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How much more powerful was the N64 compared to the PlayStation anyway?
- Thread starter Snakeyes
- Start date
- 2084
Special Edition? Interesting. The Wipeout 3 I own is definitely not producing those visuals. It's 240p.
Now I see where that talk came from.
Bleemcast eliminates all of the post processing effects (such as motion blur which was heavily used in MGS) while reducing the sound quality quite a bit. It's neat, but not a great way to play the game.
Now I see where that talk came from.
Bleemcast eliminates all of the post processing effects (such as motion blur which was heavily used in MGS) while reducing the sound quality quite a bit. It's neat, but not a great way to play the game.
I took what I believe is a representative screenshot of Mario 64 actually running on a Nintendo 64, just for funsies.
There are no N64 emulators that are designed to run the games just as they were, so it's hard to really get a handle on how games actually looked like. I think the N64 had some form of edge AA, I enabled 2X full screen AA and AF to sort of reproduce the perceived IQ. I set resolution to 320x240, which was the norm.
edit: I had the brightness increased for some reason, i fixed it.
I think it only came out in PAL regions.
There are no N64 emulators that are designed to run the games just as they were, so it's hard to really get a handle on how games actually looked like. I think the N64 had some form of edge AA, I enabled 2X full screen AA and AF to sort of reproduce the perceived IQ. I set resolution to 320x240, which was the norm.
edit: I had the brightness increased for some reason, i fixed it.
I think it only came out in PAL regions.
Oh wow, really?
I kind of feel that way about N64.
I only recently added one to my collection and, outside of a few classics, it's very difficult to find great N64 games. Most of the carts I've ended up collecting are PC ports of games I wanted to see running on N64.
The PSX holds up far better today with a wider variety of more playable games (especially 2D games and the simple but smooth 60 fps 3D games). Nearly everything on N64 consists of blurry polygon based visuals with a very low framerate.
That's close, but as you noted, still off. The HUD elements are displayed at a clean 240p on a real N64 with hard pixels. It looks much better than what you see there.
The N64 also produces very messy filtering. You might be right about some sort of edge filter going on. I'm not sure how they would have done it but games on n64 are surprisingly clean. The hard polygon edges in Mario 64 are surprisingly smooth rather than jaggy on a real SDTV.
What you get with an emulators does not really resemble the real thing.
I kind of feel that way about N64.
I only recently added one to my collection and, outside of a few classics, it's very difficult to find great N64 games. Most of the carts I've ended up collecting are PC ports of games I wanted to see running on N64.
The PSX holds up far better today with a wider variety of more playable games (especially 2D games and the simple but smooth 60 fps 3D games). Nearly everything on N64 consists of blurry polygon based visuals with a very low framerate.
That's close, but as you noted, still off. The HUD elements are displayed at a clean 240p on a real N64 with hard pixels. It looks much better than what you see there.
The N64 also produces very messy filtering. You might be right about some sort of edge filter going on. I'm not sure how they would have done it but games on n64 are surprisingly clean. The hard polygon edges in Mario 64 are surprisingly smooth rather than jaggy on a real SDTV.
What you get with an emulators does not really resemble the real thing.
Definitely subjective. The only N64 games that I think are still worth playing today are Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and the Zelda games. Maybe stuff like the Banjo games could be included, too. (I never played Conker's Bad Fur Day, so I won't comment on that).
I feel like there are a large host of PS1 games that are still totally worth playing today, though. Especially if you're looking at the RPG genre, which the N64 was sorely lacking in.
I feel like there are a large host of PS1 games that are still totally worth playing today, though. Especially if you're looking at the RPG genre, which the N64 was sorely lacking in.
Wave Race 64 and Super Mario 64 are the two games that aged the best, as far as I'm concerned. They still play beautifully. On the other hand both Zeldas are a little wonky compared to the much more refined controls of Wind Waker and post-WW Zelda games.
F-Zero X is up there too because of dat 60fps, but I don't really care for how loose the gameplay is compared to the SNES game.
Their Jak and Daxter games are all open world.
Yeah it's a shame, we can't really have a proper comparison. Fuck man the best N64 emulator out there doesn't even properly output captures either, they're hideously compressed jpegs. Had to prntscrn and then crop it in photoshop.
F-Zero X is up there too because of dat 60fps, but I don't really care for how loose the gameplay is compared to the SNES game.
Their Jak and Daxter games are all open world.
Yeah it's a shame, we can't really have a proper comparison. Fuck man the best N64 emulator out there doesn't even properly output captures either, they're hideously compressed jpegs. Had to prntscrn and then crop it in photoshop.
Justified... I still remember people pirating Gamecube games even though the small disks where supposed to be a deterrent, they just stripped out the case and put normal disks in
Remember CD drives were the blu-ray drives of today (not to be confused with the blu-ray drives at the start of this gen ) the media was cheap, but the drive itself was still relatively expensive... Add into the fact that Nintendo would likely have needed more RAM for caching (access time would have been way to slow for it's 4k of texture ram) and the N64 could easily have added another $50-100 per the cost of the console.
It'd be akin to saying "PS1 would have easily blown the N64 out of the water if it had $99 additional worth of video hardware in it!"
) the media was cheap, but the drive itself was still relatively expensive... Add into the fact that Nintendo would likely have needed more RAM for caching (access time would have been way to slow for it's 4k of texture ram) and the N64 could easily have added another $50-100 per the cost of the console.It'd be akin to saying "PS1 would have easily blown the N64 out of the water if it had $99 additional worth of video hardware in it!"
A cart backup device called Doctor V64 came out in 1996.
N64 Emulator Hits the PC
There was a working and fully playable N64 emulator in January '99.
Carts didn't help Nintendo avoid piracy. Carts, was quite simply, a dumb decision. When the N64 was finally released it had been two years since the PS1 was released and Nintendo inexplicably failed to see how developers and consumers had embraced the format.
If you can't print more copies of a game soon enough to cover demand, people will just buy the games used. Games lose value fairly slowly over time so a person who buys a new game and sells it a week later will end up paying a reasonable amount for the experience. It makes up for game rentals not being allowed.
Speaking of great N64 racers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km3kUtZvq00&feature=related
Beetle Adventure Racing desperately needs a sequel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km3kUtZvq00&feature=related
Beetle Adventure Racing desperately needs a sequel.
One effect in Beetle Adventure Racing that was really impressive at the time was that in-game objects would be reflected off of the cars' surface. No it wasn't technically correct, but it still looked cool.
I still work with the guy that implemented that effect (Richard Baker.) If I remember right, it worked by scaling the previous frame down into an N64 sized texture, probably 32x32, then generating UV coordinates for the reflection pass ala. environment mapping. Like many image based effects it is a ridiculous fake, but looked awesome.
Wow, never knew about that. I stopped playing Turok games after the Rage Wars bug debacle.
Yeah, even back then I could tell how it was done, but it still looked cool and was something I hadn't seen in other games. I guess you can tell him it was such a neat effect that some people still remember it.
Yeah, even back then I could tell how it was done, but it still looked cool and was something I hadn't seen in other games. I guess you can tell him it was such a neat effect that some people still remember it.
Poorly written on my part, but that's what I meant to say. No home console system from that era ran at 60FPS progressive scan. 60FPS games are really running at 30Hz(or 31Hz) even though they're rendering two images together interlaced at once. Though the Dreamcast did have a VGA mode with 480p 60fps progressive scan. Though apparently the Saturn did support progressive scan to a certain degree as well. But I don't think any game ever supported it, nor is there any way to enable this mode without hard wiring the Saturn to do so.
Oh I was wrong, Decathlete was 704x480i as well. But most of these other games you mentioned all ran at 704x448, or 704x240 with lower vertical resolutions.
Umm... as far as I know, exporting a quad based model to a triangles is easy, as you can make quads out of triangles. But exporting a triangle based model to quads is not so easy. But it really depends on the complexity of the model. So I would imagine that in most cases, yes. Models would have to be rebuilt for the Saturn when porting from the PS1.
Quads do have a few advantages over triangle, but they also have many disadvantages as well. In the Saturn's case, quads did have less texture warping and distortion than the PS1's triangle based rendering. You could actually also render curved surfaces much easier on quads than you could in triangles. But things like clipping and collision detection are much more of a pain in the ass to deal with for programmers. This is why the entire PC industry adopted triangles as the main form of rendering over quads.
Oh I was wrong, Decathlete was 704x480i as well. But most of these other games you mentioned all ran at 704x448, or 704x240 with lower vertical resolutions.
Umm... as far as I know, exporting a quad based model to a triangles is easy, as you can make quads out of triangles. But exporting a triangle based model to quads is not so easy. But it really depends on the complexity of the model. So I would imagine that in most cases, yes. Models would have to be rebuilt for the Saturn when porting from the PS1.
Quads do have a few advantages over triangle, but they also have many disadvantages as well. In the Saturn's case, quads did have less texture warping and distortion than the PS1's triangle based rendering. You could actually also render curved surfaces much easier on quads than you could in triangles. But things like clipping and collision detection are much more of a pain in the ass to deal with for programmers. This is why the entire PC industry adopted triangles as the main form of rendering over quads.