Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection • Hacker News Board

Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection

#31

Post by JohnBooty » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 3:00 AM UTC

wiz21c wrote: post #28

JohnBooty wrote: post #8

It's hard to convey how absolutely transformational it was for me to play Space Harrier in an arcade back in the day. The graphics were mind-blowing. Big part of why I became a programmer, even though I went down a different path than game development. Those big, bright, detailed sprites moving around with hardware-accelerated scaling at a smooth rock-solid 60fps! There had been nothing like that before. I mean, we'd…

Makes me realize how MAME is insufficient to reproduce the incredible gameplay of Space Harrier (I don't say this as a critic of Mame but more to express that there was somethign really special about Space Harrier). The moving cabinet was so smooth and the joystick reacted so well to the manoeuver (especially when you had to do that "triangle" to avoid the mech at the higher levels). Anybody remember the Asute level…

Yeah MAME is great (and I've actually played through Space Harrier on MAME, it's only like 15 minutes long ha ha ha) but there's nothing like playing on real hardware on a CRT for a true zero lag experience.

Playing a game on a modern platform (including MAME running on a PC) adds about 100ms of latency, minimum. That's not a ton of latency, and games can still be plenty fun, but it's on the threshold of being noticeable and even if we're not conscious of that input lag, it's just not the game as that "I'm wired directly into the machine" feeling of a true zero latency setup.

http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...

(of course, even in an all-analog setup, there can be latency, but not on the order of 100ms. at least not on the hardware side of things)

Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection

#32

Post by JohnBooty » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #29

JohnBooty wrote: post #8

It's hard to convey how absolutely transformational it was for me to play Space Harrier in an arcade back in the day. The graphics were mind-blowing. Big part of why I became a programmer, even though I went down a different path than game development. Those big, bright, detailed sprites moving around with hardware-accelerated scaling at a smooth rock-solid 60fps! There had been nothing like that before. I mean, we'd…

This makes me realize how amazing it is that the C64 port of Space Harrier was fully playable and actually pretty good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMHuYjIlpY

That's... wow. That's... impressive.

I'm kind of laughing because it's simultaneously like...

(a) impressive that they even pulled this off

(b) you might almost have to know what the original Space Harrier is "supposed" to look like in order to recognize what the heck is going on there

Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection

#33

Post by PhasmaFelis » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 6:19 AM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #32

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me realize how amazing it is that the C64 port of Space Harrier was fully playable and actually pretty good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMHuYjIlpY

That's... wow. That's... impressive. I'm kind of laughing because it's simultaneously like... (a) impressive that they even pulled this off (b) you might almost have to know what the original Space Harrier is "supposed" to look like in order to recognize what the heck is going on there

My expectations for "what the heck is going on in this game" were probably a lot lower at age 10, but I played the C64 port before I ever saw a Space Harrier cabinet, and I think it read about as well as the original, which is to say not very. :) There's rocks in the sky and giant mushrooms on the ground and one-eyed mammoths and Zardoz heads are shooting lasers at you. I don't think "the player should have any clue what is happening ever" was in the design doc!

The fascinating thing is that the C64 port was actually fun. It's decently fast, all the core gameplay is there, and it's got way more stuff moving and happening at once than you normally ever saw on the C64, or any 8-bit system really. There were quite a lot of crappy 64 ports of much less technically impressive games (Karnov and Ikari Warriors come to mind), so the fact that they (or him, I think this was a one-man effort like most C64 games) managed to make it work is kinda mind-blowing.

And I just learned that this was the somewhat-rushed UK release--the programmer apparently tweaked it a lot for the US release, adding striped ground textures, better projectiles, much better running animations, and improved sound effects, among other things. Wow.