Sonic 3D: Director's Cut (2019)
info.sonicretro.org
info.sonicretro.org
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He has a fantastic youtube channel documenting lots of tricks and facts about games he's worked on.
There's a ton of old-school programming cleverness that you just don't see now a days!
My favorite "wtf how is this possible" classic game will probably always be the SNES port of DOOM. It's definitely among the worst ways of playing DOOM now, but for a port to the SNES, even with the SuperFX chip assisting it, it really does not feel like that should have been possible.
Mine are from the demo scene. Second Reality, free-flying in 3D in a time where running Doom taxed machines.
The 8088MHz demo: 1024 colors on CGA.
64Kb demo generating really good mountain landscape.
That sort of thing.
I guess the CGA demo is working by very quickly overwriting the display buffer and switching the palette, using Persistence of Vision. I did the same thing on VGA in 640x480x256 color mode to get 24-bit color in the late 80s.
https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...
Do you mean Elevated? It is actually 4 kB, even more impressive:
At any rate: stunning.
The summary of it's development could be summarised with "It's LFSRs all the way down"
An obvious other counter would be 3D engine development (Unity, Unreal) where the developers of those engines will be employing some obscure seeming low level stuff to make this look good. Not to be unclear though I'm 100% in agreement that for most devs, those days are mostly over. [0] https://youtu.be/5XOV3pZj8rI
[1]https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Games are distributed using custom small PNG files.
It definitely keeps the C64 spirit alive.
Ouch.
Opps sorry. I normally make an effort to use gender neutral addressing too.
Childhood me never really knew about them, but it is so cool to see entirely new things added to old games (e.g. Super Mario 64: The Green Stars, or some of the Pokemon Red/Blue hacks). Maybe this is kinda silly, but I feel like hacks like these really extend the magic and mystery of that specific game "world" we grow to know and love inside and out after playing a game for years.
I see the wiki says this was the Mega Drive version but the one I'm familiar with was the Saturn one. Does anyone know if they are different? The screenshots are familiar.
Games written in C slow in comparison, as seen with Sonic Spinball, so I’d wager Sonic 3D would have had to be assembly too given the technical achievements involved in that game.
There’s some YouTube videos from various developers of that era and you can see them stepping through the assembly of those games too.
They might still have the original code though given they wrote the game. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they just worked off the ROM instead.
The thing is that once it's compiled down to a final rom, all the scaffolding used to build it is gone, so there's so little evidence left that it's pretty plausible for people to think it was just done completely in assembly (particularly since there's significant evidence of hand-crafted assembly routines in such a product, since they did that for parts of it).
I think there's a lot of "transposing of knowledge" there, where people know how 8-bit games got built, and assume it was the same for the 16-bit era, but I suspect the 16-bit era was where the transition away from that started, so there was a bit of both.
Back then compilers weren’t as good at writing optimised machine code as they are now and the consoles of that era were built with assembly in mind anyway so it was an easier job writing assembly for them than it would be on modern architectures.
That all said, it seems to be a lot more common these days (ie with the homebrew community) to use higher level languages even on easier platforms like the GameBoy.
More information: https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15931
A lot of the time is was as much down to portability as anything else. However I’m not that familiar with Koei (aside having a few titles as a gamer) to comment on their design decisions.
I once called up SN Systems as their office was down the road and asked if I could visit (this was about 1996) and they were such a nice bunch of people. They had very early prototypes of every console stacked on a back wall. Stuff that would not see the light of day for at least another 20 years. Early PlayStations, 32X, Saturns, Megadrives, Mega CDs. I was looking at a Mega CD dev station and they just handed it to me and said I could have it O_O. I think they gave us a couple of SNES and Megadrive dev kits too. They said they would have given us boxes of the things but they'd just thrown them out yesterday and the rubbish had already been collected.
By the time the N64 / PlayStation / Saturn generation was released, it was more common to expect SDKs. As you say, an expectation likely driven from PC development. SN Systems, being by that point acquired by Sony, would have been excellently placed for the PlayStation dev kits. Unfortunately from the stories I’ve read, Sega were really late in delivering an SDK for the Saturn instead expecting developers to continue to write code in assembly. Which was one of the many issues developers had with that console.
Unfortunately I wasn’t lucky enough to have access to any dev kits for any generation of consoles prior to the PS2 / Dreamcast era. Instead specialising in PC games (and 8-bit micro computers before IBM-compatibles took over) instead. But I have gone back and written some homebrew stuff for the older consoles since. Nothing good enough to boast about on here though.
The Saturn launch was a serious fuck-up for developers who struggled to get anything working. I don't know if they shipped a dev kit without a C compiler. It would be a total nightmare accessing all the 3D hardware without C. And they'd had the 32X for a good while before that. They'd definitely given the earliest prototypes of the 32X to SN Systems for them to make their own dev kit. I saw two prototypes there, one they said was called The Fridge as it was the size of a small refrigerator, and another they called the Pizza Box which was the size of a rack mount unit.
Their complaints were exactly that. Plus it didn’t help that Saturn didn’t really do 3D. It was a dual graphics but both chipsets were designed around sprites. So the Saturn emulated 3D by transforming squares into triangles. Imagine trying to do that in assembly. It’s definitely beyond my capabilities that’s for sure.
Slightly envious (if that’s the right word?) that you got To experience all those dev kits though. The 16 bit era is probably my favourite era in console games (even though the Dreamcast is my favourite console of all time).
All my early 3D engines were in software (x86 assembler), this was in about 1990, before any 3D hardware came along. Doing the 3D texture-mapping is actually really simple, even in assembler, once you know how. Figuring out the algorithm was really hard because it was so hard in those days to find out any information about this stuff.
What I couldn't figure out until several years later was how to fix the issue of perspective warping on the textures. Again, the solution is so simple once you know it, but as a kid it was beyond me, until the Internet came along and opened up a world of coding I'd never seen before.
It was nothing like software rendering 3D in DOS nor anything like how the N64 and PS handled 3D (and they had their own problems too). I’m fact it was nothing like how anyone did 3D maths apart from Segas own engineers and that’s only because they’d already been using those same graphics chipsets in arcade cabinets. Hence where there are so many ports of Sega arcade games on the Saturn.
Segas approach created all kinds of problems when working in 3D that was technically possible in 2D on the same hardware: like the lack of understanding about depth/z-index (since you’re not actually working with polygons), broken alpha blending (which was supported by the hardware but didn’t work properly with transformed sprites because the act of transforming them meant pixels overlapped and thus the alpha blending became uneven) and so on and so forth.
And this is without even touching the usual problems that developers have with SMP. It wasn’t that uncommon for developers to only utilise one processor, effectively halving the capabilities of the machine, just to do away with the concerns of parallel processing.
Then to top all that off, you had to figure it all out in assembly. You couldn’t abstract some of those problems away in C (at least not initially).
While it’s true a lot of developers were still wrestling with how to do 3D in the mid to late 90s, the Saturn was uniquely awkward for 3D. It was a fantastic 2D system but it sucked for writing any 3D games on it.
I would over-comment my assembler just because it is an order of magnitude harder to scan over than C code. You also lose all the labels on your subroutines and jmps, all your variable names, all your data block labels.
There's even events just for sonic rom hacking that happen yearly like Sage: https://twitter.com/sagexpo