We've been called out

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TOUKO
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Re: We've been called out

Post by TOUKO »

PAL machines are the best versions, NTSC is for lamers :P Just think how much better looking games we could have had if people made proper PAL versions...
i agree :mrgreen:
psycopathicteen
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Re: We've been called out

Post by psycopathicteen »

Oziphantom wrote:Well that was no ComaLand... Apart from the 3D flying I've basically seen all those type of effects on the C64.

The Mode 7 mode is easy, it repeats, so all you have to do is repeat a char square and then plot a piece of it into the chars. yes, lots of look up tables, pile of speed code but nothing that is too crazy. To do the rotate about the X you basically line crunch/line double your way down to get the compressed/expanded effect, which we could do in HDMA ;)
Do you mean, scaling/rotating a smaller bitmap, then "stamping" it multiple times around the screen? How does it zoom into the pixels?
Oziphantom
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Re: We've been called out

Post by Oziphantom »

Ah the 2nd roto-zoomer, I was thinking the "tartan" one.
Yeah so you have the one bitmap that you rotate/have tables of it rotated. Then you make speed code to render it in the zoom level you want.
So you things like

Code: Select all

LDA #value
STA DEST
STA DEST + 1
STA DEST + 8
STA DEST + 9
lda #nextValue
STA DEST + 2
STA DEST + 3
STA DEST + 10
STA DEST + 11
....
which gives you 2x2 mode Then the smaller code you have some code that does

Code: Select all

LDA #value
STA DEST
LDA #value
STA DEST +1
Then for smaller you make tables that hold the colours pre packed into a byte so you can just use a lookup table to load the value and store 2,3,4 "pixels" in one write.
Basically the effect is very carefully chosen patterns, with nice look-up tables and then a pile of speed code generators to do the plotting. It might do pallet changes down the screen to also make the pattern look like it is changing when it is the same "bits", also you might be able to use X and Y scroll registers to dupe a line or slide a line around to give it a new look and mask the sides of the shape with some sprites so you don't see the wavy edge.
Again this is just speculation, I don't really know the MD hardware but this is the kind of crap we pull on the C64. Zomming chessboard, NAH, 8 char-sets pre-set with data and we change the charset each line to be the one we want with the right edges stored in it ;) The you shift the Y Scroll to choose the right "row" in the char-set you have chosen.
psycopathicteen
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Re: We've been called out

Post by psycopathicteen »

There was talk about using 2 layers as frame buffers for even an odd pixels, and dma-ing pixels vertically. I think it blits stripes of pixels using dma, to perform horizontal scaling and vertical shearing, and uses raster tricks to do vertical scaling and horizontal shearing.
creaothceann
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Re: We've been called out

Post by creaothceann »

Espozo wrote:I'll be more impressed when I finally see a beat em up game on either the SNES or the Genesis with 8 good sized and well animated characters onscreen.
Like this?
My current setup:
Super Famicom ("2/1/3" SNS-CPU-GPM-02) → SCART → OSSC → StarTech USB3HDCAP → AmaRecTV 3.10
psycopathicteen
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Re: We've been called out

Post by psycopathicteen »

My idea wouldn't work because there wouldn't be enough dma for 2 layers, even in PAL.

@Oziphantom, I'm still confused. Wouldn't there need to be so many prerendered tiles of different scroll values, and scaling rotation amounts that you might as well just prerender the whole thing?
Oerg866
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Re: We've been called out

Post by Oerg866 »

Guys, you're freaking hilarious and just absolutely full of it. The salt level in this thread is insane. :)

The allegations are hilarious. Custom chip? Prerendering? Playing an animation? This is not the SNES and we most definitely don't need half a dozen Super FX, DSP or other helper chips to do something useful. Just grab a calculator and you'll end up with ~350 bytes per frame. Sorry, not even the best engineers on this planet would compress an 8 minute 320x224 (in one scene even more than that) 50fps video down to that. If you do not believe us and if you are actually as technically well versed as you guys claim - Disassemble our ROM, top our 3.5 years of research, reverse engineering and development. Actually do something impressive instead of making empty claims and trying to downplay our efforts with baseless accusations. The pouet thread has a GIF file showing step by step how our vector renderer works, for example.

This thread is full of people saying "The SNES could do this and that with ease." - Back up your shit, please :) And let's also not forget that between our platforms the one that dared to have a "demo" released that was actually pure FMV was the SNES. (Don't get me wrong Ferris, I loved your work ;))

I think there's a very good reason why absolutely nothing technically impressive has come out of the SNES homebrew / demo scene in 27 years, sans the recent efforts by elix. ;)
If the latter, bring it on ;)
I won't be as much of a pushover as the Genesis emulation scene has been.
(Still hoping that one of these years someone as talented as blargg will come along and get the YM2612 cycle-accurate too. But we still don't even have a perfect understanding of the SN76489, so good luck with that.)
Yeah this is one thing I wish the MD scene had. One of the main purposes of ODII was to finally push emulator developers to try and catch up with your work (could we bribe you to come to our side some day? ;))

Also yeah this was meant as a callout to the SNES homebrew/demo community. Been a while since we've heard from you. (We do have a few SNES nuts in our group but we're not planning on doing anything with the system.)

@Oziphantom: There are many reasons why MD demos or console demos in general will never reach the quality of effects you get on C64 and Amiga. (Tiles vs. Linear bitmap / bitplanes /etc., video memory not being mapped to the CPU address bus, closedness and unknownness of many parts of the systems, memory size, lack of good dev environments and/or emulators (ok a non issue for snes i guess) and most importantly those platforms having a 30+ year head start.) - but again let me just ask you to attempt something like this before calling our efforts trivial.
Honestly, if a demo for the Megadrive wasn't comparable to an Amiga 500 (OCS) demo, I wouldn't think it was noteworthy.
Are you literally trolling? The Amiga is a computer designed for things like this. It has a ton of custom chips devoted to fast graphics, overhead-less digital sound and 512KB+ of memory - oh, and it isn't tilebased.
Last edited by Oerg866 on Mon Apr 17, 2017 3:55 pm, edited 3 times in total.
psycopathicteen
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Re: We've been called out

Post by psycopathicteen »

Sorry, not even the best engineers on this planet would compress an 8 minute 320x224 (in one scene even more than that) 50fps video down to that
Just the one part where it keeps zooming and rotating into that Mandelbrot pattern. That's the one part I can't figure out.

Oerg866 wrote: I think there's a very good reason why absolutely nothing technically impressive has come out of the SNES homebrew / demo scene in 27 years, sans the recent efforts by elix. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6niMlZzoUY
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mikejmoffitt
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Re: We've been called out

Post by mikejmoffitt »

creaothceann wrote:
Espozo wrote:I'll be more impressed when I finally see a beat em up game on either the SNES or the Genesis with 8 good sized and well animated characters onscreen.
Like this?
That features 8 tiny characters, and the potato-video makes it difficult to tell how well animated they are.
psycopathicteen
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Re: We've been called out

Post by psycopathicteen »

I might as well get started on a multiple zooming checkerboards demo as fast as possible.
Oerg866
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Re: We've been called out

Post by Oerg866 »

At which point I shall congratulate you that you have replicated one effect in isolation. :P
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Khaz
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Re: We've been called out

Post by Khaz »

I would love to make a demo showing off what the SNES could do, but I'm more than busy enough already making my own game for it.

If someone else wants to spearhead one though I'll make time to contribute in some way.
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Drew Sebastino
Formerly Espozo
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Re: We've been called out

Post by Drew Sebastino »

@Oerg886: Regardless of hardware, the lack of anything very noteworthy on the SNES (psychopathicteen is getting there though) is in part due to the state of disarray the SNES development community is in. You could argue this is in part due to hardware (at least because of how difficult it is to deal with; I'll tell you any day of the week that the Genesis is better designed, except for only having 64 color entries), but I could also tell you that the demo scene is far more popular in Europe (hell, this demo in particular is for PAL systems, although that may only be due to increased time for updating vram), where the Genesis/MD is more popular too.

I don't think anyone was arguing about full FMV, but it is true that in a demo like this, things can be much more hardcoded than they can be in a game, (as a lame example, I could create a raycaster with walls with that have 1 pixel columns prerendered at different heights. You could get away with this in 10 second raycasing demo that only shows 4 wall textures, but you're not going to see that in a full fledged game) which is why I'd rather the work put into these demos be showcased in a homebrew instead. New assets don't even need to be made if it's a port. SNES and Genesis both can look much better with better vram management for large, well animated sprites and other unconventional things (like the system of dynamically changing sprite colors I'm trying to come up with, or doing the near impossible task of occluding sprites like psychopathicteen briefly suggested.)

This is not an only anti Genesis/MD demo thing. (Certainly no one said the SNES could do better; I'm not trying to discredit you.) I openly stated I wasn't impressed by elix's demos (I don't have anything personal against him) in an older thread, which aren't even in the same dimension as this one. Smash It in particular doesn't look any better than a regular SNES game; it's just a bunch of Mode 7 with HDMA.
creaothceann
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Re: We've been called out

Post by creaothceann »

mikejmoffitt wrote:video makes it difficult to tell how well animated they are
You can download it here: http://gra.dforce3000.de

(another video)
My current setup:
Super Famicom ("2/1/3" SNS-CPU-GPM-02) → SCART → OSSC → StarTech USB3HDCAP → AmaRecTV 3.10
lidnariq
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Re: We've been called out

Post by lidnariq »

Oerg866 wrote:Are you literally trolling? The Amiga is a computer designed for things like this. It has a ton of custom chips devoted to fast graphics, overhead-less digital sound and 512KB+ of memory - oh, and it isn't tilebased.
Specifically talking about the launch Amiga, not the later ones.

It's a 68k at the same speed, with (because of your choice of large cart) usually less memory available (albeit, per your complaint, more memory dedicatable to the graphics processor). Any reliance on computrons should be comparable between the two, and any substantial differences will be due to the hardware support.

Sure, the OCS has the copper function (but OD2 tentatively seems to not rely on many raster effects) and seventy-gazillion DMA channels (but OD2 streams most of the soundtrack from ROM). And despite the A500's support from its coprocessors, OD2 looks as good as a top-tier A500 demo. With better pacing ... much better.

Regardless, I will definitely enjoy reading whatever technical writeups show up as they come out.
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