SONIC THE HEDGEHOG PORTED TO THE SUPER NINTENDO

[0078265317]

https://www.sonicstadium.org/2020/08/sonic-the-hedgehog-ported-to-the-super-nintendo-because-nothing-is-sacred-anymore/

[Austin]

 

[Tanooki]

Hah blast processing my ass.   Seriously though, and yeah it's a tech demo that still lacks a act 1 boss and sfx, but geez that moves fast, smooth, it's clean, and based off the more impressive Japanese version of Sonic that came out after the english version.  The lies in the day the game engine wouldn't work on the SNES or any game that fast (Road Runner Death Valley Rally does) and there it is.  Very cool to see.  I know it's not intended to be finished, but if it happened that would be fantastic either by Tiago or he drops the source and someone dedicated does it.

[No One You Know]

Cool! Another ridiculous myth (speed of a 2D object at a fixed framerate somehow limited by CPU speed EDIT: actually I didn't think about the need to load new tiles quickly (I don't think physics can take that many calculations for each frame) apparently some people still believed in destroyed! Or so you would think at least. Now we just need Super Mario 64 on Playstation! A bit harder than this but another perfectly achievable thing that some fanatics would probably deny. I'm sure the pirate NES sonic already ran at a reasonable pace. Amazing though that this is based on a decompilation of the original game though! I wonder how long it took to make, and how much of that time was just studying and annotating the source? The difference in music sound I presume was artistic - a normal SNES game isn't going to use samples of the mega drive version's synth setups. Software FM synth on the SPC700 is something we need to see! I wonder how terrible the home computer versions of Sonic would have been being done by US gold? I'm sure Super Mario World on the Mega Drive would be easy (well obviously it takes some time and effort to program anything but I mean it wouldn't need any special tricks) except when it comes to the final boss (normal boss level tilting platform could be done just not as well) and making sure your music instruments sound good and appropriate for the Mario music. Of curse if you made it a full game (or probably even just a demo) you have to worry about what on earth Nintendo will do to you. Yoshi's Island running unaccelerated on the SMD would be something to see. Doing all the rotation and scaling tricks for multiple objects would be the challenge. And of course some interrupt palette altering and light and shadow tricks to add colour but done dynamically in game.

2 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Hah blast processing my ass.   Seriously though, and yeah it's a tech demo that still lacks a act 1 boss and sfx, but geez that moves fast, smooth, it's clean, and based off the more impressive Japanese version of Sonic that came out after the english version.  The lies in the day the game engine wouldn't work on the SNES or any game that fast (Road Runner Death Valley Rally does) and there it is.  Very cool to see.  I know it's not intended to be finished, but if it happened that would be fantastic either by Tiago or he drops the source and someone dedicated does it.

I always thought Sonic came out in Japan first? I never noticed the lack of line scrolling in certain places either. I think i just assumed those bits were meant to be the same distance from the foreground.

Edited August 18, 2020 by No One You Know

[Tanooki]

8 hours ago, No One You Know said:

 

I always thought Sonic came out in Japan first? I never noticed the lack of line scrolling in certain places either. I think i just assumed those bits were meant to be the same distance from the foreground.

Honestly I never cared.  Sega in the first half of the 90s on the console front with their childish lying ads infuriated me so I mostly ignored them, in time I did end up owning all their stuff outside of a Pico.   Where I got that tidbit was from the video, they pointed out how the SNES test demo is based off the Japanese version due to the added layers of parallax scrolling and other little notables.

 

And yes it was a lie that stood for like what 30 years about?  Even when it was busted speed wise about the same time (road runner) too.  It's probably why they decided to mock Nintendo using Mario Kart vs Sonic which don't even run the same direction, and one wasn't even with putt putt go-karts made for speed, to peddle their bs.  The added CPU is great to allow more calculations and faster, allow more to happen with a lot of sprites going on, which outside of the take a hit and rings fly Sonic never was big on anyway.  That NES game 'Somari' it has some pretty solid speed that supposedly lacking 'blast processing' should never happen either yet some HK pirates did it.

 

SMW on the Gen/MD would be easy.  While the system lacks the whole MODE7 mechanic one game I know of at retail does it using raw math with heavy optimization, their version of the Adventures of Batman and Robin.  SO all those MODE7 bits Mario does with various objects can happen, and they could dither in the places of all that transparency the SNES can do (much like how PS1 did it and Saturns version of SOTN did not.)  Yoshi's Island I just wouldn't count on, at least not unless they wanted another $100 SVP chipped game to have the capability to pull off what that one does...or at least some form of helper chip.  SNES used the FX2 for Doom, and the Genesis can do a choppier uglier somewhat similar thing without help as is with Zero Tolerance.

[turboxray]

12 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

While the system lacks the whole MODE7 mechanic one game I know of at retail does it using raw math with heavy optimization, their version of the Adventures of Batman and Robin.  SO all those MODE7 bits Mario does with various objects can happen, and they could dither in the places of all that transparency the SNES can do (much like how PS1 did it and Saturns version of SOTN did not.) 

Yeaeaahh.. doesn't quite work like that. If it was that easy, all sort of cheap companies would have been doing it back in the day. AofB&R is just doing some raster effects. Not really impressive, just nice looking.

 

Quote

....without help as is with Zero Tolerance.

SNES does Wolfenstein 3D without any mapper chip - just a stock snes (no mode 7 rotation either). Now THAT's impressive.

[No One You Know]

8 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Honestly I never cared.  Sega in the first half of the 90s on the console front with their childish lying ads infuriated me so I mostly ignored them, in time I did end up owning all their stuff outside of a Pico.   Where I got that tidbit was from the video, they pointed out how the SNES test demo is based off the Japanese version due to the added layers of parallax scrolling and other little notables.

 

And yes it was a lie that stood for like what 30 years about?  Even when it was busted speed wise about the same time (road runner) too.  It's probably why they decided to mock Nintendo using Mario Kart vs Sonic which don't even run the same direction, and one wasn't even with putt putt go-karts made for speed, to peddle their bs.  The added CPU is great to allow more calculations and faster, allow more to happen with a lot of sprites going on, which outside of the take a hit and rings fly Sonic never was big on anyway.  That NES game 'Somari' it has some pretty solid speed that supposedly lacking 'blast processing' should never happen either yet some HK pirates did it.

 

SMW on the Gen/MD would be easy.  While the system lacks the whole MODE7 mechanic one game I know of at retail does it using raw math with heavy optimization, their version of the Adventures of Batman and Robin.  SO all those MODE7 bits Mario does with various objects can happen, and they could dither in the places of all that transparency the SNES can do (much like how PS1 did it and Saturns version of SOTN did not.)  Yoshi's Island I just wouldn't count on, at least not unless they wanted another $100 SVP chipped game to have the capability to pull off what that one does...or at least some form of helper chip.  SNES used the FX2 for Doom, and the Genesis can do a choppier uglier somewhat similar thing without help as is with Zero Tolerance.

Yeah I knew you got it from the video, that's how I knew what you meant. I've always been a sega person for as long as i have been into games of this time (I wasn't around at the time). I have always been less into nintendo though I do have some modern machines (DS, Wii U, 3DS) and I have always wanted an N64 (now I have two, a PAL and an NTSC because I am stupid) and certain gamecube games. Anyway if I was around at the time I wouldn't have been exposed to the same rubbish living in the UK, only "a whole lot more for a whole lot less" or something adverts. But with annoying AVGN on the internet you get to here about the adverts a lot. Well the lie only stands in the minds of people who don't think about it very deeply, such as kids, the target audience. The advert doesn't even make it clear what exactly they mean by "blast processing", people only later deduce it is something to do with clockrate or they find out about the "blasting pixels" interview and assume it came from that. Super Mario Kart has the DSP-1 right? Isn't that just for generating another Mode 7 background layer (though I don't know how that would work without all the copying from cartridge to machine problem that Star Fox is meant to have)? Or calculating parameters for the SNES' own VDP's background generation?

 

Oh yeah Somari was the NES sonic game i was thinking of. Actually it is just a hack of that pirate game that just claims to be normal sonic, not the original? they show it and mention it in the video but there they refer to chinese pirates. Researching it now apparently Adventures of Batman and Robin is not done by Zyrinx (they, or Jesper Kyd at least, only did the music for it). I can't remember what the fancy tricks are in that game but I know Red zone by Zyrinx has some proper rotation (not line scroll or column shifting). Also the special stage in the unreleased Res-Q is pretty cool though apparently not by them, which I thought it was mixing it up with sub-terrania I think. The MD has some limited translucency effects (that is a better term than transparency in this case i think?) where transparent pixels can have "light or shadow" settings to slightly change the brightness of the pixel behind. There is a Gamehut video on YT where he shows how this was used to get over a 100 colours on screen at once on Toy story cutscenes without the pixel streaming exploit or interrupt palette editing. Of course these effects probably aren't on a level with what the snes might have.

 

Yoshi's island would be hard without cutting down the animation and colour - that's the whole reason I brought it up, because that would be a true achievement. SVP would be overkill I think. So would 32X which could do it easily. The 68K is meant to be significantly more capable than the 65c816 because of all the registers and double the bit width even if the statistical MIPS numbers are similar. This is of course the favourite thing for MD fanatic programmers to talk about (normal MD fanatics just talk clockrate) so maybe an efficiently written program can get game logic sorted out quickly and do all this rotation and scaling (or some of it, maybe just the harder rotation) in software? The F-zero demo showed mode 7 style affine transformation full screen albeit lower res and without game logic. Then light and shadow used to help colour and if the writer is really good some interrupt palette editing which would be less reliable and hard to do dynamically. Zero tolerance is more like Wolf3d which is also on the SNES though at lower resolution and using Mode 7 to scale that lower res image to full screen size. It plays reasonably well though I believe and impressive if it is done just with software with 3.5MHZ CPU with 8 bit data bus, and impressive for the SNES hardware if that did help in a significant way though I think it is all software. A raycaster and not a particularly fast one I don't think. Toy story's inside the machine level is also like this but faster and more detailed I believe. And on both SNES and mega drive versions i think. But not PC ironically. I wonder if the MD could handle Doom with the help of the Mega CD (not 32X) and its scaling and extra faster 68K?

[+Cafeman]

Doesn't look very good without the Blast Processing. 

 

I don't actually believe this

 

[Punisher5.0]

I played it on my SD2SNES and it looks and sounds great. The music sounds a little higher quality than the original. It looks like the ROM has been pulled to make some changes. Hopefully sound effects can be added.

[Tanooki]

21 hours ago, turboxray said:

Yeaeaahh.. doesn't quite work like that. If it was that easy, all sort of cheap companies would have been doing it back in the day. AofB&R is just doing some raster effects. Not really impressive, just nice looking.

 

SNES does Wolfenstein 3D without any mapper chip - just a stock snes (no mode 7 rotation either). Now THAT's impressive.

I'm very well aware I over simplified it.  I've seen some explanations of what Batman did and it does fairly nicely in a passable way pull off the look that was needed.  Is it copying mode7, definitely not, but what is there simulates in a way knocking down a barrier a bit.  You'll get no argument out of me on that Wolf on SNES despite the miserable censorship was a work of art pulling that off and with those objects, sounds, music all going and retaining the speed it pulls.  Another I found, but we're into polygons, Star Trek the bridge sim one, sure it's not full screen as the rest is the crew/bridge but you get a few ship models and also polygons for the phaser beams and torpedoes too all using no help from the FX.

 

12 hours ago, No One You Know said:

Yeah I knew you got it from the video, that's how I knew what you meant. I've always been a sega person for as long as i have been into games of this time (I wasn't around at the time). I have always been less into nintendo though I do have some modern machines (DS, Wii U, 3DS) and I have always wanted an N64 (now I have two, a PAL and an NTSC because I am stupid) and certain gamecube games. Anyway if I was around at the time I wouldn't have been exposed to the same rubbish living in the UK, only "a whole lot more for a whole lot less" or something adverts. But with annoying AVGN on the internet you get to here about the adverts a lot. Well the lie only stands in the minds of people who don't think about it very deeply, such as kids, the target audience. The advert doesn't even make it clear what exactly they mean by "blast processing", people only later deduce it is something to do with clockrate or they find out about the "blasting pixels" interview and assume it came from that. Super Mario Kart has the DSP-1 right? Isn't that just for generating another Mode 7 background layer (though I don't know how that would work without all the copying from cartridge to machine problem that Star Fox is meant to have)? Or calculating parameters for the SNES' own VDP's background generation?

 

Oh yeah Somari was the NES sonic game i was thinking of. Actually it is just a hack of that pirate game that just claims to be normal sonic, not the original? they show it and mention it in the video but there they refer to chinese pirates. Researching it now apparently Adventures of Batman and Robin is not done by Zyrinx (they, or Jesper Kyd at least, only did the music for it). I can't remember what the fancy tricks are in that game but I know Red zone by Zyrinx has some proper rotation (not line scroll or column shifting). Also the special stage in the unreleased Res-Q is pretty cool though apparently not by them, which I thought it was mixing it up with sub-terrania I think. The MD has some limited translucency effects (that is a better term than transparency in this case i think?) where transparent pixels can have "light or shadow" settings to slightly change the brightness of the pixel behind. There is a Gamehut video on YT where he shows how this was used to get over a 100 colours on screen at once on Toy story cutscenes without the pixel streaming exploit or interrupt palette editing. Of course these effects probably aren't on a level with what the snes might have.

 

Yoshi's island would be hard without cutting down the animation and colour - that's the whole reason I brought it up, because that would be a true achievement. SVP would be overkill I think. So would 32X which could do it easily. The 68K is meant to be significantly more capable than the 65c816 because of all the registers and double the bit width even if the statistical MIPS numbers are similar. This is of course the favourite thing for MD fanatic programmers to talk about (normal MD fanatics just talk clockrate) so maybe an efficiently written program can get game logic sorted out quickly and do all this rotation and scaling (or some of it, maybe just the harder rotation) in software? The F-zero demo showed mode 7 style affine transformation full screen albeit lower res and without game logic. Then light and shadow used to help colour and if the writer is really good some interrupt palette editing which would be less reliable and hard to do dynamically. Zero tolerance is more like Wolf3d which is also on the SNES though at lower resolution and using Mode 7 to scale that lower res image to full screen size. It plays reasonably well though I believe and impressive if it is done just with software with 3.5MHZ CPU with 8 bit data bus, and impressive for the SNES hardware if that did help in a significant way though I think it is all software. A raycaster and not a particularly fast one I don't think. Toy story's inside the machine level is also like this but faster and more detailed I believe. And on both SNES and mega drive versions i think. But not PC ironically. I wonder if the MD could handle Doom with the help of the Mega CD (not 32X) and its scaling and extra faster 68K?

I am old enough and also more of that rubbish I think was planted just squarely in the US/NA market because Nintendo had one hellish lead over Sega while in PAL regions Nintendo took a bit of a back seat, especially in Europe and also down in Brazil so the ads would have had no reason to outright lie and be so manipulative.  That is the trick, they never put words clearly to blast processing, but just baited the comment by referring to slowness, that's it, never even defining what slowness hence the Mario Kart vs Sonic stupidity.  The DSP-1 was a basic math calculation chip to handle the mode 7 in a more advanced way and added some new faster calculation for floating point and something else with 3D math.   And yes Somari was a hack of a hack I think as well like you said.  On Yoshi I was mostly just using the SVP as a bit of mockery as I know it would be well overkill considering what the game does.  The SVP was no joke that's for certain and neither was the price it tacked onto Virtua Racing either.  I don't know all the Sega stuff as much as Nintendo, never really dug that deep as I cared far less.  I've had all their stuff other than Pico and enjoyed many games from SMS through the DC, but I looked for the fun things there, some diamonds in the rough, not the ports outside of a couple PC gems (Star control and Dune 2.)

[Steven Pendleton]

I finally played it. If I want to be picky, I can say that the physics behave oddly at times, collision detection is not great, weird stuff happens when you try to fall to your death (especially at the beginning), speed shoes do nothing, the shield does nothing, game feels somewhat uncomfortable to play due to the lower 256 resolution, and Sonic's speed cap has been removed (although I think everyone would probably consider this an upgrade!).

 

Still, this was made as practice for a totally different project, so I must acknowledge it as such and not as an actual Sonic conversion. Good job, whoever created this!

 

If this gets expanded upon other than the planned update, I'd like to see the music get replaced with real sampled YM2612 audio since cartridge space is not a problem on ROM carts or emulators. Overall, I think I like it.

[+Black_Tiger]

On 8/18/2020 at 10:42 AM, Tanooki said:

Hah blast processing my ass.   Seriously though, and yeah it's a tech demo that still lacks a act 1 boss and sfx, but geez that moves fast, smooth, it's clean, and based off the more impressive Japanese version of Sonic that came out after the english version.  The lies in the day the game engine wouldn't work on the SNES or any game that fast (Road Runner Death Valley Rally does) and there it is.  Very cool to see.  I know it's not intended to be finished, but if it happened that would be fantastic either by Tiago or he drops the source and someone dedicated does it.

 

Sonic not running as well on SNES wasn't misleading af the time, if it was ever stated, as SNES devs struggled to get the hardware to perform.

 

Blast Processing was the marketing term for Sonic 2. This demo is only the first stage of Sonic 1.

 

The outlandish lies surrounding Sonic and the SNES were the "technical articles"/propaganda that Nintendo put out.

 

Separate from the rest of the nonsense it contained, they claimed that the SNES could do a perfect port of Sonic and scale in realtime a hi-def player sprite of such an impossible resolution that you could make out his whiskers.

[+Black_Tiger]

On 8/19/2020 at 7:22 PM, Steven Pendleton said:

I finally played it. If I want to be picky, I can say that the physics behave oddly at times, collision detection is not great, weird stuff happens when you try to fall to your death (especially at the beginning), speed shoes do nothing, the shield does nothing, game feels somewhat uncomfortable to play due to the lower 256 resolution, and Sonic's speed cap has been removed (although I think everyone would probably consider this an upgrade!).

 

Still, this was made as practice for a totally different project, so I must acknowledge it as such and not as an actual Sonic conversion. Good job, whoever created this!

 

If this gets expanded upon other than the planned update, I'd like to see the music get replaced with real sampled YM2612 audio since cartridge space is not a problem on ROM carts or emulators. Overall, I think I like it.

Cart space has never been the bottleneck for SNES sound. There is not enough memory in the soundchip to run decent quality samples for music and sound effects. That's why most bgms have low quality droning instrument mashups in the background and sound effects are sped up and chopped up.

 

Street Fighter II is a good example of a game the SNES soundchip can't handle.

 

That's why the Mega Drive port of Mega Man X included voice samples. Because the SNES couldn't do it.

[Steven Pendleton]

6 hours ago, Black_Tiger said:

Cart space has never been the bottleneck for SNES sound. There is not enough memory in the soundchip to run decent quality samples for music and sound effects. That's why most bgms have low quality droning instrument mashups in the background and sound effects are sped up and chopped up.

 

Street Fighter II is a good example of a game the SNES soundchip can't handle.

 

That's why the Mega Drive port of Mega Man X included voice samples. Because the SNES couldn't do it.

Is that how it works? Or doesn't, I suppose. I remember the first time I heard the SNES when I played Donkey Kong Country at my friend's house. I thought the system was broken or damaged because the sound was all muffled compared to my Genesis.

 

I've never played any of those games you mentioned and I'm not planning to, so I'll take your word for it.

[Punisher5.0]

36 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Is that how it works? Or doesn't, I suppose. I remember the first time I heard the SNES when I played Donkey Kong Country at my friend's house. I thought the system was broken or damaged because the sound was all muffled compared to my Genesis.

 

I've never played any of those games you mentioned and I'm not planning to, so I'll take your word for it.

He's just chugging the Sega juice

[Tanooki]

7 hours ago, Black_Tiger said:

 

Sonic not running as well on SNES wasn't misleading af the time, if it was ever stated, as SNES devs struggled to get the hardware to perform.

 

Blast Processing was the marketing term for Sonic 2. This demo is only the first stage of Sonic 1.

 

The outlandish lies surrounding Sonic and the SNES were the "technical articles"/propaganda that Nintendo put out.

 

Separate from the rest of the nonsense it contained, they claimed that the SNES could do a perfect port of Sonic and scale in realtime a hi-def player sprite of such an impossible resolution that you could make out his whiskers.

Care to quote a direct source.  In all these years that is the first time I've ever seen that written about being able to make out whiskers and scaling in real time.  I'd buy the perfect port bit, I'd call it technically more or less possible, but the rest is nonsense.

 

And Punisher... no doubt, he didn't just get a glass of kool-aid to say that dumb crap, the Kool-Aid man broke the wall, scared him, he jumped into that living pitcher and chugged it dry to come to that conclusion.  The Genesis was the epitome of having tinny, buzzing and at times muffled audio(typically on samples including voices).  Hell I'd say the PC Engine had nicer to the ears audio in more cases than not.

[No One You Know]

On 8/20/2020 at 2:51 AM, Tanooki said:

I'm very well aware I over simplified it.  I've seen some explanations of what Batman did and it does fairly nicely in a passable way pull off the look that was needed.  Is it copying mode7, definitely not, but what is there simulates in a way knocking down a barrier a bit.  You'll get no argument out of me on that Wolf on SNES despite the miserable censorship was a work of art pulling that off and with those objects, sounds, music all going and retaining the speed it pulls.  Another I found, but we're into polygons, Star Trek the bridge sim one, sure it's not full screen as the rest is the crew/bridge but you get a few ship models and also polygons for the phaser beams and torpedoes too all using no help from the FX.

 

I am old enough and also more of that rubbish I think was planted just squarely in the US/NA market because Nintendo had one hellish lead over Sega while in PAL regions Nintendo took a bit of a back seat, especially in Europe and also down in Brazil so the ads would have had no reason to outright lie and be so manipulative.  That is the trick, they never put words clearly to blast processing, but just baited the comment by referring to slowness, that's it, never even defining what slowness hence the Mario Kart vs Sonic stupidity.  The DSP-1 was a basic math calculation chip to handle the mode 7 in a more advanced way and added some new faster calculation for floating point and something else with 3D math.   And yes Somari was a hack of a hack I think as well like you said.  On Yoshi I was mostly just using the SVP as a bit of mockery as I know it would be well overkill considering what the game does.  The SVP was no joke that's for certain and neither was the price it tacked onto Virtua Racing either.  I don't know all the Sega stuff as much as Nintendo, never really dug that deep as I cared far less.  I've had all their stuff other than Pico and enjoyed many games from SMS through the DC, but I looked for the fun things there, some diamonds in the rough, not the ports outside of a couple PC gems (Star control and Dune 2.)

Right. Yeah I think your reasoning about the advertising is probably right. I think here in europe home computers were generally more popular than games consoles, sega or nintendo. I don't get the impression sega was more successful than nintendo, but rather not anywhere near as far behind. They might have been more successful than nintendo as I have seen master system stuff in shops more often than NES stuff albeit rarely and in those shops I have never seen Spectrum or Amiga stuff that should be more common so the reliability of that as a source of data might not be good. I think everyone had a C64, spectrum, amstrad CPC or one of the many more obscure machines until they might have upgraded to Atari ST or Amiga though the former machines were still supported quite late. Then about half way through the 4th generation there might have been a shift towards video games consoles as the video game market grew and more popular games cam from abroad (or people realised that developers like US gold got away with far less devious crap on consoles than they could on machines with no game licensing requirements) and the proprietary home computer formats crumbled in front of wintel. I think I have met more people that had a mega drive though than a SNES though that could be anomalous. More people my age seem to know what a SNES is than a Mega Drive though, presumably because Nintendo still exists as a conssole making brand. They also probably wouldnt know what an Amiga or spectrum was unless because of their parents and I might put that down to any knowledge coming from watching american youtubers or something like that. Brazil is a different story altogether i think. Yeah, I'm more of a sega guy than nintendo. I have MD, saturn and DC. N64 is probably my favourite nintendo but I have a Wii U, a DS and a 3DS as well. I have wanted an N64 for a few year but only just got one for fear values will go up further if I wait. I have wanted a SNES maybe once or twice but not many times. I was wondering whether I would get one when I found some controllers at a carboot sale as it might have been a good thing to keep in case I did get one but I thought of my dad complaining and decide not too. I did get a multiplat Av lead though that has come in handy with an N64 I got where the bundled lead didn't have working sound. I actually bought it to use with my friend's original xbox for which he had lost the leads.

[No One You Know]

17 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Care to quote a direct source.  In all these years that is the first time I've ever seen that written about being able to make out whiskers and scaling in real time.  I'd buy the perfect port bit, I'd call it technically more or less possible, but the rest is nonsense.

 

And Punisher... no doubt, he didn't just get a glass of kool-aid to say that dumb crap, the Kool-Aid man broke the wall, scared him, he jumped into that living pitcher and chugged it dry to come to that conclusion.  The Genesis was the epitome of having tinny, buzzing and at times muffled audio(typically on samples including voices).  Hell I'd say the PC Engine had nicer to the ears audio in more cases than not.

I think I have seen the thing about scaling before. I don't remember the comment about resolution though. It is from a magazine. Why sonic needs to be scaled I don't know, but... advertising I suppose. And of course they ignore how sonic is the only thing you could scale and you could only have 1 other background layer.

On 8/21/2020 at 8:08 PM, Black_Tiger said:

 

Sonic not running as well on SNES wasn't misleading af the time, if it was ever stated, as SNES devs struggled to get the hardware to perform.

 

Blast Processing was the marketing term for Sonic 2. This demo is only the first stage of Sonic 1.

 

The outlandish lies surrounding Sonic and the SNES were the "technical articles"/propaganda that Nintendo put out.

 

Separate from the rest of the nonsense it contained, they claimed that the SNES could do a perfect port of Sonic and scale in realtime a hi-def player sprite of such an impossible resolution that you could make out his whiskers.

I think the blast processing ads made out it wasn't possible at all, not just "as well". That's the ridiculous thing about them. I don't think the SNES CPU would really have that much trouble with sonic. There isn't that much going on and I can't see that the physics that is mainly just for sonic takes that many instructions per frame considering that both of these CPUs can do over a million per second, so about 20,000 per frame. If you were running something like little big planet you might have a problem. Some elemetns of puggsy remind me of little big planet but it doesn't have quite the same number of objects affected by physics.

Edited August 22, 2020 by No One You Know

[DragonGrafx-16]

SNES can do great music:

 

Just many devs (mostly western) had no idea what they were doing with the music and just ended up using the damn presets like that horrible guitar and slap bass lol (yes I know the bass in this is borderline slap, but I love me a good slap bass and the preset slap bass from the SNES is not good).

[Tanooki]

4 hours ago, No One You Know said:

Right. Yeah I think your reasoning about the advertising is probably right. I think here in europe home computers were generally more popular than games consoles, sega or nintendo. I don't get the impression sega was more successful than nintendo, but rather not anywhere near as far behind. They might have been more successful than nintendo as I have seen master system stuff in shops more often than NES stuff albeit rarely and in those shops I have never seen Spectrum or Amiga stuff that should be more common so the reliability of that as a source of data might not be good. I think everyone had a C64, spectrum, amstrad CPC or one of the many more obscure machines until they might have upgraded to Atari ST or Amiga though the former machines were still supported quite late. Then about half way through the 4th generation there might have been a shift towards video games consoles as the video game market grew and more popular games cam from abroad (or people realised that developers like US gold got away with far less devious crap on consoles than they could on machines with no game licensing requirements) and the proprietary home computer formats crumbled in front of wintel. I think I have met more people that had a mega drive though than a SNES though that could be anomalous. More people my age seem to know what a SNES is than a Mega Drive though, presumably because Nintendo still exists as a conssole making brand. They also probably wouldnt know what an Amiga or spectrum was unless because of their parents and I might put that down to any knowledge coming from watching american youtubers or something like that. Brazil is a different story altogether i think. Yeah, I'm more of a sega guy than nintendo. I have MD, saturn and DC. N64 is probably my favourite nintendo but I have a Wii U, a DS and a 3DS as well. I have wanted an N64 for a few year but only just got one for fear values will go up further if I wait. I have wanted a SNES maybe once or twice but not many times. I was wondering whether I would get one when I found some controllers at a carboot sale as it might have been a good thing to keep in case I did get one but I thought of my dad complaining and decide not too. I did get a multiplat Av lead though that has come in handy with an N64 I got where the bundled lead didn't have working sound. I actually bought it to use with my friend's original xbox for which he had lost the leads.

In most European countries, also including in that Australia/NZ, and then Brazil and parts of South America Nintendo was compared to Sega a fart in the wind as far as popularity goes.  They did minimal penetration and advertising, just didn't bother in most places so it was local start ups or existing places/toy vendors that would shovel the stuff and weren't very good at it coupled with eating some horrid importation taxes that would make the games be dramatically more expensive than buying from the US and mailing it down and very much so than the on the shelf Sega stuff.  In the Euro areas they had the computers, lots (speccy, amiga, etc) that was more the thing to have.  Nintendo did get a decent bite in the UK but still wasn't big, and then Bergsala with Scandanavia was very successful but that's about it.  Sega was more successful with console gaming because if anything Nintendo just didn't bother, nor at the time in the 80s had the power really to do so.  By the time of the Genesis and SNES it was already too late, they did setup shop but were the odd one out so they got less stuff and came late too.  There's good history about this you can read up or hit the gaming historian and a few select non-clickbait troll for cash types on youtube that cover it well.

[turboxray]

On 8/21/2020 at 12:14 PM, Black_Tiger said:

Cart space has never been the bottleneck for SNES sound. There is not enough memory in the soundchip to run decent quality samples for music and sound effects. That's why most bgms have low quality droning instrument mashups in the background and sound effects are sped up and chopped up.

 

Street Fighter II is a good example of a game the SNES soundchip can't handle.

 

That's why the Mega Drive port of Mega Man X included voice samples. Because the SNES couldn't do it.

Just like devs have figured out how to have non-garbly samples on the Genesis while doing other things, snes devs figured out how to stream samples to the SPC without having to store them in SPC ram.

Edited August 23, 2020 by turboxray

[Shawn]

Click bait thread & linked article title (as expected). As for the actual content, this is a decent demo. A lot of the work is already done from what I can see, will be cool to see where this goes and of the guy fleshes out the whole thing. I suggest going over to NESDEV to the SNESDEV section to get further info on this from the source as it progresses in the future.

[Punisher5.0]

2 hours ago, Shawn said:

 I suggest going over to NESDEV to the SNESDEV section to get further info on this from the source as it progresses in the future.

Agreed. There is a lot of interesting information about various projects over there that you won't find anywhere else.

[No One You Know]

22 hours ago, Tanooki said:

In most European countries, also including in that Australia/NZ, and then Brazil and parts of South America Nintendo was compared to Sega a fart in the wind as far as popularity goes.  They did minimal penetration and advertising, just didn't bother in most places so it was local start ups or existing places/toy vendors that would shovel the stuff and weren't very good at it coupled with eating some horrid importation taxes that would make the games be dramatically more expensive than buying from the US and mailing it down and very much so than the on the shelf Sega stuff.  In the Euro areas they had the computers, lots (speccy, amiga, etc) that was more the thing to have.  Nintendo did get a decent bite in the UK but still wasn't big, and then Bergsala with Scandanavia was very successful but that's about it.  Sega was more successful with console gaming because if anything Nintendo just didn't bother, nor at the time in the 80s had the power really to do so.  By the time of the Genesis and SNES it was already too late, they did setup shop but were the odd one out so they got less stuff and came late too.  There's good history about this you can read up or hit the gaming historian and a few select non-clickbait troll for cash types on youtube that cover it well.

Ah. I do see SNES stuff in CEXes (they move stuff around between their warehouses and stores across the country s you always see a good variety of stuff though at high prices). Moreso than NES stuff too though there is a bit of that. They have MD stuff but rarely master system. Some game gear stuff too. But oddly no Amiga or spectrum stuff. If you go to a dedicated retro store they have it all but those are uncommon. One I went to in newcastle (a booth in an indoor market) had a power base converter which surprised me and a sega amusements basketball which the guy running it told us all about. I think I might have seen gaming historian once or twice but not much. Larry Bundy Jr is good for comedy as well and is probably where most of my knowledge of my own local market comes from outside of my dad's stories of copying copies of spectrum games with tape decks. Sometimes you copy a tape and then the copy works where the original wouldn't which I have actually experienced myself. Really weird. I have a load of CU Amiga magazines of my mum's but I haven't read them all properly. Of course there is article jumping on wikipedia too. There is some spectrum and amiga stuff in the couple of issues of retro gamer magazine I own too. Funny you should mention bergsala and I should see your reply at this time. Just today I was looking at the manual of my copy of wave race 64 which I haven't actually played yet and i noticed it said "printed in germany, imported to scandinavia by bergsala, distributed in the UK by THE games". I was wondering why it went to sweden (it also specifies sweden) first. But I do know one person my age who reckons they have a SNES and my cousin who is in their 30s (partially responsible for getting me into older video games too) had a mega drive and an N64 in the 90s. I remember once being at one of his friends' houses when he was babysitting me years ago and him showing me some mega drive games that friend must have still had (including sonic 3 which I later found out is nowhere near as common as you would expect a sonic game to be); I also now feel guilty for deleting a new super mario bros save when using a DS that was there. A former IT teacher of mine also said they sold their N64 in the morning when asked what they had done that day funnily enough the same day in the morning I had been telling my friend I wanted one. I know someone else who also said they used to use an N64 presumably with a sibling. So at least Nintendo 64 was reasonably popular here. I have seen a NES for sale in the wild once and didn't buy it I think because it was console only and because it was in brick lane market in whitechapel in london which my dad advised me meant it was probably broken. This is also how I didn't buy a boxed N64 for £20, though TBH there always was the chance it was broken despite being boxed. I got some GBA games there (Yoshis island and mario kart super circuit) though and they worked.

[Leeroy ST]

On 8/21/2020 at 3:14 PM, Black_Tiger said:

That's why the Mega Drive port of Mega Man X included voice samples. Because the SNES couldn't do it.

Capcom never released a Megadrive port of Mega Man X lol what?