Anyone care to comment in-depth on the PC-FX hardware design?

[nodtveidt]

It's a background layer. The KING BG layers are able to rotate. Sprites are usually handled by the two 7up chips, though apparently some games utilize KING to generate sprites too. But any large-scale rotation on the PC-FX is probably gonna be a KING layer. I don't know about scaling though... might be pre-rendered or raster trickery. I don't see anything about scaling in the 6272 documentation, but there is tons of information on the 6261's various registers and ability to affect layers individually.

However, I don't think it's cool to come in here and ask about the PC-FX while trying to pimp the Saturn. That's just bad form. The Saturn is a bitch to code for and, like the PC-FX, its full potential was never taken advantage of. Just because a system has X feature, doesn't mean X feature was ever used. Wanna see an underwhelming performance in a console? Look no further than the Jaguar. Like the Saturn, that thing's a frankenconsole that was never fully exploited because it was too complicated. Having multiple processors looks great on paper, but when they don't work well together, or when they're a bitch to code for... it leads to lazy coding and underused features. The Saturn is plagued with this. The PC-FX was never fully utilized because its commercial lifespan was too short. With PC-FX homebrew about to take off, I can guarantee you that it will now be fully exploited, but by us independents, not by seedy marketing teams anxious to get out the next softcore hentai comic. It can only get better. The Saturn, however, will always be crippled by its overcomplicated hardware.

[nat]

Yeah, at first it seemed like you were genuinely curious but it now seems more like a passive attempt at trolling. No offense, BTW, if this is not your intent.

It's really easy to provide loads of examples from a console that had hundreds of games (or whatever) vs. a console that had a little shy of 100. Some might argue that a console is only as good as its games and whatever cool tricks they might exploit, but that wasn't the original question, was it?

[Arkhan]

Even so, I can't think of any Saturn games that trump the PC-FX's 2D graphics.  The hand drawn stuff on the PC-FX is pretty legendary if you ask me.

also, Can Can Bunny is a fine example of why the PSG was a great choice.  In the sea of changing music where everything went lolmidi, the PC-FX stayed true to the chirpy music.

Even if the thing wasn't a huge success, it is by far the most charming console of that era. 

Maybe since these tools are coming out, we can pump out some games for it and make the library even better, lol...

that would be hilarious.  Aetherbyte and Frozen Utopia can belt out a handful of shooters and be like "\o/"

[nat]

Also, one other thought about the 3D. While it's no question the console's lack of real-time 3D rendering ultimately did it in, in hindsight, I think it was a grand decision. There isn't a single 32-bit 3D game that doesn't look like utter shit in 2011. On the other hand, nearly all PC-FX games hold up extremely well these days.

Look at Team Innocent. They were forced to pre-render the 3D and it looks a million times better than any of the real-time polygon-rendered stuff on the competing consoles.

[Arkhan]

Team Innocent is one of the best games from that entire era to be honest.  There needed to be more games just like it, on any systems.

and yeah its nice the PCFX is all beautiful hand drawn/prerendered stuff.  no muddy 3D crap

[SignOfZeta]

I think the real answer to this question is "we'll never know". When it came to software something just...fell apart. Nothing really got made. Usually even a lame system has...something, often times a launch title, but its like NEC just couldn't seem to convince any developers to do jack with this box. There really aren't more than a very small selection of decent titles for this system and even the ones that are respectable, like Zenki and Zeroyger are pretty bush league considering the state of 2D in 1994-1997. No developer was able to find the time and money to max out the FX when it was current, and no home brew guy is ever going to do it so...we'll never know.

There are 100 or so games, but really that's quite a lot. The Neo Geo only has 157 games and it did a lot in those 157 games. The main reason for this was that they were all designed as arcade releases first, often times in arcades owned by SNK. Because of this anything you made WOULD get noticed. If you made the game good enough it would earn its money. The home cart release would then just be additional profit.

The same is the case with Cotton, Astra Super Stars, and many of the Saturn's best games. Marvel Super Heroes versus Street Fighter (one of the systems most technically impressive games, IMO) already made its money as an arcade release before it came to Saturn. Capcom knew it would, which is why they put their best people on it and didn't skimp on the budget. The same is true of Astra Superstars and Cotton 2, which were STV games.

When you go to make a game for a system few people even own...its hard to justify spending a lot of money on it since nobody will even see the thing except for its tiny captive audience. A top tier developer could have made something really great with the FX, but even the best accountants in the world couldn't keep you from losing money on the project.

Maybe if the Saturn didn't turn out to be such a popular 2D machine (which was not the original intention) then the FX could have owned that territory.

[SamIAm]

Perhaps I got carried away. It's not especially about the Saturn, though; I would have made the same arguments about the PSX if that had been brought up first instead. I'm not out to prove that one is more powerful, exactly, but if we're talking about specific functionalities and two systems are fairly close, I don't see anything wrong with bringing up examples.

I'm a Saturn fan, it's true, but I'm also the first person who would say how much slower it is at 3D rendering than the PSX, and how its VDP1 can't actually do polygon-on-polygon transparencies reliably without glitching - something I learned in a Saturn forum not unlike this one.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that. It's interesting to know that the PC-FX can rotate background planes and potentially sprites in hardware. Honestly, thanks. 

[nodtveidt]

and no home brew guy is ever going to do it

I'll make you eat those words.

[SignOfZeta]

and no home brew guy is ever going to do it

I'll make you eat those words.

I hope you do. I really hope you do.

But you won't.

[Arkhan]

If I ever get something going on the PC-FX, it will be something a f*cking NES wouldn't even have problems doing.

It'd just look prettier and sound nicer. 

[nodtveidt]

But you won't.

In that case, I'll make you choke on them.

[Necromancer]

... not by seedy marketing teams anxious to get out the next softcore hentai comic.

Damn right - bring on the hardcore hentai comics!

I hope you do. I really hope you do.

But you won't.

Mr. Positivity strikes again!

[SignOfZeta]

Mr. Positivity strikes again!

Do you actually think its possible for a homebrew developer to fully exploit the FX? When the system was current, had tens of  thousands of paying customers, and real pro dev teams working on it we got nearly nothing. We very rarely, two or three cases, even saw something as good as a high-end PC Engine game. Where is the funding and skill going to come from to make a full on FX game? Shit, how many full on PCE homebrew games have we seen? It looks like we will have one pretty soon.

I appreciate the homebrew scene, believe me, but a well made FX game that shows us what the system can really do seems like the most extremely remote of possibilities, at least until the dev tools get AMAZINGLY powerful, as in, so powerful even an idiot like me could make a game.

Maybe The Old Rover will just blow us all away with a NG Dev Team style release, but I just don't see it as being realistic. Even NG Dev Team has to charge hundreds of dollars for their MVS games (which are encrypted to hell and back) and also go multi-platform to make ends meet.

[nodtveidt]

Most homebrewers do it in their spare time, but we don't have the looming deadlines and marketing departments to answer to.

The PCE has been a real nightmare to work with. In order to get the most out of it, you have to have a deep understanding of assembly language. For us regular C coders, we have... HuC. And HuC is a mess... it's lacking in so many ways. Frozen Utopia has literally pushed HuC past its breaking point and not even come close to fully exploiting the PCE.

The PC-FX, on the other hand, is a completely different story. The toolchain is built using gcc as a base, with standard binutils, working in a Unix environment. Official tools for it were leaked out long ago, many of which can be used now. The compiler is efficient and generates very good code, unlike HuC which generates tons of bloat (macro soup = a bad time is had by all). trap15 and I are working on high-level functions for liberis to make it even more powerful (he's on SCSI, I'm on 7up), and when we get the M-JPEG encoder working, we can fully exploit the RAINBOW chip. The rest of the hardware was figured out and exposed long ago. The rest is up to the design prowess of the software developers. I can hire talent to create content, and my own coding skill is more than adequate. Furthermore, Charles MacDonald has also expressed interest in developing for the PC-FX. His skill with code and hardware hacking is legendary.

Again, the PC-FX was never fully exploited during its commercial days for two main reasons: 1, the system did not have enough market time for developers to really dig deep, and 2, the industry was already well into the "marketing team rules" phase, meaning that designers were at the mercy of the almighty yen. The first issue only applies to those of us who are still relatively new to the system; the second detail will never apply so it's not a roadblock.

So yeah... I think it's totally possible for a homebrew developer to fully exploit the PC-FX. But then again, how many consoles were truly "fully exploited" in the past? And how do you really define "fully exploited"? Some people look to Dracula X as an example on the PCE... but there's a few things I would have done differently that would have made it even better (mainly in the data loading scheme... it's really poor here).

[Necromancer]

Do you actually think its possible for a homebrew developer to fully exploit the FX?

Yes, at least as tech. demos (look at the impressive things done on the PCE and SGX), though how many and how consistently those things will filter over to real games is questionable.