I have been playing my newly acquired Blast Off PCB. However, I noticed that when there is a ton of ships and missiles on screen the game slows down. I know this also happens when you play in MAME, but a lot of strange things can happen in MAME. Does it seem odd that the hardware can't process the graphics fast enough? Might I have a bad chip or something or it just is what it is? Any input on this would be greatly appreciated...
Thanks!
Blast Off - Slow Down...
Slowdown happens on some games even on arcade hardware. Try Double Dragon for a hilarious example - as soon as there are 3 enemies it drops from 60fps -> 30fps (maybe slower).
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Not just on some games — on many games. Obviously most of them were using expensive hardware for the time, so the developers were commonly trying to milk every bit of its capabilities to make the games display more/larger sprites, better sound, etc. As soon as teh game crossed the limit of performance, it lagged. You can't also discard such things as sloppy coding: it existed back in 1989, and it still does.
Matskat wrote:This neighborhood USED to be nice...until that family of emulators moved in across the street....
The fun thing is now a lot of games are actually built from the ground up with slowdown in mind, stopping the game from getting too hard while bullet storms rage around the player. Along with the concept of the 'hitbox', i think this utilisation of slowdown is perhaps the most important defining trait of the modern shooting game. Fuck tonnes of bullets, but a much more reasonable challenge 