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But neither is practical in a cartridge based gaming environment.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
But, I'll just add this. Notice how the music slows down in Lightning Force when the action gets heavy. The 68k is now getting bogged down and can't deliver the music at a constant pace. This isn't a knock on the game, which I think is great, but it does expose the limitations of the sound hardware once the CPU is pushed to its limits.
If you have a driver that requires the 68k, yeah, that will happen, when it comes to these old machines everything is a tradeoff.
In Technosoft's case they were just terrible sound programmers, like the music stopping to play a garbled sfx that somewhat resembles "claw" which would be fine in 1988, not 1992.
Another good example is Sonic 1 vs Sonic 2. Sonic 1 has a 68k driver and uses the Z80 solely for drums, so they have better quality than Sonic 2 which uses the Z80 for everything.
For Sega PCM was an afterthought, you can see it in the design of the machine itself and of their games.
Alien Soldier uses a variant of the 68k sound driver used in Sonic 1 too, even though it wants to dedicated the main CPU as much as possible to the action, but has far superior drums to Sonic 1.
In fact, Dual PCM driver reuses Sonic 1's FM driver in the ROM hacks, so it is practical for a game like that. You could literally put that Sonic CD cover in Alien Soldier.
It had already been addressed by this post actually:Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
The more primitives drivers using the 68K, such as the SMPS 68K, may show some of those side effects such as you cited for TFIV.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
The most well-known example is Moonwalker's freeze before the final battle in each stage; special dance animation frames are being decompressed using a not-so-good algorithm causing your hacked up 1989 sprite engine to freeze and your poor SMPS 68K driver to halt the music as well.
Yeah, Alien Soldier has much better sound samples, but it does cut out the music during large explosions and also slows down occasionally when there are moments of slowdown. There's a lot more going on with the Thunder Force games though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
And Technosoft are not terrible sound programmers. Herzog Zwei has some of the best music on the Genesis and it only slows down when a base has massive amounts of fire power going on.
Maybe you should look at footage recorded from Real Hardware instead of a tinny sounding emulator?Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Huyliuxe8
The music isn't cutting out during large explosions in that footage. While there is slowdown, there's some pretty bad slowdown in Thunder Force IV on real hardware as well.
I wouldn't say that. Sure Thunder Force may have more tiny sprites on screen, but Alien Solider has larger sprites and large enemies put together from multiple sprites with unique animations and tilting, warping, and rotation like effects going on.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Just because the music is good and well composed doesn't mean the Sound Driver isn't shit. Technosoft still had the issue in their sound driver of cutting off all sound when you needed to play a voice sample well into 1992. That's pretty bad considering most other developers had solved that issue years earlier. Hell even Capcom didn't have that issue with Street Fighter II.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Same shit happens. Try again.Quote:
Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118
Are you serious? There are multiple layers of parallax scrolling, more bullets flying across the screen while that is going on and bosses that scroll all the way around the screen.Quote:
The music isn't cutting out during large explosions in that footage. While there is slowdown, there's some pretty bad slowdown in Thunder Force IV on real hardware as well.
I wouldn't say that. Sure Thunder Force may have more tiny sprites on screen, but Alien Solider has larger sprites and large enemies put together from multiple sprites with unique animations and tilting, warping, and rotation like effects going on.
You might want to bust that game out again. Music layers cut out whenever a voice sample is played and during a lot of concussive sounds. The music also has serious timing issues.Quote:
Just because the music is good and well composed doesn't mean the Sound Driver isn't shit. Technosoft still had the issue in their sound driver of cutting off all sound when you needed to play a voice sample well into 1992. That's pretty bad considering most other developers had solved that issue years earlier. Hell even Capcom didn't have that issue with Street Fighter II.
Uh?!Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
I'm not hearing any music slowdown nor music being cut off by sound effects in Alien Soldier.
Alien Soldier pushes a lot more animation, top-notch sprite articulation, bosses with AI, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Also, Technosoft was very rough in terms of DMA usage; they don't use it properly pushing too much stuff at once and thus degrading the PCM playback quality really hard. All Treasure games have a proper DMA queue implementation instead.
Well the drums are cut during "power up", I guess that's what he means?
It's there at the boss at the 1:41 mark. He just finishes it off so quick, that you don't see most of the slowdown that boss creates. And yes, a lot of the music does get cut off when there are big explosions.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barone
Yes, Alien Soldier pushes a lot more animation with the boss battles, but the backgrounds aren't doing much during those scenes. Treasure is just more clever about splitting resources, while I get the impression that the Technosoft music creator pushes the sound hard, but it gets sabotaged when the game graphics push the 68k to the limits. The original Sonic the Hedgehog also has music slowdown when the graphics overloaded the CPU.Quote:
Alien Soldier pushes a lot more animation, top-notch sprite articulation, bosses with AI, etc.
Also, Technosoft was very rough in terms of DMA usage; they don't use it properly pushing too much stuff at once and thus degrading the PCM playback quality really hard. All Treasure games have a proper DMA queue implementation instead.
Treasure still had moments with Gunstar Heroes, where the action slightly slowed down the music. It's very slight, but the sound effects also cut out the music.
*edit*
Screw that, the sound in that video was horrible.
Sorry gamevet, I still don't see it. The only slowdown in the game I can see is when there's a phoenix attack and that's clearly just "cinematic" slowdown since it is very consistent. Also the game has a 68k sound driver so if it does slowdown the music should also slowdown, which it actually doesn't (meaning the game is not actually slowing down, ever)Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
The game also cuts off the music when a boss dies but again that's just a stylistic choice, when a miniboss dies (and the minibosses in the game are just as complex as the bosses) it does not happen.
When the minibosses are dying and are exploding all over there is some cutout of part of the music, but since the game uses all sound channels for music something had to give. This is not the same as TF 4 cutting out all music and sfx to play really low quality, unstable sound samples. Gunstar Heroes similarly uses all channels for music so it has to cut out some when there's a lot of sfx, but that's nearly every genesis games.
The only example I can think of where the music actually slows down on real hardware is Road Rash II, and that's on the menu screens (specifically the bike and stage select). There has to be more though I suppose.
I've never heard GH, Alien Solder or anything else do what's being reported here. Channels are relinquished to play sound effects, but like Kamahl says, that's just about every MD game.
Here's the thing with that second video. Trekkies tried to say that an emulator doesn't count, and I took that video for granted. Looking at it a bit more, I realized that his video wasn't right either, because the guy was using an OC'd 68K.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
Again, the same boss with another person's video. This boss causes slowdown, the music drops to one voice to make way for all of the sound effects and that one channel does have slight slowdown,
I just think that the problem with Lightning Force is that Technosoft pushed the Genesis graphics to the limits, with 4 and 5 layers of parallax scrolling and screens full of bullets and enemies. Play a less demanding game like Technosofts Herzog Zwei and the only time you'll ever experience slowdown is when someone has a half dozen Jolly Rodgers filling the air with missiles, along with a barrage of tanks shooting along side them.
Bullshit.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
That shit doesn't happen with Thunder Force III, even with bosses that fill half of the screen. The music and graphics in TFIII are way toned down to what Lightning Force is doing. Lightning Force is more demanding than it's getting credit for.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barone
Trying to put the blame on Technosoft for the Genesis hardware's shortcomings is just a lame excuse.
There's no such thing as "the limits" with consoles. That's why poorly developed games prove nothing and the best examples we got are simply the best we've seen so far.
The difference between games which perform great and those that don't is all about management and design. Hardware like the SNES will always struggle to push a lot in traditional 2D games, but slowdown in MD and PCE games is often the results of quirks in the engine.
FX Unit Yuki has scenes with lots of of enemies, collision, dynamic tiles and misc, but runs full speed and fast. Yet the sparse tutorial stage still slows down in spots just because of the code (thanks in part to HuC) Dev kits can play a big role in the performance of a game project.
NEC Ave built the sprites in its Capcom ports the same way as the arcade versions. So the player sprite in Strider eats up 3/4 of the horizontal bandwidth instead of the small fraction it could be arranged to require instead. Pretty much any game with bad flicker is really just suffering from bad design.
Twice the number of layers of parallax can use half as much resources. You can't always just count something and compare it to something similar and be correct, yet you could still be right.
Thunder Force IV may very well do some things efficiently but not others. It could be sloppy all round under the hood or really streamlined and performing better than any other game.
We don't know. We're just observing the superficial end result, which is images and sound designed to trick our mind.
All we know for sure is that TFIV is technically impressive overall for a 16-bit console game and the aesthetics are great in their own right.