09 Jun 2012, 10:28 am
10 Jun 2012, 8:04 am
10 Jun 2012, 2:52 pm
10 Jun 2012, 3:08 pm
Tollorin
Veteran
Joined: 14 Jun 2009
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,178
Location: Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada
10 Jun 2012, 3:22 pm
11 Jun 2012, 2:04 pm
Tollorin wrote:
Kurgan wrote:
Venger wrote:
I always thought the Donkey Kong Country games looked like a side-scroller for the PS1 or Saturn.
It's very impressive that they got it to run 100% smoothly on hardware no more powerful than that of a mid 80's computer, but the main reason why the figures looked so "alive" was that they were prerendered 3D models. This goes for the backgrounds as well, which is why they don't look even the slightest bit grainy.
It doe help that the snes had a greater color depth that the Genesis.
The Genesis had a shadow/highlight system, which made it possible to highlight or darken the 64 colors, thus giving it (effectively) 256 colors.
This was demanding on the hardware, though, and was difficult to implement.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ71NMZ_zZI[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY0CjXG--S8[/youtube]
11 Jun 2012, 9:36 pm
12 Jun 2012, 4:30 pm
celebrei wrote:
Nintendo 64 was pretty powerful during its' time
Agreed.
13 Jun 2012, 6:55 pm
Tollorin
Veteran
Joined: 14 Jun 2009
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,178
Location: Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada
12 Mar 2014, 8:45 pm
Kurgan wrote:
Tollorin wrote:
Kurgan wrote:
Venger wrote:
I always thought the Donkey Kong Country games looked like a side-scroller for the PS1 or Saturn.
It's very impressive that they got it to run 100% smoothly on hardware no more powerful than that of a mid 80's computer, but the main reason why the figures looked so "alive" was that they were prerendered 3D models. This goes for the backgrounds as well, which is why they don't look even the slightest bit grainy.
It doe help that the snes had a greater color depth that the Genesis.
The Genesis had a shadow/highlight system, which made it possible to highlight or darken the 64 colors, thus giving it (effectively) 256 colors.
This was demanding on the hardware, though, and was difficult to implement.Even when it was somewhat able to show 256 colors on screen, the Genesis still was limited to "choose" between 512 colors, compared to the 32768 colors of the snes. It could mean more greens to choose from for the grass, more blues fot the skie, more browns for the land and so on. Also, Donkey Kong Country still had some really impressive effects for its time, like the transition from day to night at the end of this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p644fWUfVBQ
guitarman2010 wrote:
The Atari Jaguar was very much ahead of its time. It was released in 1993 and was miles ahead of the SNES and Genesis which were the big consoles on the market. It was advertised as being the first 64-bit system and while some aspects of it were in fact 64-bit, it was not comparable to the N64. The main CPU (which they describe as just being a "manager" was a Motorola 68000. Based on its complicated architecture, it was extremely hard to program for. Some of the more patient programmers were able to make some really awesomes games despite of this challenge. John Carmack was able to get a decent port of Doom on the Jaguar but unfortunately was music free during gameplay. The actual music tracks were on the cartridge but only played during level changes. Alien vs. Predator was another awesome first person shooter but also lacked in the music department. That didnt matter to me back then, the graphics were far superior to the SNES and Genesis.
There was also a CD-ROM peripheral that plugged into the cartridge slot and acted like a big tumor on the Jag. There was only 13 titles available for the Jag-CD including Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Myst, Primal Rage and a absolutely horrible pack-in game Blue Lightning.
If Atari had made better marketing choices than the Jag could have been a big hit.
There was also a CD-ROM peripheral that plugged into the cartridge slot and acted like a big tumor on the Jag. There was only 13 titles available for the Jag-CD including Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Myst, Primal Rage and a absolutely horrible pack-in game Blue Lightning.
If Atari had made better marketing choices than the Jag could have been a big hit.
The Jaguar still had the problem of not having sound memory, a element that held it back compared to the sound of the snes. I don't see how you can say it was ahead of his time though, it's weird architecture was never used again and it was still very limited in the 3D department compared to consoles that got out only one/two years after. And that's without the problem of not being a japanesse console in the nineties.
They were other console more powerfull that the Genesis and the snes back then like the Neo Geo and the 3DO, but they were very costly.
28 Mar 2014, 10:17 am
