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/vr/ - Retro Games

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9772187 No.9772187 [Reply] [Original]

Why Outrun style racing games run at 60fps on NES but on Genesis and SNES they are often 20-30fps?

>> No.9772227

>>9772187
They are 60fps on the snes and genesis, but the nes had more flickering.

>> No.9772245

>>9772187
interesting question. i haven't seen anyone competent enough to answer it on this board though.

>> No.9772250

>>9772187
I have wondered it myself, it only takes a couple of % of the cpu to be able to animated a road smoothly each frame like you get in hang on or world gp on sms. Road Rash runs slow because it tries to scale the objects in software but for other games there should be more than enough cpu power. Super hang on uses a large amount of cpu to calculate the hills and position of the objects. Outrun 2019, pretty good but runs slow while on snes super chase hq and full throttle racing are about 30 fps.
What they should have done is separate the animation of the road to the animations of the objects or the processing for the hills, The hills and objects can be updated every few frames but it will still look smooth as long as the pallete gets cycled every frame. Outrun in the arcade animates the road and object at a different frame rate.
My guess is developers were not skilled enough or it was not considered important enough to plan for at the time or maybe racing game were not popular enough to care enough.
There were some speccy games and at least a bbc micro games that was able to seperate the pallete cycling from the roadside animation anyway.

>>9772227
Rad racer and most nes racers just look smoother than random snes racers I've tried. I think only roadblasters on gen runs smooth. I used to think nigel mansell was 60 fps but it really is 30 fps.

Actually chase hq on sega saturn actually has a fair bit of slow down, it only runs 60 fps sometimes.

>> No.9772271

>>9772250
maybe scanline effects framerate was limited to match the roadside spites so that picture is more coherent?
or maybe these games render to a framebuffer? that would be slow.
road rash also renders road using polygons. it's limited to 30 fps but averages around 15 with no overclock.
street racer on mega drive is another 60 fps one and it even uses textured road.
top gear 2 mega drive is 20 fps.

>> No.9772278

It's like people are realizing only now that the NES is a better console than the SNES and Megadrive

>> No.9772384

Rad Racer was programmed by an elite MOS 6502 programmer who was personally headhunted to work on Famicom games. It might be an unfair comparison.

>> No.9772418

>>9772384
From the top of my head there's also chase hq port and that nigel mansell f1 game. And that old ass nintendo's f1 game. They all are 60fps. Didn't check the rest but I feel there's more.

>> No.9772438

>>9772418
Nintendo's F1 Race was programmed by Satoru Iwata, whom I'd also add to the pantheon of elite 6502 programmers.

>> No.9772518

>>9772187
NES has no VRAM, so can't be any software sprite scaling drop the framerate.

>> No.9772527

>>9772518
LMAO, every cartridge console after (and even before) Atari 2600 has VRAM.

>> No.9772536

>>9772527
More specifically, NES has no tile VRAM. It uses rom instead. The carts have two separate buses, one for the cpu, and one for the gpu.

>> No.9772637

Its like on c64 you have 60fps games while on amiga they're real slow like with turbo outrun. But lotus shows that 16 bit can do a super awesome racer.

>>9772271
Really wouldn't surprise me if developers had the false idea to make everything slow to match the choppy scaling of the sprites, they had weird ideas of what looked good and back then having similarities to an 8 bit was considered crap. The objects in hang on sms only have 2 or 3 animations but they move perfectly. There is a hack of road rash to give a better frame rate using the sega cd and actually the road seems to overlap other parts of the road.

>>9772418
Chase hq on sms is 60 fps but is so cut down I like the amstrad version better. There is a Konami F1 game on nes which 60 fps in time trail which has very detailed graphics.

>>9772278
Many times I've considered it asking where are snes equivalents of shatterhand and all those others.

>> No.9773086

>>9772187
The answer is because those NES games are doing so little.
>3 simultaneous roadside obstacles at most
>2 simultaneous other cars
>Tons of flicker
>No parallax line scrolling
Compare to Mega Drive racing games, which can have fully polygonal roadside obstacles, realtime scaling sprites, and far more simultaneous racers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwbzga9P3XU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdi_PL7v3Tg
The Master System also had far more going on, which makes sense as it was TWO TIMES more powerful than the NES.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPoMviKmtkA
By comparison, NES racers were interesting spectacles, but not compelling as games, as with much of the NES library.

>> No.9773394

>>9772637
World Grand Prix on SMS is another really smooth racing game