Hacker News Reader

Comment by slagfart | Hacker News Reader

Go and play Metal Slug 3, and tell me that was done on a 12MHz processor with a straight face - what they did with this thing was magic.

View on HN

The artwork is amazing, but I don't think it's computationally demanding.

Especially given the number of sprites supported by this console - you can basically cover the screen multiple times over with hardware sprites.

Right, for the paradigm of that era, it was a beast, numerous, large, full colors sprites, good audio.

But again, the art work is amazing, I'm more in love with this style than the latest GTA.

Indeed. Even the backgrounds are made solely of hardware sprites.

Yeah. For my part I remember being completely blown away by games such as Art of Fighting with the real-time zoom on already huge sprites on screen. At the time it was just unseen on any other format. And sound-wise it was very impressive as games used tons of samples because of the large memory size, well before the CD-era. But cartridges were very, very expensive... :)

Art of Fighting is a good example. Something remarkable is also the more and more refined graphics throughout the iterations of a serie. If you compare fatal fury 1 & 3 it's the same resolution and same colors but there is a huge progress in the graphics. It's the same for most of the game systems, when programmers have to cope with the same hardware during 5 years or so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0aPKy8-qsE

had always read about it, never seen it in motion, quite good!

Yet Metal Slug has a lot of slowdowns. So yes, the game is beautiful and very fun but not as amazing technologically as e.g. the first Doom was.

DOOM (and Wolf3D) included a window-size option which would put the screen in a small box to avoid slowdowns. Unless you had a 486, you were probably going to use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com