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Mode7 vs Raster racers
- Thread starter lazygecko
- Start date
Nah, MK64 is, because of basically everything about it, that isn't battle mode on Block Fort.
NeoZeedeater
Member
Why do people keep saying this when Power Drift and Super Monaco GP have been mentioned? That arcade technology wasn't just used for linear racers.
Graphics Horse
Member
Not seen that site for ages
Racin' Force has got to be the pinnacle of visuals in 'mode 7' racers, although it's pushing it to call it that when it's a voxel landscape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X0Mjw32CLY
MightyHedgehog
Member
It's a real shame that when base console hardware was finally able to trivially scale, rotate, and skew the perspective of hundreds of large sprites and multiple massive tiled playfields, it coincided with the viability of more advanced 3D, making it effectively obsolete to the masses. Sega really dragged their feet too long on 'Superscaler'-like home hardware and stuff like Mega/Sega-CD wasn't either capable nor easy to effectively use for that smooth arcade experience.
Voxel landscape for a racer, what a brilliant idea.Not seen that site for ages
Racin' Force has got to be the pinnacle of visuals in 'mode 7' racers, although it's pushing it to call it that when it's a voxel landscape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X0Mjw32CLY
LordRaptor
Member
It was obvious as early as the late 80s with titles like Stunt Car Racer or Hard Driving that driving games that actually feel like driving games were not going to be raster based.
Arguably even a decade earlier than that with vector based titles like Vectorbeams Speed Freak or Ataris Star Wars providing more of a feeling of actually moving at speed in a vehicle
Sorry, I missed your reply. I haven't really programmed anything for GBA in almost 15 years so I only have a vague concept left of how exactly all this worked. But in the case of GT Advance 2 it's difficult to see what exactly is used. I tried to stand still on a slope and rotate the camera and the whole track starts warping so I just assumed that they're scaling scanlines on HBLANK to create the hill effect.
MightyHedgehog
Member
Oh, I loved SCR at the time on my Amiga (favorite racing game ever still) and Hard Drivin' was incredible for its time as was all early wireframe/vector 3D, and even though it was the inevitable future for games and not just the flight/racing gametype, I was always expecting the state of the art arcade experience of the '80s at home for, at least, one console generation and it never really happened.
Raster was the best solution and far superior on arcade hardware. But at the time any of this mattered, the Genesis and SNES couldn't do Raster justice. So I'd have to say Mode 7 was the superior console choice.
That said, F-Zero and Mario Kart did some cool stuff you wouldn't have been able to do on Raster.
That said, F-Zero and Mario Kart did some cool stuff you wouldn't have been able to do on Raster.
Raster racers were just bouts of straights and turns with no sense of actually being a track. Hell, most of the time you weren't which is why you had games like the Outrun titles where you went "cross country".
Mode 7 racers (before we had actual 3D racers) were always more fun to me. And I enjoyed the hell out of raster racers, so don't get me wrong.
Mode 7 racers (before we had actual 3D racers) were always more fun to me. And I enjoyed the hell out of raster racers, so don't get me wrong.
nkarafo
Member
It depends.
In 16bit home consoles i prefer Mode 7 games. They look better and run smoother.
Raster Racers are better in powerful Arcade systems though. You get tons of smoothly scaling sprites and fast frame rates. Especially in Sega's sprite scaling monsters at the time (X-board, Y-board).
In 16bit home consoles i prefer Mode 7 games. They look better and run smoother.
Raster Racers are better in powerful Arcade systems though. You get tons of smoothly scaling sprites and fast frame rates. Especially in Sega's sprite scaling monsters at the time (X-board, Y-board).
Graphics Horse
Member
I didn't choose the best video but you get hills going higher than the usual horizon on some tracks. Yeah it will look weird when you rotate on a hill but that's to be expected as it's a raster style rolling road effect shouldn't really work with full camera rotation.
You can't just alter scale of the lines or it would look even weirder, you have to work out the map location of the centre/start of each scanline and find the scale from that. I think they use flat slopes to make the interpolations easier, It's something like the '3D projected segments' from that page, but applied to mode 7 style hblank scaling.
I mean turning to drive the other way. I'm not aware of any raster racer where the developer bothered implementing that even if it is theoretically possible.
As GBA has capable sprite scaling quite some racing games essentially combined raster with 3D like use of sprite scaling. Personally I liked Top Gear Rally the best of those: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd0f83wODqg
petran79
Banned
Arcades had a much more demanding and older audience vs the SNES kids. So much more effort went into it
Graphics Horse
Member
Was looking at a video of that one earlier! Aside from the cars & isolated trees, the big tree 'walls' and fences must be drawn by the CPU, I think.
CamHostage
Member
Oh dear, this thread is demanding that I choose...
For arcades, there AFAIK never was a "Mode 7" game that really put the technique to the test with beefy hardware, and game designers especially in the '90s were going out of their minds with incredible technical experimentation, so there are plenty of raster-road arcade racers that make me drool even today. At home, though, the limitations of raster-road engines to represent a fully-mapped racing course were laid more bare, it was a lot of power-sliding to 'simulate' the thrill of racing but not a lot of line-choice or positioning or speed shifting to capture the strategy of driving; unless you were in a master's hands (which thankfully was often given how popular raster-road engine racing was in arcades and how those things sucked up quarters,) raster-road racing could feel more like steering than driving.
Meanwhile, Nintendo was at the top of its game and produced two of the most enjoyable racing games ever with Mode7 techniques, and they were flat and limited in their own way but the designer's balance of gameplay was perfectly polished while the newly-opened avenues of driving simulation were fully explored. As future Kart clones poured out we saw that we had already experienced the best that the technique perhaps would ever offer, but those two were ace and gave a great glimpse of racing's future.
At that 1991/1992 crossing point of raster roads and Mode7, my heart is absolutely with Mode7, but raster roads have such a rich history before & after this period, literally decades of experimentation and application, so it's difficult to compare.
For arcades, there AFAIK never was a "Mode 7" game that really put the technique to the test with beefy hardware, and game designers especially in the '90s were going out of their minds with incredible technical experimentation, so there are plenty of raster-road arcade racers that make me drool even today. At home, though, the limitations of raster-road engines to represent a fully-mapped racing course were laid more bare, it was a lot of power-sliding to 'simulate' the thrill of racing but not a lot of line-choice or positioning or speed shifting to capture the strategy of driving; unless you were in a master's hands (which thankfully was often given how popular raster-road engine racing was in arcades and how those things sucked up quarters,) raster-road racing could feel more like steering than driving.
Meanwhile, Nintendo was at the top of its game and produced two of the most enjoyable racing games ever with Mode7 techniques, and they were flat and limited in their own way but the designer's balance of gameplay was perfectly polished while the newly-opened avenues of driving simulation were fully explored. As future Kart clones poured out we saw that we had already experienced the best that the technique perhaps would ever offer, but those two were ace and gave a great glimpse of racing's future.
At that 1991/1992 crossing point of raster roads and Mode7, my heart is absolutely with Mode7, but raster roads have such a rich history before & after this period, literally decades of experimentation and application, so it's difficult to compare.
Graphics Horse
Member
Power Drift is interesting to look at from that point of view, which had full 3D tracks built entirely from sprites, but still feels much like a raster game.
CamHostage
Member
Power Drift was bonkers! Not that I understand raster road engines, but from what logic I can apply, I still don't understand how it did some of its tricks (already I learned something from the post above.) I remember being really excited because this was scheduled for Atari Lynx at the time (a hotbet of "how can this system be doing this?!" games) but the port never happened
You can't drive backwards anywhere I can think of, but as I just mentioned, Power Drift spun the world around you in collisions, and had that crazy full 360 fly-over that showed the track and its curves rendered with the sprite elements. I'm not sure what Monaco GP's course allowed you to do wheels-down on the course, but it also got crazy with spin-outs. They're just moving the track elements around in front of you in a perspective that doesn't really work (you get lost in the seams and gaps, and see the flatness of the track elements so clearly as they scroll right on by) but you do at least see the "reverse" of a raster-road track if you could 180.
POWER DRIFT: https://youtu.be/N9L2zN7JeN8?t=18 & https://youtu.be/N9L2zN7JeN8?t=33
MONACO GP: https://youtu.be/n1e2hrbSx_k?t=174
Those are great, thanks.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with the different business model behind arcade and console and the consequent difference in the cost of hardware and refresh of the technology.
It was only caused by the "more demanding and older audience vs the SNES kids".
Graphics Horse
Member
Yep. They build the road from lots of long sprites, it's why the perspective on the road markings look kind of dubious from some angles.
They weren't though as the numerous Power Drift examples show. Not only could you often see into the corner, but you would even see elevated structures that you'd later be driving over.
Power Drift imo, does a much better job of feeling like a track than stuff like Mario Kart and F-Zero do. The flatness of those makes any boundaries unconvincing. It looked like you should be able to drive straight over everything in the world.
Graphics Horse
Member
They weren't though as the numerous Power Drift examples show. Not only could you often see into the corner, but you would even see elevated structures that you'd later be driving over.
Power Drift imo, does a much better job of feeling like a track than stuff like Mario Kart and F-Zero do. The flatness of those makes any boundaries unconvincing. It looked like you should be able to drive straight over everything in the world.
The way Power Drift works would have been completely compatible with a Mode-7 style textured floor* at ground level though, if they weren't so sprite crazy at Sega.
*just realised having a banking camera angle makes it more complicated than that though
yurinka
Member
Some raster games were almost 3D games:
Rad Mobile (Sega, 1991)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQqstuDCl4Y
Rad Mobile (Sega, 1991)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQqstuDCl4Y
CamHostage
Member
Rad Mobile always caught my eye too, I need it explained to me because I'm just not capable of getting it (that said, I'm so happy that Lou's Pseudo 3d Page gets found time and time again when we talk raster roads, it's a great resource!)
One thing I always had a problem with in Rad Mobile and Power Drift though is that the way it did height in tracks with segments layered together, it could feel like you were driving on "logs of road" since you saw the seams of the track chunks as they shifted perspective and scaled into view. It worked decently in PD since it was intentionally a chunky game (I think there was even a course that had log ramps?) but Rad Mobile was supposed to be super-slick and composed. On the plus side, Rad Mobile had banked turns (and also those tri-segmented track segments,) and also did the Outrun think of merging tracks together and fading backgrounds in / swapping roadside+track elements out to make one long racing highway. It could also do a cool thing where it expanded or narrowed the road, so it could go from a tight two-lane forest stretch to a five-lane highway.
'Log-wobble' but also Banked/Piped Tracks https://youtu.be/MMs7eeleDjA?t=105
Environment Change & Road-Widening: https://youtu.be/MMs7eeleDjA?t=919
Speaking of raster racer with scaling sprites on console Super Burnout for Atari Jaguar is a fine example and often forgotten.
Released in 1995 when everybody and their dog were beginning to develop racing games with polygonal graphics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dq1h-TmN0k
Released in 1995 when everybody and their dog were beginning to develop racing games with polygonal graphics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dq1h-TmN0k
The example was primarily to argue against the idea that the courses are just an unrelated set of turns and straights. A sense of place was perfectly doable in raster racers also (with Super Monaco GP being another common example). And yea, with some sacrifice you could definitely have made something like Power Drift in Mode 7 (though I'm not sure how well some of the overlapping course elements would work)... but I think the flexibility makes it easier for something like Power Drift via raster to combat games like F-Zero or Mario Kart, than it'd be for a Mode 7 game to combat stuff like Outrunners or Rad Mobile.
I will admit that the comparison isn't entirely fair as when citing Mode 7, you're pretty much only going to get SNES games as comparison, whereas for raster there are a lot of examples that would be far more comfortable on something like a Saturn or Neo Geo. But the title is "Mode 7 vs Raster racers", so the games that actually exist are what's going to get contrasted as opposed to what may have existed if Sega wasn't running the arcades with sprite scaling all the way up to Virtua Racing.
Raster racers forever!
Came here to post about OutRunners.
It's not that I have a preference for raster vs. Mode 7-style. I don't, actually. But OutRunners is the very top of the old style raster graphic racers and everyone should know and love it! This was Sega's final release before Virtua Racing and they never looked back from 3D.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJXC1uUlm5I
KnightimeX_Legacy
Banned
Raster feels like your car is on a stick that's stuck in the center of the screen.
Pushing accelerate doesn't feel like your car is moving but making the background come at you faster.
mode 7 always felt like it delivered a better experience to me.
Pushing accelerate doesn't feel like your car is moving but making the background come at you faster.
mode 7 always felt like it delivered a better experience to me.
Did ANYONE play Super Monaco GP for the Mega Drive?
This game combined raster effects, line scrolling, and pseudo scaling fantastically. You had a rear view mirror that showed the full road behind you, as well as cars that you lap, or are coming up quick behind you. The only system that did it better was the arcade. However the MD version was arguably the better game, because of Grand Prix mode, and the fact that it had over 16 tracks, to the arcade's single track.
CamHostage
Member
The experience of driving versus the sensation of racing ... that may be the central theme of this thread.
I must admit I did not, and you make a good case that arcade-style speed thrills weren't all that raster-road engine graphics could do. You could get complete tracks and design courses for racing-line and speed-throttling strategy.
I feel like as soon as I saw STUN Runner, I was just waiting and waiting for the miracle to come...
It's sad that we never got a home port of Rad Mobile in most of the world. Then again, looking at Gale Racer closely, I think I see why SEGA left it in Japan; it looks nice in motion but doesn't seem to have scale right for vehicles and can't draw enough of the track ahead so it doesn't work.
There's a sequel called Rad Rally that I'd never seen before and don't know much about. Seems like it handles pretty well, but its most distinguishing feature appears to be multicab link-up play (though I'm not sure how much a difference that'd make since it's not course-based play so you only see each other if you can ever pass each other and also the collision/passing mechanic of Rad Mobile is geared towards avoidance rather than challenging the opponent's line so does the sequel make that work better?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCNezY-RqZA
Graphics Horse
Member
Yeah I'm just being pedantic as I don't consider the machines which avoid using any per-scanline effects as raster games (everything from Monaco GP until Outrunners, I think). Super Scaler racers is a fairer name, but Sega specific.
Super Monaco GP on Mega Drive / Genesis was a really good game, however the arcade version absolutely destroys it graphically. The arcade ran on the same superscaler hardware used for After Burner II and Thunder Blade (which are both perfectly ported to 3DS btw). However Super Monaco GP never got an arcade perfect port to any platform anywhere, ever.
Arcade vs MD / Genesis
https://youtu.be/n1e2hrbSx_k?t=1m
SGRU
Member
Not seen that site for ages
Racin' Force has got to be the pinnacle of visuals in 'mode 7' racers, although it's pushing it to call it that when it's a voxel landscape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X0Mjw32CLY
I can't believe that's a SNES game.
Graphics Horse
Member
Vroom/Domark F1 was good for this, especially using mouse x&y to control steering and throttle, you had to line yourself up even on the straights rather than it auto-centering the steering like most raster style games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dvYHQIIOFI
edit: can't find a video of mouse mode
hah, it's not it's an arcade game that draws a mode-7 style floor and then from there they extrude each pixel upwards based on its height information. Not something the SNES would be able to do unfortunately.
Absolutely no lies detected. Super Monaco GP arcade is an absolutely beautiful game. No game console or computer at the time were able to throw sprites around like Sega's arcade hardware.
However you can see in the video, the MD version still is able to handle smooth line scrolling while having multiple sprites on screen and showing a "rear view mirror" at 30 fps with no slowdown. It did a fantastic job of giving the illusion of doing a full track.
It also handled collision detection better than the arcade - you could seriously wreck your shit on the MD version. In the arcade, you'd magically go through obstacles on the edges of the track, getting pushed back onto the track.
UncleSporky
Member
How does Mario Kart not feel like that?
In fact I'd argue that raster games feel like LESS of that than Mode 7, because of the aforementioned issues above, that it's more about navigating the track horizontally back and forth avoiding obstacles. Because the tracks aren't represented as a "real" 2D map, raster design tended to emphasize horizontal movement to dodge other vehicles and such. They were the furthest from "stuck on a stick."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAprFOGApsQ&feature=youtu.be&t=125
Futaleufu
Member
There are some arcade games that use something like Mode 7.
F-1 Grand Prix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLrNwT9PN6o
Cameltry (not a racing game)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bssMf8f8tek
CamHostage
Member
I don't know, you're actually building up my feelings against raster-road engine racing with your example, because one of the issues I have with the majority of these games is that the opponents tend to be obstacles rather than other racers. They don't seem to be as interested in getting to where they're going as you do, and they don't have awareness of the road. In your Road Rash example, for instance, bikes fight with you but they don't as aggressively lean into turns (though that's this game; they all lean in Hang-On) or panic when a car is coming up on them or adjust their approach into a turn. The other racers seem to be playing a different game than you are; in most all Mode7 racers, the AI quite clearly is dealing with the same conditions (aside from rubber-banding) that you are.
There are surely plenty of exceptions in raster-road engine racers, of course (and it's tough to say outright what AI is "thinking") but I feel like it's telling that multiplayer was rarely a major factor in the history of raster-road engine racing games and yet was so natural and essential in Mario Kart (and so clearly missing in F-Zero, even in 1990 before we knew 2p Mode7 could work.)
Good pull, thx! I feel like there's a lot in PC that are easy to miss against the killer Sega SuperScaler games (some Amiga games have already been mentioned) that did interesting things with raster-road engine racing which wouldn't have been necessary to explore in a quarter-muncher.
I don't think it is