1993 interview with Treasure

Somebody digged an old interview with Treasure:
http://megadrive.me/2011/11/03/an-in...with-treasure/

Gotta love this part:

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Q: Konami is a big 3rd party for Nintendo, so why are you now making games for Sega?

A: I’ve always been fascinated with hardware. People are constantly comparing Mega Drive to SNES, saying that the SNES has more colors etc…

But the Mega Drive has a 68000 processor, which is very easy for programmers to work with. I was a programmer for years, making games for the SNES, and I can tell you, the hardware is a pain in the butt. If consumers look at a still shot, they may think the SNES is better, but actually, if you tried to put Gunstar Heroes onto the SNES there would be no way. See those bosses? On the SNES they would slow down, that movement requries sooo much computation. It could only be done on the Sega hardware.

Q: How many colors do you have on screen in Gunstar?

A: Actually there are 64, but we can make it look like much more by adding shadow and lighting effects etc.… When you look at Sonic or Gunstar you would think that they display more than 64 colors, but they don’t, we just make it look like more. In my opinion the colour looks as good as the SNES. We can also make it appear that 3 to 4 screens are present, although you can supposedly only display two (background and foreground) at once, as I said the hardware is very easy to work with. All things considered, the 68000 is a very good CPU allowing room for experimentation while the SNES hardware limits you to their design standards. Scaling and rotation can be implemented in the Sega software, forget it on the SNES.

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So much for the SNES being better =P

Their games certainly did show their love for the hardware in all areas.

man do i love treasure and everything they did for the genesis. thanks for posting this sik

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A: There are things we have left over, so I would say 80%. If I give it 100% that would mean we could never top it, but we can!

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And so Alien Soldier was born.

Btw, what did they meant by "compressing" gunstar heroes?

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Originally Posted by Thunderblaze16

Btw, what did they meant by "compressing" gunstar heroes?

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It means the game uses software compression to store it's data, think .zip or .rar only simpler.

I get that, but how they make game 16 megs to 8? Did they have to remove some stuff?

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Originally Posted by Thunderblaze16

I get that, but how they make game 16 megs to 8? Did they have to remove some stuff?

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via compression

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Originally Posted by Thunderblaze16

I get that, but how they make game 16 megs to 8? Did they have to remove some stuff?

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Text can be greatly compressed, graphical data can be compressed quite a bit (check blast processing forum), they could have used ADPCM in the audio driver... etc.

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Originally Posted by Sik

Somebody digged an old interview with Treasure:
http://megadrive.me/2011/11/03/an-in...with-treasure/

Gotta love this part:

So much for the SNES being better =P

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Yes, because a Sega-centric developer would be 100% impartial, when discussing which company had better hardware. Hey, let ask Retro Studios if they like Nintendo the best! I bet the answer will shock and surprise us! :|

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Q: OK, last two questions. Is there any comment you would like to make about this industry?

A: Yes, lately all I see are sequels, or translations of popular arcade games. It is really sad. Consumers are in pursuit of quality and original game designs, but not many third parties are doing them.
We are going to develop original games only! To sum it up, we present ourselves a challenge to do new things in the action platofm category. We would like to be the company that makes the Sega Genesis and Mega Drive number one. We will think of what would be most fun, and then develop it.

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You could apply this today. Just replace "translations of popular arcade games" with FPS sequels.

I like a good sequel as much as the next guy, but too many sequels suffer from "Doom II Syndrome", which while an excellent game, made no significant improvements over its predecessor.

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Originally Posted by Bastardcat

Yes, because a Sega-centric developer would be 100% impartial, when discussing which company had better hardware. Hey, let ask Retro Studios if they like Nintendo the best! I bet the answer will shock and surprise us! :|

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He did admit the SNES had more capabilities - but the hardware setup is such a piece of crap that it's really impossible to exploit it to the extreme without suffering lots of slow down (or being forced to use a coprocessor).

And the 65816 isn't very good at computations... It may have the same amount of instructions per second as the 68000 in average, but it has many less registers, which severely limits its ability to make complex computations with lots of values. SNES programmers will tell you that page zero doubles as many registers and thereby it can do more than the 68000, but let's be fair, that's akin to the word addressing mode in the 68000 (which covers half of RAM). Also the 68000 allows more possible operand combinations for all operations, and almost all operations can be done in 32-bit (only the slowest ones can't, e.g. multiplication and division), so that leads to a lot more of optimization. And of course, there's programmer sanity to take into account... The 65816 instruction set is annoying >.>'

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Originally Posted by Bastardcat

I like a good sequel as much as the next guy, but too many sequels suffer from "Doom II Syndrome", which while an excellent game, made no significant improvements over its predecessor.

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I wish that was the case because at least that'd mean more good games (especially in cases where the gameplay experience is directly tied to the level design), but most of the time sequels are worse than the first game.

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Originally Posted by Sik

He did admit the SNES had more capabilities - but the hardware setup is such a piece of crap that it's really impossible to exploit it to the extreme without suffering lots of slow down (or being forced to use a coprocessor).

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I guess it was so crappy that no good games came out for it.

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Originally Posted by Bastardcat

I guess it was so crappy that no good games came out for it.

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Oh it has plenty of good slow moving games that's for sure. Lets try fast moving. There's... Sparkster... and... huh... right... I got this....
Hagane, that's pretty fast too...
Space Megaforce! Quite a bit slower than MUSHA... but I guess it works... let's see more... hum... R-Type 3 is fast... sometimes...
That's all I got.

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Originally Posted by Bastardcat

I guess it was so crappy that no good games came out for it.

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We're talking about Treasure here, remember. Most games can do away with an average hardware usage (and don't really need more), but we know they need more than just that =P Even the Yuu Yuu Hakusho fighting game does some wacky stuff (real-time sprite "scaling").

It's still a pain in the ass though. When you're under a deadline the least you need is the hardware getting in the way. Even if it was powerful enough, it still didn't prevent the code from becoming spaghetti and near unmaintainable, severely hampering development time. Remember, the problem isn't a bad choice of hardware, but outright completely disastrous design choices that have no real justification at all. The Mega Drive is much easier to program, period, and that alone gives it an advantage.

Notice that last paragraph fits the stereotype that multiplatform games looked prettier on the SNES but played better on the Mega Drive. The SNES had more capable hardware, but the programming was better on the Mega Drive.