Back in the day, many games simply weren't multiplatform like they are today, meaning the games like the one in your video were crazy optimized for that specific platform. Nowadays games are almost never well optimized because they focus on making them run on as many platforms as possible. In short what happened was the Xbox came along and popularized multiplats as it was basically just a machine for multiplats, and multiplats killed gaming. Blame Microsoft.
Back in the day, many games simply weren't multiplatform like they are today...
Jackson Martinez
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Aiden Wilson
William Collins
I'd like to see what kinda programming went into making it on the gamegear.
Brandon Jackson
More than that for years the purpose of DirectX wasn't actually to provide the fastest possible, or highest level of graphics card features but rather to lock game developers to the level of features offered by the Xbox console and to restrict performance to ensure the Xbox would provide better value for the money than a PC.
Its only now when the industry has finally gotten fed up and released a superior alternative in Vulkan that they've released DX12 which hypothetically at least can provide the same level of features and performance. They're still using it in an attempt to lock developers in by restricting it to a single version of a single OS even though there's no technical reason it couldn't be on any OS except that Windows 10 has their UWP 'console mode' designed to kill off the PC as an independent platform once and for all by reducing it to just another console platform.
Bentley Turner
You just KNOW that Vulkan will die off and devs will turn to using DX12 instead. No way Microsoft will lose their monopoly on PC gaming. Sad.
Liam Sanchez
The problem is that vulkan is backed by android.
And REAL backed up by it, as in its a mandatory component of the next android distribution, because it also increases battery life.
Eli Richardson
The game gear version seems the usual.
Hsync scrolling, prebaked sprite scaling.
Nathaniel Rodriguez
Well shit, I didn't consider phones, but that makes sense. That would seriously threaten Microsoft's dominance.
Brody Carter
About the only good thing is that both Vulkan and DX12 are descended from Mantle and are much more similar to one another than DX11 and OpenGL were so there won't be the same kind of learning curve that there was for devs familiar with DX11 to switch to AZDO OpenGL 4.5.
Its really a shame that developers won't change the way they do things. If they developed to standards first they would produce games that are easier to port and that offer better performance on all platforms. What they do now, developing against the least standard platform with totally non-standard proprietary APIs is asking to have poor performance and the maximum difficulty porting like back when web-devs built sites for IE6.
Aiden Clark
>what happened was the Xbox came along and popularized multiplats
hah
The PS2 is what made multiplats popular, due to ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION consoles sold. All Xbox did was take multiplats away from PC.
Connor Turner
Techfags don't like to boast it, but vulkan is a great solution for shitty CPUs.
Daniel Watson
Multiplats existed sure, but they weren't as numerous, and they weren't developed the same way. Games weren't continually gimped on PC, for example, because the devs absolutely had to make it available on consoles as well. Showing one game that had a lot of ports is not indicative of how the industry as a whole functioned back then. And if you're the same person who keeps posting the Mortal Kombat ports, I'd just like to tell you that you're a disingenuous faggot.
John Campbell
>when web-devs built sites for IE6
Thanks for giving me PTSD flashbacks.
Brody Campbell
The draw distance on that is pretty fucking amazing. Virtua Racing had all the pomp and circumstance (and the fuckhueg cart containing who knows what) and yet I reckon they're about on par.
Ian Cruz
Was impossible to do like we do today back then because the games were written in assembly, which means the WHOLE game code was locked to a specific platform.
Now its all written in C, which means you only need to switch the API commands around to port.
Jordan Sullivan
uhuh
Noah Peterson
Virtua racing had the SVP, a 20Mhzish powerful DSP chip, able to spit multiply OPs as fast as the genesis could use em.
Luis Gutierrez
Except there are tons and tons of ports for snes and genesis
Josiah Gonzalez
post moar technology
Levi Hall
Robert Thompson
For some reason this reminds me of a game in an episode of Dexter's Lab. Can't remember the name though, haven't seen it since I was a kid.
Jaxon Hall
Except that devs usually had to remake the game from the ground up (possibly including the graphics) if they we're going to port a Genesis game to the SNES and vice-versa, which can take a long time and might involve another company. That or the game would be completely different from the other platform, like Aladdin or Jurassic Park.
Aiden Sullivan
GAME BOY
youtube.com
Elijah Morales
>dem precious 2 frames a second
Ryder Morales
It's actually smoother than the snes version.
But mostly because its rendering to 160x120.
Elijah Gray
This looks like a PS1 game, and even the PS1 had trouble with 3D stuff.
Julian Phillips
Considering this is a processor that was mainly used for midrange scientific calculators by 1996, it's pretty impressive.
Dylan Scott
Not that much.
I would say 32x.
Caleb Moore
If you double the video speed, it looks pretty enjoyable.
Evan Wood
Well, yeah.
How did they do it? Speaking of technology i don't understand, what's up with games in a cassette tape?
Bentley Gray
Game programmers were wizards back in the day mang
Caleb Edwards
So few of these exist because they pretty much pushed the hardware well beyond any sane limits; they'd perform a 'burn in' test and roughly half the boards overheated and died. Some collector in South Florida had a cabinet for a time.
Jason Fisher
There was dedicated vector hardware used in some arcade games.
Tapes were popular because they could store tons of data cheaply, but they fell out of favor in PCs because it was sequential access only and the seek times were horrible and just backing up to hard drives is now a lot cheaper than it used to be.
Gabriel Ortiz
What about laserdisc? That one confuses me as well.
Dragon's Lair might have been innovative for its time, but it's literally an interactive movie now.
John Murphy
Laser Disc isn't that difficult to understand. It was basically the same technology as CDs but on a larger disc for more storage space and it needed it because it used more archaic encoding of the data.
They actually made a version of Dragon's Lair on DVD that allowed you to just watch the whole thing through, though you could play it with a DVD remote as well if you wanted to (which worked best on a PS2 since its default 'remote' was the gamepad.
Colton Walker
Militar vector chips.
Nolan Edwards
>It was basically the same technology as CDs
But wasn't it analog?
William Mitchell
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Have good discussions of how it worked. Essentially the technology is the same, but instead of encoding digital information it used a raw format that stored the analog video signal but they could also store what was essentially cd digital audio or more advanced schemes.
Oliver Morris
I wonder if you can use PWM to store more digital data by using the pit size to encode a number from 0 to 15.
Jacob Turner
No, the data was still stored in binary pits its just that instead of storing MPEG video it was storing a direct approximation of the waveform that you would output to an analog tv. Old fashioned tvs worked by firing an electron gun at a grid of phosphors that would sweep horizontally varying the intensity of the beam to draw a line and would then be aimed down skipping a line before sweeping again. The laser disc was directly encoding the signal to control that.
Compression schemes today for digital video are a lot more efficient and don't have to store every pixel all the time.
Justin Murphy
I know.
But i mean, it sounds like it use the size of the pits as the analog intensity of the signal sent to the analog tv, and the question is if you can't use the pit size to encode 0 to 15 instead of 0 to 1.
Connor Ortiz
I know what you're getting at, but it doesn't work that way, the pits are still the same so you still need four of them to cover 0-F its just that the laserdisc wasn't encoding digital information it was literally storing the instructions for how to flip the output power on and off to approximate the analog output signal directly instead of storing MPEG 1 and requiring a codec chip that would then do that job.
Ian Watson
Yes, i'm aware of that.
But it is a flood that gets smoothed out to an analog signal by a capacitor, or it counts the time a pit lasts and the higher the time, the bigger is the output?
John Morales
Not an expert on laserdisc, but my understanding is that its a bit of both. Every 1 is the switch on, every 0 is the switch off so if you have a bunch of 1s in a row the switch keeps getting flipped on to the power in the output grows, every 0 in a row conversely make the power in the output decrease. Do that often enough and fast enough and you get a nice wave.
en.wikipedia.org
That would be something like 1110 1110 1100 1000 1000 1000 1000
Nolan Ward
Sounds like the NES audio output thing, and in this case indeed, you can't get more data.