that's because it accessed memory in a different way, it was more advanced than the CPU NES used. NES' Ricoh CPU was based on MOS 6502 while the C64 had the newer MOS 6510. Bank switching on a NES was primitive and complicated, on C64 it was more modern and efficient.

>>6468414
>it was more advanced than the CPU NES used. NES' Ricoh CPU was based on MOS 6502 while the C64 had the newer MOS 6510. Bank switching on a NES was primitive and complicated, on C64 it was more modern and efficient
It's the same CPU except the 6510 had an added switching circuit built in to bank the OS ROMs. The NES also had a non-working decimal mode so Nintendo/Ricoh wouldn't have to pay Commodore royalties to use the 6502 and they figured that games didn't really need it anyway.

I can't tell how much of this thread is ironic and how much is sincere.
Are you guys really that upset about the fact that japanese developers did better action games on consoles, and western developers did better simulation games on computers? You're all just funposting and not being serious, right?

>>6469482
Anon, I...

>>6469482
20% are epic trolls, 80% are sincere retards

>>6469531
>80% are sincere retards
That's fucking sad.

>>6467967
If this game was ported to the NES, the developers would have three possible ways of doing this.

1) They make the sprite much smaller, up to a maximum width of 64 pixels.
2) They make the bird a giant background object against a black screen that bounces all over the screen, similar to the mecha dragon from mega man 2. Instead the acme vacs on the sides would be sprite objects, since there will be no other sprites that high and it won't be a problem, similar to the platforms in picrel.
3) They make the bird into two separate 64pixel wide sprites and flicker each half rapidly. This is not ideal but some games used this method in really specific ways, such as Ken-Oh's death sprite in the NES port of Shinobi.

>>6469756
>They make the sprite much smaller, up to a maximum width of 64 pixels

>>6468414
>The C64 CPU had slower clock cycle on paper but that's because it accessed memory in a different way
ie. the memory mapped video slows the CPU while the NES has port-mapped video memory

>>6469426
I'm not denying that the 6510 is the same processor as 6502, only with i/o pins added. I just found the guy ridiculous for saying that 6502 is faster. Yeah nintendo had cartridges so it wouldnt need such a thing anyway.

>>6469482
The NES was $200 at launch in 1985 (bundled with duck hunt and mario), and the games themselves cost $60-100. By 1985, commodore 64 was $149 with games that could easily be pirated. That's a really huge margin for a console that was only very slightly better for playing action games.

>>6469761
Thunderbird is only 48 pixels wide, or 6 tiles. This is to help hinder flicker when Link jumps up to attack, who is 16 pixels wide when not attacking. I can't think of any NES games that actually used full sized sprites, even the largest boxers in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out are only 56pixels/7 tiles wide. The closest would be Amazon's Running Diet.

>>6467838
You can avoid sprite flicker, but it takes some careful programming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMm6NIhJFJ4

The game engine never puts more than three sprites in a line so there's no flicker.

>>6469790
That was my point. Thunderbird was about the nearest approximation on the NES I could think of to the bird boss in Creatures and he's still a lot smaller. If you put eight NES sprites in a row, you can cover a width of only 64 pixels while eight C64 sprites in a row would cover 160 pixels and and also have the double size feature.

Maniac Mansion was famously difficult to fit into the C64's memory space, in fact they even had to use the 1541's RAM for additional storage. Yet on the NES it could fit into a 40k ROM space and the game as a whole was 256k while the C64 one totally filled two sides of a 1541 disk, for a total of 340k, and the NES also had in-game music. Ron Gilbert, who was not involved in making the NES port, was surprised they pulled it off given the difficulty trying to fit it into the C64's memory. How?

Well one thing is that the NES's hardware is very simple as >>6467761 mentions so the game didn't need as much code as it did on the C64, especially stuff like the disk routines and even anti-hacking checks all took a lot of space and the NES didn't have any of that.

Maniac Mansion was famously difficult to fit into the C64's memory space, in fact they even had to use the 1541's RAM for additional storage. Yet on the NES it could fit into a 40k ROM space and the game as a whole was 256k while the C64 one totally filled two sides of a 1541 disk, for a total of 340k, and the NES also had in-game music. Ron Gilbert, who was not involved in making the NES port, was surprised they pulled it off given the difficulty trying to fit it into the C64's memory. How?

Well one thing is that the NES's hardware is very simple as >>6467761 mentions so the game didn't need as much code as it did on the C64, especially stuff like the disk routines and even anti-hacking checks all took a lot of space and the NES didn't have any of that.

>>6469785
>The NES was $200 at launch in 1985 (bundled with duck hunt and mario), and the games themselves cost $60-100
Come on it wasn't that much. The price of NES games could be as little as $15 for NROM titles like Ice Climber while late period releases like Castlevania III that had large ROMs and advanced mappers were easily over $60.

I wanted to ask how come some of you are this knowledgeable about the NES hardware and such?

>>6469851
Werent mmc5 games so expensive they sold like crap? Not sure if any of them could be as expensive as $100 but i heard somewhere it could.

>>6469901
Nothing used MMC5 anyway but CV3 and Koei games. The mapper was actually a clone of the VRC6 with a few slight differences in how IRQs were handled. Konami also had the one-off VRC7 for Lagrange Point which was stupidly expensive.

>>6469785
>The NES was $200 at launch in 1985 (bundled with duck hunt and mario), and the games themselves cost $60-100. By 1985, commodore 64 was $149 with games that could easily be pirated. That's a really huge margin for a console that was only very slightly better for playing action games.
So what you're trying to tell me is that you're actually unironically engaging in system wars for stuff from 30+ years ago, not funposting? Sad, man.

>>6469785
>By 1985, commodore 64 was $149 with games that could easily be pirated.
And you could make your own games as well.

>>6469785
>By 1985, commodore 64 was $149 with games that could easily be pirated.

Of course the disk drive wasn't exactly cheap, that was something like $200-$300.

I, for one, am a contributor to the anti-Nintendo propaganda online. I, for one, am fervently against the Monopolistic, Tyrannous, Villainous, Vile, Acidic, Bad-doer practices this company, "Kabukicha Nin Ten Dou Co. Ltd.", based in Kyoto, Republic of the People of Japan, and am standing against them in an attempt to showcase that their hardware (as well as their software, including Third Party software released on their hardware) includes intrusive and dangerous messages for the westernial youth, including:
-Spending more money
-Anti-didactitational software learning practices
-Pro-mapping fanaticism
-False ideological dichotomy
-WWII Imperial brainwashing techniques
-Dangerous, Hazardous demeanor in relation to interaction with software and user interfacing digitation
I, for one, stand against the evil empirical, monopolical dictatorship of Mr. Miyamotors and his henchmen.
We, the Western Union of Micro Computer Enthusiastic Hobbyists will NOT tolerate Nin Ten Dou Co. Ltd.'s intrusion in the Computer Game market, both from a hardware and from a software perspective, we will be militantly patrolling these parts in order to bring Truth and to spread the right ideology, so that younger people won't fall in the hands of the evil doers.
I have spoken.

>>6470006
From there we divine that playing Jet Set Willy and Chuckie Egg on the Zedd Exx Spectrum is the one and only true path to enlightened gaming.

>>6470006
>>6470029
Nice little fic you made, fagtron.

>>6469958

>>6467770
I wouldn't call it a "hax trick" per se, the PPU generates an IRQ when Sprite 0 is scanned and this is used for split screen scrolling unless you have the more advanced mappers. It also generates an NMI when the VBLANK occurs.

The MMC3 makes NES programming a lot easier, but it was poorly documented for years--even Nintendo's official documentation was not that useful since it was badly translated from Japanese.

>>6465414
Doom didn't really start that trend. If you think Doom was amazing looking in 1993, wait until you see how Daytona USA looked in the arcades that same year.

It wasn't until the turn of the millinium that the PC became the bleeding edge of graphical fidelity (a change fueled by arcade machine architectures having shifted shortly beforehand from using highly customized hardware to being based on PC and console hardware).

>>6470006
https://vocaroo.com/3w4GaL55bZ5

>>6469990
C64 had a lot of options. There were cartridge games that load instantly. You could get a datasette for like 30 bucks if you're a cheapskate but it was very slow even with a fastloader cartridge. There were third party drives too. But $200 for a floppy disk driev is still worth it since NES games were $50 each on average.

To be fair, Yamauchi originally intended to sell the Famicom for only 66 USD.

>>6464918
>luv me amiger
>luv me speccy
>'ate nintender
>simple as
Why do you keep making this thread?

>>6470512
See the WUMCEH Anti-Nintendo manifesto:
>>6470006

>>6467761
>>6467967
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aJYm4mJZSg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdfIfC9BHwQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWwyhymcDxI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4exGV-XUbQ

Yeah, about the NES being the weaker system...

>>6470678
1. That Archon port was made many years after the C64 one and it was on a 128k cartridge while the C64 version was roughly 40k in size.
2. The chintzy weeb audiovisuals in the NES Lode Runner still don't hide that it has only 50 levels and no way to save anything you made with the level editor.

>>6470691
>they needed 128k for Archon, a game that was single load on all of the home computer versions
What the fuck were they doing with all that space?

>>6470698
The animated backgrounds and music mostly. If they just copypasted the audiovisuals from the computer versions it could have probably fit onto an NROM cartridge.

>>6470678
op and i were talking about pc games, not c64 games