Hardware pushed to the limits according to Sega-16 members

[TrekkiesUnite118]

VF2 by Sega Saturn with 60 fps can be considered an example?

Possibly, though it is only drawing the 2 fighters and the sides of the ring. The floors are done entirely with VDP2. And if I remember correctly the fighter models really aren't that high in the polygon count either. Dead or Alive, Last Bronx, and Fighter's Megamix I'd say were a tad more impressive just as they were doing a bit more.

[Tanooki]

Since it was mentioned in passing, I think that there are 3 3D games on the GBA that must be mentioned as they're insane in how much they pull off using entirely software rendering. Two engines though, one is the earliest form, and then the latest form of the same engine, the V3D one for GBA. V-Rally 3 came out around 2002 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqH8dg-urso This game is a full 3D title with the entire terrain you drive upon rendered in all polygons, in a very similar fashion to how Sega Rally Saturn pulls it off. It has the same unique defects too where near the corners of the screen the polygons will warp and bend a bit. The game has 2D in car view and other cars with a heap of angles to mask that, in car even has a pair of little hands and windshield cracking. The latter end of that engine was a 3rd or 4th revision by 2004 for Asterix and Obelix XXL -- the only 3rd person platforming adventure game (think Mario 64/Rayman 2 type play) and it does it surprisingly well with a camera that behaves pretty nicely. You have fairly large open areas with many structures.

The other engine out of Italy -- Blue Roses, this blows away the V3D to me. This one got a good run of little games out like Smashing Drive that namco racer, but the huge beast they put out with this was a FULL conversion of the PC game Wing Commander Prophecy. The between stage CGI is gone for pop up text/stills, but that aside, you have every single 3D flight combat stage of the PC title intact. There's usually a good bit of stuff going on screen, the polygons are more stable, they don't warp much or tear, and there's plenty of detail even down to flickering bubbles around enemy targets as you cook off their shields with your guns or missiles with a nice smoky con-trail behind. Pretty chatty game too with lots of vocal samples in flight. Tiny objects, huge ones, they're all there, even fly into/through your ships hangar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmRBzp-pk78 I still own this one, have finished it (same with V-Rally, had Asterix but sold it.)

They look less nice blown up and/or recorded with screwball software youtube people mess with, but on a legit Nintendo device these look insane.

[Sik]

The latter end of that engine was a 3rd or 4th revision by 2004 for Asterix and Obelix XXL -- the only 3rd person platforming adventure game (think Mario 64/Rayman 2 type play) and it does it surprisingly well with a camera that behaves pretty nicely. You have fairly large open areas with many structures.

Skip to 0:32

Possibly, though it is only drawing the 2 fighters and the sides of the ring. The floors are done entirely with VDP2. And if I remember correctly the fighter models really aren't that high in the polygon count either. Dead or Alive, Last Bronx, and Fighter's Megamix I'd say were a tad more impressive just as they were doing a bit more.

Virtua Fighter 2 ran in high resolution which was unusual at the time on any console.

[Blades]

Anyone remember this game? Blew me away back then.



Also this.

[Folco]

^ Top Gear Rally for GBA is probably the best game that used that Tantalus engine.
It was even published by Nintendo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd0f83wODqg

Possibly, though it is only drawing the 2 fighters and the sides of the ring. The floors are done entirely with VDP2. And if I remember correctly the fighter models really aren't that high in the polygon count either. Dead or Alive, Last Bronx, and Fighter's Megamix I'd say were a tad more impressive just as they were doing a bit more.

Dead or Alive was a perfected VF2 graphics wise (but sans dynamic shadows).
Fighters Megamix had some advanced shading (gouraud shading) and 3D cages but at lower res and usually with less polygons per characters.

I loved these games, and quite a few others. Despite the GBC only getting a good 3-4 years on the market due to GBA popping up in mid 2001, it did some stunning work one would never have figured the old GB hardware could handle just having the CPU and ram essentially doubled on it. This thing kept me busy on all my breaks in college.

Wacky Races by VD Dev (the guys behind V-Rally 3 on GBA) is also impressive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNedYpA7BRg

Race Drivin on the original Game Boy (polygonal game developed by Argonaut):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azo_kw1ZfZ4

One Piece Swan Colosseum for WonderSwan, it's a fighting game developed by Dimps.
Not only it has very colorful graphics, animated background, some good music (for the system) and clever controls scheme (more Smash Bros than Street Fighter 2 and if you know WonderSwan you know that's a good thing) but the sprites animations are jaw dropping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdGIhXqIEng

[Folco]

COP The recruit is by far the most technical impressive game on Nintendo DS.
It uses an aggressive LOD but an open world game like this was unthinkable on Nintendo little handheld:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYDJBY3p3TM

Often as the best looking games on N64 are cited games by Nintendo or Rare but I do believe that third party did some of the most impressive work on the system.

World Driver Championship:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBUhDrnVvdg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYMhodXW6oo

Shadow Man:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aMRg73t3G4

[Soulis]

Atari 2600 - Pitfall 2

NES - Mr Gimmick!

Master System - Land of Illusion

Genesis - Vectorman

SNES - Yoshi's Island

PS1 - Quake 2

Saturn - Quake

N64 - World Driver Championship

GBA - Payback

NDS - Cop The Recruit

DC - Test Drive Le Mans

PS2 - Shadow of the Colossus

GC - Metroid Prime

XBOX - Chronicles of Riddick

PS3/360 - GTAV

[Gogogadget]

Gimmick! is not only a technical showcase, but also a really fun game.

[segarule]

Master System - Land of Illusion

I dont think that LoI pushed the hardware to limits. It have the same engine of Castle of Illusion with enhancements. But CoI had 256 KB and LoI had 512 ! So you can make a lot of features with this amount of memory.

[Robotwo]

While it might've not been perhaps "pushing" by most definitions.
Aladdin on the Master System did an amazing job with its parallax, even going as far as to having animated sides of the buildings, changing perspective as you move along.

This was only used in the first two levels though, skip along to 1:20.

[NekoNiaow]

Oki, forgive me for the long reply but I have been watching this thread the past week and am only able to post now.

Jim Power on the Amiga is positively crazy. 3 overlapping layers of parallax scrolling (+ linescrolling on top), 50 fps, full 320x256 resolution, transparent UI, music + sound effects. I can count on my fingers the number of amiga games that have even 1 of these things, much less all of them!

The game is essentially built around Amiga hardware limitations. It's a technical showoff with a game on top.

[...]
One game that looks entirely unimpressive but is actually insanely optimized is Flimbo's Quest. Despite being one of the ugliest Amiga games it is doing brute force full color parallax scrolling at 50 fps. It's even more impressive when you consider that the game runs in 32 color mode which has a large performance hit (1 extra blit per sprite and tile plus a performance hit to the CPU and Blitter). If you switch to 64 color mode the extra hit in performance to the CPU is enough to make the game go haywire.

All that effort was unfortunately wasted in some of the most ugly artwork imaginable. The game looks like it has 5 colours at best. So weird.

Jim Power is indeed very impressive considering how few DMA cycles the dual playfield (6 bitplanes) leaves available and how many of them are then eaten by the creation of the third background layer with racing-the-beam-Copper-positioned-sprites. There are barely any DMA slots left for the CPU except during the vertical blanking interval.

Note that I would not really call it a game, the gameplay is so horrendously difficult, finicky and fast paced that the game is unplayable. It really is a tech demo, masqueraded as a game.

And yup, Flimbo's Quest is a complete mystery. Why go to the trouble of making such a technical achievement while hiding it behind a horribly unremarkable color scheme which looks like it comes straight from the Atari ST? They probably hired the wrong artist I guess...

Btw this is a typical Amiga game, just as a point of comparison: [...]

The Amiga has a huge game library compared to the 8&16 bit consoles so there are bound to be many crappy games. This said, there are many good games so I would not say that this one is very typical. It is clear though that most Arcade and console ports totally suck rabid kangaroos on the Amiga (thanks US Gold/Tiertex for that).

The Amiga really is such a shame, a computer that in the right hands is capable of doing so much but almost no developers ever took advantage of anything it could do.

I kind of agree but there are many very good games still. Of course console games are usually more polished and playable but still the system is not without merits.
This said, regarding under-exploited machine, I agree, but this is a fixable issue.

It doesn't say anywhere that PC games are beyond the scope of this thread, so games that come to mind for me are Bioforge and Ultima 9. They pushed the limits of PC hardware at the time, and I had to upgrade my PC when each of those games was released, only to find that I could only just play them. Origin seemed to have a habit of making games that were out of reach to many PC users.

Wouldn't this indicate on the contrary that they were not pushing the limits of the hardware? I would think that keeping things smooth and fluid even on low end hardware would be what one calls pushing the limits. Overflowing a machine is actually a very easy thing to do.

Shadow of the Beast had a few areas that had 3 overlapping layers of parallax scrolling, along with line scrolling of the clouds. It was also able to maintain all of its music, along with the sound effects.

Agony isn't displayed at a full 320x256, but it is still pretty impressive. It manages to maintain all of the sound effects, along with the music. It also has some nice parallax scrolling.

The Amiga also had some impressive 3rd person shooters, that could be played on the Amiga 500.

Agony also has three layers of parallax: two provided by the dual playfield mode (3 bitplanes each), and one faked by scrolling one of the bitplanes of the background layer through blitter brute force and reducing the color palette of said layer. This is why the "center" layer has only 3 colors instead of 7, while the background layer has only two.

Note that SOTB, Jim Power and Agony have in common that they are very pretty and technically impressive but are completely lacking in the gameplay department.

[...]
However reading the Shadow of the Beast manual I found many interesting things. Maximum colors on the screen is 128 in the game. That is impressive right there which is quadruple that of the 32 advertised by Amiga hardware and double that of the 64 colors of the halfbrite mode. So how that is done is unknown, perhaps done with the copper chip using it's fancy raster tricks between frames for the background. Then we have the 220x150 maximum sprite size which is impressive, and the Blitter function is probably the reason for this impressive feat. Then we have 13 layers of scrolling, not sure if this is specific to that of purely parallax, or including playfield layer.

Now one I thought people would list was Lionheart, which has probably the most impressive use of color on the Amiga OCS.

Shadow of the Beast (and most Amiga games not coded by Tiertex/Probe/ICE/US Gold) does indeed use the copper, both to modify the CLUT on a scanline basis and to scroll the parallax horizontal slices. The thirteen layers of scrolling are the horizontal slices.
Regarding sprites, note that putting all 8 hardware sprites next to one another horizontally, allows for 128xunlimited sprite size. The tree in the Attract Mode is actually such a big sprite.

The Dual Playfield mode of the Amiga also has the advantage to simplify blitting as there is no need to pre-save background when blitting over a part of the layer which is fully transparent. This allows for bigger BOBs (Blitter OBjects in Amiga parlance) than in regular one-layer modes.

Yeah the 128 colour stuff is just bullshit. SotB is 1+7+7+15 colours (back colour, background, foreground, sprites). It then changes those colours a bunch of times in the forest area to make it a lot more colourful. Lionheart does the same except the 15 colours are just for the main character and the other colours are changed way more often, to the point of being a bit rainbow puke in the first level.

Technically there really are 128 colors displayed on screen. The fact that the number of used CLUT entries is 15 for the playfields does not limit the number of onscreen colors since they can (and are) changed on the fly. To be precise, one could say that the game displays 128 colors while only using 15 (planes) + 15 (sprites) CLUT entries.

And yes, the Copper is responsible for changing the palette on the fly. Nifty little piece of silicon that it is.

If any of you are interested, there are a few technical dissections of Amiga games on CodeTapper's website: http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/, Shadow of the Beast, Jim Power, Agony, and a few others have a few of their secrets exposed to the open there and I must say I wish there were similar articles for the MegaDrive.

[gamevet]

CBS Electronics did some pretty interesting things with the Atari 2600. Mountain King had additional memory on the cart, allowing the game to have better graphics and sound. Omega Race came with a pilot controller that you slipped over your joystick.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Virtua Fighter 2 ran in high resolution which was unusual at the time on any console.

While that is nice, I don't see why that's seen as pushing it to the limit. Other than Resolution and Framerate it's not really doing that much more. It's not pushing tons of polygons, it's not doing any kind of lighting or transparency effects. It's a very nice looking game, but I wouldn't really consider it pushing the system to it's limits the way games like say Burning Rangers, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Quake, etc. do.

Dead or Alive was a perfected VF2 graphics wise (but sans dynamic shadows).
Fighters Megamix had some advanced shading (gouraud shading) and 3D cages but at lower res and usually with less polygons per characters.

Yes, and I'd say they're more impressive because they're all doing a little more. Dead or Alive has better handled backgrounds that are in sync with the camera better. There's explosions and the character models seem to be a bit more detailed at times. Fighter's Megamix is drawing a lot more scenery with walls and what not while also doing lighting. And then we have Last Bronx. We have 3D walls, characters with weapons, exceptional VDP2 plane use, and the 2D backgrounds are in almost perfect sync with the camera movements which really does a good job at faking the 3D background elements. And it does that at 60fps in high res mode:



And again, I'm still not sure I'd say that's pushing the system to it's limits as a lot of the work there is being done by VDP2 background layers.

[zetastrike]

CBS Electronics did some pretty interesting things with the Atari 2600. Mountain King had additional memory on the cart, allowing the game to have better graphics and sound. Omega Race came with a pilot controller that you slipped over your joystick.

Mountain King is a really clever game. I have it on the 2600 and A8bit. How come it never gets brought up in "who invented scrolling platformers" arguments? You run, jump, climb ladders, and the screen scrolls horizontally and vertically.

[gamevet]

Mountain King is a really clever game. I have it on the 2600 and A8bit. How come it never gets brought up in "who invented scrolling platformers" arguments? You run, jump, climb ladders, and the screen scrolls horizontally and vertically.

I brought it up in another thread on this board. I think that it was the first side scrolling platformer.

Here it is.

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...l=1#post753369