Mega Man 1 & Mega Man III (IBM PC)

[Da_Shocker]

Why is Probe always behind so many terrible ports?

[Bastardcat]

Why is Probe always behind so many terrible ports?

A question for the ages, if there ever was one. I've seen them do good games, which makes the fact that most everything they've made being utter crap sting that much more.

[evildragon]

The game isn't supposed to run that fast. You need a slower processor, like a 386 to run this at normal speed.

More like a 8086. I have this on my 8086 XT, and it plays normal speed..

[Bastardcat]

I can verify that it runs normal speed on a 286, because thats what my Tandy 1000 was, which is the computer I owned when I had these two games.

[eddiespruce]

I wonder, if you had a 386, and turned the turbo button off to cut the CPU speed in half, would it run at normal speed?

[A Black Falcon]

I remember it running at playable speed on our 20Mhz 386SX, without needing to disable the Turbo button...

[Baloo]

I think if the Amiga had....now loading....one major....now loading....flaw it was....now loading...the...now loading...load times. It really made me learn to appreciate my Tandy 1000's massive 10 megabyte hard drive.

The Tandy had it's fair share of loading too though, especially if you didn't have two 5.25 floppy disk drives...:/

[Da_Shocker]

Tandy uhm wasn't that Radio Shack's line of PC's?

[Bastardcat]

Yup. It was what I like call Almost IBM Compatible, as while the software worked just fine on it, some of the hardware was proprietary. I had a pretty nice one, two high density disk drives, both sizes, and a 10 meg hard drive. And the integrated sound blew away your standard PC-Speaker stuff.

[Waterfaller]

I remember we had a Tandy like AGES ago. I have fond memories of playing Ghostbusters, Pac-Man, or Dig Dug

[Bastardcat]

We got mine from my uncle. It came with Battlechess and Chuck Yeager's flight simulator. Landing the space shuttle on that game is one of my favorite gaming memories.

[evildragon]

Tandy 1000 was nothing more than a modified PCjr.

But it did have the same TI chip the Master System used. (sorta)

[Bastardcat]

It was great for what it was though. It was an affordable gaming PC for it's era.

[TheSonicRetard]

I had a CGA 8088... I remember looking at the other computer screenshots on the back of konami games and being amazed at how much better they looked. Obviously the Amiga screenshots looked the best, but even Tandy screenshots looked worlds better than my CGA 8088.

Seriously, I can never, ever call another gaming machine ugly, because this is what castlevania (the first one) is to me:

[kool kitty89]

Still better than the Amiga Street Fighter games.

Do you mean the mediocre SFII ports for the ST/Amiga/etc . . . or the truly horrible conversion of the original Street Fighter by Tiertex.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAQn0HUHZUc


Which, of course, spawned "Human Killing Machine"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zUkK14bHDk



US Gold's efforts are masterpieces by comparison. (especially since several examples of those -including SFII- were forced to be done without any cases to the original game code, data, or graphics available -they literally had to re-make the game by-hand by playing/observing the arcade game -all the graphics, animation, damage modeling, controls/combos, sound, etc)

Well, in this case the reverse problem happened. Shitty companies doing the PCE ports.
Shadow of the Beast PCE is pretty good though, considering it's a tech demo.

There's also the issue of PCE cards generally using small ROM sizes and the Super CD (and especially original PCECD) had less RAM to load into than the Amiga 500.

Shadow of the beast is pretty awful IMO. Great graphics at the time, an impressive soundtrack, but terrible gameplay. It's a huge game of trial and error, and in several games in the series, not killing an enemy fast enough early in the game will actually make the game impossible to finish.

The graphics are also limited in some areas . . . animation and sprite interaction is pretty sloppy at times. (the bizarre "enemies fall off screen" death animations come to mind)

Amiga's advanced hardware is actually what proved its undoing once games like Doom came out for the PC. Amiga developers' efforts to make Doom clones proved difficult. Most efforts used half of the screen and didn't run anywhere nearly as smooth. You didn't see a decent "Doom" for the Amiga until well after the source code was released.

The AGA arquitecture (Amiga 1200 or CD32) is pretty shitty hardware, that's the problem. It WASN'T advanced at all, it was a slight upgrade to 1985 hardware. It was bound to fail.

Even if AGA had beefed up the blitter and such, it wouldn't have helped much for Doom unless chunky pixels were supported (and the blitter was redesigned to take advantage of that -let alone add something like scaling support in hardware -or affine rendering for that matter -for scaling/roation/texture effects).

PCs had the advantage of using CPU grunt for everything (and, 8-bit chunky pixels with VGA), so games didn't have to be designed around the hardware's strengths and graphics favored software rendering. (a shame the ST didn't use chunky pixels -EGA posed a similar problem for PC games . . . though also had poor color compared with the ST)

So the real issue was lack of CPU resource to render a game like doom. (and for '020 based systems without FastRAM, you had that massive bottleneck too -ie the A1200 out of the box, or CD32 . . . though plain 68k systems were slower still)
And, remember, to run Doom at a decent quality and speed, you at least needed a fast 386 and a fast VGA/VGA card. (mid-speed 386s with ISA video cards would be more problematic . . . slow 386s -or 386SXs- would be worse -especially since SX boards tended to lack caches . . . otherwise an SX-33 or SX-40 might have been fairly decent)

I can verify that it runs normal speed on a 286, because thats what my Tandy 1000 was, which is the computer I owned when I had these two games.

I remember it running at playable speed on our 20Mhz 386SX, without needing to disable the Turbo button...

For running plain 16-bit x86 (8086/286) code, the 386 is actually slower at some things (clock for clock) than the 386 (and equal for many others), though the 8086 is far, far slower than either.
There's the issue of the caches on many 386 boards (and higher clock speeds), but many SX boards tended to lack caches and thus fared little better (or worse) than 286 boards running at similar clock speeds. (so a 286-16 might actually outpace a 386SX-16 -or the less common 286-20 vs SX-20 . . . or the rare 286-25)
I don't think any 286 boards featured caches either. (though that should have been a significant issue for the higher speed CPU grades -since you'd be suffering hefty wait states in DRAM)

That's also one of the interesting things about the 486: 16-bit code performance was boosted substantially with the new pipelined architecture. (while the per-clock 32-bit performance wasn't much better than the 386 by comparison -though there's the issue of caching too . . . but with that you also had the issue of fairly large external caches on 386 boards vs some cut-rate 486 boards with no external cache -actually that was also an issue comparing K6/6-2/3/+ CPUs with socket 370 Celeron/PIII chips -Super7 boards had large motherboard-mounted L2 -or L3- caches vs none on 370 boards . . . and were still notably cheaper than 370 boards)