/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7706906
The power of Me Speccy™ compelled them.

Also, they never topped Jetpac.

>>7706906
As I understand it, there were no devkits. Everyone, including Konami and Capcom, had to reverse engineer it.

>>7706979
So why would Nintendo be impressed that Rare was able to reverse engineer it?

>>7706987
I think it was because they approached Nintendo first, while Nintendo approached the others themselves. The story has always been that Rare surprised Nintendo with a working demo. Whether or not dev kits never existed to begin with, I don't know, the Japanese developers obviously had to have some leg up over a random ZX spectrum developer from England.

>>7706979
>Meanwhile, the company inspected an imported console from Japan, the Famicom, and believed that it would be an ideal future platform of choice for the company as it was more sophisticated than the Spectrum, it had a worldwide market, and its cartridges had no load times.[5] As a result, Rare was established in 1985.[6] Its main goal was to reverse-engineer the console and investigate the codes for Famicom's games to learn more about the console's programming.[2] With successful results, the company decided to sell the Ultimate brand to U.S. Gold, and ceased game development for the ZX Spectrum in the following year.[3]

>The Famicom's manufacturer, Nintendo, claimed that it was impossible to reverse engineer the console.[3] Using the information the Ultimate Play the Game team acquired from Rare, the team prepared several tech demos and showed them to the Nintendo executive Minoru Arakawa in Kyoto.[2][6] Impressed with their efforts, Nintendo decided to grant the Ultimate Play the Game team an unlimited budget for them to work on games for the Famicom platform.[2]
There had to have been dev kits or some other guidance given to their developers, or they wouldn't have been impressed by this.

>>7706979
>there were no devkits
And SEGA was the one who had to die?

>>7706979
https://www.retroreversing.com/famicom-nes-development-kit/
>Since Nintendo were very new to the video game market and saw themselves as creating most of the software that will run on the NES they did not make a specific development kit, or if they did it was very well hidden in the official Nintendo headquarters and no public information has been released on it.
>Due to the lack of official NES development kits, many companies had to reverse engineer the system themselves in order to do any game development for the system.

Battletoads was such a crowning achievement for the NES. It's a shame that 70% of RARE games for the NES were stupid movie games made in 2 months. I guess those titles paid the bills?

>>7707076
Pretty cool that it showed their dev kit.

So mystery solved, everybody had to make their own, Rare were just the first gaijin to do it

The Stamper brothers had a background in arcade development, complimentary skills and worked 18 hour days. No big conspiracy required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamper_brothers

>>7706906
T Stamper posted this
This could have been split into two equal length rows
Intead it was not.
Can you see why ,,,//vr//??

>>7707015
>Nintendo decided to grant the Ultimate Play the Game team an unlimited budget
Unlimited budget? That sounds like bullshit. Maybe the entire greentext is bullshit?

>There had to have been dev kits or some other guidance given to their developers, or they wouldn't have been impressed by this.
Maybe Nintendo were always impressed whenever developers were able to demonstrate proficiency with the system. Or maybe they were impressed because they had low expectations of a foreign development team.

>>7706906
>Were they in on some conspiracy shit with Nintendo?
In the N64 days Nintendo didn't want people using the hardware to its full potential but Rare (and a few others) did it anyway.

>>7708253
[citation needed]

>>7708252
they released 27 nes games, doesn't sound like bullshit to me, they had to get that money from somewhere and they weren't getting it from spectrum sales

>>7708253
I don't have a source for this but I do remember reading once that Midway made a jab at rare for having superior development kits before any of the other companies while the n64 was launching.

>>7706906
Literally only made one good game.

>>7709576
You will never bring anywhere near as much enjoyment to anybody else as rare has.

>>7709576
And it's on the Speccy.

>>7709587
you're right, i'll never make as many shitty collectathons for autists and speedtrannies

>>7709587
bringing joy by making things for kids is cheating. kids like whatever they get.
If people had never had games they would have all these fond memories of trees they climbed. should we bow down to those trees?

>>7706906
I've thought a similar thing about Wisdom Tree. They're located in my hometown and I often wished I had just wandered into their building to see if I could see if the guy who successfully broke the NES copy protection so they could make games about Moses still worked there.

>>7706979
>As I understand it, there were no devkits.
none. from what I understand, nintendo gave their jap licensees a manual, a confidentiality agreement to sign and that's it. everyone was on their own to make their own tools. meanwhile at nintendo, they had this large HP computer network (~1983) they used for programming and testing software hardware. HP9000 (i think). also it had an internal mail system and bunch of other cool shit.

>>7711153
not sure on the technical details of their cart pcbs, but the lockout chip simple to defeat using a few cents in parts until nintendo started revising the NES boards

>>7711153
very nice. that would have been an interesting conversation. I'd like to know the process of what he went through in reverse engineering it. not sure on the technical details of their cart pcbs, but the lockout chip simple to defeat using a few cents in parts until nintendo started revising the NES boards

>>7709534
>>7709551
https://ultimatepopculture.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_64_programming_characteristics

> Although it generates more than 100,000 high accuracy polygons per second, this microcode is optimized more for accuracy than for speed, and performance suffered.

>Nintendo's "Turbo3D" microcode allows 500,000–600,000 normal accuracy polygons per second. However, due to the graphical degradation, Nintendo officially discouraged its use.

For comparison the ps1 could do 180,000 flat shaded polygons a second. So in its base configuration the way Nintendo intended the N64 was weaker than the ps1. God bless western devs for ignoring Nintendo