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MajorRawne

Could the Genesis/Megadrive have done Super Mario World?

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I almost want to take a stab at making Super Mario World on the Genesis. Not that I've ever programmed for the Genesis, but my ego feels that I could do better. Its just quite the investment of time.

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Tritnew said:


http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Super_Mario_World_64

Now i want to know the blood, sweat, and tears it took them to make the genesis run that... Instantly noticing the missing audio-visual effects, slowdown, no map, no point counter.

Partially running a butchered simplified version is not running it, its Confirmation Bias.

And Super Mario World is not even close to the graphically most extreme game the Snes had to offer at normal gameplay speeds.

The truth is that both systems can run something the other one cant. ;)

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geo said:

I almost want to take a stab at making Super Mario World on the Genesis. Not that I've ever programmed for the Genesis, but my ego feels that I could do better. Its just quite the investment of time.


You could give It a shot.

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I'd need a dev kit of some sort and I can't imagine they're cheap when they're 30 years old. I'd also need more than pride as an incentive. I can't imagine people are clamoring for Super Mario World on Genesis since its been done before albeit bad. Perhaps a master system remake would be better and more impressive, but without it being on the Genesis, no one would care since the war wasn't on until the 16-bit era.

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FireFish said:

You have to downgrade SNES games to run them on the mastersystem.
You have to downgrade Mastersystem games to run them on the SNES.

The Genesis is the Mega Drive, not the Master System.

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Bloodshedder said:

The Genesis is the Mega Drive, not the Master System.


I was just correcting all of that while thinking about it being odd that nobody cought on. I appologize to anybody whom might have been irritated. It was 6 in the morning when i wrote all that. I stick to what i wrote though, even if i like both of them.

And the joke of it all ;
You have to downgrade SNES games to run them on the Mega Drive.
You have to downgrade Mega Drive games to run them on the SNES.

edit ;
a sleep depraved brain seems to fail short on decisiveness... i hope i fixed all of them.

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FireFish said:

http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Super_Mario_World_64

Now i want to know the blood, sweat, and tears it took them to make the genesis run that... Instantly noticing the missing audio-visual effects, slowdown, no map, no point counter.

Partially running a butchered simplified version is not running it, its Confirmation Bias.

And Super Mario World is not even close to the graphically most extreme game the Snes had to offer at normal gameplay speeds.

The truth is that both systems can run something the other one cant. ;)


Yup, pretty much. But they're Russians obviously. My point of view on the systems Is that they run their own games, they're not meant to be played on the other system and that's their rule.

http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/bootleggames/images/c/c6/JESUS_FUCKING_CHRIST.png/revision/latest?cb=20141005232725

Russians created a Felix The Cat Sega port of the NES game, and they made this the damn game over. Russians are fucked up.

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Super Mario World itself is basically just an NES game running on a 16-bit console, (albeit with slightly more colors and scaling effects, the latter of which could easily be replicated through software) so doing a faithful homebrew port would be a cinch.

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Patch93 said:

Super Mario World itself is basically just an NES game running on a 16-bit console, (albeit with slightly more colors and scaling effects, the latter of which could easily be replicated through software) so doing a faithful homebrew port would be a cinch.


That Is the point, honestly. But I see the SNES as a entirely new Nintendo console though.

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geo said:

Without seeing the cartridge you may chose not to believe its on a Genesis. It could just be on a PC and click bait.

I own it so I can tell you first hand it's not a fake. You should try to make a better version, I'd love to see an actual decent Genesis port just for the novelty of it!

I also own a surprisingly accurate NES port. (Famicom cart, of course) It could be better - Could have the jumping and flying physics from Mario3, but instead has it's own botched engine - But it still proves that, on a technical level, SMW is actually not that hard a game to port, even to an 8bit framework.

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It's funny that people keep mentioning the 68000 as a "fast" and "superior" CPU: it was as vanilla as it gets for the 90s, and was used in everything from arcade machines, the Atari ST to the Amiga 500/600/1000, at pretty much the same clock rate. Hell, it was clocked at 7.6 MHz, a bit slower than it was on the Amiga, FFS, and on none of these platforms was it considered a particularly efficient or fast CPU.

And HOW THE FUCK is it comparable to a completely different CPU?

In any case, the two consoles were separated by a two year gap between their release time, and it sure shows. The Genesis used "tried & true" vanilla technology, in an obvious effort to replicate the architecture of many contemporary arcade machines of the time (and, from that point of view, it was a breakthrough: for the first time home gamers had an access console which, at least on paper, had little to envy to what they could play at the arcades, which was no small thing: before, when home users got single-CPU 8-bit consoles (often with no custom hardware to speak of), arcades were just getting started with multi-CPU 8-bit and the first 16-bit boards.

In fact, many early arcade ports for the Mega Drive were nearly arcade-perfect, because of that. For example, it easily has the best Rainbow Islands and Truxton/Tatsujin port of any home computer and console. In theory, the architecture should have aided porting arcade titles (Hell, it was almost like a weaker Neo Geo!).

Nintendo chose to be more adventurous and went for a "dirtier" design, kinda like the C64 and NES were "dirtier" compared to their competitors using the "square" Z80: instead, they were laden with custom chips, used a "dirtier" almost-RISC CPU (the 6502) etc. They also had TWO ENTIRE FUCKING YEARS to design a "Genesis Killer", from that point of view.

Now as for the CPUs alone: a commonly cited figure is "1 MIPS average for a 68000 @ 8 MHz", which was the limit for the good old Amiga (in practice, as any seasoned 68k programmer knows, the fastest instruction on the 68000 takes 4 CPU cycles, the slowest up to 56), and -surprise surprise- 1.5 MIPS for a 65816 @ 3.58 MHz (!), so in terms of raw CPU horsepower, the Genesis should be beaten fair and square.

What really hurts the 65816 is the memory access pattern, which isn't as free as it is on the 68000, and thus limits throughput (the "blast processing"). But when you have hardware that can do stuff the 68k couldn't possibly do even with 100% CPU usage, who cares?

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FireFish said:

The Mega Drive was being held back by its inferior image quality and less popular titles with a lot less content (overal as a whole). For me it is easy to accept the fact that it had better processing hardware while ignoring the image quality.


You're gonna have to elaborate on what you mean with "image quality" since that's such a vague term that could mean any number of things to different people. For instance it could mean the video outputs on the actual machines such as RGB/Composite, and there are some big differences between the two there. IIRC people have said that the Genesis (or at least certain models) have much better RGB output. Genesis also utilizes a higher resolution at 320x224 compared to the standard 256x224 on the SNES. SNES also has a high res 512x448 mode, which is often mentioned in comparison charts, but this is really misleading since that comes with so many caveats that practically no one used it in an ingame context.

FireFish said:

It is a gaming system, a carefuly crafted system of which its main goal is to run quality games with quality content... you wont get far with "fast superior cpu's" running empty action, bland content, and ugly images just because the pogrammers liked it.


On the contrary I think you do get quite far with just the better CPU. This was precisely why Treasure felt it was such a barrier to their game design aspirations and started developing exclusively for the Genesis. And I think the debates around the hardware differences are as valid and warranted as anything else. The fact that the two are such vastly different architectures is precisely what makes them interesting, and their distinct strengths and weaknesses manifest in so many things.

The Genesis hardware just lent itself better to the types of games which were prominent in arcades at the time, and thus received a better selection of titles within that philosophy. Problem is that there was a shift in the mainstream zeitgeist starting at the time, where people started to get more interested in long term immersive types of experiences from adventures/RPGs and the likes. This trend was even further exacerbated retroactively through emulation and retro culture (for instance you'll notice what a gigantic reputation Chrono Trigger has today, but the original game only sold 200k copies in the western market, which while good for its time was still not even close to the heavy hitters of its time), and a lot of the arcade-style gems on the Genesis are now unfairly dismissed by that sort of culture. Yeah, you won't get something like Chrono Trigger on the Genesis, but you'll also never find anything like Alien Soldier on the SNES.

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Very interesting: Toy Story side-by-side comparison on Genesis and SNES



IMO, one would be hard-pressed to find substantial differences in content or gameplay, not even e.g. an extra layer of parallax scrolling on the SNES. The FPS part is pretty impressive, too! Somehow, Wolf3D engines appear to be perfectly feasible on the Genesis, as this is not the only game to feature one.

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Maes said:

IMO, one would be hard-pressed to find substantial differences in content or gameplay, not even e.g. an extra layer of parallax scrolling on the SNES.


The gap in color difference between the two systems is usually pretty exagerrated as both have enough to be within the realm of diminishing returns for the kind of art styles you usually saw in the era, and both systems seldom ever maxed out their color displays (Genesis games probably average around 40-50 on screen colors, and SNES probably hovers around 100-150). Main difference would be that more objects can afford to have their own dedicated sub-palettes on the SNES, as you can see in the video thumbnail there with the shelf having its own colors while on the Genesis it shares the same color as the wood floor, yet you don't really get the impression that it's starved of colors. I'm actually surprised the Genesis version looks as good as it does from a color standpoint, since these types of pre-rendered 3D assets are usually where the SNES shines the most. It just goes to show that it's not what you use, but rather how you use it, and the devs working on Toy Story were obviously very talented.

Maes said:

The FPS part is pretty impressive, too! Somehow, Wolf3D engines appear to be perfectly feasible on the Genesis, as this is not the only game to feature one.


You can do all of Wolf3D on the vanilla hardware. In fact that's exactly what an extremly talented homebrew dev has been doing:



IIRC it's the original unaltered art assets stored in the ROM, but going through some kind of algorithm to fit them into the Genesis palette rather than reoptimizing them manually, hence the vertical dithered look. The full game with all the episodes would require a cartridge space of about 2.5mb, so it could very feasibly have been released and sold at a reasonable price back in the heyday. Last I heard, he had optimized the engine further to run between 20-25fps. It's an insanely impressive piece of work.

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GeckoYamori said:

It's an insanely impressive piece of work.


^ That, a thousand times. I still haven't figured out how even a Wolf3D kind of engine is possible (and furthermore, so efficient) on a platform which uses tile-based video hardware, and by definition you CANNOT simply write a pixel where you want it to, unless you spend a lot of time modifying a tile. Dithering would be a secondary problem, compared to this. Probably the technique used is a mixture of limited tile-editing and scanline-fuckery, I dunno.

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There was also this:



(Never mind the fact that it's a barely functional pile of crap compared to the proper Duke, that's pretty much to be expected given the circumstances)

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GeckoYamori said:

The Genesis hardware just lent itself better to the types of games which were prominent in arcades at the time, and thus received a better selection of titles within that philosophy. Problem is that there was a shift in the mainstream zeitgeist starting at the time, where people started to get more interested in long term immersive types of experiences from adventures/RPGs and the likes. This trend was even further exacerbated retroactively through emulation and retro culture (for instance you'll notice what a gigantic reputation Chrono Trigger has today, but the original game only sold 200k copies in the western market, which while good for its time was still not even close to the heavy hitters of its time), and a lot of the arcade-style gems on the Genesis are now unfairly dismissed by that sort of culture. Yeah, you won't get something like Chrono Trigger on the Genesis, but you'll also never find anything like Alien Soldier on the SNES.


This tenfold. Bringing the arcade experience into the home was Sega's entire remit, a philosophy which carried on into the Saturn era (until Bernard Stolar screwed it all up, which is also the reason why my Saturn collection is mostly JP imports of arcade titles).

A lot of my favourite games were on the SNES (Star Fox, Super Metroid, SMK, Rock'N'Roll Racing), but I grew up playing games like Afterburner, Outrun and even Thunder Force AC in the arcades when I was a kid (yes, I am over 30), and the prospect of having those games in my bedroom was what pulled me towards the Mega Drive. The SNES was already out in Europe at the time and I'd been impressed by games like F-Zero and Supr R-Type, but the arcade draw was too much. Sonic was barely a blip on my radar when I got it. It was bundled with the system, but I was more interested in Road Rash (not an arcade game, granted, but still MD-exclusive at the time).

I now own both, and I can honestly say that the two systems compliment each other really well and it wouldn't be the same if they didn't co-exist.

And, for the record, Alien Soldier is as shit-hard as it is ace.

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Personal preference V.S. personal preference. ;)

Some people like Arcade style action gaming for the high-points and thrills...

Spoiler

which does not seem to translate well to "buy once, play forever" games on modern consoles... no thrill of losing your money. ;)

Other people like in depth games with a story, multiple gameplay situations, etc.
Spoiler

which is what almost every big-name console and pc game fits into after 1999, because most people seem to realy like this.

And none of them are wrong.

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Yeah and I think people play games now to relax and be provoked rather than be engaged and active with a game. There's a lot of downtime in modern games. Not every game of course.

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FireFish said:

The objective quality purely based upon the chipset requires one to look at the entire machine its motherboard...

FireFish said:

You do not purely rate them acording to their hardware in terms of carefully crafted consoles,

What do you even want.

FireFish said:

I was just correcting all of that while thinking about it being odd that nobody cought on.

What do you think the giant "Nope" was meant to mean? Pumpkins?

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Those are rather clear and straight to the point. They also do not contain one bit of contradiction either. Objectively Looking at everything includes the motherboard. ;)

And Yeah. I totaly missed your post which barely contains any words when i was reading the other posts. You kind of ended up in a theoretical ignore list.

And i was already correcting it before somebody else came to point it out.

have a nice day. :)

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I think we're missing the real issue here. Could the Genesis have done Sonic 4 better?

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geo said:

I think we're missing the real issue here. Could the Genesis have done Sonic 4 better?


I'm sure It could've. But... You know, there IS a bootleg. I'm a noob on posting YouTube videos here, so I'll show the cartridge.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/bootleggames/images/e/ea/Sonic4_cart_alt.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100822023707

Kind of a tiny picture, but I'm sure you can see the amount of cancer this cartridge might hold.

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Tritnew said:

I'm sure It could've. But... You know, there IS a bootleg. I'm a noob on posting YouTube videos here, so I'll show the cartridge.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/bootleggames/images/e/ea/Sonic4_cart_alt.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100822023707

Kind of a tiny picture, but I'm sure you can see the amount of cancer this cartridge might hold.


Sadly I can't play that on my Genesis :-)

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geo said:

Sadly I can't play that on my Genesis :-)


Yeah, but I think there's a Rocket Knight Adventures bootleg with Sonic replacing the sprites of the character.

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Tritnew said:

Yeah, but I think there's a Rocket Knight Adventures bootleg with Sonic replacing the sprites of the character.


Dang I need a dev kit. Doomguy and a gun could be in Mario World.

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geo said:

Dang I need a dev kit. Doomguy and a gun could be in Mario World.


OR, OR. You could make a SNES DOOM hack where all the characters are Super Mario World enemies (and maybe some Yoshis too). It'll be PERFECT.

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Tritnew said:

OR, OR. You could make a SNES DOOM hack where all the characters are Super Mario World enemies (and maybe some Yoshis too). It'll be PERFECT.


I see your point. It hasn't been done before even if Super Mario Doom was done on the PC. Its all about diversifying the same games. Come to think of it Mario 64 Doom has been done too.

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