/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5339478]

why do giana sisters favs always get so angry and pissy when you call their games mario clones?

[Anonymous No.5339485]

always hated c64fags
literally pcfats from the 80s

[Anonymous No.5339492]

>>5339478
I'm pretty sure the game was programmed intentionally to be a mario clone for the c64

[Anonymous No.5339498]

Because the game has 1/5th the content of SMB yet is made to be a far better game by Euros.

[Anonymous No.5339502]

>>5339498
i can smell you from here

[Anonymous No.5339512]

Why do Mariofags think their subpar bing bing wahoo game invented sidescrolling platformers?

[Anonymous No.5339516]

>>5339512
Actually Pac-Land was the first one.

[Anonymous No.5339517]

>>5339485
Americans with C64s never saw this game, we didn't even know it existed until the Internet.

[Anonymous No.5339524]

>>5339517
I knew about the Amiga port by the late 80s, maybe 1990.

[Anonymous No.5339526]

[Anonymous No.5339528]

[Anonymous No.5339541]

>>5339528
>>5339526
What am I looking at?

[Anonymous No.5339545]

>>5339541
Posting maps of the levels to show that Giana Sisters is a very much smaller game than SMB even though it's physically bigger by 12k.

[Anonymous No.5339547]

SMB took an entire year of work by top-tier developers. No European software house was going to invest a year of work into a game when they wanted the things out in 2-3 months tops.

[Anonymous No.5339551]

I think Giana Sisters could have been better if they'd toned down the blatant Mario references and made a more unique concept.

[Anonymous No.5339552]

>>5339545
Because it doesn't recycle sprites like bush/clouds.

[Anonymous No.5339553]

>>5339552
Tiles, not sprites.

[Anonymous No.5339557]

>>5339545
If you've seen the ROM disassembly of SMB, they relied on some extreme compression to fit everything in 40k. They didn't waste a single byte. That kind of programming is difficult to pull off and makes editing/debugging the code tough.

I doubt Giana Sisters has everything packed in that tightly.

[Anonymous No.5339565]

By recycling game assets, you would be surprised at just how much you can fit into a really small space.

[Anonymous No.5339574]

>>5339551
The entire point of the game was to copy Mario though.

[Anonymous No.5339580]

>>5339565
Firelord is 43k on the C64 version, slightly bigger than SMB. The Spectrum version I believe is a little smaller because Z80 code is more compact than 6502 code.

[Anonymous No.5339629]

I wish Giana Sisters had half as good controls as Mario.

[Anonymous No.5339632]

>>5339478
Was this the first lesbian platformer?

[Anonymous No.5339693]

Also if only Chris Hulsbeck's music was half as good as Koji Kondo's.

[Anonymous No.5339703]

I think part of this game's undeserved reputation is that it was in stores only for a short time before Nintendo forced them to pull it, so not many original copies exist.

[Anonymous No.5339714]

>>5339528
>>5339552
It seems to have more palettes than Mario as well.

[Anonymous No.5339721]

>>5339714
>C64
>palettes
There's only 16 colors and in multicolor char mode two colors are global and have to be shared by all characters. The NES does actually have palettes; four three color palettes out of 25 sprite and background colors and each block of four tiles has to share a palette. Also one color is global and has to be used by all sprites or background tiles.

[Anonymous No.5339735]

>>5339693
Then he'd do a quarter of his usual performance.

[Anonymous No.5339829]

I think this guy makes a good point. Way too many Euro C64 games were so loaded down with elaborate demo effects and music that they ate all the RAM up allowing for only the most minimal gameplay. Something like Flimbo's Quest looks cool but there's hardly any gameplay or content there.

[Anonymous No.5339839]

>>5339829
It is worth pointing out that Euros on Lemon64 often decry the minimalist audiovisuals of NTSC games but most of the time an NTSC C64 game is actually a game and not a demo that has some vaguely game-like stuff in it.

[Anonymous No.5339854]

>>5339693
>I think part of this game's undeserved reputation is that it was in stores only for a short time before Nintendo forced them to pull it, so not many original copies exist.
Yes, it got most of its popularity as a pirated game where it was passed around as "psst kid, I got the game Nintendo banned!" Also there was a hacked version with an actual Mario sprite inserted that also attained playground cache as a secret leaked Nintendo game on the C64.
>>5339829
>I think this guy makes a good point. Way too many Euro C64 games were so loaded down with elaborate demo effects and music that they ate all the RAM up allowing for only the most minimal gameplay.
I think that's a silly confusion of cause and effect. The bigger problem is that groups who could make amazing scene demos were not necessarily good videogame designers. Probably the epitome of this is the game Rubicon. A snarky Youtube comment I saw summed it up perfectly saying something like: "The plot of this game is killing all the really cool graphics the artist drew!" It's a peculiar game that on the surface looks like a Contra style run and gun but soon demonstrates a complete lack of literacy of the genre (or at least the premier Japanese games within) by the designers.

[Anonymous No.5339867]

All the same there does seem to be a noticeable difference from earlier C64 games made up to 1985 (say something like Entombed) which had more crude audiovisuals but were often very fun to play. Post-85 you started getting games like Hawkeye that look and sound awesome but there's barely any gameplay except shooting generic enemies that don't do anything but move left and right. At some point in the late 80s, demo effects took precedence over actual game design.

[Anonymous No.5339875]

>>5339839
The proof's in the pudding how Lemon64 is a mostly Euro site and 63 of the games on their top 100 list are NTSC ones.

[Anonymous No.5339884]

>>5339854
>The bigger problem is that groups who could make amazing scene demos were not necessarily good videogame designers.

The other problem obviously was that they didn't have that much money to play with and Euro software devs wanted games released as fast as possible, they weren't going to allow a year of development time like with a NES game or something.

[Anonymous No.5339889]

>>5339884
Ok but even early 80s games like Lode Runner and Manic Miner with really limited audiovisuals made by like one guy still had more content and gameplay than Hawkeye or Rubicon or (dare I say it) Mayhem in Monsterland.

[Anonymous No.5339894]

Manfred Trentz, as usual a great programmer who could not design a game to save his life.

[Anonymous No.5339897]

>why do giana sisters favs always get so angry and pissy when you call their games mario clones?

The truth always hurts.

[Anonymous No.5339898]

One thing I find significant about Laser Squad is the audiovisuals are quite spartan and far from the overwrought demoscene stuff in Flimbo's Quest. And well, it goes without saying these guys went places post 8-bit era while David Hogendorf...did not.

[Anonymous No.5339914]

>>5339478
'Cuz their game got sued out of the existence for it.

[Anonymous No.5339917]

>>5339545
Yeah it's about 53k and loading it from the BASIC prompt takes forever and ever unless you use a Fastload cartridge.

[Anonymous No.5339919]

>>5339917
52k. That's the largest file size you can load with the kernal "load PRG" function--going from $800 to $CFFF.

[Anonymous No.5339923]

>>5339854
>>5339829
European games with demoscene influences suffer from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui in their visual design. They try to use every pixel, even those that would have been better left unused. Demos do it too, though primarily the 8-bit/68k. I've seen less of it in demoscene productions for the PC.

I prefer the sparse look of >>5339898. It gives the visual elements space to breathe.

[Anonymous No.5339926]

>>5339898
^This. Guys who actually had talent went on to develop PC games while the demosceners never did anything in their life but post on Lemon64 in their undershirts and discuss how lame the NTSC C64 community was.

[Anonymous No.5339930]

>>5339898
>And well, it goes without saying these guys went places post 8-bit era
>Gollop Brothers
> No one outside of UK even knows Lords of Chaos
>Never heard of again past UFO Enemy Unknown
>Forced for rest of life to watch endless flawed attempts to remake their games they are not even involved in
I like this forced meme of "the graphics weren't good so it was a real game!" but it didn't matter how good your games were, post 1990 they all these devs ended up either in one of the few big Euro houses or mostly just faceless cubicle drones at US places like EA (or making mobile games now).

[Anonymous No.5339931]

>>5339930
Aren't they working on Phoenix Point?

[Anonymous No.5339935]

>>5339930
>Never heard of again past UFO Enemy Unknown
Apocalypse?

[Anonymous No.5339937]

It's not that you can't have good graphics or sound because if you look at NES games, Konami, Capcom, and Data East had some amazing musicians and graphics people. Nintendo themselves had a pretty minimalist approach.

[Anonymous No.5339938]

>shitty bait thread got turned into interesting thread about game design and Euro software history
You did good, /vr/

[Anonymous No.5339942]

Though honestly, other than Sid Meier most of the prominent US game designers in the 8-bit era didn't remain relevant long in the 90s either. Richard Garriot or those Wizardry faggots became literallywhos pretty fast and their franchises went to shit.

[Anonymous No.5339950]

>>5339926
And all the same there was never a Euro equivalent of Maniac Mansion or Ultima V, so...

[Anonymous No.5339952]

>>5339950
It's hard to do that when you are lacking disk drives.

[Anonymous No.5339959]

>>5339950
Ultima V is 1.2MB, it's actually bigger than the biggest NES game (DQ4).

[Anonymous No.5339983]

>>5339959
MB, Mb, and mb are all different right?

[Anonymous No.5339986]

>>5339950
>And all the same there was never a Euro equivalent of Maniac Mansion or Ultima V,
Well yeah, there never would be. Different parts of the world have totally different tastes. There's no Japanese 'Maniac Mansion' equivalent either - why would there be?
There's a reason why e.g. Grand Theft Auto came from where it did.

[Anonymous No.5340554]

We love Giana's what?

[Anonymous No.5340562]

Commodore ain't keepin up.

[Anonymous No.5340608]

>>5339632
also the last

[Anonymous No.5340618]

Giana Sisters has factually better music and graphics (+overall atmosphere) than SMB. The monsters are clearly weaker though. The owl, the eye and the crab are the same enemies with different sprites.

While I usually hate hacks and mods, I enjoyed the levelpack Furry Knibble Girls much more than the original game. It captured the game's essentials and high points better.

[Anonymous No.5340664]

>>5340608
sadly it wasn't

[Anonymous No.5340856]

>>5339512
>subpar

[Anonymous No.5340864]

>>5340664
I remember that, it was ok.

[Anonymous No.5340885]

>>5340554

[Anonymous No.5340947]

I always wondered this. When the Commodore computers died and DOS/Windows became the new computer format, did Euro devs make "demo style" games for those computers?

[Anonymous No.5340962]

Giana Sisters was, is and will be an awesome platformer.

[Anonymous No.5340968]

>>5340947
No. That would be hard.

Do people make awesome demos that make use of the latest high end graphics cards? No. That would take a lot of effort.

[Anonymous No.5341049]

>>5340968
>Do people make awesome demos that make use of the latest high end graphics cards?

They're called benchmarks nowadays, and Nvidia has demos they create to showcase their cards. Demos have evolved.

[Anonymous No.5341179]

>>5340947
>I always wondered this. When the Commodore computers died and DOS/Windows became the new computer format, did Euro devs make "demo style" games for those computers?
You're misunderstanding the point of the demoscene, it wasn't to make games, it was to make cool and visually interesting works of art on technologically limited computers. The kind of games being shit on in this thread were from the period of around 1986 to 1994 (last game I can really think of that fits this description is the awesome Super Stardust in 1994). The reason why they were possible was because the hardware they were targetting was essentially fixed - the C64 hadn't changed since 1982, and the Amiga (not really the same case at all, but essentially) since 1985. Once you hit PCs with their rapid pace of change of technology two things happened a) the lack of limitations meant the understanding and level of skill wasn't needed to get similar results, and with the sky now being the limit you would have to spend a lot of time to create technically impressive presentations and b) without custom chips to leverage in clever wars everything esssentially just became a race of 3D engines. There were and still are demos, but they typically revolved around self imposed limitations, things like being no bigger than 64KBs of space on disk to keep things interesting and limit how much time they take to make (many were made over big parties at a weekend after all). An infamous example of an actual game developed in this style is .kkrieger, which was for its time (2004) a visually extremely impressive FPS which was a tiny 97 Kilobytes big.
>>5341049
>They're called benchmarks nowadays
The plot thickens here. 3DMark was developed by the company formed from Demoscene group Remedy. You'll probably also know them for the game Max Payne - which first appeared as an unplayable demo mock up of the lobby scene from the Matrix in 3DMark 2001. Old habits die hard.

[Anonymous No.5341323]

>>5339986
>Well yeah, there never would be. Different parts of the world have totally different tastes. There's no Japanese 'Maniac Mansion' equivalent either - why would there be?

It's hard to do those kind of games when you use cassettes for everything, anon.

[Anonymous No.5341327]

>>5340962
Nah dude nah.

[Anonymous No.5341338]

>>5341179
An interesting exception was Beverly Hills Cop which was made by a British team and it uses some EGA hax tricks for smooth scrolling (also requires a real EGA card to work correctly).

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

VGA cards could do a similar trick and it works a lot like VSP scrolling on the C64.

[Anonymous No.5341361]

>>5340618
I would argue it's better programmed as well while SMB has 1001 bugs and glitches. The limited content in the game vis a vis Mario is something that's hard to overlook.

[Anonymous No.5341369]

>>5341338
Yes but there's the problem with tricks like these. On a C64 you could generally guarantee a given game/demo would work on any machine. Mostly, of course different VIC/SID revisions could throw things off like VSP not working on some VIC-IIs and digitized samples not working on 8580 SIDs.

There were a million different PC configurations around so undocumented graphics card tricks like EGA/VGA smooth scrolling didn't work on everything particularly some shitty Taiwanese cards that didn't bother implementing the spec properly.

[Anonymous No.5341419]

It always seemed to me that Euros liked bright colorful cartoon games but had less interest in dry war sims or dungeon crawlers.

[Anonymous No.5341427]

Why no US demoscene?

[Anonymous No.5341439]

>>5339935
Forgot about that game completely but the idea of paying for property damage your squad caused was kind of interesting.

[Anonymous No.5341441]

>>5341427
too busy sucking jap dick with the in-ee-ess and ess-in-ee-ess

[Anonymous No.5341473]

>>5341441
Americans always have, and always will be, console kids. The vast majority of PC ports are made for European markets, even today.

[Anonymous No.5341484]

>>5341473
Computer gaming was born on the Apple II and TRS-80 if you didn't know. It started when they took games like Colossal Cave Adventure and Hunt The Wumpus that had been played at colleges by students on mainframes and ported them for the early microcomputers.

Americans were developing whole new genres like the CRPG, graphic adventure, and flight sim while Euros had nothing but silly knockoffs of Japanese arcade/console games.

[Anonymous No.5341491]

>>5341484
Then why don't Americans made computer games anymore, while Europeans still do?

[Anonymous No.5341494]

There's no real consoles anymore anyway, the recent generation ones are just hacked-up PCs.

[Anonymous No.5341503]

Also the first big-box PC game productions (made by a team as opposed to one guy in his den) were King's Quest and Summer Games. It was several more years before you started to have European games like this and then only from bigger devs like Ocean and Infrogrames.

[Anonymous No.5341512]

>>5341503
>>5341484
Sigh. I'll sadly grant you that Americans always had more money to work with than us and more sophisticated computers and tools to develop games with. In the late 70s when you could buy a TRS-80 with disk drives and RS-232 ports at Radio Shack, Clive Sinclair was still selling calculator kits and we didn't have any computers of our own until the 80s.

[Anonymous No.5341557]

>>5341327
>Nintenfag tries to convince us his retarded plumber is better

[Anonymous No.5341608]

ZED EX SPECTRUM

[Anonymous No.5341629]

The C64 port of the Simpsons Arcade Game was done by a US team and Euros never saw that game.

[Anonymous No.5341638]

>>5341608
Oi, m8, takin about me speccy? What's this zx mess. It's just the speccy, roight?

[Anonymous No.5341652]

As I've mentioned before, the NES is fairly equal to the C64 in capabilities unless you get into more advanced mappers like MMC5. It was really the higher budget of its games and tighter quality control standards that made the thing.

[Anonymous No.5341659]

>some autists were making Farming Simulator for the C64

[Anonymous No.5341684]

>>5341659
The same autists talked for years about making SMB for the C64 but they've never done it even though the ROM disassembly is online for anyone who wants to read it.

[Anonymous No.5341690]

I always wanted to do DQ1--not a big game and not a lot of complex sprite animation that would be tricky to implement.

[Anonymous No.5341696]

>>5341690
I'd hate trusting any Euros to porting DQ1 to the C64; chances are they'd ruin the simple two-channel game music with some awful arpeggio garbage.

[Anonymous No.5341747]

Zelda II strikes me as a game that would be a disaster to try to do on a computer like the C64. You'd have to stop and load every time you fight enemies in the overworld and that's a lot of enemy encounters.

[Anonymous No.5341753]

>>5341747
The best solution to that might be to break the overworld into small pieces that are loaded separately, then you could keep the enemy fighting screens in memory and not need to load each one individually. But yeah, nothing beats being able to insta-switch data in from a ROM cartridge.

[Anonymous No.5341761]

>>5341753
Or just code it for an REU/C128. Whatever works.

[Anonymous No.5341783]

>>5341557
>thinking a picayune knockoff is better than one of the greatest platformers of all time

[Anonymous No.5341803]

>>5341473
>Americans always have, and always will be, console kids
Actually that would more true of Japan than anything.

[Anonymous No.5341808]

Didn't some guys remaster Super Pitfall or something?

[Anonymous No.5341809]

>>5339478
>the arm patch that says "I'M COOL"
goddamn

[Anonymous No.5341812]

>>5341808
They did. But still, I'd like to see someone attempt that for the C64.

[Anonymous No.5341818]

>>5339829
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCxXMquPKs

It looks and sounds nice and the programming is top-notch but the gameplay is indeed very limited and repetitive.

[Anonymous No.5341820]

>>5339478

[Anonymous No.5341821]

>>5341818
But still I will grant you that C64 scrolling is clean and not full of glitches like NES scrolling.

[Anonymous No.5341828]

[Anonymous No.5341840]

>>5341828
Point well taken.

[Anonymous No.5341856]

>>5339942
I wouldn't even call it just games but a lot of the giants in application software like Lotus also failed to make the transition into the 90s.

[Anonymous No.5341867]

>>5341856
That makes me wonder. American magazines always seemed to focus on the use of the C64 for productivity and educational use while the UK magazines were all about games.

[Anonymous No.5341896]

>>5341747
Couldn't be worse than Ultima for multiloads.

[Anonymous No.5341898]

>>5341747
>>5341753
You realize that Zelda was made with floppies in mind?

[Anonymous No.5341907]

>>5341898
Both Zeldas in their original Japanese format were 128k and fit onto two sides of a FDS disk. Zelda II was significantly enhanced in the US release which included two additional bosses and different color palettes for every palace while they were all just gray in the original; it also ballooned to 256k, twice the size of the FDS original. Also it was not cheap when it came out.

[Anonymous No.5341913]

>>5339478
Again with the 70s art shit making me uneasy.

[Anonymous No.5341915]

>>5341907
The two games are organized pretty neatly; in LOZ the overworld fits onto side one of the disk and the dungeons on side two (you're prompted to flip the disk over every time you enter or exit a dungeon). On Zelda II I think the west side of the map was on side 1 and the east side was on side 2.

[Anonymous No.5341921]

LOZ wasn't altered as much for the US release, mostly just translating dialog into Engrish and replacing FDS sound chip sfx with PCM channel samples.

[Anonymous No.5342031]

>>5341361
SMB was coded still very early in the Famicom's career and a game of this scope and ambition had yet to be attempted. Giana Sisters came out when the C64 was half a decade old and programmers knew it like the back of their hand.

[Anonymous No.5342056]

>>5341907
https://tcrf.net/Zelda_II:_The_Adventure_of_Link/Regional_Differences

The FDS version had a lot of differences actually and there were three color palettes for the difference palaces, but all had the same brick/wall tiles.

[Anonymous No.5342064]

>>5342056
I definitely think the overworld/cave enemy battle music in the NES is better than the original FDS music (better suited to a palace/boss battle desu)

[Anonymous No.5342112]

>>5341783
>one of the greatest platformers of all time
Imagine being THIS delusional fanboy

[Anonymous No.5342113]

>>5341915
And I think the FDS Zelda II stops and loads whenever you switch between caves/towns and the overworld.

[Anonymous No.5342118]

>Gitty's Dreams I (A01) - created by Gitty
>Gitty's Dreams II (A02) - created by Gitty, Bine, Sandy and Prof. Knibble
>Power Sisters I (A03) - created by Posocopi Waldkirch
>Frankie's Horror Trip I (A04) - created by Frankie
>Frankie's Horror Trip II (A05) - created by Frankie
>The Furry Knibble Girls I (A06) - created by Prof. Knibble
>The Gitty's News (A07) - created by Gitty and Bine (aka "The Gittys")

Are any of these worth trying? I remember playing Giana Sisters II and it was hacky.

[Anonymous No.5342774]

>>5341690
There's an official MSX port that's really janky.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTN1ui8c4eI

[Anonymous No.5342827]

>>5341690
>>5342774
i'm sure it's possible and you could probably have smoother scrolling than the msx versions with multi-color sprites if you're willing to sacrifice some horizontal pixels

[Anonymous No.5342859]

GGS never made up its mind about its visual presentation outside of the game. Sometimes its a woman in a dress with nips, and sometimes its a counter culture dyke.

[Anonymous No.5343217]

>>5342859
"never making up its mind" was pretty much an issue with tons of those games.
Hell, since Rubicon was mentioned multiple times let's take it as example:
Apparently the game is about a nuclear accident in Russia and you have to shut down nuclear reactors... exept that none of that happens in the game itself and in the end you're actually securing nuclear weapons.
Nothing in the game looks even remotely like a radioactive Russia and your Snake Plisken-esque character doesn't resemble the guy on the cover and intro graphic in the slightest.

Maybe the Amiga version made more sense, I dunno.

[Anonymous No.5343259]

>>5341821
Only when doing four way scrolling, the NES has dedicated hardware for horizontal or vertical scrolling without artifacting. Gauntlet, however, is one of the few four way scrolling games for the NES that does not have any artifacting present, which I believe is due to the game map fitting into all four name tables instead of just "calling" new data like other games.

[Anonymous No.5343408]

I loved Giana Sisters.

[Anonymous No.5343435]

>>5339485
hating somebody because their video game system is better than yours is awfully petty of you anonymous, perhaps you should try getting a job so that you too can afford to own a real machine instead

[Princess Sevenleaf !IT2uZpX.Ic No.5343525]

>>5341820
Imagine if they made a sequel to Super Hornio Bros. where Mario fucks the Giana Sisters, it would be the most epic crossover event in history.

[Anonymous No.5343536]

>>5342112
Claiming that SMB 1 isn't one of the most significant games of all time is being needlessly contrarian.

[Anonymous No.5343554]

>>5343259
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2TLjyoglS4

I don't notice any artifacts in MC Kids.

[Anonymous No.5343557]

>>5341690
You could base it off the Japanese version; less sprites and simpler code.

[Anonymous No.5343579]

>>5342774
The MSX1 is rather less of a machine than the C64 especially in that it can't fine scroll and only allows four monochrome sprites per line (note the flicker at 1:51). And don't even get me started on the sound.

On the other hand it doesn't have the resolution/color restrictions of the C64 so the graphics would end up being much blockier.

[Anonymous No.5343590]

>>5342774
This could be converted for the ZX Spectrum quite easily though it would be multiload and you'd lose the music (though coding it for the Spectrum 128 would fix that and perhaps also allow the entire game to fit into memory).

[Anonymous No.5343597]

The Famicom DQ1 is only 64k in size, the NES version swelled to 80k mostly because of the added graphics data. I don't know about the MSX although it might be a little smaller because Z80 code is more compact than 6502 code.

[Anonymous No.5343621]

>>5343597
Yeah I would probably keep the simplified sprites from the Japanese version to reduce the amount of work and keep the game smaller to cut down on load time.

[Anonymous No.5343630]

They put DQ2 on the MSX as well, the game was cartridge in both cases and not magnetic media.

[Anonymous No.5343640]

The Famicom DQ2 was 128k, still not that big of a game, the NES was 256k partially because of bigger English dialog and also because of adding the lengthy intro sequence.

[Anonymous No.5343661]

>>5343579
You could do the graphics in hi-res if you're willing to sacrifice some color.

[Anonymous No.5343729]

>>5343259
The NES also has horizontal and vertical mirroring of the name table so you can have wraparound maps (go to the end of a map and it restarts at the beginning) which is for example how DQ2 has a wrapping overworld. On a system like the MSX or C64 you don't have this feature so it would be a little trickier to implement. I actually don't know how the MSX DQ2 handles the wraparound map, the one Youtube video of the game didn't show much.

[Anonymous No.5343739]

>>5343729
Not really. On the C64 you scroll by loading two char rows (H) or one row (V) and scroll them, then load the next row and repeat. So when you get to the end of the map you just reset your pointer back to the start of the tile data. But on a map the size of DQ2's overworld you'd probably need to pause at some points and load from disk because the game probably switches in char data from the cartridge on the fly.

[Anonymous No.5343772]

>>5343217
That's the problem with how amateurish many of these Euro devs were.

[Anonymous No.5343871]

>>5343729
From what I see from Gauntlet, it seems like Tengen loaded the entire room into all four nametables, which explains why the levels are so small. MC Kids also has relatively perfect scrolling, but there's a noticeable blue bar to the left (possibly to hide scrolling artifacts), and Jurassic Park has black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, also likely to hide artifacting. As it stands, Gauntlet is the only NES game that has seamless scrolling without cutting off parts of the screen.

[Anonymous No.5343906]

I don't recall Dragon Quest having any artifacts although it does have four way scrolling.

[Anonymous No.5343907]

>>5339517
>Americans with C64s never saw this game
NEPA imported it in 1988.
https://csdb.dk/release/?id=39927

[Anonymous No.5343912]

Check out Double Dragon for scrolling glitches up your ass. The entire game is a bugfest due to having been coded by an inexperienced team.

[Anonymous No.5343914]

I know on Lemon64 they bitched that the C64 Castlevania has to stop and load when you enter a different section of each level. It shouldn't need to do this, the thing does after all have more memory than the NES but I'm guessing they probably just took the NES source code and tried to convert everything line by line.

[Anonymous No.5343918]

So my understanding of NES programming is that every two screens you have to load in the next nametable or else it will just wrap back around to the start.

[Anonymous No.5344038]

>>5342774
Someone needs to convert this for the Colecovision.

[Anonymous No.5344045]

>>5344038
You'd have to retain the password save though since the Colecovision has no provisions for supporting battery-backed SRAM.

[Anonymous No.5344061]

>>5339478
> clone
OH NO. nobody gives a fuck. was a great game. nobody gets angry, you compulsive lying retard. is this some lame attempt at a bait thread to see how many retarded americans you can reel in? it seems to be working:
>>5339517
>Americans with C64s never saw this game, we didn't even know it existed until the Internet.
have a guess how i know you're a completely clueless zoomer?

[Anonymous No.5344091]

>>5343871
>it seems like Tengen loaded the entire room into all four nametables
that explains why there's no need to cover any "artefacts". nothing in the tables to update, nothing to mask on the edges, just nice smooth scrolling.

[Anonymous No.5344092]

>>5339485
t. proud zx spectrum owner

[Anonymous No.5344098]

>>5343739
Correct. On C64 you can scroll 1-2 rows after which it wraps around. The NES lets you scroll two whole screens before you have to update the name table.

[Anonymous No.5344124]

How about the Master System? Where does it stand capability-wise?

[Anonymous No.5344130]

>>5344124
Tarted-up Colecovision. Aside from more colors and bigger sprites it's not better than the NES in any meaningful way and in some categories it's actually more limited because the video bus isn't brought out to the cartridge slot. The whole thing was a very lazy effort by Sega and they got the market success with it they deserved.

[Anonymous No.5344154]

>SG-1000 debuts in 83, already way outdated hardware
>Famicom easily crushes it in the marketplace
>Sega takes the same machine, adds a little more memory, and a newer video chip with more colors and smooth scrolling

[Anonymous No.5344178]

>>5343536
It was influential, but it aged horribly. Graphics/colors are shit, music is shit, controls are like walking on ice.

[Anonymous No.5344179]

>>5339485
>pcfats from the 80s
BULLY

[Anonymous No.5344182]

>>5344178
Still has 5x the content of Giana Sisters even though the latter has more atmospheric music and is much cleaner and better programmed.

[Anonymous No.5344189]

Yes nobody's arguing SMB isn't a janky game; it was early and Nintendo's programming teams got better as time went on. By SMB3, they'd learned to outline all the graphics in black to cut down on dot crawl.

[Anonymous No.5344212]

>>5341484
^This.

[Anonymous No.5344286]

>>5341896
Ultima V on the Apple II and C64 was on something like three double sided disks. That's over a megabyte of code.

[Anonymous No.5344294]

>>5344286
Yeah it required a fuckton of disk swapping. At least on the PC you could install the thing on a hard disk.

[Anonymous No.5344303]

>>5344286
Four disks.

[Anonymous No.5344323]

>>5343871
Gauntlet does have a bar on the right side of the screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPyRbAqw73o

[Anonymous No.5344470]

C64 Gauntlet had different NTSC and PAL versions, the latter is the more commonly encountered one online.

[Anonymous No.5345181]

>>5344323
Not when being emulated, at least not on FCEUX.

[Anonymous No.5345203]

europeans are really protective of their bad computer games and really bitter towards japanese consoles of the time for being better in every conceivable way

[Anonymous No.5345778]

>>5345203
>americunt is preaching about good taste

[Anonymous No.5345803]

>>5342112
>baiting this hard

[Anonymous No.5346430]

>>5345203
It's like an affront to their shitty childhoods if you question the things.

[Anonymous No.5347590]

>>5346430
>americunt tries very hard to prove his shitty point

[Anonymous No.5347595]

>>5347590
>europoor does it for him anyway

[Anonymous No.5347606]

>>5347595
>him
I smell a lot of samefag baiting here.

[Anonymous No.5348164]

>>5339894
The fucking state of Americans

[Anonymous No.5348691]

Dumb thread is dumb.

[Anonymous No.5349671]

>>5343536
> significant
maybe in your tiny pea sized mind.
> what is the arcade industry?
>>5344182
> Still has 5x the content of Giana Sisters
who gives a fuck. they're two different games on two completely different hardware platforms.

[Anonymous No.5349675]

>>5339894
> what is turrican?
imagine being this ameritarded? my fucking sides. sorry, faggot. you're wrong.
>>5348164
agreed. they're utterly pathetic. i'm sure if manfred was an amerilard you'd hear and see nothing but praise!
amerilards: continuously jealous of everyone around them, for eternity.

[Anonymous No.5349680]

>>5348691
i'm pretty sure it started off as a bait thread to reel in americans. seems to have worked well.

[Anonymous No.5349993]

The 2nd Giana Sister looks like something Shmorky would draw.

[Anonymous No.5350005]

Imagine getting defensive over The Giana Sisters.

[Anonymous No.5350034]

>>5349675
what he said applies to turrican too you moron

people would praise manfred if he came up with something creative like laser squad for example

[Anonymous No.5350149]

Giana Sisters had different highs to SMB. SMB is the better platformer game, but Giana had infinitely better music, better visuals and atmosphere. I think it should have got a proper sequel for it's legacy. I played Hard and Heavy, and while it improved challenge, depth and overall leveldesign, the graphics were bland and lots of bugs were left unfixed. In one of the later maps (which starts with a robot) I can float over a pit by a programming mistake.

[Anonymous No.5350190]

All europeans games suck

[Anonymous No.5350340]

>>5350149
The DS game and Twisted Dreams are both pretty good.

[Anonymous No.5350403]

>>5339478
Why are we pretending like there's more than five or six people on the planet still alive who know what this game even is?

[Anonymous No.5350405]

>>5344061
>have a guess how i know you're a completely clueless zoomer?
He's not. Very few Americans have any idea what the fuck this crappy eurogame is, and it's not an age thing.

[Anonymous No.5350617]

>>5344130
The sms seems to have similar sprite capabilities as the nes; both can display either 8x8 or 8x16 sprites, both can display up to 8 sprites per scanline, and both can display up to 64 sprites on screen. The sms does have a few quirks as well, in that it can double the size of sprites and apparently sprites and background graphics share the same page as opposed to being in two different pages like on the nes. It can display up to 33 colors on screen versus the nes 25, but there's only one 16 color palette for backgrounds and one 16 color palette for sprites. This means that sms graphics can be more colorful and not need to depend on layering like the nes, which in turn would make flickering less apparent. The sms isn't an overall improvement though, there's a few weird choices that hinder it, such as sprites being unable to be flipped, chewing up valuable rom space for redundant graphics, a smaller display resolution (something like 256x192 vs the nes 256x224), and the audio system only has three square waves with a set duty cycle and a noise channel; it makes the nes APU look like the SID.

[Anonymous No.5350910]

>>5343621
The MSX port came out before the enhanced American release.

[Anonymous No.5351261]

>>5350617
>such as sprites being unable to be flipped, chewing up valuable rom space for redundant graphics

The Master System actually has the reverse; you can flip tiles instead of sprites.

[Anonymous No.5351262]

>>5350149
>but Giana had infinitely better music
Yeah no.

I'll grant you it's much better programmed than SMB and not filled with hundreds of bugs.

[Anonymous No.5351269]

>>5350617
>and background graphics share the same page as opposed to being in two different pages like on the nes

The CHR ROM on the NES has two separate tables, one for the sprites and the other for the tiles and both can hold 256 objects. I guess on the Master System you can just put everything in one table and select which objects in the table are sprites and which are tiles.

One important difference is that the Master System doesn't have a separate CHR ROM, all graphics data is in the main program ROM and your code has to copy it into the VRAM (like how it works on CHR RAM NES games like Castlevania). So this is a bit of a handicap too since you can only access 32k of ROM at once and some of it gets eaten by graphics data, while on the NES you don't have this problem unless you have a CHR RAM setup.

And of course the Master System doesn't bring its video bus out to the cartridge slot so expansion of the system's capabilities via mappers are not possible; mappers on the Master System only handle ROM banking and battery backed save games, they can't be used for enhancements like the MMC5.

[Anonymous No.5351282]

>>5340554
We love 'ginas

[Anonymous No.5351310]

>>5341179
>The plot thickens here. 3DMark was developed by the company formed from Demoscene group Remedy. You'll probably also know them for the game Max Payne - which first appeared as an unplayable demo mock up of the lobby scene from the Matrix in 3DMark 2001. Old habits die hard.

Actually both Remedy and Futuremak were spawned from a demo scene group called Future Crew. Future Crew released demo's like these for MS-DOS PC in the early '90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA

Part of Future Crew split split up and formed Remedy. Apogee funded Remedy's first game, which was Death Rally. After Death Rally, Remedy went to work on Max Payne and the MaxFX engine.

The other part of Future Crew became Futuremark. Where they kind of continued making demo's as graphic benchmark software.Future Mark made their first graphics benchmarking demo using Remedy's MaxFX engine which used DirectX 6.1 feature set.

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

They also used MaxFX for 3DMark2000 as well, but this one a later version of the MaxFX engine with DirectX 7.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8T149k63SQ

They also the Max Payne engine for the 2001 demo as well, this version of the engine uses DirectX8 and also showcases the Havok physics engine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg7Vk4b0Ook

This is pretty much the same engine that shipped with Max Payne in 2001. But Max Payne 1 did not use Havok. Max Payne 2 did use Havok Physics engine though and a DX9 version of the MaxFX engine.

They also did an "SE" version of 3DMark2001, which was the last time they used Remedy's MaxFX engine before switching to their own tech.

[Anonymous No.5351314]

One of the clever design tricks Nintendo did with the Famicom was offloading the graphics memory to the cartridges and only putting just enough RAM in the console itself to hold the screen data. So it made the Famicom really cheap and hugely profitable to manufacture.

[Anonymous No.5351323]

>>5345203
>europeans are really protective of their bad computer games and really bitter towards japanese consoles of the time for being better in every conceivable way

At least i am not.

[Anonymous No.5352857]

Here's the better question: could the
C64 get an accurate port of SMB? What about the NES, could it get an accurate port of Giana Sisters? I'm surprised there aren't any fan ports of SMB to the C64, but I'm not surprised that the NES doesn't have much of a homebrew scene, let alone fan ports of C64 games.

[Anonymous No.5352916]

>>5350340
Can't stand Twisted Dreams, levels are too long and it doesn't feel like Giana at all.
DS game was great, too bad it was so easy. You really could feel it was made by the original designer.

[Anonymous No.5353387]

>>5352857
>C64 get an accurate port of SMB?
Don't see why not. They put Castlevania on the C64 and that's a larger, more complex game than SMB. The programming was trash-tier, but they pretty much got all the gameplay elements in there.
>What about the NES, could it get an accurate port of Giana Sisters?
Giana Sisters is a very much simpler game than SMB; that would be cake to port except the music which really wouldn't translate well.
>but I'm not surprised that the NES doesn't have much of a homebrew scene
NES programming is a huge headache if you've ever tried it and the thing doesn't have 35+ years of a homebrew/bedroom coder tradition behind it.

[Anonymous No.5353397]

One nice feature the NES has is its ability to flip sprites up, down, left, or right. This saves you a lot of space with not needing redundant sprite patterns. Can't do that on a C64.

For example in SMB when you fireball Goombas, the game just flips their sprites upside down as they're knocked off the screen. On a C64 you'd need to include separate sprites of the Goombas being upside down.

[Anonymous No.5353403]

>>5353387
>and the thing doesn't have 35+ years of a homebrew/bedroom coder tradition behind it.
It does in Japan to an extent, not in the US at all.

[Anonymous No.5353495]

Doing SMB on the C64 has been talked about for years but nobody's ever actually done it.

[Anonymous No.5354117]

>>5353403
That explains why Famicom homebrew games are much more polished like Blade Buster or Kira Kira, while American games have things like Nomolos or Slappin Bitches. Even though the NES wasn't popular at all in Europe, it does have some impressive European homebrew games, like Super Bat Puncher or the port of Streemerz.

[Anonymous No.5354148]

Even back in the day there wasn't a lot of US development on the NES and most of what was was pretty bad other than LucasArts--Maniac Mansion was ace if you overlook the censorship issues.

[Anonymous No.5354167]

NOJ would sell Famicom dev kits and docs to anyone, they didn't have the Gestapo-tier (and very expensive) licensing policies NOA had.

[Anonymous No.5354194]

>>5354117
>Even though the NES wasn't popular at all in Europe, it does have some impressive European homebrew games, like Super Bat Puncher or the port of Streemerz.

A lot of these were probably done by C64fags because same CPU.

[Anonymous No.5354206]

>>5352916
DS should have been great if they had added more gameplay elements, more powerups, and not remade the original levels so fucking poorly. The actual game really started at world 6, when they stopped the remake nonsense and created levels specially for the game's style.

[Anonymous No.5354217]

>>5354206
I still think there's a lot of content, you just breeze through it because the game is a piece of cake.
Very underrated game that got buried by the huge amount of shovelware existing on DS.
It sucks Gessert died so young.

[Anonymous No.5354305]

>>5354217
>It sucks Gessert died so young.
That was a terrible tragedy. He wouldn't let Giana Sisters derail so badly.

[Anonymous No.5354395]

>>5354194
Come to think of it, I think the super bat Puncher guy is Polish and the Streemerz guy is Russian, those guys had the Dendy which was more popular than the actual NES.

[Anonymous No.5354490]

>>5339478
The Giana reboot games that came out a few years ago mostly did do their own thing, didn't they?

[Anonymous No.5354493]

>>5354490
I probably should have refreshed before posting

[Anonymous No.5355218]

>>5339478
Giana SISTERS
Mario BROTHERS

GET IT?

[Anonymous No.5355531]

>>5354490
I don't know about the DS one but Twisted Dreams is a weird puzzle-platformer where you have to switch between the sisters to change the environment.

[Anonymous No.5355725]

>>5339478
I didn’t realize the Vagina Sisters even had a fanbase. Lol