/vr/ - Retro Games

Where ya crt shader at

Playstation could draw sprites faster so it could have more on screen simultaneously. It was also much faster at transparency.
Saturn had more VRAM so it could have more frames of animation. VDP2 supported interesting effects for background layers that a framebuffer GPU couldn't perform well.
Both consoles had different advantages for 2D. Most of the time Saturn was better suited but sometimes Playstation could be better.
This has been discussed to death.

>>9131586
Why was N64 so bad at 2D?

I remember back in the mid 90s i couldn't give a fuck about which console does 2d better because all I wanted to play is cool new 3d games.

>>9131645
2kb limit on tiles.

>>9131578
Everything except frame counts and loading times.

Still, Capcom should have included the full tag team modes for the VS games as an option in the games for those who were willing to put up with it.

>>9131645
It wasn't.
Various technical discussions on /vr/ have dived deeply into this and the overall informed consensus was it had a lot of untapped potential for 2d games that was never utilized.

>>9131645
rakuga kids and wonder project j2 look incredible, ill also say Yoshi's Story is a good looking game even if you might not like the aesthetics.
the problem is that no devs were doing 2d games for the console.

>>9131578
Yeah man this game from 2002 looks terrible on Saturn

>>9132375
Lol was gonna post this. This would've been a charming GBA or SNES game, but as a PS1 game post Street Fighter 3? Embarrassing. But its a budget title from a still-new Dimps I guess.

>>9132246
Cope. This is what 2d games could look like in 96.

>>9132425
N64 could probably do that. Its RDRAM was wonky what with its unified architecture and it wasn't the fastest but it did have a lot of bandwidth. Plus cartridges make a lot of the complications with X-Men vs Street Fighter moot compared to PS1 and Saturn. I think people look at the shitty port of Mortal Kombat Trilogy and assume that's the best the N64 can do when it could clearly have been better.

>>9132461
>n64 probably could have done that
>easily could have done better
Then show us. Surely one game shows its true potential.

>>9132465
No games did but if you know the hardware you can extrapolate its potential. There's nothing especially taxing about CPS2 games. It's CPU is a 68000. With CD systems its entirely a RAM thing. The N64 won't have the same data access issues.

What handicapped MK Trilogy was the tiny cart size chosen. They had to cut it down to fit.

>>9132246
Yoshi's Story has nothing much going on. One background layer, no cool effects.

>>9132465
There aren't any. You've already been told earlier in the thread that the potential was never realized.

There have been threads specifically about whether the N64 could do X-men vs SF and the answer was yes, it could.

The only potential hiccup with CPS2 ports on N64 is the blur filter that typically can't be disabled and probably wouldn't have been in a hypothetical port. So you'd get an arcade perfect X-Men vs Street Fighter but one that looked a little worse than the Saturn version since you don't need anti-aliasing for 2D graphics. This can obviously be disabled in a homebrew best case scenario situation but if we're talking what would have been done in 1996/1997, the hardware filter would have been a minor issue.

>>9132465
KI Gold is a decent example. The backgrounds were FMV in the arcade KI2 so had to be converted to 3D in Gold but the characters themselves are 2D.

>>9131578
Bought this game back in the day and it kicked my ass, also it had very smooth tag team battles which makes me wonder if the Capcom VS. games could actually do the same if they messed with the graphics of something.

>>9131578
PS1draws 16x16 sprites with 16 colors max. Its way weaker than a SNES. And the shittiest 2D hardware of the entire 1990s. But but but.... muh PSX 2D games. They fucking cheated with polygon engines because the playstation could not draw large sprites.

>>9132847
Playstation could draw arbitrarily sized rectangles in up to 15 bit color, though.

>>9132847
Is Yoshi Island playable on a stock snes?

>>9131645
mostly the stupid anti aliasing making 2d look incredibly bad

>>9131645
Never had built in 2D hardware based on CPS-III.

>>9132425
>>9132461
>best the N64 can do when it could clearly have been better.
>This is what 2d games could look like in 96.
maybe this.

>>9132847
Sony can’t stop copium, after failing upgrading SFC hardware.

>>9133376
Oops, meant retro stuff.

>>9132847
>t-they cheated
lol you sound like an angry grade schooler

>>9133396
he isn't even correct.

>>9132847
>Waah flay polygons aren't real 2D
Yes they fucking are, dumbass. It makes no difference in practice.

>>9133414
It can make a difference, there can be small quantization errors when transforming them.
Playstation doesn't draw 2D objects with polygons, though, so the point is moot.

>>9132847
It's not cheating at all. Utilizing the PSX's graphics chip to make 2D games grants inherent benefits that a more traditional sprite engine wouldn't have or would otherwise need a whole lot of microchip space dedicated for fixed-function use. The GPU was more general, and was an order of magnitude more impressive at 2D than the SNES.

>>9131586
>actually using facts and data and understanding of hardware instead of shitposting
Oh no no bros it wasn't supposed to go down like this ABORT ABORT

>>9131578
yup

>>9133598
Never noticed that the PS1 background looks darker.

>>9133598
This comparison is even worse when the spotlights overlap.

>>9133428
Did someone use flat polygons for one game, and word got out about it, then everyone starting parroting that it does for every game?
It should be pretty obvious that even if the GPU had no 2d support the playstation can do better 2d than the SNES just with software alone.

>>9133853
My guess is that someone used an emulator in hardware mode, saw triangular wireframes, and assumed that was how the Playstation actually worked rather than just his graphics driver.

There's also a few 2D games which used triangles for select purposes. SotN has 3D elements in the background. One of the Street Fighter games uses polygons for impact sparks. If you want to rotate a sprite, you'd have to draw it as a polygon. I don't know of any games which use polygons for everything.

>>9133598
the saturn could do transparency properly, but most devs werent good enough to figure it out
sonic R has actual well implemented effects that arent just that shitty mesh that other teams opted for
blame lies on whoever designed the saturn and made it needlessly complex to work with

>>9133927
Whether it can do transparencies or not depends on what layer the transparency is on and which gpu is rendering it. It is a clusterfuck. Sega themselves used meshes all the time. Unless you're saying Sega weren't good enough devs on their own system.

>>9133598
I'm all for comparisons but why do people always use the spotlight transparency as a point of comparison while ignoring the heat ripple effect in that exact same stage that's completely missing on PS1? Also PS1's music doesn't loop properly.

>>9132578
>blur filter that typically can't be disabled
I don't think that's true. That one launch title star wars game had the option to disable it in the debug menu, IIRC.
>>9132847
PSX could do quads, though.

>>9133964
Playstation's quads are just decomposed to tris.

>>9133978
Implementation detail. Or what, are you going to complain the PSX renders everything into a framebuffer instead of generating a signal on the fly?

>>9131578
PS1

Nothing the Saturn does better in 2d games really comes out in a screenshot. It can do more, better backgrounds, and more frames of animation. PSX can do big detailed sprites and detailed backgrounds just fine.

>>9134078
It really depends on what you're asking the system to do. The Saturn completely shits the bed if you ask it to act like a PS1 but the PS1 also shits the bed if you ask it to act like a Saturn. That's why ports from one to the other tend to have glaring flaws. If Grandia had been designed for the PS1 from the start they never would have handled the ground textures the way they did. The Saturn having an extra processor with it's own VRAM let them go ham so when it came time to port it over to PS1 they had no choice but to copy+paste one small section over and over since they couldn't fit the whole thing.

>>9131806
>>9132461
>>9132480
VGHhhh…..technology research.

>>9134181
It's kind of irritating that Capcom didn't take advantage of the N64 as an option once it became clear the Saturn was finished in the west. The N64 controller would have been pretty decent as a six button pad and the four controller ports could have meant four player X-Men vs. Street Fighter? Sign me up.

>>9134194
Looking at the port of Megaman Legends, doubtful they would have "taken advantage" of anything.

>>9134195
Resident Evil 2?

>>9133881
Which SF?

>>9134236
Looks and sounds worse than the PSX version. Don't get me wrong, it's a great port given the constraints, but sacrifices had to be made.
Also it was done by some western studio, not Capcom themselves.

>>9134295
>done by some western studio, not Capcom themselves.
Like how Darkstalkers 1 port run on PS1.

>>9134295
Is there any guarantee that Capcom would do a great job?

>>9134037
Ew

>>9134295
Too say could've worked well. I read that Capcom's CPS2 games were around 40MB and the largest N64 cart ever used was 64MB, so it seems feasible.

>>9132552
>yes it could
Nah, judging by its library nothing came close. If you want to make a n64 to prove me wrong go ahead but you won't and it'll forever remain the worst looking 5th gen system in 2d and 3d.
>>9132585
I remember playing as Kim Wu at my mates place. It didn't even come close to looking as nice as Xmen VS SF.

>>9131578
also on ps1

>>9134425
ok kid

>>9133960
It's not on the same stage; it's on Magma Dragoon's.

>>9134442
It's also on part 2 of the opening stage after the sky lagoon crashes.

>>9134447
Then it's all Magma Dragon's fault.

>>9133598
Not a problem if you played on composite like 99% of people did (and as the developers intended)

>>9134295
Getting Resident Evil 2 ported to N64 was a hell of a bigger undertaking than any CPS2 game. The point of comparison is to show that X-Men vs Street Fighter would have been cake.

>>9134580
Why does saturn perform worse than the ps1?

>>9132578
With the RAM expansion the N64 could have any CPS2 game, the color range was much higher with it.

It only performs worse if you play on RGB, which no one did.

>>9131578
games and sound too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anFZQfEAVNM

>>9134457
Rooster fire stand appears low quality>>9134431

>>9134441
>N64 does the best 2d
>Proof? Trust me
Here's Mischief Makers made by possibly the best team N64 had for 2d showing off those amazing backgrounds of nothing.

I say this as someone who grew up on the N64 but I don't really see the point in talking about a system's hypothetical capabilities as opposed to what we actually got

>>9134605
Why did you post the game that is clearly better on Saturn?

>>9134805
It needed the Expansion Pak for higher color depth.

>>9134914
>every expansion pack game still looks like n64 jank

>>9134938
False, 007 TWINE and MM look almost like "early" DC.

>>9134194
>>9134309
>>9134586
Pretty Fighter X or V.G or Groove on Fight or Darkstalkers 2 & 3

>>9134976
That isn't impressive at all. Here's early DC for comparison.

>>9134236
The N64 port is overhyped crap. Yes it's impressive on a technical level but it's still gimped compared to literally any other port. Oh woooow you got some extra costumes BIG EFFING WOOP!

>>9135121
>B-but my shiny graphics
Hmmm, example?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yh4khdcGL8

>>9135326
t. zoomlet

>>9135326
Read the thread.

>>9134181
What could have been?

>>9134805
Given that there are 2d games on the SNES that look much better than anything on the N64, it should be pretty obvious no one even tried on the 64.

>>9131771
That has no effect on N64's 2D capabilities. The 2D UI elements of games like Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are pulled directly from the system memory or right off the cart when needed.
The texture cache was entirely part of the GPUs mechanism to skin / apply textures to models. The framebuffer is stored inside of the 4/8mb system RAM. The reason you didn't see very many 2D games on the N64 is really simple, Nintendo wouldn't allow many 2D games to be published which was a double fuck you to Namco, Konami, and Square after having gone with carts instead of optical media. Sony did similar shit with PS1 games outside of Japan.
3D was the hot shit of the era. It drew a line between the fourth and fifth gen consoles. Nintendo wanted you to see it as brand new and marvel at what this brand new 64 bit console could do. Sony also wanted westerners to think their PS1 is leaps and bounds beyond anything the SNES or MegaDrive could do.

>>9131771
*4kb texture

>>9136679
That microcode was never used.

>>9136679
>anti-2D published from Nintendo
A myth. Only Sony temporary won’t support.

>>9136679
>is leaps and bounds beyond anything the SNES or MegaDrive could do.
They were, all three main consoles. But the ignorant mass, unable to even differentiate between units like kB and mB, thought everything was about the "tHrEeEeDeEeE". Well, they were the customers, and "the customer is always right", so be it.

>>9136820
Threedee only was a industry shill magazine writer thing. Customers obviously wanted new gameplay experiences that you can get with a 3d world, but I've never seen "anti 2d sentiment" outside of shill magazines.

>>9135902
>>9135920
Both of you shut the f up and go back to the youtube comments. Or better.
>>>/v/
Leave my board now before I lick your butts.

>>9131645
couldn't actually do 2D at all so everything was actually flat polygons

>>9136860
wrong.

>>9134276
SF Alpha 3 on PSX used polygonal hit sparks. They optimized the shit out of that game to save on as much RAM as possible for the animation, and a lot of it included stuff like that.

It actually was pretty decent looking too.

>>9135894
that's an extremely small little level and it drops to 10fps at parts.
Crazy Taxi has a full city sized sandbox and runs at 60fps.

>>9136858
>lick
This isn’t Pokémon UwU

>>9136885
>runs at 60fps
F-Zero X

>>9136925
F Zero X is a very plain looking game. There isn't much detail on anything, really. It's impressive for its speed, framerate and number of racers, but that's about it.

>>9136749
Its not an issue for the N64 doing 2D. When the RDP is drawing it uses that 4kb of cache but its capable of doing multiple passes to build up the scene and there is specific microcode that automatically subdivides a sprite of any size so the RDP texture cache isn't an issue.
https://youtu.be/CBiKtpY7sqg (skip to 2:28:41)

>>9136750
You can't possibly know that unless you've decompiled and reverse engineered every N64 game. I really fucking doubt you've done that. Besides that I'm only pointing out that this exists and it wasn't that the console couldn't or that Nintendo / SGI forgot about sprites. Nobody wrote their own 2d microcode for the N64, SGI wouldn't release dev tools or debugging tools to see what was going on in the RSP / RDP. All the shit Factor 5 and Rare did was based on reverse engineering of the SGI provided microcode.

>>9136885
But level look like earlier DC graphics.

>>9131578
PlayStation could do 3D as 2D better than Saturn

>>9136935
It also has framebuffer effects like the eject blast
from the vehicles.

>>9136838
You don't need to be "anti", just by "forgetting" 2D you discourage the creation of those games. Devs won't work for free, they also need to sell games, but so little people are buying 2D, because they pay it no attention, even if they have nothing against that kind of game.

>>9137000
>The game allows players to explore, craft objects, build houses and fight various creatures in a 2D world. As of April 2020, Terraria had sold 14 million units worldwide on PC.

>>9137006
Wow! A 2D game riding on Minecraft's success decades after the 5th-gen will change the past (which is being discussed here, you illiterate) and make tons of 2D games appear on PS1, N64 and Saturn.

>>9136935
It has real-time lighting.

>>9131586
>Playstation could draw sprites faster so it could have more on screen simultaneously
remember the differences between saturn arcade ports and ps1 ports.
>literally butchered
>ps1 was unable to draw all frames so they removed them.
>sprite size was smaller on ps1.
i can tell you are OP and you are snoyfag.
saturn was superior.
Advice play marvel super heroes vs street fighter on both and you will learn the truth.

>>9137091
>Goalposts

>>9137689
Read the title, anon. Goalpost is fifth-gen. We're on /vr/ here. Remember?

>>9136415
Cope.
>>9135894
>hmm example?
Your example looked and ran like shit and it was a tech demo to demonstrate something that looked good. And how are you going to try and hate on Sega blue blue skies aesthetics? Give it up.

>>9136935
>it's impressive for its speed
Not really. The game is a fucking mess. I get more of sense of speed from Sega Rally of all games.

https://youtu.be/TATYUX8maTQ

>>9138180
Seethe
>>9138187
Shit games

>>9131586
>Playstation could draw sprites faster so it could have more on screen simultaneously.
Is there any 2D PS1 game with more going on than Dragon Force?

>>9138990
I remember DS one.

>>9138558
Seethe at N64 graphics? Lol

>>9140006
Only graphic whore/whiny fag from post-2007.

>>9138180
Not a argument.

>>9131578
Both machines differ greatly in their method of operation and features. The Saturn can do things the PS1 cannot, and vice versa. Neither is universally better, it depends on what graphic effects are wanted.

>>9131645
Because its bad at everything.

>>9138990
Not sure, but in terms of how many polygons it can handle as well as fillrate, the PS1 is a good ways ahead of VDP1. It doesn't really matter most of the time though, you can throw tons of shit on screen, like in dragon force.

>>9141030
Saturn can do everything psx can do if not better. Psx couldn't handle Saturn ports while Saturn was able to handle every psx port.

>>9141076
How about hardware accelerated UV mapping with full size textures

>>9141092
Show me one port Saturn couldn't handle. I'll be waiting.

>>9141095
How about Gran turismo 2 with all effects intact, at the same frame rate.

>>9141076
>Saturn was able to handle every psx port.
I can't think of any PlayStation ports which weren't gimped to hell on Saturn.

>>9134101
The playstation would shit itself if it would have to run Dragon Force, with its 202 sprites on screen.

>>9136884
Street Fighter alpha 1 uses polygons for sprites. The game does not use rotation.

>>9137282
These threads are usually full of snoy cope. Its amusing to read :P

PS1 has better raw performance at rendering sprites. see symphony of the night for instance. VDP1 was chocking while ps1 handled it without issues. main advantage for Saturn was the higher RAM amount that allowed it to use more frames of animation

>>9141129
Go on, try and top that gimping.

>>9141162
Nobody said otherwise.

>>9137282
Anon, why can't you read?

>>9141156
One problem with SotN was the number of layers used. It's no problem for a framebuffer-focused console like the PlayStation but a platform with fixed background layers like the Saturn struggles in a direct port.

>>9141164
How are you going to say Saturn put out gimped ports when psx wouldb release zx spectrum tier ports at times totally changing the entire game.

>>9141178
>>9141030

>>9141095
Omega Boost

>>9141076
>Saturn can do everything psx can do if not better.
High-res shaded polygons
Motion blur
24-bit color sprites
a decent framerate

>>9138990
>Is there any 2D PS1 game with more going on than Dragon Force?
The ports for Donpachi / Dodonpachi had just as many sprites on screen and were said to run better on the playstation.

>>9141171
It also used a shitload of transparency and shading effects, and the Saturn can't do that and combine it with the backgrounds - the polygons would appear opaque. But you also have to use sprites under backgrounds, which means you need to use sprite priority bits, which means you HAVE to use paletted sprites... which can't do sprite transparency, makes shading extremely difficult, and you have to set up transparency for each background one by one.

>>9141193
24 bit color wasn't used much on PlayStation, it's basically just fmvs. Only 4, 8 and 15 bit color had any hardware acceleration.

>>9141162
If not for the RAM cart the Saturn version would be just as bad.

>>9141245
Saturn can run arcade port just fine without the cart. I say this as person who own N64 and PS1.

>>9141539
Not X-Men vs SF. Most Saturn games didn't need the full 4MB cart, there's a good reason this one did.

>>9141206
>24 bit color wasn't used much on PlayStation, it's basically just fmvs.

Heart of Darkness used it.

>>9141156
SotN just isn't a good example, because it was a game specifically designed to take advantage of the Playstation, and it uses a lot of 3d assets which the Playstation is great at. Saturn is 100% better at parallax 2d backgrounds, but when SotN wants background depth, it uses 3d.

>>9136959
Holy shit, that's a LOT of sprites. I don't think I've seen any game of that generation anywhere close.

>>9141076
>Saturn can do everything psx can do if not better
Like decompressing audio samples fast?

>>9132847
>They fucking cheated with this thing the hardware was capable of doing!
Cope and meds.

>>9141893
This board is mega autist. They think that raycasting isn't "real" 3d despite the games calculating and playing in 3 dimensions and that a game isn't "2d" if it doesn't use sprites. Playstation does use sprites, though, so even that is wrong.

>>9141139
Liar.

>>9136959
Anon, I….

>>9141946
I feel like this is the reverse of where someone posts a hideous looking 3d monstrosity on a system that doesn't have good 3d support and claims it is "impressive".
Yeah, there's a lot of sprites on screen, but the graphics are really bad.
I understand that it is being brought up to show sprite capability though.

>>9141937
Best post. Evidence and not opinion.

>>9141954
>but the graphics are really bad.
What kind post are you saying?

>>9134586
1gb+ on 64mb? How they handle the data texture?

Here's proof for SFA3's polygonal sparks too. By the way, parts of the backgrounds with parallax scrolling are drawn with quads. Playstation supported quads in addition to tris.

>>9141806
Yup, this is the fundamental problem of Saturn and PS1 ports. Their architectures are so wildly different that unless a game was designed to be multiplatform at the start you quickly run into trouble when trying to retrofit it to the other machine. You can't just take the SOTN backgrounds and toss them at the Saturn's VDP2 and expect it to work as well as it would had you built the layers to take advantage of the separate GPU (and also considered it's limitations) in the first place. That's why you end up with seemingly contradictory information. Saturn is "worse" than PS1 because it can't do SOTN right. But then PS1 is "worse" than Saturn because it can't do Grandia right. Both are really bad at trying to behave like the other.

>>9142034
This is just how must consoles were until the 7th, maybe even the 8th gen. Hardware used to be built in a fundamentally different way instead of just being a sliding scale of "weak" to "powerful".

>>9142038
I can't imagine the ps2 running any game at 120 fps like the ps5 does

>>9141245
>>9141539
>>9141686
It's moot anyway because the PS1 would have been able to do those games just as well had it been compatible with a RAM expansion module through it's expansion port like the Saturn was. It just so happens that a quirk of engineering made that impossible. But that's more of a lucky break for Sega that the cartridge slot could be used that way. And some games didn't even do it right anyway. Using the RAM cart with Marvel Super Heroes adds extra animation frames...and more slowdown.

>>9142038
This is probably why Konami had two entirely separate teams working on SNES and Genesis. So you'd get sister games like Turtles In Time and Hyperstone Heist, Dracula X and Bloodlines, etc. rather than forcing one game to do double duty.

>>9142052
Yep, the cartridge port is unfortunately pretty slow.

>>9141946
Bangai-O, Bangai-O, I'm scared but not very though.

>>9141937
A rectangle is also a polygon, anon.

>>9142209
Then I guess NES graphics were polygons too.

>>9142063
Not on N64 slot kek

>>9142059
No PC Engine Contra?

>>9142327
It'd be slow if you were using it to stream animation frames like Saturn RAM cart games.

>>9131645
probably because of the blur filter applied to everything

>>9133927
that game has transparency on the same level for the glass in the tunnel so they knew how to use it kek

>>9133927
Sonic R used two different rendering modes simultaneously and used a game design that made it not immediately obvious that some of the transparency effects are broken (get a shield and stand on the mode 7 ground, it stops being transparent).
It also had fuck all draw distance, you had to memorize the maps because each turn materialized 10 steps ahead of you.

>>9142063
It wasn't that slow, MSH was just coded in a stupid way. XvsSF and MSHvsSF used the same sprites and animation and ran fine.

Cyberbots had the same problem too, it came out around the same time and also used the 1MB cart. It access the cart the same stupid way because with the extra animation it was far slower.

>>9142052
The PS1 could have had a RAM cart using the I/O expansion slot.

>>9142523
That interface is too much slow for any RAM to be useful.

>>9142523
or other wayward.

>>9142348
https://mattgreer.dev/articles/sega-saturn-and-transparency/

The Saturn can do transparency in hardware but it's weird about it.

>>9142612
>only in software
Not natively.

>>9133964
>Star Wars
Factor 5 or shadow of empire?

>>9142497
Saturn generally had better draw distance than PS1 though. It also had more stable textures that warped much less dramatically. Check out how bendy the wood paneling is on PS1 in comparison. The Saturn had a lot of limits compared to PS1 when it came to 3D but it wasn't universally worse off.

>>9142621
It wasn't only in software. It did have "native" transparency but it was weird with how it could be used. If you wanted specific kinds of transparency then you'd need a software option but like the Mega Man X4 tunnel shows, it wasn't required 100% of the time.

>>9142645
Stop making up crap.

>>9142576
It's not, this has been debunked the last 17 times we talked about it

people should be required to be programmers to talk about this stuff

90% of the people on here have basically no idea what they're talking about, and regurgitate buzzwords with very little understanding

>>9142840
are you incapable of reading? the article explains exactly how it works.
saturn vdp1 and vdp2 both support transparency, but have quirks and restrictions that make it tricky to use and not as applicable as ps1 transparency.

>>9142885
>you dont think n64 graphics look good? Well what do you know you're not a programmer

>>9131586
>VDP2 supported interesting effects for background layers that a framebuffer GPU couldn't perform well.

So many Saturn 3D fighting games that came after Virtua Fighter 1 used VPD2 for the playingfield. Virtua Fighter 1 uses a polygon mesh arena:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggjSaSfXN6U&t=47s

Virtua Fighter Remix uses VPD2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4QUZ-yyDSs&t=181s

Virtua Fighter 2, Fighting Vipers, Last Bronx, Dead or Aline and some other fighters all use the VPD2 layer for the arenas.

Saturn Dead or Alive:
https://youtu.be/hFgoSGMmMeU?t=624
Playstation DOA1 uses polygon areas and has some texture warping issues:
https://youtu.be/W5UIZxD4x6Y?t=364

>>9142885
I know enough about the subject to look at the N64 specifications and see no technical reason why a faithful port of X-men vs SF or other Capcom CPS2 fighters would not run on it.

It has the overall processing power.
It has the RAM capacity.
The carts had the ROM capacity.
The cartridge format eliminates any concerns over loading times (and yes I know about the SNES SFA2 port and still say it would not be an issue on N64).
It could use the same flat textured polygon technique the PS1 used to draw the sprites and backgrounds.
Would the bilinear filter make the game appear smeared? Yes. But it's pretty easy to demonstrate what that might look like and I might go try that on my desktop later. I don't think it would be that bad.

Worst case scenario: 3d backgrounds instead of the originals.

Clay Fighter 63 1/3 used 3d backgrounds. It didn't look terrible.
XVSF for N64 was my most wanted game announcement of 1997 and I would have accepted this compromise without a second thought.

>>9143078
Rakuga Kids had greater color depth than cps2 games

>>9142995
who are you quoting?

>>9143078
Look at that background, it's a solid shade, you would need the expansion pak for a CPS2 game on the n64 and hope Capcom was savvy enough to know how to disable the forced AA.

I've taken a raw screenshot of X-men vs Street Fighter for the Saturn and resized it to 4x with integer scaling.

This is the same screenshot with the N64 VI filter (blur filter) applied over it.

The same image run through CRT-Royale NTSC Composite.
Pretty blurry.

The same image run through CRT-Royale NTSC Composite.
Pretty blurry.

>>9143103
>hope Capcom was savvy enough to know how to disable the forced AA
They probably would have considering the tier of developer they were and that some games like Quake 64 did it.

>>9134914
Tell me you never played the game without saying you never played the game.
Mischief Makers doesn't use the expansion pak.

>>9143237
No shit it doesn't, leave back to plebbit.

>>9143085
You.

>>9143158
>>9143128
>>9143123
Arw you using the ps1 ports screenshots, in those the sprites were shrinked because ps1 couldnt do 384x224 like the cps boards

>>9143601
Ok it was the saturn, didnt read that part sorry, but i think neither the ps1 or the Sat could match the arcade resolution

>>9134431
PS1 version of JoJo looks so shit. It made Magicians Red look like that fire fucker from Killer Instinct.

>>9131586
Yes, everybody assumes the PS1 dominates in all fields since it's the one that people actually had and the Saturn crapped itself to death due to incompetent Sega of Japan.
However, if you actually look at things at a per-game basis you find that it's more of an even match in terms of hardware capabilities, despite the differences in what features they each have. It also helped the Saturn tremendously to have an expandable RAM feature, so games could take advantage of the increased memory pool, something that the PS1 sorely lacked while the N64 also used such a thing (and, personally, the Expansion Pak offered a lot more to N64 games compared to the Saturn RAM Carts since the N64 Game Paks loaded shit insanely fast compared to the CD technology at the time).

>>9131801
There was no way for the PS1 could handle all the data that needed to be passed around on the hardware simultaneously, the slow read speed and tiny pool of available memory was never a match for the arcade boards running multi-CPU/multi-GPU setups. It's why their ports struggled, but anything specifically made for the PS1 (Resident Evil, Megaman Legends, Strider 2) stand as essential games in the console's library.

>>9134194
It came down to manufacturing costs. If you're a software company, then would you put your product on CDs that costs pocket change to print 2,000,000 copies or go through the sole manufacturing company that produces N64 cartridges and pay out the ass? Obviously the Saturn ports didn't sell much, but Capcom still managed to turn a profit from them simply because it was cheap to do so.

>>9143605
I don't think the N64 could either, but I haven't studied enough of the supported resolutions and limitations of such. So I stuck with the Saturn resolution as an example of what it might have looked like.

>>9143158
Reviewers would have complained about the blur but I would not have cared and still bought it.

>>9143023

Saturn 3D fighting games really benefited from the VPD2 co-processor.
https://youtu.be/fjWepky0Wwk?list=PLMHR2xnx8VCpjPN9Ldpd3nkKiv6qGdAo7

Sega Saturn sports games used it well too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RL_G-mqmog

>>9143703
Doesn't the N64 support 640x480?

>>9144148
640x480 isn't 384x224. Saturn and PS1 have a fixed set of resolutions to pick from. IDK about N64.

>>9143605
>>9143703
It's not anything to worry about regardless. The Saturn has an imperceptible horizontal crunch that required moving the character profile images underneath the lifebars instead of to their sides as the most noticeable consequence.

>>9144167
>>9144761
Any thoughts on PC-FX?

>>9143023
>Virtua Fighter Remix uses VPD2
VF Remix looks worse because it completely lacks lightning. Just look at Sarah's level, with the characters being lit up from below.

>Playstation DOA1 uses polygon areas and has some texture warping issues:
Playstation DOA1 has lightning effects, transparent hit sparks, and the textures weren't using like 8 fucking colors maximum.

>>9142885
See other, Alisha’s Adventure dev know too much on SNES hardware.

>>9143064
>see no technical reason why a faithful port of X-men vs SF or other Capcom CPS2 fighters would not run on it.

That's because you are an infantile fanboy who thinks technical limitations are the only limitations for making a game available. XvsSF weighs at over 40 MBytes. Assuming they can get all on-screen graphics & sound into RAM plus game code for one single fight scene (remember, Saturn had almost twice as much RAM with the cart), and have some simple zlib libraries available to compress the data on the cart, then they can get it down to 20-30 MB. Compress the data on cart, decompress it into RAM for playing, no need to stream animation from the cart. But they'd still need a 32 MB ROM for that.
The bigger the ROM size, the more the game would cost, and the slimmer the publishers profit margins. Given that 2d fighters sell very low numbers and that the N64 did very badly in Japan, and that the N64 did not have a player base who preferred fighting games (all good fighters were on PSX or Saturn, N64 got like three fighting games total), it simply would not have been economical to produce the game.
Even if they compress the game a shit ton and remove a lot of frames (making it look like the MK Trilogy N64 port), to make the ROM size smaller and cheaper, they'd still have the problem of very low projected sales.

I mean yeah if you are doing some homebrew stupidity then a 64mb cart could run the game fine. In fact you could probably run an entire CPS2 emulator that way. The only problem would be that it would cost $100 per game.

>>9145047
N64's 3D fighters are underrated

>>9142637
>Saturn generally had better draw distance than PS1 though.

uh, no, generally in 3d games Saturn had worse color, worse shading, no fogging, no transparency, and half the frame rate. That is for most multiplatform games.
Using Tomb Raider for comparison is cherry picking, that game was made for the Saturn first and then ported over to Playstation, it had a bunch of crap like the aspect ratio permanently screwed. You may as well have mentioned Exhumed/Powerslave.

>>9143674
>There was no way for the PS1 could handle all the data that needed to be passed around on the hardware simultaneously, the slow read speed and tiny pool of available memory was never a match for the arcade boards running multi-CPU/multi-GPU setups.

The only limitation for CPS2 ports on the PSX was the lack of memory. It could handle everything else when this was not an issue. It did not struggle the least, it just lacked the RAM for the animation frames - which was the one asset that arcade games could abuse due to coming on huge ROM boards that cost hundreds of dollars per game. Even the CPS3 could not do anything the PSX, or even the Saturn could not, it just had more memory for animation and nothing else.

>>9144761
>The Saturn has an imperceptible horizontal crunch

Even I can see that it completely fucked up the aspect ratio. Both the Playstation and Saturn versions have both characters stretched the fuck out. They look horrible compared to the original.

>>9145003
Maybe if there were a porn version...

>>9145047
The N64 has 4MB of RDRAM stock and an additional 4M with the Expansion Pak. That's plenty. It's more RAM than the actual CPS2.

>>9145047
>the N64 did very badly in Japan
So the Saturn. Don't believe the hype.

>>9145179
Even so the margins were better. A Saturn game could sell fewer copies and still be considered successful.

>>9145183
That's kind of moot since overseas the Saturn port wasn't even available while the N64 was sitting there doing very well in comparison. Releasing an N64 port, even just in America, would have been wise, margins be damned since the alternative was doing no business at all. It's weird that they'd rather port Mega Man Legends years after it was on PS1 rather than their fighting games.

>>9145039
Alisha’s Adventure dev is a fucking shilling autistic retard.

Never trust on autismo.

>>9145015
>>Virtua Fighter Remix uses VPD2
>VF Remix looks worse because it completely lacks lightning. Just look at Sarah's level, with the characters being lit up from below.

I'm not saying that the lighting doesn't look worse. it does. i was just pointing out how much this effect was used in Saturn fighting games.

Like Virtua Fighter Kids;
https://youtu.be/onNKs-I48kU?t=226

Last Bronx uses multiple VPD2 playingfields to create the look of an underground garage.
https://youtu.be/nKpypMvLTSg?t=511

Decathalete uses it heavily:
https://youtu.be/pEm8Uy1tqRI?t=1063

there is a disconnect between the polygon layer and the VPD2 layer with the lighting/ effects.

>>9145269
>fucking shilling autistic retard.
Why rage quit?

>>9145039
Good new demo: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=enJLZJQhGTw

>>9145448
It's impressive, but snes cpu was pretty shitty, nintendo already used its full power in SMW, all done in stock console, without gimmicks. You can see as many sprites as you can put in a nes, fancy scaling effects and fast scrolling.

>>9143321
I never said anything about n64 graphics being good, or better than saturn or ps1

if anything, n64 is the result of optimizing one aspect of your console to the point of neglecting others. technically more accurate and better in some ways, but severely let down in others.

>>9145269
while that is true, he's also put a lot of effort into learning how to make snes homebrew, which is more than I can say of just about anyone on here

>>9145456
>nintendo already used its full power in SMW, all done in stock console, without gimmicks
Mario RPG used SA-1 as important example.

>>9145047
see
>>9142885
>people should be required to be programmers to talk about this stuff
This post is in reference to the technical challenges, not the market feasibility. You are changing the goalposts moving it to a different area of discussion.

>Assuming they can get all on-screen graphics & sound into RAM
They could.
>Saturn had almost twice as much RAM with the cart)
Saturn was also running off of a disc. So all 4 characters had to be loaded into RAM at once.
On the N64 the characters could possibly be loaded during gameplay.
>The bigger the ROM size, the more the game would cost, and the slimmer the publishers profit margins.
Midway seemed to think it was worth porting MKT to the N64. Even if the cart cost $80+ tax players would have bought it.
>Given that 2d fighters sell very low numbers
1. that is not true
2. This is both the Street Fighter and X-men franchises. The N64 did not even have an X-men game. And only one Marvel game overall (Spider-man).
>N64 did not have a player base who preferred fighting games (
This is putting the cart before the horse. This game would have been one of the initial wave of titles that would have started a base of fighting game players on the N64. If it had done well you could have expected MSH vs SF, SFA3, and MVC.

>The only problem would be that it would cost $100 per game
Compress everything that isn't the in-gameplay sprites and you'll get under 32mb. Maybe use the PS1 SFZ3 trick of using 3d hit sparks and some other effects instead of sprites.

PS1 could have done full tag-teaming XVSF and other VS games if it had a RAM cart released for it using the parallel port on the back of the console.
Except they took that off some of the later versions. Oops. Most people wouldn't have wanted to buy it anyway. Sony was probably very wary about those kind of add-ons given Sega's experiments with it not that long ago at the time.
And Sony probably calculated that 1v1 was good enuff to get the casual audiences to buy.

>>9145164
Kek

>>9145612
That bus is too slow to be useful for RAM expansion.

Reminder that on PSX the devs could have used the MDEC to decompress sprites on the fly. There would have been some artifacts due to compression, but on a CRT it probably wouldn't have been very noticeable. There's at least one game doing this for backgrounds. It likely would have worked for sprites, too. Since it's obviously fast enough to play full screen video decompressing a sprite or two per frame shouldn't have been a problem at all.
Source: https://psx.arthus.net/sdk/Psy-Q/DOCS/TECHNOTE/mdecnote.pdf
>The unit is designed to decode 9000 macroblocks per second. A video frame with a resolution of 320x240 is comprised of 300 macroblocks. This means that the MDEC can decode 30 frames per second at maximum capacity
Source: https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/PlayStation_Motion_Decoder
Another option would have been to just use some fast lossless compression scheme. Since sprites tend to have large areas with the same color or repeating color patterns this would have worked quite well, too. Did any games even bother with this at all?
>>9142627
>shadow of empire
That one. It was shown on DF Retro: https://youtu.be/mznc8dhijTo?t=740
I'm not sure if it's possible to disable the other blur filter like that, though.

>>9145645
That's like 3MB/s of bandwidth, right?
It's tight, but would have been enough for a sprite or two per frame. Barely.
Could have worked with some effort, possibly at the cost of a frame of latency but not more.

>>9145703
they werent gonna release an expensive RAM addon with 3MB/s of bandwidth. so yeah maybe possible, but pretty silly

>>9145551
My mistake then.

>>9131578
It was just better in general. More games, better games, less arcade ports, more exclusives. People in the west didn't start liking the Saturn until recently. At least SEGA finally got it right with the Dreamcast

>>9131668
You're not old enough to remember early 90s then

>>9145649
That sounds absurd. I can't even imagine what that would look like in practice. Would love to see it though just for the visuals.

>>9142523
If they actually kept it then it could have, but in the end Sony never did anything with it outside of supposed developer stuff and got rid of it even before the PSOne revision. A shame because a lot of PS1 games could have used that extra RAM, not every company had a literal rocket scientist to optimize the ever loving shit out of their games on the hardware after all.

>>9146081
At school the n64 fanboys wanted fmv in their games so badly.

>>9146351
No they didn't.

>>9145179
>So the Saturn
This retard has obviously never been in japan.

>>9145059
>Tomb Raider
Does not look much better on the playstatuon. Suffers from frame drops and really bad polygon seams.

>MAH GRAFX
Nobody cares, kids. Gameplay was basically the same and that's all that goddamn matters.
Fucking brainwashed kids thinking graphics have anything to do with games being good.

>>9146709
Hahaha whatever kiddo opinion matters.

>>9146147
It would have looked like normal, just with some JPEG-like artifacts, which on a CRT are likely to be masked away anyway. Note that it would NOT have looked as bad as FMVs generally were since those generally used high compression levels. For sprites you'd probably use something close to lossless.
Only thing I'm not sure about if that actually saves much space compared to just using a regular lossless compression scheme (like RLE) on bitmapped pallete sprites. Take a sprite like >>9143674 which has large areas using the same color. That could be stored at like 1/16 the size using just RLE, easily.
The way it would work is that the compressed sprites reside in main RAM and then when you press a button or the next idle animation frame is up next or whatever you decompress the sprite into a buffer in main RAM and then upload it into VRAM. Maybe it could even be decompressed right into VRAM, but I'm not sure how much overhead there is for many smaller uploads. Maybe it would be even faster, maybe not. Doesn't really matter because it would be fast enough in either case. PSX has a 133MB/s main bus (2.3MB/frame) so I doubt this would be a bottleneck when a 128x128x4 sprite is like 64KB. Not sure how fast uploads to VRAM are, but it works for FMV, so no reason it wouldn't work for a sprite or two and that's all you really need for a fighting game other than effects or whatever. but those would easily fit, too.
With MDEC in the mix it's just another step in between where the CPU feeds the MDEC a block of compressed sprite and a place in RAM to decompress into. This is also asynchronous, so the CPU is free to upload a sprite while MDEC decodes the next one. Or decompressing and uploading individual 16x16 blocks or whatever. I don't think MDEC can decode into VRAM directly so this stuff needs to be copied, but since it works for FMV, no reason it wouldn't for individual sprites. Since MDEC decoding is asynchronous sprite upload can happen in parallel, too.

>>9146710
It is looking at two shockingly ugly games and picking the one that looks worse. Sure, the Saturn version is even uglier, but does that really matter?

>>9146710
>Does not look much better on the playstatuon. Suffers from frame drops and really bad polygon seams.

I'm pretty sure the PS1 Tomb Raider runs at a pretty steady 30fps with minimal frame drops. I had a Saturn with Tomb Raider back in the day. It was my first introductory to the series. I was impressed with how the game looked, but the framerate definitely hovered around 20-25fps. And would slow down a lot. One of my friends had Tomb Raider for DOS/ PC and would play it on his parents Windows 95 PC. he played the game in software mode at 320x200/320x240 and the PC version is capped at 30fps. But in software rendering mode , it still had shaky polygons and texture warping like the PS1 game. But only less. The PC version supported some early 3D accelerators through API's. But it wasn't a widely used thing. Most people who played this on a PC, played it in software rendering mode.

>>9147078
> which on a CRT are likely to be masked away anyway
It always blows my mind how different the experience of sd tv is to the people from the NTSC regions. For them sd is a blurry mess that is so bad that it even allowed for the n64 to not look immediately terrible to them. The idea that MPEG decoded sprites could look anything other than terrible just highlights this disconnect.

>>9147241
I live in PAL land, buddy. RGB master race. Picrel looks OK even on my monitor.
>The idea that MPEG decoded sprites could look anything other than terrible
MDEC format is different from MPEG. It's more like JPEG, or MJPEG in case of video.

So, I played around to get some hard numbers. A 223x233 sprite like this at 4bit/16 colors weights (223*223/2/1024=) 12KB. With RLE it comes down to around just 5KB. That means using MDEC for a sprite like this would have likely been retarded unless it compresses better. It's larger and looks worse. But for a different art style with more colors and noise-like high frequency detail it would probably still come out ahead. Like Mortal Kombat or whatever.
In any case, some form of sprite compression could have saved a lot of RAM and would have allowed for ~twice the number of sprites in cases like picrel. I'm actually wondering if some games might not actually have done this. You wouldn't see it in the VRAM viewer since the compressed sprites would be in main RAM, not VRAM.

>>9147570
Basically every cartridge based console uses compressed sprite graphics in many games but I don't see why a disc based console would need to.

>>9133598
> Why does a game running in an emulator look different than a game running on a composite connection on a CRT?????

>>9133598
Why do people endlessly post the same image of the game running on an emulator that massively overstates the mesh effect instead of showing how the game actually looks over composite or RF?

As an aside, you can find true transparencies in MMX4 on the Saturn by literally walking right for two seconds.

>>9147176
The PS1 version is nowhere near a steady 30fps, its framerate dips constantly. It maintains a higher average framerate in most (but not all) areas compared to the Saturn version, but they had to drop the render distance way down to make it happen.

>>9147702
>why do people remove blur filters for graphics comparisons
idk

>>9147647
I'm talking about storing compressed sprites in RAM so you can have more of them for animation frames or just more stuff on screen. And no, SFA2 on SNES doesn't do this. It just decompresses everything from the cartridge once and that's it. What I'm proposing is keeping the compressed sprites in RAM as is and decompressing them on the fly into VRAM as necessary. Instead of storing the decompressed sprites in RAM. On the SNES this would have been impossible because it's too slow but the PSX should have no problem doing this. Or the Saturn, for that matter.

>>9146417
I recall a conversation about pro evolution soccer or some sports games possibly on both systems and it was said to have FMV like graphics on the n64. I'm pretty sure the n64 just used in game graphics though.

>>9147716
Not going to fully dismiss it as cope on my part but I do think the low draw distance fit some of the levels

>>9147702
Unless you were some kind of moron who didn't know better no one played with RF or A/V on a SEGA system, they were made to be played with RGB SCART cable.

>>9148041
>they were made to be played with
False claim backed up by nothing

>>9145448
Demo made me smile.

>>9148041
>9
Even RGB doesn't make the dithering look quite as obvious on a CRT because of the phosphor glow. You can tell, sure, but it looks way more natural than emulating on a flat panel.

>>9147702
>Why do people endlessly post the same image of the game running on an emulator
Because those faglords don't actually have a Sega Saturn and have to deal with emulators on LCD monitors.

ps1

>>9148594
*pc-fx

>>9134425
Play on!

>>9148498
When you emulate you can have actual transparency, anyway.