3 May
2010
3 May
'10
2:54 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Leonard" <trixter at oldskool.org>
To: <General at mail.mobygames.com>; "Discussion at mail.mobygames.com
:On-Topic
and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 5:42 AM
Subject: Console programming (was: Re: Greatest videogame device)
The thing that put people off was (excluding the popularity of the SNES and
Megadrive/Genesis) that it was an unknown product with no big name game -
unlike Sega's (with Sonic, aka Mr Needlemouse) and Nintendo's (Mario and
Zelda). Not to mention that damn controller, who needs 30 odd buttons on a
controller! Todays controllers have about 8 buttons, plus a d-pad and 2
analogue sticks.
Did you get the CD unit for it? I believe it sat in the cartridge slot of
the Jaguar, so you could play CD-based games.
Whilst I don't recall any specific games for it, there was one that, IIRC,
generated the FPS levels completely randomly. Nintendo tried that as an
option on F-Zero for the Nintendo 64, but it would occasionally generate a
race track that was impossible to complete a lap on!
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
On 5/2/2010 10:06 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
>> Even the Sega Saturn was better than the PS1, though it was not as
popular.
The Saturn was hard to program, however. As I recall the polygons were
based on quadrilaterals, not triangles, which made porting and modeling
more troublesome regardless of its rendering advantages. And the CPU was
sloooooooow.
Which one? IIRC the Saturn was a dual-proc console, which added to the
difficulty of programming for it.
Speaking of multi-proc consoles, I look upon my time with the Atari
Jaguar with sadness, despair and anger. The thing had between three and
five effective CPUs depending on how you wanted to look at it (a 68000,
"tom" which had 32-bit gpu, 64-bit RISC and 64-bit blitter with
z-buffering and gouraud shading, "jerry" which had 32-bit RISC and a
DSP) and yet there isn't a single decent game for the platform that
takes advantage of the hardware. Atari didn't learn from the mistakes
made with the Lynx, so they didn't shell out money for decent licenses
and companies to implement them, relying only on internal new IP and
whatever 3rd-party sucker would develop for it. Just ONE license could
have saved the console, probably the Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter
series, which would have been perfect for it because it had a truly
kick-ass blitter. "NBA JAM" didn't cut the mustard.
With 32-bit and 64-bit RISC under the hood, plus a lightening-fast
16-bit color blitter, you'd think the thing would have been capable of a
lot, but nobody could figure out how to code for it. One of the launch
titles for it, Checkered Flag, was a flat/lambert-shaded monstrosity
that, despite low poly count, ran between 3 and 8 frames per second.
**I swear I am not making those numbers up.** 3fps is acceptable for,
say, moving chess pieces on a board, but not a high-speed racing game.
Cybermorph, the 3-d shooter pack-in, ran at about 12fps, which was
acceptable but still took getting used to.