Battle of the 32 bit consoles.

[Ze_ro]

I just argued with Z_ero about this for a long time and know I have to do it again.

 

You didn't convince me of anything by the way... I just don't post very often anymore

 

Lets look at some facts here...

• Doom came out near the end of the SNES life-span, at a point where people had figured out lots of tricks with the hardware that allowed them to do it. It's safe to say that Doom is pretty close to maxing out the hardware ala Pitfall 2 on the Atari.

[*]The SNES could only handle Doom with the addition of an extra processor, the SuperFX chip. There's absolutely no way it could have handled Doom without it.

[*]Even with the extra chip and advanced knowledge of the SNES, the game is still pretty nasty. Poor framerate, and no floor/ceiling textures.

[*]Now, the GBA is doing Doom as a very early release. It's fair to say that people don't know how to push the hardware nearly as well as they did when they did SNES Doom.

[*]GBA Doom is running on nothing but the stock hardware.

[*]Although it's debatable which one's better, I'll at least point out that the GBA version has floor and ceiling textures.

[*]Therefor, working without extra hardware, and without the benefit of years of experience with the hardware, the games are at least comparable. Therefor, I submit that the GBA is more powerful.

 

In addition, I also believe that including cartridges with extra chips in them does not give an accurate picture of how powerful something is. You could probably run Super Mario Sunshine on a NES if you stuffed enough extra hardware in the cartridge.

 

Saying that the GBA can't do DKC is ridiculous. Even the B&W Gameboy did this game, and did a fairly good job of it. Yes, the lower resolution will make the job harder, but I'm sure the game is entirely possible. Although it's already been mentioned, DKC uses no 3D abilities whatsoever. It's just a 2D platform game with really well done graphics. All the 3D stuff was done on SGI workstations (or whatever), and dumped onto the cartridge as pictures. Same goes for Killer Instinct and such.

 

Nintendo did NOT put 3D hardware in the GBA!

 

Doesn't matter! You don't need 3D hardware (Like the SuperFX chips, or 3DFX cards, or whatever) to do 3D. Doom and Quake came out before hardware 3D accelleration was even done on PC's. It just takes a LOT of processing power to do it without the extra hardware help. That ARM processor in the GBA is (essentially) doing the work of the SNES's 65C816 and a SuperFX chip combined.

 

Besides, there probably IS some 3D ability in those video chips anyways. Nothing like SuperFX of course, but mode 7 is there I believe.

 

GBA can not do DKC because the system wasnt designed for it.

 

The system wasn't designed to do 2D platform games?

 

Doom is not in 3D its actually a 2D game.

 

What's 2D about it? Since everything in video game history is displayed on a 2D screen, can anything REALLY be 3D?

 

--Zero

[Gunstar]

What's 2D about it? Since everything in video game history is displayed on a 2D screen, can anything REALLY be 3D?

 

--Zero

 

I love pointing that one out to people. But, lets look at this another way to prove true 3D; lets assume that in 5, 10 or 20 years holographic projection becomes an affordable main stream reality. Some ingenuis hackers/programmers could convert all of these current day "3D" games into TRUE 3D because the 3D math IS there in the programs and hardware, it just gets translated into 2D scaling graphics for use on 2D monitors and TV's to make it "appear" to be 3D. A perfect current day example of this can be found in the Atari Jaguar's game 'Missle Command 3D,' it was initially designed for the Jaguar VR helmet, which by the way was going to have true 3D projection into the eye creating a true 3D image, but it was made to work on a normal TV/monitor as well. Todays 3D games have the 3 dimensional math behind them and the processors "computing" true 3d points in "space" within it's calculations so conversion to true 3D visuals is entirely possible. Although I still like your point!

[Punisher5.0]

Alright this is going no where but:

 

To Zero- The GBA was not meant to run games in that resolution and that is what I meant about how the GBA was not made to run DCK.

 

About the 3D capabilities- The original DOOM was actually 2D. Also, SNES and GBA both have Mode 7 capablities. Without this both systems probably couldnt run DOOM.

 

About DCK- I never said the game was in 3D so I am not sure where you got that from. I was refering to DCK because of how good of a job RARE did with the graphics.

 

Also I know I didnt convince you . I just figured you got tired of arguing with me .

 

Regardless of what system is more powerful. What system would you rather want to play SNES games on?

[Atari-Jess]

>About the 3D capabilities- The original DOOM was actually 2D. Also, SNES and GBA both have Mode 7 capablities. Without this both systems probably couldnt run DOOM.

 

the game uses 2d sprites in a raycasting engine with elevated floors.

not completely 3d, but more 3d than a lot of "3D" games

 

>About DCK- I never said the game was in 3D so I am not sure where you got that from. I was refering to DCK because of how good of a job RARE did with the graphics.

 

almost any console could run DCK if it had enough colours, the sprites

were made on basically super computers that were in 3d but then just

"screen captured" those 3d characters and turned them into pictures,

and almost anything can just display pictures, the GBA could EASILLY

have a DCK easilly.

 

>Regardless of what system is more powerful. What system would you rather want to play SNES games on?

 

depends on the game, and where I am, its nice to play a good looking

game on the go, but sometimes its nice to play a home console

 

oh, and btw, about me saying the graphics 3d of the GBA on how amazing

great they can be, as far as i understood, engines like the ones that

monkey were showing, were done on stock GBA's but thats what was reading

that may or may not be true, id have to find out

 

 

the difference in super mario world and DCK on programming skill to make

was most likely not too much considering they are both 2d platform games

just DCK has much better looking sprites, if i had hacked DCK and replaced

all the sprites with ones I made my self everyone would think that

it really really sucked only cause of the sprites. im not saying you dont

understand, i just felt like saying it.

[Raijin Z]

I had a Saturn for a while... I burned it to death when its CD drive magically committed suicide.