Let's Compare ( Road Rash )

[Kamahl]

Tomaitheous can only be joking when he says the SNES can easily mix realtime vertical scaling. Sure, it's about as hard for the SNES as it is for the genesis (unlike horizontally), but you still need to put up with the shit CPU. You have to load the horizontally pre-scaled sprite into ram, redraw it by either taking out a line or adding one (every line beneath that one will have to be moved), and then send this into VRAM. Do this for every sprite.

The SNES can barely do mode-7 hills without dropping frames, and you want it to do sprite scaling?

Oh and sprite tucking? Let's enjoy NES level flickering now too.

[Nitroman]

If Gameboy Color can handle a decent RR conversion, why SNES wouldn't?

A half-arsed port is doable too, I see it like this.

[midnightrider]

I don't think anyone said it couldn't happen, it just wouldn't be an exact match to what the Genesis version is. Like the way that Game Boy game isn't either.

By the way, what exactly is prescaling? Is it like instead of animating a growing/shrinking effect, it just replaces the image with a larger/smaller one each frame, to make it look like scaling?

[zetastrike]

Does the Sega CD version of RR make any use of the SCD in-game? Does it not even use the extra 68000 or the Ricoh?

[tomaitheous]

Tomaitheous can only be joking when he says the SNES can easily mix realtime vertical scaling. Sure, it's about as hard for the SNES as it is for the genesis (unlike horizontally), but you still need to put up with the shit CPU. You have to load the horizontally pre-scaled sprite into ram, redraw it by either taking out a line or adding one (every line beneath that one will have to be moved), and then send this into VRAM. Do this for every sprite.

The SNES can barely do mode-7 hills without dropping frames, and you want it to do sprite scaling?

Oh and sprite tucking? Let's enjoy NES level flickering now too.

[Kamahl]

I'm fully aware you could probably pull it off at decent speed, but lets be realistic here. Even Genesis Road Rash should run much better than it does. A lot of devs back then weren't that good.

[tryphon]

The PCE has no co-processors.

I meant GPU, sorry for not having been clear.
I don't know very much PCE, but it seems to me that when it was released, its GPU was much more impressive than its CPU (and in many ways better than MD VDP).

[Segadream]

I really like the Road rash series.
My least faves were on PS1.
My first was the Genesis and I only played the first one.
My all time favorite one is on the N64.
That game is all around fun as hell.
Four players is a small window but if you have the right players it can outshine that
without a doubt.
The music is great, the sound effects are funny as shit, and the physics are awesome.
I give it the Crown untill they make a better one.

[tomaitheous]

I'm fully aware you could probably pull it off at decent speed, but lets be realistic here. Even Genesis Road Rash should run much better than it does. A lot of devs back then weren't that good.

It's not even in respect to that. It's more of a high level optimization than low level.

You're not going to induce NES level of flickering, or anything like that. Because that's not how you would apply sprite tucking for something like this. The frames are already prescaled into whatever intervals. The frame that exists in between A and B, would be frame B with tucking. Look at how the game purposely moves large object away from the view point as it gets closer, no matter how close you are to the road. Only a few type of objects are drawn near the bottom; stuff like sign posts, that would normally be close to the edge of the road. So larger objects at a closer range, are out of view anyway. And this is horizontal tucking only (not vertical, which would hit that sprite cell limit faster); sprite setup as 8x8 and 16x16 mode is perfect for this.

I don't know how doing a line skip for coping prescaled sprites is processing intensive, compared to the Genesis doing full on scaline of X and Y. Again, this is line skipping (not expanding). There's not need to line duplicate, because your prescaled frames are setup to be scaled with an aspect ration of being tall/skinny without modification. So you skips the lines needed for it to appear normal, then skip less lines as you re-copy it into work ram - until the point where the next frame would be the X step in scaling up, at which point that frame copied with most lines skipped in order to appear correct. So you get a non uniform X/Y scale of the sprite. You might have to be a bit clever because large sprites are still just 8x8 tiles, but nothing batshite insane IMO - and the SNES tiles are composite, meaning leaving Acc in 16bit more copies a 'line' at a time (you don't have to skip line skip on all four planes. Which should be much faster than the MD doing X/Y scaling). A euro coder make the original RR; finding a capable euro snes coder shouldn't have been that difficult.

[Gogogadget]

I really like the Road rash series.
My least faves were on PS1.
My first was the Genesis and I only played the first one.
My all time favorite one is on the N64.
That game is all around fun as hell.
Four players is a small window but if you have the right players it can outshine that
without a doubt.
The music is great, the sound effects are funny as shit, and the physics are awesome.
I give it the Crown untill they make a better one.

Check out Road Redemption

[Kamahl]

I forgot the SNES can actually use 8x8 sprites without quickly burning through the scanline limit. So yeah tucking would probably work.
I also didn't think of doing that to copy a whole line at a time (instead of 'four' copies per line).

But I still think you're overestimating the SNES CPU. Any game with more than 5 things moving onscreen makes the thing cry in pain (read: slowdown), unless it was done by Manfred Trenz or the Factor 5 folk.

Manfred Trenz could probably have done Road Rash on the SNES.

[LinkueiBR]

I forgot the SNES can actually use 8x8 sprites without quickly burning through the scanline limit. So yeah tucking would probably work.
I also didn't think of doing that to copy a whole line at a time (instead of 'four' copies per line).

But I still think you're overestimating the SNES CPU. Any game with more than 5 things moving onscreen makes the thing cry in pain (read: slowdown), unless it was done by Manfred Trenz or the Factor 5 folk.

Manfred Trenz could probably have done Road Rash on the SNES.

I confirm this, Manfred Trenz could do!!!

[Azathoth]

The Genesis version uses real time scaling for objects (tree, houses or whatever aside the road) and the road calculation and relief is far more impressive in this version.

As much as I've played Road Rash over the years I never once realized that it used real scaling, I always assumed it just faked it (rather well) like every other driving game for SMS/MD. In fact, when you mentioned this I thought for sure you had to be mistaken, so I popped RR1 in and sure enough it uses real time scaling for those objects. I wonder if there a technical reason why EA chose to not use the hardware scaling on the SCD version and instead kept with their previous techniques? Or can that be attributed to it being just a quick and dirty cash-in using washed out digitized graphics from the 3DO version?

Don't you get tired to listening to the same vocalized songs from early 90 grunge scene over and over and over?

Does the 3DO version actually play the licensed music while racing like the SCD version does, or does it have that horrible elevator music like the Playstation one does?

[ComradeOj]

As much as I've played Road Rash over the years I never once realized that it used real scaling, I always assumed it just faked it (rather well) like every other driving game for SMS/MD. In fact, when you mentioned this I thought for sure you had to be mistaken, so I popped RR1 in and sure enough it uses real time scaling for those objects. I wonder if there a technical reason why EA chose to not use the hardware scaling on the SCD version and instead kept with their previous techniques? Or can that be attributed to it being just a quick and dirty cash-in using washed out digitized graphics from the 3DO version?

You probably right. They just wanted a quick port. I have heard that SEGA CD's hardware scaling was tricky to use, but I can't find the source right now. They probably just used the software scaling algorithm from the genesis and dumped it over to the SEGA CD.

[Hans-CD]

Does the 3DO version actually play the licensed music while racing like the SCD version does, or does it have that horrible elevator music like the Playstation one does?

Sadly, as a big 3DO fan, i can attest that in game there's only those midi tracks available:\ . A shame, because it could have been great.