Perplexed by Turbo/PCE Parallax

[Mathius]

I was playing Ys III and Ninja Gaiden recently and started to wonder why in these two games the parallax is so choppy, and scrolls the wrong way to boot? I know the Turbo is capable of beautiful parallax, but these two games seem to be cursed. In the cinemas for Ninja Gaiden there is clearly gorgeous parallax with Ryo in the foreground and a temple in the back. Strange...

Are there any other games like these? Do any of you tech heads here have any answers to this weird issue?

[shubibiman]

I've always wondered that too.

[grahf]

I always attributed it to lack of programming skills.

[Joe Redifer]

Exactly... inferior programmers.

[BEERS AND VIDEOS]

I always thought the same thing, but you'd think for high profile titles like Ys III and Ninja Gaiden that those projects wouldn't have been thrown to unskilled programmers. 

[SamIAm]

I'm not a programmer, but I'd guess that the choppiness was a trade-off for having overlapping parallax that doesn't use sprites for one of the layers. With the layers as big as they are in Ys III and Ninja Gaiden, they would probably run into problems with sprites.

As far as I can tell, every PCE game that has overlapping parallax layers and runs at 60fps is basically using sprites for the overlapping stuff.

Are there any examples to the contrary? Better question: which emulators let you turn off the sprite and BG layers?

[ccovell]

Ninja Ryukenden was farmed out to one of Hudson's development units in Hong Kong and/or Taiwan, accounting for what I think is a lack of programming and presentation skills.  They obviously cleaned up their act later for Cotton.

Who knows what accounts for the lousy scrolling in Ys III?  Perhaps Hudson's programmers made their port from the PC a little too accurate (no scrolling hardware) or didn't feel like enhancing the scrolling routines at all.

[nodtveidt]

I would chalk up the Ys III disaster to being "too much data" and perhaps also "inefficient routines". I don't have a disassembly to back this up... just going on experience and logic.

[SamIAm]

Ninja Ryukenden was farmed out to one of Hudson's development units in Hong Kong and/or Taiwan, accounting for what I think is a lack of programming and presentation skills.  They obviously cleaned up their act later for Cotton.

Yeah, but Cotton just used sprites for the overlapping bits. You can see it when there are too many sprites on one line - the background vanishes along with everything else.

[SignOfZeta]

Who knows what accounts for the lousy scrolling in Ys III?  Perhaps Hudson's programmers made their port from the PC a little too accurate (no scrolling hardware) or didn't feel like enhancing the scrolling routines at all.

That's what I always assumed, that they never optimized for the superior hardware, that it was a straight port.

At least it happened with Ys III instead of one of Falcom's better games.

[Mathius]

I wonder then why the cinemas in Ninja Gaiden have nice parallax, but the main game doesn't? The game can clearly handle it.

[Sadler]

As I understand it, the scrolling in Ys III did not animate the background tiles, it just shifted them over one tile whenever 8 or 16 pixels went by. Parallax on the TG16 basically boils down to one of a few techniques: dynamic tiles, sprite layers, h scrolls and possibly palette rotation. H scrolls don't allow for overlapping parallax layers, but the other techniques can (although it can be costly). Here's a good thread on parallax scrolling on the TG16. Wikipedia's entry on parallax scrolling gives a decent overview as well.

[Sadler]

I'm not a programmer, but I'd guess that the choppiness was a trade-off for having overlapping parallax that doesn't use sprites for one of the layers. With the layers as big as they are in Ys III and Ninja Gaiden, they would probably run into problems with sprites.

As far as I can tell, every PCE game that has overlapping parallax layers and runs at 60fps is basically using sprites for the overlapping stuff.

Are there any examples to the contrary? Better question: which emulators let you turn off the sprite and BG layers?

I don't think Magical Chase uses sprites for overlapping layers.

[SamIAm]

Great links, thanks!

[shubibiman]

That's what I always assumed, that they never optimized for the superior hardware, that it was a straight port.

At least it happened with Ys III instead of one of Falcom's better games.

The same problem is met in Ys 2 (in the belfry, the background scrolling is just as shitty as Ys III's).