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John Romero just uploaded a video demo of Mario Bros 3 for PC made by id in 1990
- Thread starter DrFunk
- Start date
GAF, could y'all imagine a film adaptation of Masters of Doom, directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin? Oh...my...God!
zeioIIDX
Member
I agree, I always wondered how it looked. I pictured it as being slightly more crude looking. This is so damn cool.
That would be great, actually.
Vulcano's assistant
Banned
If GAF can criticize gameplay of literal tech demos, then we will criticize it in anything.
derExperte
Member
Jesse Eisenberg as John Carmack and John Romero as John Romero. Done and done.
ManUnkindH
Member
Now that's a very bad Mario game. Awful I might say.
Poimandres
Member
Hey John / id Software: this is cool and all, but what about a new Commander Keen - or at the very least a definitive Steam collection of the old games - instead to celebrate this iconic classic series?
Cheers!
(Queue people telling me this is already available...or planned...)
Cheers!
(Queue people telling me this is already available...or planned...)
derExperte
Member
Thanks for the heads-up!
radios shipping overview
Member
386? Invasion of the Vorticons ran fine on my family's XT. That was the feat.
It wasn't until Goodbye Galaxy that the series needed a beefier machine.
radios shipping overview
Member
This is how PC sidescrollers scrolled before Keen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHhRg14OhO4
Notice how it snaps to each tile. The scrolling animation has no inbetweening.
Well, I found this game from 1989 by psygnosis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbj6hIkUyYE
Scrolling seems pretty smooth.
AgentOtaku
Member
Ah, I remember reading about this in Master of Doom
Fuck I miss the 90s sometimes.... specifically id in the 90s
Fuck I miss the 90s sometimes.... specifically id in the 90s
SmiteOfHand
Member
Not familiar with this game but the patterned background makes me suspect it is using animated tiles to simulate scrolling, similar to how early parallax scrolling was achieved. Also none of the scrolling elements have collision or state the way Mario 3 does which makes a big difference.
Not saying this isn't impressive, it was probably a shitload of work and I'd love to learn more about it, but at first glance it looks to be a slightly different beast.
radios shipping overview
Member
I can't tell if the herky-jerkiness of that video is from the original game or from however it was captured.
MrCunningham
Member
Yeah, this game looks like it would be using animated tiles to achieve a fake scrolling effect for the BG layer. Though there are objects like plants and things that do look like they are scrolling from the hardware, maybe? This would be comparable to something like Moon Patrol, I would imagine. It looks like faked forced scrolling, and none of it is arbitrary like the Mario 3 demo.
This is still a really cool looking game. Psygnosis always made technically impressive stuff.
I think commander keen actually uses that level of panning, but that's only part of the solution. Commander Keen also had to support CGA in the absence of EGA. Additionally, that smooth scrolling only works for moving the entire screen. You needed additional buffers off screen and to only redraw changes, and those blits could be expensive.
Plus if I recall, drawing in EGA was a pain in the ass for a few different reasons, one of them being awkward pixel masking while drawing. If you look at the commander keen source, they seem to use this hybrid mode where they may have been using text characters and possibly drawing on top of that, which is even more interesting.
By the time VGA games were a bit more common, computers were fast enough that this could be done in software rather easily. I remember spending many a late night writing a VGA library that could handle tiles, sprites, and animations and still do smooth scrolling. This was readily doable on a 486 without any real challenges. However, commander keen and those games likely had to jump through even more hoops to run on the 286, and possibly the 8086.
MightyHedgehog
Member
I think you're trying too hard to diminish the accomplishment of Carmack's scrolling by claiming earlier titles did it first. (Also, that's the saddest and most static version of Menace I've ever seen...even worse than the C64 version, but that was the norm of most DOS action-scrolling games of the day. At least that 8-bit version managed convincing parallax tiled BGs AFAIR while this one is all what appears to be animated, pseudo-scrolling static ones.) Yeah, it looks sort of smooth, but it's running at a linear rate, limited to being only on the x-axis, and forced into being always on compared to the id Mario 3 PC tech demo which showcases a completely controlled scrolling view by centering on user movement, runs at varying rates of movement based on the user, and also scrolls on the y-axis and diagonally, preserving the positions of all animated and enemy sprites which stay perfectly anchored to the tiled platforms and include a fair number of variations on-screen at once. All running smoothly and doing a great job of what a platform like the NES does easily by comparison.
At least one review at the time called out the "jerkiness" of it.
It's still pretty impressive, and chances are it was in development about the same time. However, they did have an ever so slight advantage of it being a port.
LSauchelli
Member
I wonder, if Nintendo had said yes, what would ID had done with the Wolfenstein tech later on if they were a Nintendo partner?
DiipuSurotu
Banned
SmiteOfHand
Member
Wolf3D tech was directly inspired by F-Zero (there is a good story about Carmack locking himself in his room to accomplish this in Masters of Doom for anyone who hasn't read it like get on it what are you doing still reading this parenthetical aside, go, now!) and they ended up porting it to SNES anyway so I suspect history would have played out pretty much the same. Nintendo made it clear they didn't care about FPS for a long time. Hell, Splatoon only came out this year.
also found this dos version of golden axe from 1990 that actually looks pretty impressive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbFTjUBkeNw
and an explanation from the programmer and it sounds relatively straight forward
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbFTjUBkeNw
and an explanation from the programmer and it sounds relatively straight forward
It's using VGA, so it's likely a level up in terms of hardware (at least 286?). At the point of the 386 and VGA, it became easily possible to do this -- even in software, but that was still prohibitively expensive for many in 1990. Even more impressive for the same year was Wing Commander, which also worked in VGA and targeted the 386.
The description is interesting because he's talking about using Mode X before Mode X had been published (1991 according to wikipedia), but maybe he learned about it from Abrash on a newsgroup if he had access.
MrCunningham
Member
Golden Axe for DOS does seem to have CGA, EGA, Tandy mode, and Hercules modes as well. I can;t find any video on the EGA version, but here is what the CGA version looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoimkm9Uq8c
The scrolling doesn't look too bad all things considering.
I'm not trying to diminish anything. I'm just trying to find out how ground breaking his technique really was.
I had that Game! Impressive scrolling tech.
Yeah I saw that but couldn't find a video quickly when I looked. It's light years better than most CGA games I've seen, but it's still jerky (especially at about 2:33). However, this is likely ran from an emulator with god knows what specs and changes. My point in pointing out the VGA thing is that it's a different set of hardware, and VGA made it much easier to do (and also that i'm not 100% sure I buy the authors explanation of what he's doing there as there were other ways of doing that for VGA than modeX.)
~~~
One of the problems to understand this in context is not when the game was released and what was around it, but rather, when each of these things were being developed and what information they had access to. If we consider simply the release of examples, much of this may have been done first in the demo scene.
Few people had access to the internet in 89 and 90, aside from maybe some usenet access. This made it much more difficult to share neat tricks. Usenet, Dr Dobbs, and books like Michael Abrash's books were common. It's difficult to know what was around while they were developing and what Carmack had access to. This was especially true at the time for shareware developers like id. Undoubtedly, the development timelines for all of these were overlapped, and the engine was likely partially in development the year before. (Though the line between tinkering, learning, and full engine development may have been thin). So regardless of which hit the market first, it's at least possible that Carmack had never seen them before he had finished the basic technique. It's also possible, if not probable, that he didn't have the same access to information as some of the larger companies doing ports.
As an additional thing, Golden Axe, at least according to MobyGames was done by Team Shinobi, who had also worked on other dos ports, and their earlier work was just as unsmooth. Altered Beast and maybe shadow dancer (can't find verifiable videos that aren't emulators).
As for the demo scene, their development cycles could be much shorter as they were basically tech and skill demos, and not full-fledged games. They had a ton of techniques that were impressive to do things like emulate true color with VGA and some cool 3d techniques. There were at least a few games that came out of some of those demos.
FWIW, I don't know the exact state or what Carmack had access to, and I haven't read the book. It's clear that the industry was converging on smooth scrolling, even without Carmack, and it would have gotten there at the same time it did. It's entirely possible that id was playing catch-up and just came up with a catchy name and a "difficult problem" for sake of marketing. Keen was released earlier enough and was shareware so largely accessible, so it makes for a great story, and may still have been one of the first smooth-scrolling games most pc gamers had seen.