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Thunder Force IV, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even Gunstar Heroes has a brief moment of slowdown during gameplay. Do all Model 1s, Model 2s, Genesis 3s, CDXs, Nomads, etc., allow for slowdown to occur? Is it wiser to have your system running as overclocked all the time or should a switch be installed and used for games that run fine at factory speed?
On a side note, has anyone already made a list of all the Genny games that experience noticeable slowdown?
Great question... I'd also like to apply this to SNES and NES (if the CPU didn't control the sound as well that is).
Is Genesis capable of slow down? I thought Genesis was always 100% framerate 'smooth' and was one of the reasons it was more popular than SNES when it came to Sports and Shooter games:confused:
There is no such thing as to "allow" the slowdown.
All of the systems you named use the same chips
with the same speeds and they are not fast enough
to handle some certain situations.
I think overclocking a Mega Drive always involves two
switches, one for halting the CPU and the other one
for switching the frequences. At least that's the way
I've seen it in a youtube tutorial.
If I were you I would install those switches even if it is
possible to do without them. Maybe some rare game
will make some sort of a glitch with the overclocked 68K?
Having two possibilities instead of one is always a good thing.
Genesis is not framerate smooth, it slows down plenty when extra sprites burst onto the screen.
Mega Drive slows down often enough, hereQuote:
Originally Posted by OldSchool
and there. Try gathering, say, 80 rings in
Sonic 1 and then run in a badnik. All those
floating animated rings do slow down stuff
quite a bit. Slow down isn't as big in 50 Hz
regions, but it is mainly because the games
already run slower than they should.
Mega Drive does have a faster CPU than
SNES though, executing similar instructions
should always slow down the SNES earlier.
slowdown is ALWAYS caused by programming... you only got 16 or 20ms of time for the program loop to finish, if it takes more than that you see slowdown. You can have all 80 sprites on the screen shown with both A and B GB layers aswell as window layer and not see a drop in frame rathe, you cannot make the VDP slow down by putting all its resources into use.
overclocking will work on all machines, but the maximum speed you can achieve depends on the overclocking method, the game you use and the model of the hardware. Most games will run happily at 10Mhz, la bit less in 12MHz and 14 and more you'll be seeing lot of games having trouble. Halt switch is only required if you plan on changing the clock speed while the system runs, otherwise you can omit it.
I don't see why Nintendo doesn't make versions of the NES and SNES with digital outs/faster hardware and make a bloody killing... :confused:
I know you're saying this in regard to old 16 bit Console Gaming... I chuckled when I pictured running Crysis on a crappy computer while reading your statement. :oQuote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
Modern games and generally modern apps are allQuote:
Originally Posted by OldSchool
written in a way, that you need much more power
for running them smoothly than you normally should.
No one gives a damn about writing even the slightest
bit in assembly and no one tries to use memory efficient
programming. Just because everyone knows: in a year
everyone will have so much horsepower in the PC that
it wouldn't matter.
This is why people could fly to the moon and back with
only 3 C64s but now we need a lot more for running
Windows XP with an acceptable speed.
You know what... I never even thought about that. Here I was coming from a high horse that, "meh... framerate issues are caused by not having enough HP in the PC"... but what you say makes a lot of sense.Quote:
Originally Posted by N.Saibot
I blame my generation... not that I went to MIT and decided to be the best programmer in the world, but I remember how early PC games used to run so well compared to todays bugfest at initial release 9/10.
You make a really solid point:!:
I was having an informatics class for 3 years back inQuote:
Originally Posted by OldSchool
school and a somewhat oldschool teacher and
a good friend who explained me stuff. We have
a real vicious circle right now: programmers don't
care about efficiency at all, so their programms
need extra power to run. Hardware companies
are glad to have something to do and release
more RAM and bigger hdds and faster CPUs all
the time, so the programmers can care even less
and still achieve more.
On the one hand writing realy complicated and big
programms totally in assembly is probably too hard
of a job (TmEE works only in assembly however, so
go figure... Guess not everyone can be that good),
on the other hand we are in an exactly opposite
situation: nothing at all is in assembly and no one
even thinks about memory and/or CPU efficience.
So there isn't anything strange in every Windows
version becoming slower, and slower, and slower
than the previous (if you use the same hardware
that is).