Ranger X: The Official Debate Thread

[GUTS]

Yeah but when you actually play Silpheed it's obvious they're not pre-rendered, they look totally out of place on the backgrounds.  It's pretty easy to spot if you fire the game up again, I don't see how you could mistake them for pre-rendered sprites since they move all jerky and shit like polygons did in old games.

[Black Tiger]

And whats with the dissing of Altered Beast? I think it's a perfectly good conversion, on all systems.

As to be expected, my comments about Altered Beast are the definitive ones.  So CLICK HERE to read my reviews on ALL versions of Altered Beast.  That's right I review them all: Arcade, Genesis, Sega Master System, NES (Famicom), PC Engine (Both HuCard and CD-ROM), GameBoy Advance, and even the PS2 version.  Click and read NOW!

That's a cool rundown of the series, other than all the PC Engine bashing.

The Sega Master System version actually gains a lot with FM sound-
http://www.superpcenginegrafx.com/alteredbeastsmsfm.mp3


Anybody know of a sound test code for this game?

I've always thought that the NES version is really an aborted Gameboy color port. That would explain pretty much everything about the visuals.

The way I see it...the PCE port of ALtered Beast is terrible. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the Genesis port buries the PCE port many times over. I've actually played through and beaten the Genesis port, yet I couldn't even get through the first level of the PCE port due to the terribly shitty controls and haphazard coldet that rivals Impossamole. However, it's almost a moot point as far as I'm concerned...a crap port of a rather lackluster and dull game isn't really going to scar my experience...but someone still has some serious explaining to do for the exceptionally shitty port of Golden Axe to the PCE.

I don't even really consider it a port, since they never attempted to bring across ANY of the ingame graphics.

I'm still surprised at how bland all the home versions of Altered Beast look, considering how colorful they are. The PCE version has as much onscreen color of any game I've tested, on par wit LOXII's boss fights.

What's weird about the PCE CD ports of AB & GA, is one is all game with no CD justification and the other is all CD bells and whistles with no real game.

Now if they were going to use pre-rendered sprites in Silpheed for the player ship, enemies, and bosses, why wouldn't they make them more impressive looking?  They are obviously the same polygon ships that you see on the option screen, I doubt that somebody said "hey I know everything is pre-rendered, but lets code some polygons in here so people can rotate them for no reason!".  It's just common sense that they're polygons.

The reason that they might make simple 3D prerendered sprites in a game like Silpheed is the same reason why they did in so many other 16-bit games like Sapphire. Developers thought that it was impressive to gamers.

Hell, NEC thought that the PC-FX was better off prerendering all 3D going into the 32-bit generation.

As for how could they make the options mode models realtime and the sprites prerendered, I imagine that it'd be a lot easier for the Sega-CD to render them one at a time instead of a screen-full at a time.

And the one thing we do know for sure, is how much Game Arts invested into doing prerendered polygon visuals that were supposed to look like the real deal in Silpheed.

Plus we know how crazy developers are when it comes to doing stuff like this. Like adding a chip to Megaman X(?) just for a single wireframe enemy or Final Fantasy VII mixing a bunch of fmv with it's system generated models and still using the PSX models in full fmv sequences.

I'm not saying that I know for sure either way, in fact before your recent posts I had always assumed  that they were definately prerendered, but now entertain the possibility that they might be realtime.

But there are plently of reasons to explain any scenario. I'm going to fire up the game for the first time in years to take a look for myself now.

One giveaway that they're realtime is if each "sprite" has a unique shape, since they would all turn out different in each frame.

__________________

"I'm not gay, really!"

[malducci]

Why didn't they sabatoge all their SNES and NES games then?

 Hudson was Nintendo's very first 3rd party license when they decided to license out for 3rd partys developers - Nintendo didn't originally allow this. Hudson and Nintendo have had a very close relationship. I think this is why you see a different style of games - they weren't directly competing with Nintendo regardless of PCE's popularity. SFC received a number of ports and games related to existing titles on the PCE CD platform including Emerald Dragon as well as Hudsons own Adventure Island. I suspect Hudson was careful about how they marketed there CD system in competition to the SFC. While Sega was directly competing with Nintendo and it was very rare to see the same license game on both systems in Japan (SFC/MD).


 As far as Silpheed enemies being pre-rendered or real-time polygons - what's so hard about believing Sega would try to make seem like it's pushing those polygons? I mean hell, the background is pre-rendered video stream to make it look like real polygons and Sega cleverly didn't say it wasn't? Look at "Blast processing" ad campaign. The Sega-CD's second CPU wasn't rendering those polygons because it was busy streaming the video. So that means the slower main CPU would have to do all the work.

 I'll take a look at the savestate from the game to see if I could locate the pre-rendered frames (assuming they're not compressed or in 2bit or 3bit mode), if people are really that interested.


 Oh yeah - telenet/lasersoft really are crappy programmers - or atleast they're early inhouse teams were.

Edit: I took a quick look at Silpheed - all the enemy groups of the same polygons design share the same animation and path - if the game is using polygons it's more likely the first enemy polygon is rendered and the following group of same enemies are the prerendered frames of the first.

[Joe Redifer]

Someone needs to rip the "sprites" for Silpheed.  Us talking about it won't prove anything.  

As for Altered Beast's FM sound, I think I prefer the PSG.  The SMS FM sounds have always sounded... wrong.  The drums are always way too loud over every other instrument, and the rest of the music sounds very muted.

[Black Tiger]

Someone needs to rip the "sprites" for Silpheed.  Us talking about it won't prove anything.  

As for Altered Beast's FM sound, I think I prefer the PSG.  The SMS FM sounds have always sounded... wrong.  The drums are always way too loud over every other instrument, and the rest of the music sounds very muted.

I thought that the fm sfx were pretty cool. Usually I do prefer the PSG music for SMS games, but am also biased from playing them that way for a couple decades. It's cool to have alternate versions though.

The first time I heard Phantasy Star's fm sound, in the Saturn collection, I hated it and thought that the fm module only ruined games. It took getting a Mark III SMS and playing a few games on real hardware to make me appreciate good Mark III fm. But most games seem to only tack on fm support and don't sound as good.

[Joe Redifer]

You should record a few side-by-side comparisons for a few SMS games to be presented on your site or something.  I wish there was an FM module that would attach to the expansion slot of a US SMS.  I wonder why they didn't support it in the Genesis/Mega Drive hardware.  It would have been fairly trivial I would think.

The voices in Altered Beast sound the same in FM and PSG.  I assume the PSG does all of the voices anyway.

[Black Tiger]

You should record a few side-by-side comparisons for a few SMS games to be presented on your site or something.  I wish there was an FM module that would attach to the expansion slot of a US SMS.  I wonder why they didn't support it in the Genesis/Mega Drive hardware.  It would have been fairly trivial I would think.

The voices in Altered Beast sound the same in FM and PSG.  I assume the PSG does all of the voices anyway.

When the games allow either uniterupted play or a sound test, I plan on recording every SMS soundtrack I love. The 2 most likely candidates to get their PSG soundtracks recorded first are Ys and Miracle Warriors, since I've already got the FM versions up and they're also my favorite PSG soundtracks.

Miracle Warriors will be the best FM vs PSG game, since it has the best examples of both in my opinion.

I've had R-Type's FM soundtrack ready to go for a while now, but haven't gotten around to branding and tagging it. Since you reminded me, I'm going to try to get it done tonight. It'll be the first non-Genesis "PCE Audio Deathmatch" contestant... as soon as I decide how I'm going to record the PCE version(real hardware is officially out of the question now).  

[malducci]

Hey Joe, I did a little research and you were right - the Genesis can set a seperate scroll speed for every 8 pixel column across the screen.

 On another note - The offical sega document states that there are only 6 FM channels and 1 LFO distortion channel

 

Code: [Select]



The Yamaha 2612 Frequency Modulation (FM) sound synthesis IC resembles the Yamaha 2151 (used in Sega's coin-op machines) and the chips used in Yamaha's synthesizers.

 

 It's capabilities include:

 

--  6 channels of FM sound

--  An 8-bit Digitized Audio channel (as replacement for one of the

         FM channels) -- Stereo output capability

--  One LFO(low frequency oscillator) to distort the FM sounds

--  2 timers. for use by software

 

     To define these terms more carefully; an FM channel is capable of expressing, with a high degree of realism, a single note in almost any instrument's voice. Chords are generally created by using multiple FM channels.

 

     The standard FM channels each have a single overall frequency and data for how to turn this frequency into the complex final wave form (the voice).  This conversion process uses four dedicated channel components called 'operators', each possessing a frequency (a variant of the overall frequency), an envelope, and the capability to modulate its input using the frequency and envelope.  The operator frequencies are offsets of integral multiples of the overall frequency.

 

     There are two sets of three FM channels, named channels 1 to 3 and 4 to 6 respectively. Channels 3 and 6, the last in each set, have the capability to use a totally separate frequency for each operator rather than offsets of integral multiples.  This works well (l believe) for percussion instruments, which have harmonics at odd multiples such as 1.4 or 1.7 of the fundamental.

 

     The 8-bit Digitized Audio exists as a replacement of FM channel 6, meaning that turning on the DAC turns off FM channel 6.  Unfortunately, all timing must be done by software -- meaning that unless the software has been very cleverly constructed, it is impossible to use any of the FH channels at the same time as the DAC.



And it looks like only a small number of instruments to choose from

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    Algorithm 0 -- distortion guitar, "high hat chopper" (?) bass

     Algorithm 1 -- harp, PSG (programmable sound generator) sound

     Algorithm 2 -- bass, electric guitar, brass, piano, woods

     Algorithm 3 -- strings, folk guitar, chimes

     Algorithm 4 -- flute, bells, chorus, bass drum, snare drum, tom-tom

     Algorithm 5 -- brass, organ

     Algorithm 6 -- xylophone, tom-tom, organ, vibraphone

                 -- snare drum, base drum

     Algorithm 7 -- pipe organ



[Joe Redifer]

I wonder why there would be a PSG instrument when they had a real PSG chipset that can be used simultaneously with the Yamaha?  Anyway what does that document have to do with SMS FM sound?  Is the Yamaha chip not über-powerful enough to do SMS FM sound?  If not, they should have built in compatibility.

Also I'm pretty sure those instruments are all default.  Many games seemed to have their own sound and instrument set.

[malducci]

Anyway what does that document have to do with SMS FM sound? Is the Yamaha chip not über-powerful enough to do SMS FM sound? If not, they should have built in compatibility.

 Nothing to do with SMS FM. I just figured I'd post it because I remembering the system being shown as having 9 FM channels and 1 white noise channel. Looking at the doc it becomes more apparent about the rehash of instruments(not a bad thing ) and using instrument sounds as sound effects. The document does go on to mention about SMS compatibly mode and not using the FM portion as its not directly compatible. The Gen does have 3 PSG + 1white noise from the SMS compatibility design.

[Joe Redifer]

The SMS FM module has 9 FM channels?  I swear I've never heard a polyphony of more than 3 or 4 out of that thing.  I guess the other 5 were never, ever used.

[Odonadon]

I think Chris Covell could torch the f*ck out of the CPU on the PCE, from his programming wizardry!


Then y'all's jaws would just hit the floor and we'd all hug each other, and sing in harmony holding hands al across the world, ala hands across the world.

Dude, sometimes I don't know what you're on, but I want some!

OD

[Jammaniaclord]

I think Chris Covell could torch the f*ck out of the CPU on the PCE, from his programming wizardry!


Then y'all's jaws would just hit the floor and we'd all hug each other, and sing in harmony holding hands al across the world, ala hands across the world.

Dude, sometimes I don't know what you're on, but I want some!

OD

Weeeeeeeeeeee!

[Keranu]

Damn that's a HUGE tree! I'd love to visit one like that.

[Black Tiger]

Damn that's a HUGE tree! I'd love to visit one like that.

You could hollow it out and live inside like the Keebler elves.