Soul Star, Galaxy Force, Scaling & Rotation, PCE,SNES &a

[it290]

In 1991 & 1992, Sega was the mainstream front-runner too. Example: EGM 1991 console ratings and EGM 1992 console ratings. Notice any hype in those Sega Genesis reviews?

I remember reading those ratings when they first came out. I believe by 1993, the SNES was rated higher than the Genesis. The 1992 rating makes sense, as at that time the Genesis did have more quality games than the SNES, and many SNES games had major slowdown problems. Plus Sonic was huge at that point, more popular than SMW for sure.

[AirRaidX]

I don't understand - that's a little bit above my head. can someone explain how Neo-Geo MVS and Home console AES does scaling, if it's software or in hardware as it is in SNES and SegaCD.

Yes, that's a function of the sprite drawing hardware. It works differently than on the SNES and Sega CD, though. It's based on a set of lookup tables that say which pixels NOT to sample when drawing the sprite. So, only scaling from the full size of the sprite down is handled by the video hardware. AES and MVS are identical, the later standalone PCB Neo*Geo games like KoF2003 and SvC Chaos are slightly different.

btw, Sega's 'X Board Hardware', sometimes known as the
'AfterBurner Hardware' that powers After Burner II, Thunder Blade, Super Monaco GP and others, it pushes 256 sprites
(less than Neo-Geo's 380 sprites) and has a color pallete of 32,768 (half of Neo-Geo's) but seems to have full hardware scaling & rotation and can do this at the same time as seen in ABII. I don't know if there is a specific chip in the X Board Hardware for the scaling & rotation or if the 2nd 68000 CPU handles it.

The Neo*Geo needed more sprites because it has only the front text layer and sprites, no tilemapped backgrounds.

X-Board's sprite generator can arbitrarily scale sprites independently in X and Y directions, and can use shadow/highlight capability to broaden the sprite color palette. There is no built in sprite rotation, as far as I know. One of the tilemap generators (backgrounds, usually) is ridiculously flexible in terms of scaling and rotation, being an evolution of what was originally designed to power the road drawing in Outrun.

nZero, thank you for those pretty in-depth answers on the question of hardware S&R.

The scaling that I've seen on Neo-Geo games like The Super Spy, was pretty decent. not as good as Sega's arcade scaling, but enough to convince me Neo could scale pretty well.

the SNES was going to have more extensive scaling & rotation and other built-in functions (and maybe a 68000 CPU as well) but at the very least, the scaling/zooming & rotation and effects hardware was cut back. they had to put it back in only in specific games. I would've liked to have seen the original intended Super Famicom....

[nZero]

the SNES was going to have more extensive scaling & rotation and other built-in functions (and maybe a 68000 CPU as well) but at the very least, the scaling/zooming & rotation and effects hardware was cut back. they had to put it back in only in specific games. I would've liked to have seen the original intended Super Famicom....

Yes, the DSP-1 chip for fast vector math operations was originally intended to be a part of the Super Famicom. Look no further than Pilotwings or Super Mario Kart to see what was missing.

I'd have liked to have seen the original vision, too, but not at the price it would have commanded at the time. Maybe we can consider ourselves fortunate that leaving out the DSP-1 left the SNES cartridge port open for expansion, leaving the architecture open for such amazing wankery as the SuperFX chip later provided:

[Alpolio]

Oh. And we shouldn't forget that the SNES used several different DSP chips that would enhance the graphics in quite a few games. Both Pilot Wings & Super Mario Kart used the DSP-1 to speed up the mode 7 calculations but there were several others too. Wikipedia has a good write up on each DSP chip. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNES

[ccovell]

...such amazing wankery as the SuperFX chip later provided:

This effect doesn't rely on the SuperFX. (Or, doesn't need the SuperFX, at least.) It is merely line-and-column-scrolling used together, with a sine wave effect on the backgrounds. The SNES and Genesis both could do column scrolling; the one for the Genny that I can think of off the top of my head being the shaky underground cave in Wings of Wor.

[Specineff]

Thunder Force 3. Gorgon.

[AirRaidX]

Thunder Force 3. Gorgon.

that was an AWESOME, AWE-INSPIRING effect.

[Alpolio]

Did R-Type III use any special DSP chip? I never noticed any slowdown and it was doing quite a bit on screen.

[Marc]

...such amazing wankery as the SuperFX chip later provided:

This effect doesn't rely on the SuperFX. (Or, doesn't need the SuperFX, at least.) It is merely line-and-column-scrolling used together, with a sine wave effect on the backgrounds. The SNES and Genesis both could do column scrolling; the one for the Genny that I can think of off the top of my head being the shaky underground cave in Wings of Wor.

Or, indeedm the fifth round on Gynoug. Set inside a body of sorts with the exact same effect as Yoshi, although a tad more scruffy looking.

[BrianC]

Did R-Type III use any special DSP chip? I never noticed any slowdown and it was doing quite a bit on screen.

I'm not sure, but Jikkyou Obshaberi Parodius apparantly has a special chip in it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA-1_chip Apparantly, the chips have CIC lockout in them. Does this mean they won't play on US systems, even with the tabs removed and no adapters? I hope this is not the case. I plan to import Jikkyou Obshaberi Parodius, though I plan to get the Saturn one too.

[The Coop]

Did R-Type III use any special DSP chip? I never noticed any slowdown and it was doing quite a bit on screen.

Apparantly not, but Jikkyou Obshaberi Parodius apparantly has a special chip in it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA-1_chip Apparantly, the chips have CIC lockout in them. Does this mean they won't play on US systems, even with the tabs removed and no adapters? I hope this is not the case. I plan to import Jikkyou Obshaberi Parodius.

That's apparent apparently

[elvis]

Did R-Type III use any special DSP chip? I never noticed any slowdown and it was doing quite a bit on screen.

No. R-Type III was vanilla SNES hardware.

Don't make the mistake of comparing R-Type III to the original SNES Super R-Type. Super R-Type was a release-day title, and as such showed the results of what happens when you bring out a new "multi-CPU" (I don't really count the Mode-7 as a whole CPU, but you catch my drift) platform and don't give developers enough time to experiement and figure out how to use it all to their advantage.

Ditto for the Sega Saturn, with it's shocking release titles that suffered from poor slowdown.

The XBox 360 is going through the same drama. Currently the release titles are all only using 1 of the 3 CPUs simply because game developers can't figure out a sensible way to use all 3. Give it 12-24 months, and you'll see an exponential jump in visual quality once they get the hang of it. (Note that I'm not saying the games will necessarily be more fun, just that they'll look prettier).

[The Coop]

Regarding your question BrianC, I found this here....

SA-1 - 65c816 8/16-bit processor, clocked at 10Mhz. It also contains some extra circuits developed by Nintendo which includes some very fast RAM, a memory mapper, DMA, several real-time timers, and the region lock-out chip. A multipurpose chip that could be found in games such as Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever With Me, from Konami (Japan only), Kirby Superstars, DragonballZ Hyper Dimension, Kirby Dreamland 3, and of course the popular Super Mario RPG.

It doesn't look too promising for importing the game if that special chip also acts as a lock out.

[AWJ]

btw, Sega's 'X Board Hardware', sometimes known as the
'AfterBurner Hardware' that powers After Burner II, Thunder Blade, Super Monaco GP and others, it pushes 256 sprites
(less than Neo-Geo's 380 sprites) and has a color pallete of 32,768 (half of Neo-Geo's) but seems to have full hardware scaling & rotation and can do this at the same time as seen in ABII.

The X-Board can scale sprites both up and down (unlike earlier Sega sprite-scaling hardware), but doesn't have any rotation capability. All rotation in After Burner is done the dumb way--the graphics ROMs just contain several orientations of every sprite. The high speed of the game helps to disguise the unsmoothness of the rotation.

The Y-Board (the successor to the X-Board that powered Galaxy Force, G-LOC and Power Drift) can rotate its entire framebuffer as a unit, but not individual sprites. The capability to rotate and skew sprites is significantly more advanced than simple scaling and really falls into the "3D" category--when you think about it, a texture mapped polygon and an arbitrarily deformable sprite are exactly the same thing!

By the way, the hardware that powers Battle Garegga, Batrider and Battle Bakraid has no rotation (or scaling) capability either--all those smoothly rotating turrets in the games are completely prerendered in ROM. Confrict's turret alone takes up a sizable fraction of Batrider's graphics ROMs!

One of the tilemap generators (backgrounds, usually) is ridiculously flexible in terms of scaling and rotation, being an evolution of what was originally designed to power the road drawing in Outrun.

The Sega "road" isn't a tilemap, and it has nothing to do with scaling or rotation. And it dates all the way back to Hang-On (actually, the principles date back to Namco's Pole Position which is even older) What it is is a large pixmap in ROM and a table in RAM of parameters (X and Y offsets, palette, and priority) for every scanline of the screen. The ROM pixmap contains an image of a straight road with solid stripes. The onscreen road is made to curve by changing the X offset for each scanline; hills and dips are made by changing the Y offset as well as the priority (so that sprites can be hidden behind a hill); broken stripes are made by changing the palette on scanlines that are between stripes so that the stripe is drawn in the same color as the rest of the road.

You can easily do such a road in pure software (as the ports and clones of Outrun on home consoles show); it just ties up the CPU since you have to write the parameters to the video chip every scanline using raster-synchronized code. The SNES and Genesis have hardware support for linescroll (the technical term for per-scanline scroll offsets), so they can do Pole Position-style roads without tying up the CPU.

Incidentally, the ground foreshortening in Street Fighter 2 and similar games is a linescroll trick too. It isn't Mode 7, contrary to popular belief

[BrianC]

Regarding your question BrianC, I found this here....

SA-1 - 65c816 8/16-bit processor, clocked at 10Mhz. It also contains some extra circuits developed by Nintendo which includes some very fast RAM, a memory mapper, DMA, several real-time timers, and the region lock-out chip. A multipurpose chip that could be found in games such as Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever With Me, from Konami (Japan only), Kirby Superstars, DragonballZ Hyper Dimension, Kirby Dreamland 3, and of course the popular Super Mario RPG.

It doesn't look too promising for importing the game if that special chip also acts as a lock out.

That basically says that it has a lockout chip, but it doesn't tell me specifics. Does this chip only affect adapters or does it make it so I can't play the game on the SNES with the tabs removed without an adapter? Does this chip lock out all regions that the game doesn't come from or is it just a PAL/NTSC lockout?

[AWJ]

Yes, that basically says that it has a lockout chip, but it doesn't tell me specifics. Does this chip only affect adapters or does it make it so I can't play the game on the SNES with the tabs removed without an adapter? Does this chip lock out all regions that the game doesn't come from or is it just a PAL/NTSC lockout?

I don't think there's any lockout between NTSC-U and NTSC-J on the SNES. A North American SNES and a SFC are internally identical as far as I know.

[AWJ]

Don't make the mistake of comparing R-Type III to the original SNES Super R-Type. Super R-Type was a release-day title, and as such showed the results of what happens when you bring out a new "multi-CPU" (I don't really count the Mode-7 as a whole CPU, but you catch my drift) platform and don't give developers enough time to experiement and figure out how to use it all to their advantage.

Mode 7 isn't a CPU, or even a chip. It's one of the eight modes (and the most divergent from the other seven) that the SNES tilemap chip can operate in.

There are two major reasons that early SNES games tend to suffer from severe slowdown. One was developer unfamiliarity, as you say. Many early SNES games consisted largely or entirely of 8-bit code since the developers were using tools and libraries of code from their NES games. Another reason is ROM speed. The 65816 is a pipelined CPU (i.e. it fetches opcodes continuously, every single cycle, rather than fetching an opcode, executing it, and then fetching another, like a Z80) and so it needs memory that can operate at the same speed as itself. Early SNES games used the same mask ROM chips as NES games and these ROMs weren't fast enough for the SNES CPU, so the CPU had to run at a reduced speed. Later in the SNES' life cycle, ROM prices came down and developers were able to use faster ROMs and thereby run the SNES CPU at its full speed.

[elvis]

There are plenty of NTSC-U / NTSC-J lockout games out there. I've come across literally dozens.

But (a) there is heaps of hardware out there that will happily get around this for you (I have a SuperWildCardDX which does this nicely), and (b) Japanese SFC consoles are a dime a dozen (I picked one up locally for AU$20 [$US15]).

[AWJ]

There are plenty of NTSC-U / NTSC-J lockout games out there. I've come across literally dozens.

But (a) there is heaps of hardware out there that will happily get around this for you (I have a SuperWildCardDX which does this nicely), and (b) Japanese SFC consoles are a dime a dozen (I picked one up locally for AU$20 [$US15]).

Australia is PAL, not NTSC-U...

[Marc]

Did R-Type III use any special DSP chip? I never noticed any slowdown and it was doing quite a bit on screen.

I'm not sure, but Jikkyou Obshaberi Parodius apparantly has a special chip in it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA-1_chip Apparantly, the chips have CIC lockout in them. Does this mean they won't play on US systems, even with the tabs removed and no adapters? I hope this is not the case. I plan to import Jikkyou Obshaberi Parodius, though I plan to get the Saturn one too.

When I had this it played just fine on my US SNES, which apart from the snapped tabs was unmodded as far as I know. I'm sure that the chip actually had something to do with the stupidly huge (for the SNES anyways) amount of speech crammed into the game, sure I read that way back when in Super Play.

[llabnip]

I don't think there's any lockout between NTSC-U and NTSC-J on the SNES. A North American SNES and a SFC are internally identical as far as I know.

I've never seen any differences and do not know anyone has has a problem running Japanese carts on a US SNES (once the tabs are snapped). But based on elvis' post it seems there are some. But I've never run across one - just break the tabs and the physical lockout is removed and I've never seen any additional lockout scheme employed for the SNES. I can't think of a single Japanese shooter or playform game that wouldn't run on a SNES but I guess I have a mix of US and Japanese titles and maybe haven't hit one that would have a problem. Now I'm curious - can anyone name a specific Japanese or US game that they had trouble running on the other territory system? I have no farmiliarity with trying to run PAL games or a PAL system.

[The Coop]

Regarding your question BrianC, I found this here....

SA-1 - 65c816 8/16-bit processor, clocked at 10Mhz. It also contains some extra circuits developed by Nintendo which includes some very fast RAM, a memory mapper, DMA, several real-time timers, and the region lock-out chip. A multipurpose chip that could be found in games such as Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever With Me, from Konami (Japan only), Kirby Superstars, DragonballZ Hyper Dimension, Kirby Dreamland 3, and of course the popular Super Mario RPG.

It doesn't look too promising for importing the game if that special chip also acts as a lock out.

That basically says that it has a lockout chip, but it doesn't tell me specifics. Does this chip only affect adapters or does it make it so I can't play the game on the SNES with the tabs removed without an adapter? Does this chip lock out all regions that the game doesn't come from or is it just a PAL/NTSC lockout?

If you're truly that determined to have this Super Famicom game, and you really are that worried about it possibly being locked out in a fashion besides the tabs, then my advice would be to dig up a Super Famicom system to play it on. They're not that cheap on eBay, but you'd be guaranteed the ability to play the game (and any other SF game for that matter).

[Alpolio]

There are two major reasons that early SNES games tend to suffer from severe slowdown. One was developer unfamiliarity, as you say. Many early SNES games consisted largely or entirely of 8-bit code since the developers were using tools and libraries of code from their NES games. Another reason is ROM speed. The 65816 is a pipelined CPU (i.e. it fetches opcodes continuously, every single cycle, rather than fetching an opcode, executing it, and then fetching another, like a Z80) and so it needs memory that can operate at the same speed as itself. Early SNES games used the same mask ROM chips as NES games and these ROMs weren't fast enough for the SNES CPU, so the CPU had to run at a reduced speed. Later in the SNES' life cycle, ROM prices came down and developers were able to use faster ROMs and thereby run the SNES CPU at its full speed.

I never heard that before.

[AirRaidX]

btw, Sega's 'X Board Hardware', sometimes known as the
'AfterBurner Hardware' that powers After Burner II, Thunder Blade, Super Monaco GP and others, it pushes 256 sprites
(less than Neo-Geo's 380 sprites) and has a color pallete of 32,768 (half of Neo-Geo's) but seems to have full hardware scaling & rotation and can do this at the same time as seen in ABII.

The X-Board can scale sprites both up and down (unlike earlier Sega sprite-scaling hardware), but doesn't have any rotation capability. All rotation in After Burner is done the dumb way--the graphics ROMs just contain several orientations of every sprite. The high speed of the game helps to disguise the unsmoothness of the rotation.

The Y-Board (the successor to the X-Board that powered Galaxy Force, G-LOC and Power Drift) can rotate its entire framebuffer as a unit, but not individual sprites. The capability to rotate and skew sprites is significantly more advanced than simple scaling and really falls into the "3D" category--when you think about it, a texture mapped polygon and an arbitrarily deformable sprite are exactly the same thing!

thankyou AWJ, for that information comparing Sega's X Board to the Y Board. I've always wanted to know the differences. btw, do you have any idea if the more powerful Y Board that runs GFII G-LOC and PD, if it can do more than 256 sprites, or is it the same amount as the X Board?

I wonder why the MUCH more powerful Saturn did not get flawless ports of Galaxy Force and Power Drift ....bad programming I guess, as I said earlier.

[AirRaidX]

heh, I remember reading in EGM, in Quarterman's / Steve Harris's Gaming Gossip column that the Super NES would be getting a 33 MHz booster so that all slowdown could be totally eliminated in games that used it.

I don't remember if this was going to be an add-on to the SNES to help all games, or a chip for individual specific games. I will try to get a pic of the text.

edit: got it. from December, 1991 EGM
http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/2315 ... 2crop3.jpg



a probably-related usenet post, from 1992, most likely about the same thing:

Fortunately, not a whole heck of a lot is being coordinated when you play
a game of SF2, so just MAYBE the S-NES's puny processor can handle it...
but if not, there's the RUMOR of a 33Mhz add-on processor.

another usenet post, from 1991, definitally related to the EGM rumor:

EGM say's that there will be a add on for the SNES which will boost the processor speed to 33mhz & thus take care of slow down which was found on some SNES carts. i.e. super r-type...

another couple of usenet threads, here and here probably on the same thing.


this 33 MHZ CPU / DSP / Chip / Accelerator can *definitally* be classified as vaporware, or possibly early rumblings of what would later be the SuperFX chip, which was originally going to be twice the clockrate that it was released as (maybe 22 Mhz down to 11 Mhz, don't remember)


sometime later, it was revealed that the third and final SNES CD-ROM unit, which would be 32-bit instead of 16-bit, would be getting a 21 MHz co-processor.

[jp]

I loved Soul Star!!!! That was always one of my favorite Sega CD games.

[BrianC]

Did R-Type III use any special DSP chip? I never noticed any slowdown and it was doing quite a bit on screen.

I'm not sure, but Jikkyou Obshaberi Parodius apparantly has a special chip in it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA-1_chip Apparantly, the chips have CIC lockout in them. Does this mean they won't play on US systems, even with the tabs removed and no adapters? I hope this is not the case. I plan to import Jikkyou Obshaberi Parodius, though I plan to get the Saturn one too.

When I had this it played just fine on my US SNES, which apart from the snapped tabs was unmodded as far as I know. I'm sure that the chip actually had something to do with the stupidly huge (for the SNES anyways) amount of speech crammed into the game, sure I read that way back when in Super Play.

Thanks for the info. I think I will import it.

The thread has me wanting to try that Soul Star game. It sounds pretty darn cool. I also want to get my hands on some of those Saturn SEGA Ages games especially the memorial collections. They both have some nice penguin games in them! Pengi-chan!

[The Coop]

Between the fun game, and the great orchestral, almost John Williams-like soundtrack that can be listened to in any CD player, it's worth the few bucks it'll cost to get it BrianC.

[AWJ]

thankyou AWJ, for that information comparing Sega's X Board to the Y Board. I've always wanted to know the differences. btw, do you have any idea if the more powerful Y Board that runs GFII G-LOC and PD, if it can do more than 256 sprites, or is it the same amount as the X Board?

The Y-Board's sprite hardware is entirely fillrate-bound--there isn't really a "maximum number of sprites". There's enough RAM to store the coordinates of thousands of sprites (unlike the X-Board, where the limit of 256 is a RAM limit), but the hardware could never draw them all in one frame.

Note that the X-Board is also fillrate-bound--it can't draw 256 maximum-sized sprites, some of them will be dropped. You can bet that any hardware that has both a large maximum number of sprites and a large maximum sprite size can't reach both of those limits at the same time. The Y-board fillrate is significantly higher than the X-Board (possibly several times higher--I don't know the exact specs), and the hardware is smart enough not to waste time drawing pixels that will be offscreen after rotation, so you can place a large sprite halfway off the screen and the offscreen portion won't count against the fillrate limit (this is not the case with the X-Board)

[AWJ]

I've done some research and I think what elvis has is a PAL SNES modified to be compatible with NTSC games. These mods will work with most games, but not games that use the SA-1 or SDD1 chips. A genuine NTSC (i.e. North American) SNES should be 100% compatible with SFC games.