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Another World ported to FPGA

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Re: Another World ported to FPGA

#61

Post by PhasmaFelis »

dragontamer wrote: post #9
burglins wrote: post #2

I wonder how common were full game VMs in the 90s. For a game older than myself, wouldn't a VM layer incur a great performance penalty on PCs from that time?

It was far more important to have the same software work on Amiga, x86 (DOS), Mac and the whole slew of different machines than came and went. Today we have fewer machines than the great explosive growth of the 80s. Consider that most 'software' today is JavaScript interpreted by the Web Browser. It's not like those portability concerns didn't exist in the 80s, if anything, it was harder because you had to make your…

> Many (maybe most?) video games seem to have been written in a VM, at least before Doom / high performance 3d graphics.

This was not terribly common, for the obvious performance reasons. Another World ran at around 10-20FPS on most of the systems it was released for, which is fine for a methodical game like that (and for adventure games like Monkey Island, etc.) but doesn't work for fast action games.

And of course VM games were basically impossible for the entire 8-bit era, with the exception of things like Zork (and the rest of Infocom's Z-Machine games) whose performance needs were so small that the gigantic overhead of an 8-bit VM was hardly noticeable.

Even into the 16-bit era, the majority of multi-platform games were fully rewritten ports.

Re: Another World ported to FPGA

#62

Post by wzdd »

> [Transparency] introduces some complexity in the rasterizer. To flip only one bit [of the colour value] we need to know the prior value of the pixel at this location.

This is like one of only three advantages to using planar graphics, like the Amiga did. With bitplanes you don't need to read back video memory: you just assume the top bit is for transparency effects only and blat out your spans.

[The other two advantages are cool moire effects because you can move the planes relative to each other, and memory / bus bandwidth efficiency for awkward colour depths which don't fit nicely into a byte or a nybble, like 8 (3 bits per pixel) or 32 (5 bits per pixel)]

Re: Another World ported to FPGA

#63

Post by lacrimacida »

chongli wrote: post #56
tombert wrote: post #27

I remember playing Out of this World on my Sega Genesis as a kid, and I could not believe that graphics would ever get better than this; I had never seen fully animated cutscenes like that on my Sega and thought it was incredible. Obviously graphics did get better, but I feel like Another World still holds its own artistically. The graphics are still very stylish and distinct, and upon replaying the game again about…

I really really love Flashback. The cyberpunk setting vibes with me! It's just a beautiful setting and a cool story. Another World is a work of art though! The poster for the game seems to be an oil painting and it's just gorgeous [1]. [1] http://www.anotherworld.fr/download/AnotherWorld_Poster.jpg

Oh yeah, that game was one of my favorites back then. Also Abe’s Oddyssey, in a similar vein but even more cyberpunk or otherworldly

Re: Another World ported to FPGA

#64

Post by jtolmar »

burglins wrote: post #2

I wonder how common were full game VMs in the 90s. For a game older than myself, wouldn't a VM layer incur a great performance penalty on PCs from that time?

I don't know any more full game examples, but...

Earthbound (SNES, 1994) contains TWO complete scripting systems, one for the dialog system (which is occasionally used for things it shouldn't be; most of shop logic is in it), and one for scripting sprite movement. The dialog script is actually quite impressive and easy to use; I'd consider implementing a similar system even in a modern RPG. The sprite movement script is trash, significantly harder to work with than games that use raw assembly. Apparently that movement script system was actually a common in-house library at HAL, dating back to the NES era, but I don't know too much about that history.

Also most of the game's assembly was actually compiled from C, which was almost unheard of for console games at the time.

Re: Another World ported to FPGA

#65

Post by 7speter »

burglins wrote: post #2

I wonder how common were full game VMs in the 90s. For a game older than myself, wouldn't a VM layer incur a great performance penalty on PCs from that time?

Well the idea of a vm wasnt to foreign if my reading of computing history is right. Consider that java launched in 1993 or 94 and its big claim to fame was its portability between systems, and that was because of the jvm, or java virtual machine.

I don’t think virtual machines and emulation are that new of a thing. Virtualizing x86 at full speed on consumer hardware has been a thing for, what, 15 to 20 years? And sure that requires special processor features, but remember that systems that came before that that would need to be emulated had even less computational demands. Iirc, a widely used pos software from the 80s has been running in emulation on pos hardware that far exceeds its requirements for the last 25 years, at least.

Also, my understanding is that lots of crucial government and business software runs on many layers of virtualization.

And my last recollection from what I’ve gathered is that, really until around the mid 90s a lot of operating systems made until then were pretty much hypervisors that ran programs that were virtual machines themselves. Multitasking was simply being able to route hardware resources to a given program, which was sorta its own environment.

Re: Another World ported to FPGA

#66

Post by snvzz »

29athrowaway wrote: post #29
the_af wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game itself is barely a couple of hours. It's very, very short. I wonder, if the intro made such an impression on you, why didn't you finish it?

I also didn't finish it. The game is hard and requires more patience than usual to figure it out.

Definitely a short, and not hard at all, game.

I beat it without difficulty when I was single-digit aged.

It's absolutely worth it, and better late than never.

Re: Another World ported to FPGA

#68

Post by recursive »

the_af wrote: post #26
guiambros wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever. I don't remember playing for much more than a few minutes (maybe a couple of hours), and barely making any progress, but that intro and the initial escape got etched in my memory for all those years. The dramatic camera effects of this game were indeed out of this world for the time.

The game itself is barely a couple of hours. It's very, very short. I wonder, if the intro made such an impression on you, why didn't you finish it?

I'm in the same boat. I could not figure out how to get past the second screen. But I still remember those few minutes very clearly these decades later.

Re: Another World ported to FPGA

#69

Post by recursive »

snvzz wrote: post #66
29athrowaway wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also didn't finish it. The game is hard and requires more patience than usual to figure it out.

Definitely a short, and not hard at all, game. I beat it without difficulty when I was single-digit aged. It's absolutely worth it, and better late than never.

Maybe you're just a good gamer. I was absolutely stumped.
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