Is the (acd) arcade card worth it? Sapphire and Strider

[sheath]

The Genesis can't display any more sprites horizontally at the resolution of the SoR games than the PCE can line up at the 256 pixel width resolution. So as long as you don't make the character sprites wasteful of the PCE's sprite sizes, it should be able to do something comparable. But the only time I remember seeing that many characters on-screen in a SoR game, there was slowdown and flicker. Objects can remain as tiles until destroyed or picked up. Beat 'em ups don't require much parallax to look good, but urban settings are more dynamic-tile-friendly anyway.

Streets of Rage is a 320 wide game, which should mean that it had a 20 sprites per scanline limit.  There isn't slow down with eight or twelve character sprites, there is slowdown when there are juggling enemies on screen and 8-12 character sprites on screen.  I haven't seen anything like it on a console.  But, I bet most people just call the special car bomb attack whenever that much action is going on. 

Not that Riot Zone is very polished, but it used large characters, so there's less sprite room to throw around. The SoR games worked well because they had lots of smaller and narrower enemies to mix up with various other sized enemies in various combinations. When all of the sprites are big and wide, there's not much you can do from there to put more enemies on-screen.

Something like River City Ransom is perfect for maximizing the number of on-screen characters, but I doubt that the PCE version used more than the Famicom version.

If RED had developed a Hudson backed brawler, it would have been as good as anything from that generation.

I noticed that Streets of Rage 1 doesn't toss around a lot of character sprites while larger bosses are on screen.  Streets of Rage 2 has no problem with doing so though, especially that insane elevator level.  I'd honestly love to see the same thing done in other games regardless of platform.  It's not like I pause the game to count characters and objects, the effect of all of those enemies at once has an immediate impact on the gameplay that three enemies can never achieve.

[Black Tiger]

Streets of Rage is a 320 wide game, which should mean that it had a 20 sprites per scanline limit.

320 wide Genesis games have a 320 pixel sprite limit and 256 wide PCE games have a 256 pixel sprite limit. Either way, it equals 1 screen width.

There isn't slow down with eight or twelve character sprites, there is slowdown when there are juggling enemies on screen and 8-12 character sprites on screen.  I haven't seen anything like it on a console.  But, I bet most people just call the special car bomb attack whenever that much action is going on. 

Yeah, I can't think of any 16-bit console brawlers that come close to the SoR games when it comes to characters on-screen. That in itself would be impressive, but it's how tastefully done it is that gives it that special feel. The ultimate 16-bit console beat em up would be something for Genesis as well designed as SoR, only running in the 256 wide mode, so it could handle more horizontal sprites without breakup. Although the SoR games already toss around more than enough characters. But it would be cool to have a 4 player game.

I believe that the scene I was thinking of with slowdown and flicker is Stage 5 of SoR. There's a point where if you don't attack everyone right away, they add up until the game slows and flickers. I don't remember any scenes with more enemies than that.

I noticed that Streets of Rage 1 doesn't toss around a lot of character sprites while larger bosses are on screen.  Streets of Rage 2 has no problem with doing so though, especially that insane elevator level.  I'd honestly love to see the same thing done in other games regardless of platform.  It's not like I pause the game to count characters and objects, the effect of all of those enemies at once has an immediate impact on the gameplay that three enemies can never achieve.

I think that the SNES and PCE could do something that would be impressive, even when compared to SoR, but it's the kind of thing that had to happen back in the day. Maybe down the road as PCE "homebrew" continues to improve, we'll see a cool new beat em up with tons of characters at once.

[Bonknuts]

Streets of Rage is a 320 wide game, which should mean that it had a 20 sprites per scanline limit.

 Yes, but the sprite scanline buffer is still just that of the width of the screen. The buffer is 1.25 times larger and there is 1.25 times more sprites per scanline, but the pixels per scanline for the screen are also 1.25 more dense as well. What that means, is that 32 pixels in low res mode takes 40 pixels in high res mode. So to get the exact same output 'width' as a low res, you need more pixels. Both systems aren't going to be hitting their SAT entry per scanline limit before they would hit their scanline sprite pixel buffer limit. Genesis could have 20 sprites per scanline if they were 16 pixels wide (or less) for 320 res mode (or H40 as Sega labels it). That's it. So you could have ten 32pixel wide sprites per scanline, but those 32pixels are going to be a shallower width than low res 32pixels. For the same width you'd need ten 40 pixel wide sprites, which means you only have sprite bandwidth for 8 objects with that corresponding width. Which is exactly the limit of low res mode for both system.

 The higher res H40 mode is more optimizable for sprites of in between sizes, or more smaller/tiny objects per scanline. Where a pixeled image might push over into the next cell segment for low res (and coarser sprite cell size of the PCE), could be optimized to take less relative scanline bandwidth ratio to the real output width of the image. I.e. less sprite core cells, thus less bandwidth for the sprite scanline buffer.

There isn't slow down with eight or twelve character sprites, there is slowdown when there are juggling enemies on screen and 8-12 character sprites on screen.  I haven't seen anything like it on a console.  But, I bet most people just call the special car bomb attack whenever that much action is going on. 

 Yeah, what comes to mind is the axe juggling guys that cause the slowdown (with less than 8 characters on screen. SOR1 we're talking about here). But it's not like the game was plagued with slowdown, like I remember Final Fight on the SNES being as such.

[soop]

I can't believe it!  I was searching for "Final Fight" "sprite size" in Google, and found a page here wondering exactly what I was wondering.  I still don't actually have the sizes, but I'm gonna keep looking, because I think this is do-able.

1. Final Fight's enemies do tend to take turns.  You'd have to make an algorithm to make sure the enemies moved around to different scanlines, and the main trouble would be the charging enemies.  However, for the first stage "boss" (slash?  Forgot his name) when he sits on the wall and calls more guys, you could just convert him to background tiles.

2. You can't get rid of the destroyable objects (barrels etc), but I like the idea of making them background tiles until they get destroyed.

3. Fire effects would be hard to do unless you could use dynamic tiles.

4. The sprites are very large though.  I still can't find the sizes, but I think the PCE could handle it.  It's crazy that there weren't more beatemups considering what the PCE can do (and the fact that one of the first releases was The Kung Fu.

*edit* I didn't realise because I got here from google, but can we get this moved to the PCE development folder now?

*edit* Tom mentioned "mirroring" - what's that?

[fraggore]

I was wondering what everyones opinion of the arcade system card is. The only two games that look good to me are Strider and Sapphire. I have no need for those neo geo fighting games since I already own them on other systems. So, is it worth buying just for those two games alone? 

I just got one Sapphire is ok it aint nothing special and i realy dont like Strider the megadrive one is much better and that coming from a guy who loves the game.

as for the neo games the pretty impresive conversions but if you got a neo your not gonna play them i do like the kabuki clash game its pretty good havent tryed mad stalker yet.

[soop]

I just got one Sapphire is ok it aint nothing special

O___O  Say what?

Sapphire (the bootie) is worth getting an Arcade card for.

[soop]

crap, I just had a look at the SNES sprites, and Guy (who is a fairly small sprite) is at least 6 32x32 sprites.  Which means 3 people on screen max, using those sprites.  Not including the really big guys.

Wow, and I just find some of Tom's converted sprites! still too big tho: http://forum.frozenutopia.com/index.php?topic=176.0

[hoobs88]

I was wondering what everyones opinion of the arcade system card is. The only two games that look good to me are Strider and Sapphire. I have no need for those neo geo fighting games since I already own them on other systems. So, is it worth buying just for those two games alone? 

I just got one Sapphire is ok it aint nothing special and i realy dont like Strider the megadrive one is much better and that coming from a guy who loves the game.
as for the neo games the pretty impresive conversions but if you got a neo your not gonna play them i do like the kabuki clash game its pretty good havent tryed mad stalker yet.

I agree with Fraggore... I only own 3 ACD games- Kabuki Itouryodan, Strider, and Sapphire. If you have Kabuki on another system that only leaves Strider and Sapphire to justify your purchase of an ACD card and Strider isn't that great of port (I can only compare it with the arcade version). That just leaves Sapphire (and whether or not you love Shooties). Some people really like the music in Sapphire but I don't recall it being very memorable the one time I played it.

[fraggore]

i love shmups and Sapphire seems well a bit over rated to be honest its not a bad game but it aint great either just my opinion like.

The music is pretty good i like the rock sound track but its no lords of thunder or gates of thunder just think they is a lot better shooter on the engine not to say i am not gonna play it.

as for strider its a pretty shoddie conversion was realy disappointed with it it looks and plays pretty bad the fmv and the extra level is a nice touch but they could have used the time to make the game better instead, i am a big fan of the arcade game and the megadrive that has a awesome conversion of it i was just very surprised how bad it was.

[SignOfZeta]

I agree with Fraggore... I only own 3 ACD games- Kabuki Itouryodan, Strider, and Sapphire. If you have Kabuki on another system that only leaves Strider and Sapphire to justify your purchase of an ACD card and Strider isn't that great of port (I can only compare it with the arcade version). That just leaves Sapphire (and whether or not you love Shooties). Some people really like the music in Sapphire but I don't recall it being very memorable the one time I played it.

First off, yes, I realise that this is a year old thread that got bumped for Final Fight reasons. BTW, Final Fight is an overrated piece of fluff. If I had any skills for porting whatsoever I'd be concentrating on Kunio games. Final Fight has such a lack of...stuff to do, it gets boring in five minutes. Kunio games never had the graphical punch, but they had 10 times the gameplay of any other beat-em-um until Guardian Heroes was released.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting, the Kabuki game on ACD doesn't exist on another system. Its totally different than the Neo one.

[fraggore]

never really played Kunio games but i do agree Guardian Heroes was class.

[Black Tiger]

Even if you don't enjoy Sapphire for whatever reasons (usually due to spamming bombs/continues), it is still one of the most impressive 16-bit console games.

[fraggore]

yea pretty good looking considering the pc engine is really a 8bit console i know it has a 16bit graphics chip but the cpu is 8bit who would think you would see 3d rotating polygon sprites on a console from 1987.

[SignOfZeta]

yea pretty good looking considering the pc engine is really a 8bit console i know it has a 16bit graphics chip but the cpu is 8bit who would think you would see 3d rotating polygon sprites on a console from 1987.

The bots are getting smarter!

But seriously, "3D polygons" and "sprites" are two different things. What Sapphire has is pre-rendered grpahics, in some places. The same was done with Viewpoint, Donkey Kong Country, Sonic 3, and a million other games from that era. Instead of drawing it by hand you get a computer to do it for you. Its not a bit deal. It also ages horribly in many cases. That crappy rock boss in Sapphire is prety lame. Looks so "PS1" it hurts. Meanwhile, the first boss in Lords of Thunder looks as awesome as he ever did.

[hoobs88]

Meanwhile, the first boss in Lords of Thunder looks as awesome as he ever did.

You can select any stage in Lords of Thunder... so all of the bosses have the potential of being "the first boss".