Something's wrong when the SNES thread is the second least popular one in here

[Kirk_Johnston]

29 minutes ago, Wayler said:

I'm a bit confused though. Where is this thrashtalking about the SNES happening in this SNES forum? It's not in this thread and the linked thread was from somewhere else. 

 

Just trying to distribute my pent up rahrah-energy correctly to dismember the all the infidels. 

It was in the original thread that made me join here to comment in the first place, which someone brought up again recently, hence all the talk around that stuff now. And there's been a few other instances in here from time to time. Also, not related to this particular forum, it's pretty terrible around the Internet in general, particularly on YouTube, which just adds to my resolve to address some of that stuff.

 

This thread was mostly supposed to be about the level of SNES discussion overall in this forum, which is lacking behind almost every other console in here, and just having a talk about that and seeing if there's some way to kick some life into the SNES here.

 

But, as happens, things often go off on tangents.

[Keatah]

On the speed of the SNES. It's all relative. And it's generally unimportant in consoles unlike a computer.

 

FWIW: I've got an i9 that's clocked slower than an immediate post-dotcom era Pentium 4! Features a speed difference of -1.1GHz. But of course the i9 runs circles around it when even when idling. So clock speed isn't straightforward comparison. Never has been. Except when you're comparing parts of the same family/architecture.

 

1 hour ago, Kirk_Johnston said:

But, as happens, things often go off on tangents.

Usually happens when there isn't much to say about the original topic.

[Keatah]

On 8/16/2022 at 11:36 AM, Kirk_Johnston said:

That suggests to me that something is quite dormant/dead within the SNES indie/dev community, and I think it could and should be thriving much better than it is, all things being equal and relative. Maybe it would take a proper SDK to finally give the SNES the boost in modern indie/dev popularity it deserves, and I really wish that would just happen already. I honestly hope to God someone is seriously working on this, because I'd really love to see a bunch of brand new SNES games made for the console in modern times in the same way the Genesis is seeing a whole lot of indie/dev scene love right now. SNES deserves the same amount of love too.

It may need a proper SDK like you say. It may also be that the library covers a lot of stuff already. It may be that its demographics/audience simply aren't into technical things or don't want to take the time to learn. And it could be that games are approaching a level of complexity that goes beyond a 1 or 2 man team. Didn't SNES have co-processors in the cartridge? That's only going to be another hurdle to cross..

 

Maybe the SNES homebrew revolution hasn't even begun yet? Maybe it will start when that AI stuff evolves a little more, and we can have a 25 man team with 24 of them being virtual.

[Kirk_Johnston]

7 minutes ago, Keatah said:

It may need a proper SDK like you say. It may also be that the library covers a lot of stuff already. It may be that its demographics/audience simply aren't into technical things or don't want to take the time to learn. And it could be that games are approaching a level of complexity that goes beyond a 1 or 2 man team. Didn't SNES have co-processors in the cartridge? That's only going to be another hurdle to cross..

 

Maybe the SNES homebrew revolution hasn't even begun yet? Maybe it will start when that AI stuff evolves a little more, and we can have a 25 man team with 24 of them being virtual.

Yeah, there are a lot of variables. My gut says it's mostly the lack of an "easy" way to develop new games for it and just how convoluted and complex it all is right now. I expect if something like SNESmaker existed, as NESmaker does for NES, we'd be seeing new SNES games every other month. But only time will tell, be it regarding better development tools coming out, or if we do indeed see the amount of new games for the system increase at some point. I just know it has a lot more left to give.

Edited January 12 by Kirk_Johnston

[Tanooki]

The SNES is harder to develop for compared to say Genesis.  Genesis was a gimped Sega arcade setup basically to fall into a cheap home use budget, stuff all those developers were super cozy with, so it was an easy transition.  Nintendo went with a custom chip a custom of a custom no less being a 16bit variant of the 6502 of the NES.  The system was harder basically to develop for and get the same level at least of speed performance by what the eye sees in a game than a Genesis that was clocked faster and left more room in ways to brute force stuff.

 

Nintendo being slower needed a bit more finesse, and obviously out of the gate you had added layers of developer vs bean counting wanker(accounting team) pain to deal with.  There was the cheaper LoROM setup that was 1/3 slower than HiROM for games.  And beyond that, you also immediately had access to the DSP setup which was there day one with Pilotwings, a math co-processor to handle more calculations.  That alone added a branching family tree of stumbling blocks out of the gate in 1991 into 1992.  LoROM, HiROM, LoROM +DSP, HiROM +DSP with four choices.  DSP ulimately had 4 variants too though 1 was used I think near 90% of the cases.  Within a year of that though came the Mario Chip which became by branding the FX Chip.  That was more than a co-processor and a cheap chunky one at that being a RISC based chip, and one with added memory and other capabilities too for the hardware -- PLUS that came in 2 variants at 10 and 21mhz too.  So you had within 2 years variant after variant and you could mix and match for cheap/not cheap with boards, chip types, etc.  Later would come the SA1 from Nintendo basically more memory, a bit of storage, and it was like a 3x clocked higher main SNES CPU to run in tandem.  After that yet there were various minimally used few off to one off type chips too that could get pretty heinous (like the ST chips in Japan largely for Shougi AI routines.)

 

If you figure the chip gauntlet, harder to squeeze performance out of and code for not being old hat, factor in todays world of me me me and instant gratification wanting it easy and done for you -- it's a mix of a lot of stupid problems old and new that probably hobble having a big SNES community like the Genesis sees as it's easier and more straight forward.  SVP in one game aside, Genesis was basically stock, it was it, that was it, your console was it and the games just ran at what hardware resources allowed.  I wish there was a larger community, the few that try have done some insane shit like HIND STRIKE which is like a full fledged sequel to the chopper attack bonus end stages of Pilotwings mixed with the EA Strike series, and then PIKO with their unfinished SNES games to those they code from the ground up that truly are retail (of the era) level quality which is great.  You just don't get all the little developer stuff much which sucks...they go to Genesis and NES, even Gameboy too.

[Kirk_Johnston]

Yeah, basically, the SNES seems like it's just more of a pain in the ass to develop for pretty much across the board. And I think the only way the community is going to move past that and start putting out some more great original games is with a much better put-together SDK and/or something as complete and well-formed as a SNESmaker-like program. Because I still find any of the more hardcore programmer-centric stuff far too confusing and convoluted, and, honestly, just badly designed for anyone who isn't that like-minded, I'm rooting for the SNESmaker solution first and foremost so I can actually start making something myself. I have some cool game ides, imo, I have a bunch of [mostly SNES-ready, or at least to SNES-spec] art for a couple of them already, I have plenty of experiencing working in the games industry and making a bunch of games/apps myself, and, because I'm not some hardcore Assembly programmer and the like, I'm just waiting for the kind of SNES development tool I can use to take the next step there too. My fingers are still crossed that it's not that far off, because, as I've said before and hopefully somewhat demonstrated with a handful of examples, I think the SNES still has a lot more left to give. . . .

Edited January 13 by Kirk_Johnston

[jeffythedragonslayer]

The hardest part about programming the SNES I think is that you can accidentally derail the CPU from the code.  Your code doesn't just quickly crash and core dump showing you exactly what went wrong - it goes absolutely haywire.

[Tanooki]

It is a pain and as the post above said, custom chip, custom shit storm when it fails.   SNES is that double edged sword.  Extremely great beyond expectation performance, or epic implosion if you don't stay in your lane/lanes on what you're doing as it'll go bad a bit or totally south depending on the circumstances.  Yet if you win, you can do a game people would figure should have been the 2D output of 32bit devices it was that ahead of the game in various respects.

 

If someone made a kit so easy could could create audio and visual assets, start to click, drag, tile, tell it to do this and that by selecting things I'd even make the jump to revive some old dreams I had in the 90s when I thought I could learn to code. 😕  Clearly Enix can't get the shit right, the monster lair disasters and a few other oddities in that rebirth of Actraiser made it clear to me *I* still need to have my idea of a true sequel come out that's done right since they screwed up, and that homage Sol Seraph was so bad it just crapped the bed entirely.

[jeffythedragonslayer]

I never wanted to be a "click together" developer... part of what I find fun is being able to eek out every last bit of performance out of these systems and having tight control.  That being said, developing on the SNES has proved to be so much harder than I ever thought it would be when I began this journey.

 

When I want easy I'll just play D&D because I can make up a game as quickly as I can imagine it. 

[Kirk_Johnston]

4 hours ago, jeffythedragonslayer said:

I never wanted to be a "click together" developer... part of what I find fun is being able to eek out every last bit of performance out of these systems and having tight control.  That being said, developing on the SNES has proved to be so much harder than I ever thought it would be when I began this journey.

 

When I want easy I'll just play D&D because I can make up a game as quickly as I can imagine it. 

Well, I'm not sure about NESmaker but I know GameMaker 8.1 allows you to do both drop & drag as well as hardcore programming of every element too, to the point that people managed to make GTA III clones and simple Wolfenstein 3D fps games on it and the like, even though it was really a purely 2D tool back then, so it's really the best of both worlds imo. That's what I think any genuinely good SNES development tool needs to really hit home in modern times. And, as great as those games are that push the SNES to the limits, they are so few and far between and not always actually that great to just play, although impressive technical feats, that I'd take just a much bigger release stream of new titles that are good quality and genuinely fun to play but not necessarily pushing the boat out in terms of eeking every last bit out of the console. Interestingly, making simple SNES games that are more akin to the Genesis in typical features would be a walk in the park for a simple drop & drag SNES development tool (two background layers, no transparency, no background mode switching mid-screen, simple priority shifting and row/line scrolling, etc). So, if it's good enough for a bunch of Genesis homebrew/indie games (or indeed PC Engine titles too), it would be totally good enough for SNES for the most part. And those really hardcore developers can still make their technically mind/blowing games via pure Assembly or whatever anyway, so it's not going to be stepping on their toes in that regard. This more front-end user-friendly tool should be as well as that other more complex low-level dev stuff as I see it, just like NESmaker exists but many people are still low-level hacking away and brute-forcing NES to do some amazing things regardless. It's a win win.

Edited January 14 by Kirk_Johnston

[Austin]

On 1/12/2023 at 9:37 AM, Cobra Kai said:

If there weren't any fanboys, every topic for every system would be negative and nitpicky. Fanboys usually start upbeat threads, excited for one reason or another about a game or system advantage. Then the negative nellies come in to PROVE YOU WRONG.

 

The Jaguar is my favorite system, I'm a fanboy, I don't need proven wrong.

Are you really a Jaguar fanboy though?

 

Do you place Checkered Flag and Trevor McFur on a pedestal? Does your butt clench when it's discussed that the Jaguar was complicated to develop for, Atari dug their own grave with an inconsistent release schedule and poor marketing/PR? Did you support Jag Zombies with your wallet just because the cart looked pretty on the shelf and has a box, despite the game's actual quality?

 

If you answered "No" to any of the above, then you are likely not a Jaguar fanboy. To me, there are major differences between being a fanboy, and just being a fan of, any given platform. Fans are pretty innocuous, but fanboys tend to be anything but, as has already been demonstrated ten-fold in this thread, heh.

[Cobra Kai]

1 hour ago, Austin said:

Are you really a Jaguar fanboy though?

 

Do you place Checkered Flag and Trevor McFur on a pedestal? Does your butt clench when it's discussed that the Jaguar was complicated to develop for, Atari dug their own grave with an inconsistent release schedule and poor marketing/PR? Did you support Jag Zombies with your wallet just because the cart looked pretty on the shelf and has a box, despite the game's actual quality?

 

If you answered "No" to any of the above, then you are likely not a Jaguar fanboy. To me, there are major differences between being a fanboy, and just being a fan of, any given platform. Fans are pretty innocuous, but fanboys tend to be anything but, as has already been demonstrated ten-fold in this thread, heh.

Haha, well said. I've had my moments in the past where I felt like this fervor for the Jaguar, but I've calmed down a lot.

[Austin]

4 hours ago, Cobra Kai said:

Haha, well said. I've had my moments in the past where I felt like this fervor for the Jaguar, but I've calmed down a lot.

Oh trust me, me too. It’s been a long, winding ride, especially when it comes to things like the Jaguar.

[Mittens0407]

On 1/10/2023 at 6:46 PM, Tanooki said:

Quite a bit, it was discovered quite a few games that have frame rate issues would have had no slow down problems or utterly minimized it to a you got to look for it to complain level of it at that rate.  Doom on SNES would have nearly doubled its speed had it had it coded one way vs another, a simple line of text from an interview Randy did which would for the PAL release had it often running at full frame for them (50fps) which is nuts.

Link for the interview?

[Kirk_Johnston]

Well, patience is going to come in real handy here then, in every regard.

 

Because the only problem that this fanboy sees with being a fanboy is other people saying there's a problem with being a fanboy.

 

But, stick around, share some more of your thoughts, and who knows what the future might bring.

Edited January 14 by Kirk_Johnston

[Tanooki]

36 minutes ago, Mittens0407 said:

Link for the interview?

I believe this bit of info was IN this, either way it's a must check for SNES deep coding stories and vast efforts, Doom on SNES is no joke.  I think he brings up where someone did some work on his released source and found the change did it, if not, perhaps in the comments, but it was this.  Set the time aside it's a gem to listen to and see.  This guy is insane, he go tother crazy stuff working like he ported Quake to Nintendo DS for instance.

 

 

[Mittens0407]

12 minutes ago, Kirk_Johnston said:

Because the only problem that this fanboy sees with being a fanboy is other people saying there's a problem with being a fanboy.

My suggestion is to not call yourself a fanboy when everyone is telling you there's a problem with being a fanboy. Being a fan is good enough.

[Kirk_Johnston]

46 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

I believe this bit of info was IN this, either way it's a must check for SNES deep coding stories and vast efforts, Doom on SNES is no joke.  I think he brings up where someone did some work on his released source and found the change did it, if not, perhaps in the comments, but it was this.  Set the time aside it's a gem to listen to and see.  This guy is insane, he go tother crazy stuff working like he ported Quake to Nintendo DS for instance.

 

 

If it's the bit about increasing the speed of the SNES version of Doom basically two-fold using little more than some HDMA code, it's around here:

Personally, I think HDMA is another one of those features of SNES that has some pretty significant untapped potential just waiting to be fully exploited in general. I mean, from what I can gather, you can do eight HDMA transfers during every HBlank period, that's 224x8 times every frame, and that's without stalling the CPU and before you even get to the regular DMA that you can mostly stick to running during VBlank, if I understand this stuff correctly. I don't know exactly what that means yet, but I think there's some creative ways that it could be used to aid that so-called "slow" SNES CPU. But that's me just speculating, as I'm not a hardcore SNES Assembly programmer, so I'm just going on my gut here, which at least has been pretty decent/accurate regarding a few other thoughts and ideas I've had thus far around Mode 0, Mode 3, and Mode 5. Like so much other stuff to do with SNES, I guess/hope time will tell what's really possible there.

Edited January 15 by Kirk_Johnston

[Tanooki]

Yes that's it, flipping the bit for HDMA to handle the process as it basically doubled the FPS of the game, and kind of a funny thing, the way it all works that it inches the frame rate most the time up to 50 or very close to it, which gave it full speed against the PAL systems output of the time.  But even at 50 that would have been very slick on a US or Japanese copy.

 

I get the game has almost no room left to spare, really down to just a few bytes left it's so tight, but it would be great if someone would patch the the change and release it.  I'd love to compare it against my actual Doom cart.  WOuld be great if they could enable the episode choice at start too, it's in there, blocked, behind x-band code.  If you fire up Doom with the x-band online or off, it allows picking any episode immediately and difficulty basically like the Japanese copy does.  I wish it could be done but saving would be fantastic or some very basic password system but it just won't fit supposedly.

[Mittens0407]

16 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

Yes that's it, flipping the bit for HDMA to handle the process as it basically doubled the FPS of the game, and kind of a funny thing, the way it all works that it inches the frame rate most the time up to 50 or very close to it, which gave it full speed against the PAL systems output of the time.  But even at 50 that would have been very slick on a US or Japanese copy.

 

I get the game has almost no room left to spare, really down to just a few bytes left it's so tight, but it would be great if someone would patch the the change and release it.  I'd love to compare it against my actual Doom cart.  WOuld be great if they could enable the episode choice at start too, it's in there, blocked, behind x-band code.  If you fire up Doom with the x-band online or off, it allows picking any episode immediately and difficulty basically like the Japanese copy does.  I wish it could be done but saving would be fantastic or some very basic password system but it just won't fit supposedly.

I think he means that 25 frames per second would draw 1 frame for every two screen refreshes, not that you could get 50 frames per second. Sort of like how Doom on DOS ran at 35 frames per second for 70hz monitors. But even still, 25 fps would still be a huge improvement.

[Kirk_Johnston]

7 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Yes that's it, flipping the bit for HDMA to handle the process as it basically doubled the FPS of the game, and kind of a funny thing, the way it all works that it inches the frame rate most the time up to 50 or very close to it, which gave it full speed against the PAL systems output of the time.  But even at 50 that would have been very slick on a US or Japanese copy.

 

I get the game has almost no room left to spare, really down to just a few bytes left it's so tight, but it would be great if someone would patch the the change and release it.  I'd love to compare it against my actual Doom cart.  WOuld be great if they could enable the episode choice at start too, it's in there, blocked, behind x-band code.  If you fire up Doom with the x-band online or off, it allows picking any episode immediately and difficulty basically like the Japanese copy does.  I wish it could be done but saving would be fantastic or some very basic password system but it just won't fit supposedly.

Yeah, with double the frame rate, the strafing patch, and a few other tweaks here and there, I think it would be pretty great all round on SNES.

[Tanooki]

I guess that was it, something about how it draws to the system it would give the appearance of that, even if not, and as PAL is 50 it would appear as relatively smooth.