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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

When Lack Of Pixelation Leads To Consternation 42

Posted by simoniker from the hip-to-be-squares dept.
Thanks to GameSpy for its 'Pixel' column discussing the problems inherent in translating classic remakes to modern consoles. The author argues plaintively: "For reasons both technical and probably cultural, most video game companies not giving their reissued classics the polished, flawless presentations that they deserve." He explains of Mega Man 2 from the forthcoming Mega Man Anniversary Collection for PlayStation 2: "The low-res, 256x224 graphics of the original NES game have been line-doubled for display on the PS2, are run in an interlaced (flickery) screen mode." He also laments: "Believe it or not, things were a good deal better back on the original PlayStation and Saturn... Looking back, the 32-bit era was a golden age of classic game reissues, with great products like Irem's R-Types, the Namco Museum line and the Capcom Generations series offering 99% accurate renditions of dozens upon dozens of classic video games", although it's suggested "the 32-bit renaissance was more likely due to technical limitations than actual care on the part of the developers."
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When Lack Of Pixelation Leads To Consternation More

When Lack Of Pixelation Leads To Consternation

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  • Why didn't they (Score:5, Interesting)

    by foidulus ( 743482 ) * on Monday June 21, 2004 @07:08AM (#9482784)
    just make the mega man collection a ps1 game instead of a ps2 game(like Final Fantasy origins), I find it hard to believe that they could not pack all the data onto a cd. Plus, releasing it for the ps1 would have reached a larger audience, maybe not your core audience, but when you have backwards compatability and no need to put a game on a DVD, why bother?

    • Re:Why didn't they (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Slightly harder to pirate on ps1 vs ps2? only explaination I can think of, plus say someone has a ps1 and is sortof casually looking at getting one of the next gen of consoles, this could push them towards ps2...?

      • Re:Why didn't they (Score:5, Informative)

        by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Monday June 21, 2004 @12:42PM (#9485570)
        "Slightly harder to pirate on ps1 vs ps2?"

        From my own experience they're both pretty damned easy to pirate on. I'm against having to open a console case for any reason on philosophical terms but I've managed to boot burned code on both of these consoles.

        You can pirate software on the PS2 exactly the same way you do it on a PS1: You change disks without letting the machine know you changed disks. You can do this either electronically (install a mod chip that lies to the rest of the hardware) or you can do it physically (defeating physical switches that let the machine know the drive is open).

        With the PS1, the lid pushes in a button that indicates to the hardware that the lid is open. A spring works well in the original PSX while the PSOne requires a little more creativity with a small, plastic tab. Once you've got that, all you need to do is insert a disk you know will eventually stop spinning so you can make the swap. The ol' Action Replay disk works well for this (but not Game Shark). And now you can play your favorite NES games through an emulator to your heart's content without ever cracking open the case.

        The PS2, with its front-loading mechanism, is a bit trickier. The easiest way to do it (without opening the case) is to carefully remove the front of the disc tray so you can then slim jim the tray open. If you look on the bottom side of the tray you can see a groove in which a locking arm moves through. The trick is to move that locking arm back out of the way. Once you do that, the trick again is to get a disk that you know will stop spinning. If you're trying to play PS1 softawre, you can use the PS1 flavor of Action Replay (as before). If you're trying to run PS2 software (say, an SNES emulator) things are trickier and unfortunately the PS2 flavor of Action Replay won't help you (it never stops spinning as far as I can tell). You can find proper boot disks in the Hong Kong gray market, but note you'll need a boot CD and a boot DVD, using the proper one for the media you're aiming to run. Once you've done that, all you need is a Super Wild Card to dump your SNES carts and you can then put all your SNES periphernalia safely into storage.

        The PS2 will read music CD-RWs but not PS1 code on said CD-RWs. I haven't had the opportunity to try PS2 code on a CD-RW, though. The PS1 doesn't seem to want to read CD-RWs at all, no matter what's on it.
    • With the exception of Megaman 7, all these titles were released on the PS1 in Japan. In fact, on each of the Rockman remakes for the PS1, Capcom included little Pocketstation games.

      If, as another poster mused, this collection is emulated, that means an interesting step in emulation for the PS2: SNES emulation has been slow and glitchy in most cases, and it would be nice to see it done accurately. It would be even nicer to see, one week later, someone rip the emulation code out and make a standalone emula
    • They can't get them all on a single disc for PS1. The PS1 apparently isn't powerful enough to do the audio emulation, so the Rockman Complete Works discs on PS1 use digital XA audio rather than emulate the sound chip-- each game, as a result, uses up nearly an entire CD..

  • What about the Gamecube? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wheresdrew ( 735202 ) on Monday June 21, 2004 @07:16AM (#9482800) Journal
    This same collection is coming out for the Gamecube. Will it be plagued by the same problems?
    • It would sadden me if it is... since Nintendo has a damn fine working NES emulator on the GCN (you see it in things like animal crossing, and even in second-party stuff like Metroid Prime). Though I do miss the ideology behind things like Tempest 2000 and Super Mario All-Stars... leave the gameplay alone, but update the graphics and sound a little.

      • Re:What about the Gamecube? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Bloomy ( 714535 ) on Monday June 21, 2004 @09:16AM (#9483322)
        If Capcom or Atomic Planet had used Nintendo's emulator, I'm sure similiar complaints would be made. From what I've read, Nintendo's emulator for the Gamecube might emulate the NES too perfectly, down to the scanline flicker when too many sprites are at the same vertical line on the screen. The easiest example of this is the graveyard in the original Zelda, let out as many ghosts as possible. I haven't played it yet on my Zelda Collection disc, and I haven't cracked Animal Crossing to unlock it, but I've seen it mentioned enough to give it some credence.

        According to the IGN review [ign.com], "slowdown and flicker from the original cart versions have been almost entirely eliminated (it's still in there, but it's only noticeable a few times per game)". IGN didn't do separate reviews for the GC and PS2 versions, and the person that reviewed it is one of their PS2 people.

        • That is nothing new. Free NES emulators have been emulating the scanline flicker due to too many sprites for years now! Nintendo is such a hypocrit. They first claim that emulators are illegal, and then they make emulators themselves.

          FCE Ultra is the best, most accurate free and open source emulator that I have yet to see. I use it to play NES games on my XBOX. Who needs Nintendo?
          • Yeah, the scanline flicker has been in emulators as far back as I can remember (I think it was 1997 when I first played one), because that's how the NES worked. But newer emulators have gotten around that limitation of the original hardware, and apparently Atomic Planet and Capcom have as well (if not perfectly) for the Mega Man collection. If others can do it, there's certainly no reason Nintendo can't.

            On a similiar point and out of curiosity, are there any emulators for CD based consoles that keep load

  • What I don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by th1ckasabr1ck ( 752151 ) on Monday June 21, 2004 @08:39AM (#9483094)
    I realize that when rereleasing a game on a new console, they want to keep it as true to the original as possible, but they should give that a second thought when it comes to load times.

    This is definitely noticible in Final Fantasy Anthologies (FF5 and FF6), and Final Fantasy Chronicles (FF4 and Chrono Trigger). After hitting the menu button there is a good two or three seconds of black screen before the menu itself actually pops up. I find it hard to believe that my PS2 (or PS1) really needs that much time.

    • Load Times (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fwitness ( 195565 ) on Monday June 21, 2004 @09:15AM (#9483304)
      Agreed. I still wince when I see Crash Bandicoot:Wrath of Cortex in game stores. I rented that once, and the load times made it absolutely unplayable. Sad, since my girlfriend would have really enjoyed that game.

      I am a programmer, and I know there are techniques to avoid this, but it takes some design thinking, and of course, time.

      GTA and GTA:VC do this beautifully (especially VC) for huge environments, and Jak and Daxter does it even better (which they mostly acheived while using LISP, if you can believe that).

      If there are game developers out there, please listen:"Load times suck. Long load times may not decrease sales, but they will decrease your company's image. Oh, and hire me will you? I'll fix the load times. Swear."

      • Re:Load Times (Score:5, Interesting)

        by mausmalone ( 594185 ) on Monday June 21, 2004 @09:34AM (#9483492) Homepage Journal
        I recently tried out the *achem* less than legal PSO gamecube hack (lets you run ISO's across 10 MBit ethernet). I'm quite shocked that Zelda: Four Swords runs ::gasp:: really well across it. The little video clip in the menu runs at like 1 fps, but the actual game's load-time is barely affected at all.

        But Nintendo's great at that. Take Animal Crossing, for example... it's done loading by the time it finishes saying "Nintendo!" at the logo. Try it for yourself, you can take the game out after the logo and boot it on another system. One copy is good for a whole party, since the entire game finishes loading before the title screen is displayed. :)
        • That doesn't really have anything to do with Nintendo as a developer, it's more that those games have simple graphics and therefore doesn't need as much disk space. Animal Crossing is a somewhat updated edition of a N64 game, and Four Swords is a juiced up GBA port.
          • Nintendo has very few games with long loading times - or at any rate good tricks to hide said loading times. Metroid Prime, Wind Waker, SSBM, Mario Sunshine, the list goes on. Prime loaded each room separately, and the loading was covered up in the opening - this can be seen when you shoot a door to a large room and it takes a few seconds to open. Wind Waker just gives you a black screen for half a second, it's barely noticeable if you aren't looking out for it. Melee simply didn't take long, and SMS didn't

    • Re:What I don't understand... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DLWormwood ( 154934 ) <wormwood@meCOMMA.com minus punct> on Monday June 21, 2004 @09:50AM (#9483672) Homepage
      After hitting the menu button there is a good two or three seconds of black screen before the menu itself actually pops up. I find it hard to believe that my PS2 (or PS1) really needs that much time.

      Actually, I'm surprised it wasn't worse. The PS1 re-releases of the SNES originals were emulations of the original cartridge ROMs. The SNES did memory accesses assuming ROM latency, not CD latency. There was no streaming or pre-caching of data via asynchronous memory access.

      The original game ROMs are too large to fit within the PS1's working RAM. Everytime the PS1 version tried to change the graphics context (between menu, combot, and field modes), a synchronous CD hit was required, slowing things down. (Things might have been different for FFIV if Square waited to port it to PS2 instead, that older game may have fit in the PS2 RAM.)

      • Re:What I don't understand... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Thedalek ( 473015 ) on Monday June 21, 2004 @10:30AM (#9484086)
        Why isn't there a moderation option for "blatantly false?"

        No, The PS1 re-releases in Final Fantasy Origins and Chronicles were not emulations of the SNES originals. Yes, Chrono Trigger (and possibly some of the FF series) included the SNES original on the disc. However, this was used only for retrieving sprite graphics. This was demonstrated by the fact that, back before Square announced that they were going to release the re-issues in English speaking parts of the world, many rom-hackers tried inserting English-translated snes roms into the disc image. This resulted in nothing noticably different occuring. All text was still in Japanese.

        Simply put, at 2 megabytes, the PS1 didn't have enough RAM to successfully emulate the SNES. True, the SNES didn't have all that much RAM itself, but the contents of the cartridges themselves were locations in memory. Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger both exceed this limitation.

        And no, you couldn't stream the data. Not without putting your framerate in the toilet.
        • No, The PS1 re-releases in Final Fantasy Origins and Chronicles were not emulations of the SNES originals. Yes, Chrono Trigger (and possibly some of the FF series) included the SNES original on the disc. However, this was used only for retrieving sprite graphics.

          Poor choice of word on my part. I was aware that parts of the game engine were re-written to be more native. But the fact of the matter is that the original ROMs were the point of reference for the PS1 implementations. Some older versions of MAME

  • Classics on Modern Hardware - Zelda Collection (Score:5, Interesting)

    by extrarice ( 212683 ) on Monday June 21, 2004 @11:01AM (#9484390) Homepage Journal
    The GameCube Zelda Collection, released this past Christmas, is a good example of the proper way to release older games to a nostalgic audience. The sprites are the same, the music is the same, and most importantly: the games have the same slow-down in the same places they did in the original releases. It seems like the Zelda Collection disc just has a real-time NES emulator that loads on the cube and runs a ROM, keeping the speeds the same as the original.

    Though FFOrigins for the PS1 is a fantastic remake, I would not want to see the same treatment done to the MegaMan Collection.
  • are run in an interlaced (flickery) screen mode

    I feel obligated to point out that in the NTSC standard, everything you see on your TV is interlaced already (at 60Hz, so the end result is considered to be 30fps).
  • While I wouldn't be suprised if Capcom did a sloppy job on the remake, this article doesn't really describe the problems very well.

    At one point he says there is blurring, but then he corrects himself. So... is there blurring??? The picture he presents as evidence seem to suggest this, but some/all of the ugliness of that could be attributed to his tv tuner. The author doesn't seem to specify the source of the "old" picture, but I'm guessing it's from an emulator, which isn't exactly a fair comparison.

    • Yes, his terms were a little vague. You can tell that this writer didn't necessarily know the most about computer graphics, but that's no crime.

      The "blurring" would be doubling the resolution by extrapolating what color the pixel in between two other pixels would be (IE if a blue pixel is next to a white pixel, put a light-blue pixel in between them.. although the algorithm may be more complicated than that). Some of the newer NES emulators can do this (and no, IMO it doesn't improve the graphics as effect

  • ... considering that console emulation is huge and emulating the original 8, 16-bit and older 32-bit consoles for a modern PC is easy performance wise. The N64 and the PS1 are completely emulated on modern PC's they do have their quirks and not all the games work, but all the "golden oldies" and usually the most popular ones you'd actually want to play do. Also pulling ROMS off DC++ and the newsgroups for pre Playstation/CD games is cake on most news providers that provide binaries.

    I got to play Majora's

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