Impressive SNES Graphics

[Tanooki]

@Kirk_Johnston well you're right captain kirk there are a good many ships of the era and did you know there's a code to add more?  I don't remember how many, but the Excelsior from ST6 is in there and it's an utter powerhouse that even can manhandle the constitution class(enterprise) ship if you're not good at keeping on top of things.  There's a few enemies ships added as well that are not joke, also within the space you can do this the combat sim you can unlock the hot firefights from a couple of the old crew movies as well and even a solveable(wow) kobayashi maru too.  When you play within the standard game you can get a few ships on screen at one time and it doesn't seem to impact the frame rate either which is nice, meaning in the end, I guess the SNES can hack it or they locked a steady frame rate that won't kill it.

 

@Mittens0407 Good call with Race Drivin' that game is a pain in the ass it's so utterly too slow, in part as kirk said with the lame use of cheapass LoROM which didn't help, but it wasn't well optimized either so a one-two cock punch to anyone who paid for it in the day as they were just stuck.  It's horrid that the lowly Gameboy release which also uses polygons too amazingly actually runs at a notably faster and smoother speed as it's quite playable (I own it.)  There have been works done on the game though with SNES to speed it up to largely good effect.  NOw keep in mind this was a two pronged hit to do this, there was some pretty badly done code, but also the SA1 was tapped as well to offload the changes to maximize output as much as possible as the turd ran at 4 FPS!

 

 

I went digging on this, and basically the game was coded with some bugs and bad design choices.  There were many code bottlenecks that caused the game to chug having to wait to pull off the math needed for the 3D environment, but also an overkill level of added code to synchronize the game wasn't done well tapping NMI that also throttled the speed even worse the bottlenecks amounted also to a 5 frames delay.  It seems the game should have run as nice as any other non-chipped 3D game (perhaps star trek?) had it not been bungled repeatedly by some fool and left that way to get it out for sale.  Reading between the lines the game was 4FPS, but without the SA1 hack you could get +5 (9FPS) fixing the frame delays from the bottleneck, and even more FPS (not stated) with the NMI over-requesting issue for synchronization.  If we can generously say it gave a few more frames the game should have ran in the lower or middle teens, not great, but definitely playable.  A note about the SA1 boost (read below) I saw said at times the boost won't work when on a super stunt track in places with other 3D modeled trucks where the WRAM I guess is limited by the stock SNES and drops the game to around 12FPS, so perhaps that's where it would have run up to, a 3X speed improvement without those shitty bugs making it run 4FPS.

 

But going balls to the wall he used the SA1 chip as the games primary processor only slaving the actual SNES for calls required to still make the game work at all the SA1 lacked, and that faster SA1 got the game largely up to a fully consistent 30FPS.

Edited December 15, 2022 by Tanooki

[Kirk_Johnston]

19 hours ago, Tanooki said:

@Kirk_Johnston well you're right captain kirk there are a good many ships of the era and did you know there's a code to add more?  I don't remember how many, but the Excelsior from ST6 is in there and it's an utter powerhouse that even can manhandle the constitution class(enterprise) ship if you're not good at keeping on top of things.  There's a few enemies ships added as well that are not joke, also within the space you can do this the combat sim you can unlock the hot firefights from a couple of the old crew movies as well and even a solveable(wow) kobayashi maru too.  When you play within the standard game you can get a few ships on screen at one time and it doesn't seem to impact the frame rate either which is nice, meaning in the end, I guess the SNES can hack it or they locked a steady frame rate that won't kill it.

 

@Mittens0407 Good call with Race Drivin' that game is a pain in the ass it's so utterly too slow, in part as kirk said with the lame use of cheapass LoROM which didn't help, but it wasn't well optimized either so a one-two cock punch to anyone who paid for it in the day as they were just stuck.  It's horrid that the lowly Gameboy release which also uses polygons too amazingly actually runs at a notably faster and smoother speed as it's quite playable (I own it.)  There have been works done on the game though with SNES to speed it up to largely good effect.  NOw keep in mind this was a two pronged hit to do this, there was some pretty badly done code, but also the SA1 was tapped as well to offload the changes to maximize output as much as possible as the turd ran at 4 FPS!

 

 

I went digging on this, and basically the game was coded with some bugs and bad design choices.  There were many code bottlenecks that caused the game to chug having to wait to pull off the math needed for the 3D environment, but also an overkill level of added code to synchronize the game wasn't done well tapping NMI that also throttled the speed even worse the bottlenecks amounted also to a 5 frames delay.  It seems the game should have run as nice as any other non-chipped 3D game (perhaps star trek?) had it not been bungled repeatedly by some fool and left that way to get it out for sale.  Reading between the lines the game was 4FPS, but without the SA1 hack you could get +5 (9FPS) fixing the frame delays from the bottleneck, and even more FPS (not stated) with the NMI over-requesting issue for synchronization.  If we can generously say it gave a few more frames the game should have ran in the lower or middle teens, not great, but definitely playable.  A note about the SA1 boost (read below) I saw said at times the boost won't work when on a super stunt track in places with other 3D modeled trucks where the WRAM I guess is limited by the stock SNES and drops the game to around 12FPS, so perhaps that's where it would have run up to, a 3X speed improvement without those shitty bugs making it run 4FPS.

 

But going balls to the wall he used the SA1 chip as the games primary processor only slaving the actual SNES for calls required to still make the game work at all the SA1 lacked, and that faster SA1 got the game largely up to a fully consistent 30FPS.

Yeah, that all sounds about right to me.