Diluted Dante wrote:

retroking1981 wrote:

hylian_elf wrote:

Definitive versions? In that case reworked SSF2THD on XBLA is besht

Na that's a remake.

In that case doesn't matter between SNES version of a game or PS1 or 2.

It does. The SNES version was a port of the arcade game, whereas the 32Bit game was arcade perfect.

Thats not to say we can't have both the HD Remake and the Arcade perfect versions. The point is we haven't go the shitty 16Bit ones.

In the 16Bit thread we settled on both NHL 93 and 94, as both have a strong case for being the best one.

Lets discuss and educate.

So then you disqualify any game that is an arcade port, and we start an arcade thread too.

We do need an arcade thread, although that particular ROM set will be a bitch to put together.

However, not all arcade ports would necessarily be disqualified, some ports are probably preferable to the arcade version. Off the top of my head, SFII remix would be a better choice than individual SFIIs as it throws everything together. Dreamcast House of the Dead comes with loads of mini games and bonus modes.

I enjoy the shit games as much as the good ones for short bursts (especially if the whisky's out), but I appreciate you like to view it partly as a weeding process.  When I get my Pi I'll go for all the roms; thousands upon thousands of games at my fingertips, rough and smooth side by side.

Exactly, its why we all watch Lethal Weapon on itv2 instead of wading through netflix or our DVDs.

Haha, very good!

How about the Jap only RPGs/Strategy games? The 98% of sport games? The painfully average and forgetful abundance of platformers?

Don't get me wrong, there's room for utter shite like Home Alone and George Foremans Boxing, but they're rarer than the really good games.

retroking1981 wrote:

Why are the colour pallettes different? Never heard of that before?

NTSC and PAL are colour coding standards and are actually quite independant of the refresh rate, though the fact that they are linked to a region means they are related. Refresh rates are linked to the way power grids work in their respective territories as far as I am aware.

The reason I know this is about a pallette change? I quite like (still), Atari 2600 games. I had a woody back in the day and one of my favourite twitch games then (and in fact ever) is Activision's Kaboom!. It's a superb wee game and is a basic catch game played with paddle controllers but it was delivered with some panache for the day and had a cruel gameplay tweak that moves the object you use to catch with up the screen each time you lose one of your three lives.

Anyhow - back then I could score a few hundred thousand on this game and when I got to hear about 50/60Hz and the difference it made I wanted to know if my scores in the 80s were valid.

Turns out they weren't. Atariage.com is a great community and someone was kind enough to look at a dissassembly of the game and could state that the game wasn't adjusted for PAL - so it ran slower.

I can code. Used to do it for a living and in my late teens/early 20s I taught myself 6502 assembler programming so I could write some fast code for my Oric-1.

That was a short lived adventure but the 6502 stuff and the basic concepts stuck in my head.

Then I learned that the 2600 is based on 6502 architecture. It's actually a stripped down version with a smaller instruction set and less address lines (smaller memory) that Mr Bushnell used to keep the costs down.

So I found the disassembly myself - easy to find online. The guy had done an amazing job of commenting it. Even to the point of showing how the devs changed the code for PAL and NTSC.

The only difference between an NTSC and PAL 2600 is the colour pallette in the graphics chip (the TIA) that drives the electron beam in CRTs of the day. (Atari 2600 programming is a terrifying prospect as you actually place pixels on the screen , synchronised with the movement of the electron beam. There is no concept of a memory mapped screen or screen buffer. Incredible stuff.)

Anyhow- after some discussion in atariage threads it was pointed out to me that a PAL60 game could be created by taking the NTSC listing which has timings for 60Hz electron beam movements and simply change the code that set colour values.

So as the Kaboom source was so well commented I was able to change it pretty quickly to use the NTSC (60Hz) timings with the PAL colour values. And dear lord it worked. I should point out at this juncture that I own a Harmony cartridge which is basically the 2600 equivalent of the DS's R4 cartridge. So after testing my code in an emulator I was able to copy the ROM onto the Harmony and play it on my actual console. Which is fucking cool.

I subsequently went on to create a batch of PAL60 versions of my favourite 2600 games which inadvertently started a bit of a mini-movement at atariage to do as many as possible. (Some games are done by changing the timing code of a PAL game to 60Hz but that doesn't always work for certain horrible techie reasons - the 2600 was pushed well beyond its limits with some hair-raising coding techniques).

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/193459-pal60-roms/page-1

That level of geekery makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

I'm not sure Davy's ever posted anything I haven't enjoyed reading.

I'm feeling a massive retro mood coming on.

Yup, it's weird how they made a shitter version of something already really shit.

Superb!

On topic tho, 60Hz was reason enough to hack your machine.
The pirate scene was a bonus you got with chipping your consoles.
I still have a bunch of US PSone imports lying around because the NTSC releases ran full screen full speed. Pal releases had huge borders often utilising only 60% of the screen and ran at much slower speed.

NES/SNES was the opposite, playing a 60Hz game on a PAL machine would force it to 50Hz and vice versa.

Mega Drive was even weirder, I remember putting a PAL Mercs in a Japanese machine and it running the Japanese version. Guess that makes it more like the PSone.

They later implemented on cart region locks like Nintendo in later years though.

Yeah it just read the correct regions cart then played the import. Didn't matter though as it would play the speed of the console not the cart.

I believe the MD needs modded. Mine certainly is.

Quite a few MD carts are multi-region though. If I boot up with the machine's region switch in different settings I get different title screens for example. My PAL Toki will have a Ju Ju title screen when set to JPN for example.

SNES needs modded too though it's a bit more complex because most 1st party games got PAL optimised and glitch at 60Hz. Some later games had software based locks too - a frame rate check was quite common for example. The game wouldn't run if it detected a 60Hz framerate. 

Some later MD games have that too - PAL Thunderforce IV is one example. You can get around these by booting up at 50Hz and then switching to 60Hz but some games check for it more often than just at boot up. It's a royal pain in the arse and another reason not to bother with PAL games if starting to collect.