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[Rlan]

Of this type of thing - PortsCenter on Youtube is a favourite show of mine that goes through similar ports stuff.

They did one based on Doom originally which was great.

 

[jacob armitage]

Oh awesome! I'd love to see them tackle the PS1 and N64 Forsaken games. Beautiful games that both run at 60fps. Technical wonders.

Great games too.

 

[Fuzyfrog]

So you could take the disc out and put a music cd in while playing right? or am i dreaming?

I have strong memories of playing this with Korn Issues playing....

 

[Krejlooc]

So you could take the disc out and put a music cd in while playing right? or am i dreaming?

The Sega Saturn has a mechanism attached to it's door hinge that, when released, dumps the console back to the control panel. So no, unless you opened up your saturn and taped down that mechanism, you couldn't put your own music CD in (in fact, doing that is how people enable the swap trick boot).

 

[Beer Monkey]

Yes, the US version have less graphics details and some missing replay angles.

http://segaretro.org/Sega_Rally_Championship

I believe that page is wrong about the SRC Netlink Edition (US) not having 3D controller support. However my copy is in storage right now so I cannot test it. I believe the Netlink Edition (US) had other improvements as well (I owned the original release as well). I do admit it has been a long time, though, and memories get a little inaccurate, though not usually.

 

[c0de]

I'd love an analysis of the Resident Evil N64 port and all the tricks and hoops that were jumped to fit a 2 650MB CDs-game in a 512Mb cartridge

IIRC there is info available out there, especially the video magic is explained in detail.

 

[Storm360]

Would love to see more, I find the retro stuff a lot more interesting than the current gen stuff.

Had a lecturer who was part of Westwood and talkimg to him was always super interesting, I remember discussing the porting of C&C/Red Alert to PS1 and some of the tricks used are stuff that would never even occur to me to be possible nevermind actually using them

 

[sn0man]

Please do a PSOne, SS, and N64 face off article showing their best softwares and multi platform games comparision. Then PS2, DC, NGC and Xbox face off since that gen has the most competitions.

Yes a million times. Cover all the systems but the first two generations of 3D have very lacking text and YouTube comparisons. DF is my first stop when deciding between a 360/PS3/PC game to add for retro collecting. I'd definitely patreon if you needed it.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

If this video does well I'll do Quake 2 PSX and the two N64 Quake games

I would be interested in seeing DOOM 64

 

[c0de]

Well dark, it seems you opened the box of Pandora here ;-)

 

[KKRT00]

Yes a million times. Cover all the systems but the first two generations of 3D have very lacking text and YouTube comparisons. DF is my first stop when deciding between a 360/PS3/PC game to add for retro collecting. I'd definitely patreon if you needed it.

Its PC, always. There, i saved hundreds of hours of work for Dark10x.

Ps. I still need to watch the video from OP, but yesterday I just launched it without a sound in the background to give them revenue

 

[Oemenia]

Would love to see more, I find the retro stuff a lot more interesting than the current gen stuff.

Had a lecturer who was part of Westwood and talkimg to him was always super interesting, I remember discussing the porting of C&C/Red Alert to PS1 and some of the tricks used are stuff that would never even occur to me to be possible nevermind actually using them

Sounds inreresting, any other tidbits? It was a good port but lacked more than half the missions in the PC version.

 

[Tain]

Awesome video and I'd love to see more.

 

[Karak]

All this does is make me want to play Powerslave

I'm still a freaking southpaw because of Saturn quake and duke.
.

I honestly am as well and never thought that happened to anyone else. When I talked to some of the peeps at Sega they would laugh at me but honestly it worked really well.

 

[Celine]

Remember there's no z-buffer on PSX, so in order to make an object look solid you need to apply the painter's algorithm to each face and draw it back-to-front relative to the camera. Rather than compute this every time for each face, we basically pre-generated 8 lists per object -be that a chunk of world geometry or an entity within it- then simply selected which one of the lists to use.

As a system it really had no major drawbacks other than the inherent limitation of the painter's algorithm which struggles with complex shapes. 8 angles pretty much covers all cases but its very manpower intensive to prepare it as what it entails is someone sitting there and manually selecting faces and pushing/pulling them around in the order until you have something that looks right as much of the time as possible.

Where stuff was problematic we either removed or rebuilt to work around the problem.

It was a pure code/data solution that required no hardware assistance, very old school in its reliance on pre-calcing as much as possible to reduce cpu overhead.

To clarify a bit on why 8 lists, its really simple if you imagine you are rendering a cube. A cube is made up of 6 faces, each made up of 2 triangles. Now if you look diagonally down on the cube's corner from above and build your face-draw order list, you are 1/8 of the way there.

Do all 4 corners looking diagonally down, you are half way. Then repeating the process looking up from below covers all bases because looking directly parallel can always be covered by the corresponding diagonal orders.

This thread keep delivering.
Thanks for sharing.

BTW awesome job on Quake 2 port for PS1.

 

[Atomski]

Yeah it's amazing it's running but man that control scheme.. I feel like it turns beautiful butterfly into a festering peice of dog poo.

 

[Celine]

As I understand it they massively underbid for those ports and they were not the biggest sellers in the universe. Though was spelled the ultimate doom for Lobotomy was a game called Shadow Madness.

What? How?

I thought Lobotomy was working on a few N64 projects before closing down (Caesar Palace 64, Aquaria) but I could be wrong.

 

[Neiteio]

Great video!

 

[dreamcastmaster]

What? How?

I thought Lobotomy was working on a few N64 projects before closing down (Caesar Palace 64, Aquaria) but I could be wrong.

One of the Last things Lobotomy worked on was a pitch for an underwater Ecco style game for the Dreamcast. They really felt they has a good chance as they supported the Saturn so well but the concept was rejected.

 

[deleted]

Really great video! Hopefully this finds success so we can have more like it and eventually comparisons between PS1/N64/Saturn Versions. I'd been wanting to see something like this for a rather long time!

 

[Toadthemushroom]

This is great. I've liked dark10x's posts on games both old and new, and games that were new and now old (I remember him commenting on the PSP port of OutRun 2006 for example).

Would be great if this series also stretched to handheld stuff. There's some impressive stuff on the GBA (Gunstar Future Heroes), DS (Solatorobo, GTA with a lot of its code being written in assembly to get it running at 30fps) and PSP (Ridge Racers, 60fps at launch with great UMD load times) that deserve the spotlight shone on them.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

I would be interested in seeing DOOM 64

Another vote for Doom 64 - one of the few 3D N64 titles to run at 60fps, and it had a few graphical enhancements(?) above and beyond the other Doom games at the time.

 

[SpinningBirdKick]

Quake on the Saturn was an amazing port. I enjoyed it a lot at the time.

The retro video is OK but fairly shallow in content.

I would be good to get some comments from the actual developers in there explaining the black magic they had to use to overcome the challenging hardware limitations. Most game developers are quite open after time moves on. Where the methods the employed no longer have any commercial value.

A video more along the lines of a GamaSutra game postmortem or CodeTapper's 16 Bit retrospective articles would be amazing. People are eager for this type of in depth content. Look how popular the NES tile engine video was for example https://youtu.be/Tfh0ytz8S0k

 

[Cow Mengde]

I'd love to learn about Quake 2 on PSX and N64 as well.

 

[Dictator93]

I am not sure what everyone is so impressed by in this port. It just has what are predominantly basic and flat looking textures, enemy character models which look no better than OG xbox's fable, and it still struggles so much on the Saturn even when most assets are at medium quality or lower quality and many sliders below low of the PC version.

 

[nogoodnamesleft]

I am not sure what everyone is so impressed by in this port. It just has what are predominantly basic and flat looking textures, enemy character models which look no better than OG xbox's fable, and it still struggles so much on the Saturn even when most assets are at medium quality or lower quality and many sliders below low of the PC version.

You do realize how powerful/underpowered the Saturn is, right? Even back then.

 

[Shard]

What? How?

I thought Lobotomy was working on a few N64 projects before closing down (Caesar Palace 64, Aquaria) but I could be wrong.

Ah, why I am so glad you asked. Right, you are indeed correct that Lobotomy was working on a Nintendo 64 version of Ceasers Palace but they were doing that work under the aegis of Crave Entertainment whom had purchased the developer. Crave at that point in time had already crafted another internal development division called Craveyard made up mostly of Square Redmond expats whom had developed the game Secret of Evermore along with various SNES translations. Indeed they were being tasked in creating what amounted to a Western styled JRPG called Shadow Madness that was one of many, many attempts at grabbing that post Final Fantasy 7 RPG pie and it just kind faded beneath the waters. The title ended up doing so bad Crave shifts focus from internal development to external publishing dissolving both Craveyard and Lobotomy in the process. Such an ignominious fate to behold a developer but not an uncommon one.

 

[Deft Beck]

This is one of the most fascinating and civil threads I've seen on this forum for a while. I would love to learn more about technical achievement on older consoles.

 

[c0de]

I am not sure what everyone is so impressed by in this port. It just has what are predominantly basic and flat looking textures, enemy character models which look no better than OG xbox's fable, and it still struggles so much on the Saturn even when most assets are at medium quality or lower quality and many sliders below low of the PC version.

The lighting also does look really flat and it's easy to see that the devs didn't know what they were doing. It lacks polish in a serious way. Compared to other games this just looks poor in every way, especially exclusives. It's a shame they weren't able to use the better hardware more like many other games showed before, especially considering that Saturn had two processors.

 

[GreekWolf]

I am not sure what everyone is so impressed by in this port. It just has what are predominantly basic and flat looking textures, enemy character models which look no better than OG xbox's fable, and it still struggles so much on the Saturn even when most assets are at medium quality or lower quality and many sliders below low of the PC version.

It's impressive because it shouldn't have technically been possible at all regardless of texture quality or chunky models.

This is essentially a bunch of guys putting their heads together and somehow figuring out how to approximate a 3D environment on obsolete hardware which was designed for sprite based gaming.

 

[Spiral Insanity]

The lighting also does look really flat and it's easy to see that the devs didn't know what they were doing. It lacks polish in a serious way. Compared to other games this just looks poor in every way, especially exclusives. It's a shame they weren't able to use the better hardware more like many other games showed before, especially considering that Saturn had two processors.

Oh man, this is a parody post?

 

[Combichristoffersen]

Completely untrue as far as I know. Sony had nothing whatsoever to do with porting Q2. It was a job-for-hire deal between us (Hammerhead) and Activision.

If anyone from DF wants the skinny on the development process of that particular title, feel free to PM me. It was quite a time we had

Any general questions from GAF, fire away.

Just wanna say thanks for the PS1 port of QII, I had so much fun with splitscreen MP

 

[Kabuki Quantum Lover]

The Saturn version looks a lot better than I expected.

I'm still holding on to my copy of Q2 for PS1. I love that version of the game (more than the PC version for some sick reason).

 

[ResidentDante]

Cool DF video, would like to see more like this with older games!

That Quake port seems like a really good one considering the difficult architecture of the Saturn.

 

[c0de]

Oh man, this is a parody post?

I guess dictator and I overdid it because not everyone knows what often happens in df threads.
Yes, I was not serious.

 

[Tapejara]

Did you ever do one for Doom 64? If not, I'd like to see that be made into a video, since that's widely acknowledged as the best version of Doom available.

Lol, I think you quoted the wrong person there .

 

[lohankain]

One thing that i remember now from the Saturn Version is a exclusive easter egg in episode 3 or 4, that is a comic book that you find in a false wall or window.

Quake saturn comic - dank and scuz (scud)

 

[Storm360]

Sounds inreresting, any other tidbits? It was a good port but lacked more than half the missions in the PC version.

The biggest one that stands out for me is that they had huge issues with RAM (probably why there was a lot of cut content) so to work around it, they attempted to offload areas of the game to the PS1's SPU. I really wish I could have had the chance to pick his brain more.

 

[Aizu_Itsuko]

Was looking for this. I did that interview with Ezra back when I was running Curmudgeon Gamer.

Great interview.

 

[MrCunningham]

One thing that i remember now from the Saturn Version is a exclusive easter egg in episode 3 or 4, that is a comic book that you find in a false wall or window.

Quake saturn comic - dank and scuz (scud)

"Say Dank, ever noticed if you combine "Scuz" with "Dank", you get "Scank"? Heh, heh..."

I've never seen these before. But they are amusing.

Spoiler

Haha at the Doom Guy cameo!

 

[gelf]

Its PC, always. There, i saved hundreds of hours of work for Dark10x.

Ps. I still need to watch the video from OP, but yesterday I just launched it without a sound in the background to give them revenue

Funny you say that as in the case of Lobotomy's Exhumed/Powerslave PC is actually the last platform you should be getting it for(unless Night Dive rescue the new port). PC version is more of a standard FPS and is missing much of what makes the console versions special in terms of level design and metroidvanian elements.

 

[Dictator93]

You do realize how powerful/underpowered the Saturn is, right? Even back then.

It's impressive because it shouldn't have technically been possible at all regardless of texture quality or chunky models.

This is essentially a bunch of guys putting their heads together and somehow figuring out how to approximate a 3D environment on obsolete hardware which was designed for sprite based gaming.

lol you guys

C0de saw right through it.

 

[Sayad]

Great video dark10x, hope to see more of those.

 

[laxu]

I didn't even know Quake was made for Saturn. Very impressive considering at the time Quake with software rendering was very taxing even on the PC. That said, Quake on Saturn seems like one of those ports that just should not have been done considering the framerate is just borderline playable when any enemies are on screen.

 

[Spunky Monkey]

I didn't even know Quake was made for Saturn. Very impressive considering at the time Quake with software rendering was very taxing even on the PC. That said, Quake on Saturn seems like one of those ports that just should not have been done considering the framerate is just borderline playable when any enemies are on screen.

What many people keep forgetting in this thread is these machines were not 1080p, 60fps power houses. They really were not designed to push lots and lots of 3D graphics initially. In 1994 you had 16 Bit consoles that could do good 2D, but certainly had a lot of room to grow in just that area, so having 3D arrive at that time was almost a step too soon.

The Saturn especially, was meant to be a 2D power house above and beyond even the Neo Geo, which it was and is why 2D ports and fighting games suffered on the PS1 in comparison. But most games around that time had frame rates ranging from 8-25 fps. It's not uncommon to play N64 games with frame rates in the low teens and at the time no one really cared because you couldn't play anything better unless you was on PC which really didn't feature a lot of console type gaming. We really are spoiled in this regard with the machines we currently have.

Let's say for an example the average PS1 game could display 20,000 polygons a second (im sure someone will come in with a more accurate number). Now divide that by how many frames a second, lets say 15. That's around 1,333 polygons in each frame.

Thats the number that's important as thats the whole scene being drawn including characters, levels, objects, enemies etc. Now lets take a character like Lara Croft.

On the left we can see her in her original form and on the right in Anniversary edition. In the left alone she is around 230 polygons. That's quite a chunk of polygons used just for the character, let alone enemies, objects and the actual game world. So you can see quite quickly that developers really didn't have much to work with to begin with. Lower frame rates mean they have more polygons per scene but it should be considered absolutely amazing that any of these games ran and looked as good as they did considering they had so little to actually work with.

As another example, Lara croft in the PS2 game was 4,400 polygons alone. That's around 3 times more polygons just for her character as the first game had for a whole scene.

 

[ExitPlanetDust]

I believe that page is wrong about the SRC Netlink Edition (US) not having 3D controller support. However my copy is in storage right now so I cannot test it. I believe the Netlink Edition (US) had other improvements as well (I owned the original release as well). I do admit it has been a long time, though, and memories get a little inaccurate, though not usually.

It is wrong. Netlink Edition supports the 3D controller. I still have a video on my YT channel where I discuss some lesser known 3D controller supported titles and I show the changes in the options menu as well as some gameplay.

 

[dark10x]

I've actually continued to play Saturn Quake again after doing this video and...I'm having a weird amount of fun.

I hate to trot out the whole "Dark Souls" comparison, but it's giving me a similar vibe that I don't necessarily feel with the PC original.

Why? Two reasons, really.

The main thing is that the controls aren't very good but just manageable enough to feel playable. Since you have to rely on health packs and such, getting through the stages requires a lot of care and attention. There are traps and areas where you'll just get ripped to shreds if you're not prepared. Really requires you to take your time and plan out your attacks unlike the PC game where you can shred through enemies with little issue. You also can only save between levels so running into a dangerous foe near the end can result in repeating the whole stage. Higher stakes, easier death, and tricky combat definitely makes for a strangely fun experience.

Secondly, the Saturn game is dark and dreary in a way that none of the other versions are. It just feels super grimy in a way that I'm liking. The mix of the original Quake soundtrack with these super dark visuals and strange color choices leads to a very moody game.

I've played Quake to death on the PC but going through the Saturn game again is a weird twist on something that I'm familiar with.

I also booted up the N64 game again for comparison. That version looks much more like GLQuake with low-res textures and simplified geometry. I was surprised to find that the Saturn version does a better job of replicating some of the more complex arenas better than N64.

Of course, the N64 game runs almost completely smoothly at 30fps, had a full-screen view of the action, and plays much better. It also features cool colored lighting all over the place and hugely improved sky boxes.

Unfortunately, it's way too bright and colorful. It feels vibrant and looks nice but it loses a lot of the atmosphere. It's like GLQuake taken to its extreme. GLQ never felt as gritty or dark as the original software renderer and Quake 64 goes further in that direction.

 

[MrCunningham]

It's not uncommon to play N64 games with frame rates in the low teens and at the time no one really cared because you couldn't play anything better unless you was on PC which really didn't feature a lot of console type gaming. We really are spoiled in this regard with the machines we currently have.

The original Tomb Raider for the PC did support different hardware acceleration (3DFX, Matrox, Rage Pro, etc) and could render up to 1024*768 (I think this is the highest it went) with a framerate that was locked at 30FPS. But the framerate never went above 30 on the PC. Though the native software renderer is locked at 640*480 with maybe an option for 320*240. I would have to look at the game again.

Thats the number that's important as thats the whole scene being drawn including characters, levels, objects, enemies etc. Now lets take a character like Lara Croft.

On the left we can see her in her original form and on the right in Anniversary edition. In the left alone she is around 230 polygons. That's quite a chunk of polygons used just for the character, let alone enemies, objects and the actual game world. So you can see quite quickly that developers really didn't have much to work with to begin with. Lower frame rates mean they have more polygons per scene but it should be considered absolutely amazing that any of these games ran and looked as good as they did considering they had so little to actually work with.

As another example, Lara croft in the PS2 game was 4,400 polygons alone. That's around 3 times more polygons just for her character as the first game had for a whole scene.

Also interesting to note that the original Lara Croft model was designed for the Saturn first and optimized to be rendered in quads and then it was ported over to the PS1. The Saturn was the lead development platform for Tomb Raider up to a point to where they shifted gears over to the PS1, because it was just better equipped at running the game at higher framerates. And it really shows in some of the larger areas in the game.

Here is the original Lara Croft Saturn model:

PS1 vs Saturn:

The PS1 version uses the Saturn model, but does increase the colour depth and resolution of the model textures and also applies gouraud shading to try and give the models a smoother and rounder appearance. The PS1 model is technically higher poly, because everything is constructed out of triangles instead of four sided shapes.

Since Core axed the Saturn version of Tomb Raider 2, the sequel was more focused on the Playstation and Lara's model received some refinements to better suit the PS1 hardware. Since they didn't have to worry about rendering everything in quads. But her model overall wasn't massively higher polygon for TR2, but I think it was better designed to work with triangles.

 

[SpotAnime]

Lol, I think you quoted the wrong person there .

Lol yeah - that was a general statement to dark10x, just snuck in with your quote.

Anyway, looks like a couple of folks had it covered with their own Doom 64 requests.

 

[sn0man]

Its PC, always. There, i saved hundreds of hours of work for Dark10x.

Ps. I still need to watch the video from OP, but yesterday I just launched it without a sound in the background to give them revenue

Super true and while you may be joking you are right that almost always a game is best graphically on a PC. For me, however, what I can't get with a PC is a physical item to collect and be able to play much later. In that case I'm looking for the best console version because at least for the time being those are the places where I can buy a disc and play it offline.

Example1: The WiiU version of Need for Speed uses the same assets as the PC version did and plays smoothly and renders at a nice resolution. Obviously with a PC you could render at a higher resolution but the PC is likely digital only.

Example2: bioshock 360 and PC seem to have the same assets according to DF. Bioshock infinite, however, uses higher resolution textures and normal maps on PC than consoles. Now I'm somewhat interested in the rumored Bioshock collection for PS4/Xbone.

DF then helps me identify which port is worth collecting. It would be helpful if they would do the same for the prior generations as well. They can skip the 16-bit stuff as that has been covered extensively by plenty of random YouTube channels.