Gaming Forums => Nintendo Gaming => Topic started by: Edfishy on May 26, 2006, 08:21:14 PM
Title: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Edfishy on May 26, 2006, 08:21:14 PM
Something I absolutely love about emulating the N64 on the PC is that you can sometimes get a smooth 60 fps on your favorite N64 game. Unfortunately, the PC sucks in terms of gameplay and has constant hiccups. Any word on the Virtual Console's framerate? *Crosses Fingers*
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: NinGurl69 *huggles on May 26, 2006, 08:50:33 PM
Most of the emulators I've tried "say" its running N64 games at 60fps, when it actually is just running a 3X multiple of 20fps. Not all 60 frames in a second were unique, just 1/3 of them. F-Zero X is the only official 60fps N64 I know of, and Excitebike 64 is the only reliable 30fps game. EVERYTHING ELSE hopes to maintain 20fps.
If it was really running at 60fps, it'd look as smooth as Metroid Prime, Mario Tennis, Mario Kart, F-Zero GX, etc. Can you verify this?
Not even Nintendo bothered to run Ocarina of Time at 60-unique-fps in the GC ports. It might've been a software issue, hardware issue, or both. Frankly, it might be more trouble than it's worth on their end, and we're likely NOT going to get the framerate upgrades we'd like.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 26, 2006, 11:53:19 PM
Do you mean that these games only ran 20fps on actual N64 hardware and the emulator emulates this accurately, or that they run nearer 60fps on the N64 and emulators can't keep up?
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: ThePerm on May 27, 2006, 12:09:46 AM
if nintendo had a small team that just ported all their games..they could port every n64 game to Wii VC in 2 years
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: KDR_11k on May 27, 2006, 12:38:28 AM
thejeek: The former, I think.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 27, 2006, 01:07:27 AM
That's probably trickier to fix then? If it was simply that the emulator was too slow, Nintendo might be able to get around it by putting custom hardware in the Wii to aid emulating whatever aspects of the N64 cause performance problems but if the original games drop frames on real N64, it might not be possible to fix this without changing the games themselves (which I doubt they plan to do, because rebuilding old software can be tricky or impossible if the source code and development environments are lost)
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: NinGurl69 *huggles on May 27, 2006, 01:38:54 AM
See, more trouble than it's worth...
I imagine the games will get a rez bump to 480p, and a solid 20fps with no slowdowns, much like the Zelda GC ports.
Also, Majora's Mask port had miniscule audio glitches, a stutter, whenever the game had to do sudden camera angle changes that involved loading a new region (like in its intro, since Clocktown was composed of 4 separately loaded sections). I dunno if other N64 games have to worry about this.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 27, 2006, 01:52:40 AM
Hmmm. Having played Starfox recently on an N64 emulator (can't remember which one) I was impressed that it worked at all, let alone at an acceptable frame rate. It's debatable how much the experience would be improved by bumping the frame rate or even the resolution - what I noticed the most was the low resolution textures and particularly the blocky on screen text - so maybe it is more trouble than it's worth. I can't imagine them improving game assets like textures and fonts.
[EDIT: fixed garbled word order]
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Shecky on May 27, 2006, 03:33:38 AM
Quote Originally posted by: Professional 666 See, more trouble than it's worth...
I imagine the games will get a rez bump to 480p, and a solid 20fps with no slowdowns, much like the Zelda GC ports.
Also, Majora's Mask port had miniscule audio glitches, a stutter, whenever the game had to do sudden camera angle changes that involved loading a new region (like in its intro, since Clocktown was composed of 4 separately loaded sections). I dunno if other N64 games have to worry about this.
Since these would be loaded from flash and not a GC disc, chances are that MM wouldn't have any audio glitches.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: KDR_11k on May 27, 2006, 04:32:04 AM
Flash isn't much faster. What should make a difference is the Wii's RAM since it can hold the entire game in RAM at all times.
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Edfishy on May 27, 2006, 05:27:10 AM
Um... most game designers never base timed events upon the framerate, since there is no way to lock an absolute framerate in a game. You usually want to have your variables take in account frames that may have been skipped or added, thus allowing an object to always travel the same distance in the same amount of time regardless of a difference in framerate. Otherwise, if the framerate dropped, everything would go in slow motion rather than just looking choppy.
So, a 60fps N64 game is deffinitly possible, and most desirable. It may however require the code of a game to be changed a bit.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: KDR_11k on May 27, 2006, 08:01:47 AM
Um... most game designers never base timed events upon the framerate, since there is no way to lock an absolute framerate in a game.
That may be true today on computers but on consoles and older systems all games were frame-based. Mostly because it was assumed that the framerate is upper-limited by the vertical refresh rate of the TV (and the exact number of cycles between redraws and during redraw were known). Most games were coded to make sure the game doesn't drop below that very often. Some games drop often, as a result the game slows down (old games indeed do not become choppy, they slow down). Another result was that PAL versions were usually slower than NTSC versions, sometimes resulting in changes to the game physics (Rygar was modified in the european version, as a result the player is able to jump over a river he cannot jump over in the US version).
I don't know if there were many games on the N64 that used frame independent code but I'd assume they were coded to frames with the hardware set to limit the frames to a lower number.
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: mantidor on May 27, 2006, 09:14:15 AM
I thought that MM glitches happened because it was the only Zelda game that used the expansion pack.
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Svevan on May 27, 2006, 10:39:45 AM
I can't join the tech conversation, but Super Mario 64 looked smoother than I remember when I played it on the virtual console at E3.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Edfishy on May 27, 2006, 11:27:30 AM
Perhaps Nintendo can have a team run through specific games(Such as platinum hits) and update their variables to allow for the 60FPS, and then give them a special symbol so they're readily recognizable as "enhanced" games.
I can live with the games running a smooth 20fps, but I'd much rather prefer games like Perfect Dark and Vigilante 8: Second Offense to run at 480p with 60FPS. This would be a dream come true.
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Jensen on May 27, 2006, 12:12:09 PM
Quote Originally posted by: Professional 666: F-Zero X is the only official 60fps N64 I know of, and Excitebike 64 is the only reliable 30fps game. EVERYTHING ELSE hopes to maintain 20fps.
Quote Originally posted by: EvanTBurchfield: I can't join the tech conversation, but Super Mario 64 looked smoother than I remember when I played it on the virtual console at E3.
Mario 64 runs at 30fps.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: ThePerm on May 27, 2006, 01:59:35 PM
mario had a good framerate, also..i used gameshark once..and upped the framerate to 60..however this caused the text to go all wacky
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Nick DiMola on May 27, 2006, 04:18:22 PM
Quote Originally posted by: Edfishy Perhaps Nintendo can have a team run through specific games(Such as platinum hits) and update their variables to allow for the 60FPS, and then give them a special symbol so they're readily recognizable as "enhanced" games.
I can live with the games running a smooth 20fps, but I'd much rather prefer games like Perfect Dark and Vigilante 8: Second Offense to run at 480p with 60FPS. This would be a dream come true.
My god if Perfect Dark ran at 60 fps I am pretty sure I would crap myself.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: ThePerm on May 27, 2006, 06:36:26 PM
iv ran perfect dark on an emulator with the high ruz on and then bumped up to 1024x768 with a ton of effects on and although the framerate was still shoddy..im surprised at how well the game holds up.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: 18 Days on May 28, 2006, 09:25:30 AM
I played MM on 64 the other day and the frame rate pretty much rendered it unplayable. I hope this can be rectifyed for Wii.
I'm pretty sure upping the resolution will be detrimental to msot games though.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: ThePerm on May 28, 2006, 09:41:52 AM
i say they write a game engine designed on wii and use it to port the games(much like re2 on n64..it was a baseball engine). Imagine a few enhancements to existing games co-op.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 28, 2006, 09:45:04 AM
That would be far too much effort I'd have thought for games they're going to sell for (hopefully) very little money. They're going to want to concentrate on getting the emulator right and then running all the games as close to unchanged as they can - that'll get them the best results for the least time and money.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: ThePerm on May 28, 2006, 09:57:12 AM
well Iwata said some games will have upgrades. Why settle for anything less? We should have a high class virtual console. Especially since Microsoft is putting a ton of classic games in HD. Also, i'm just talking about first party games. However, it would be nice to see some upgrades to third party games. Maybe it would be cool if third parties paid an extra fee for their games to be enhanced.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 28, 2006, 10:08:40 AM
I've written games and a mate of mine worked on a couple of N64 games, so I'm not just pulling this out of my arse. Nobody is about to start dragging the source and development environments out for old N64 games and start making major changes to the code or the game assets. You can't just dive in and start making changes and the people who even knew how to build these things from source, let alone understand them well enough to start changing how the games physics and gameplay are synchronized to framerate have long since left to work on other projects for other companies and they're not about to come back and do those things for the amount of money being offered.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: ThePerm on May 28, 2006, 10:52:32 AM
then they're just lazy, if i were a good company then I would have an archive of all my assets, and a knowledge base of everything else. If i didnt have that I totally didnt plan ahead. I know EA does this.
Valve did this with half-life..they rereleased it using the Source engine that powers half-life 2.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 28, 2006, 11:04:06 AM
Well maybe but I think lazy is going a bit far. It may well be different now but my experience is from ten years ago. These games were largely written in a blind rush with no regard for future re-use - it's not like the developers or the publishers ever expected these games to ever be rebuilt so nobody will have been taking notes with a view to someone else reviving the project ten years later. Picking up somebody else's project and altering it is not easy - one of the N64 titles my friend worked on was a port from the PS1 and they basically had to rewrite it, reusing only some of the game assets and very little code - partly because the code was deeply Playstation specific but also partly because much of it was just impossible to understand.
I don't know for certain but I'd guess that Half Life Source is practically a re-write.
[EDIT: clarify]
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: ThePerm on May 28, 2006, 03:15:59 PM
heres how they did half-life - half-life 2...they wrote a conversion program
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Uglydot on May 28, 2006, 04:02:19 PM
Developers might have assumed we would just play the game on the console it was made on. Evidently they underestimated the amount of nestalgia and the fact that everyone would get used to a higher FPS. Frankly, not surprising.
And talking about HL is useless, PC games in that era were not frame-based, it's a different argument. They are also designed to be modded, updated, etc.
EDIT:Personally, I'd rather they put all their resources into making new games rather than making a 3rd way to play Mario 64 and Zelda games.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: ThePerm on May 28, 2006, 06:11:21 PM
the fact is the emulators werent running the n64 games perfectly on the gamecube. I saw lots of games being ported from n64 to dreamcast to psx to etc. I'd rather my games run well then chug. I'v been saying this for years.
most games are the same. Only subtile differences make them play different. Theres not a big difference between Zelda 64 and Mario 64. All one would have to do is write an engine native to the Wii, this engine of course would not be wasted and would be used for multiple things: ports, new games, etc. Then using the source of the original games write a program that converts all the levels, textures, and character/item models into a more usable format(and chances are this wont even need to be done because chances are they have backups of these in a more usable formats ie *.3ds, alias wavefront, or maya).
then all they have to do is convert the"events" system into the new engines native format, and write the code for interaction. That simple
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: NinGurl69 *huggles on May 28, 2006, 07:44:44 PM
Quote Originally posted by: Jensen
Quote Originally posted by: Professional 666: F-Zero X is the only official 60fps N64 I know of, and Excitebike 64 is the only reliable 30fps game. EVERYTHING ELSE hopes to maintain 20fps.
Quote Originally posted by: EvanTBurchfield: I can't join the tech conversation, but Super Mario 64 looked smoother than I remember when I played it on the virtual console at E3.
Mario 64 runs at 30fps.
No, Mario 64 on N64 (NTSC) runs at 20fps... of the 30 "displayed frames in a second," only 20 of them mattered (same goes for the 3D Zeldas). In each sequence of 3 frames, the first 2 frames were unique, while the 3rd frame was a duplicate of the 2nd frame, hence the pattern:
[frame displayed : unique frame rendered] 1: A 2: B 3: B 4: C 5: D 6: D etc.
Hookup Mario64/N64 to a video capture device, grab a couple seconds of video (NTSC 29.97fps or 30fps), restore the progressive frames (or just examine one field), scroll thru the image sequence frame by frame, and you'll find 1/3 of the frames in your 30fps sequence are duplicates.
Frame by frame, it looks like "go. go. stop. go. go. stop..."
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 29, 2006, 01:50:51 AM
Quote heres how they did half-life - half-life 2...they wrote a conversion program
Quote All one would have to do is write an engine native to the Wii...
I don't think you have a clue how much effort is involved in doing something like that, even for a game which is well written and where the game specific code is nicely separated from the game engine. It's just not that simple - even when games from the N64 era used a generic game engine, it would typically be heavily customised for each game - any Wii port of any generic game engine would have to be re-done again and again for each N64 game using it.
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Jensen on May 29, 2006, 09:13:38 AM
Quote Originally posted by: Professional 666
No, Mario 64 on N64 (NTSC) runs at 20fps... of the 30 "displayed frames in a second," only 20 of them mattered (same goes for the 3D Zeldas).
I used an emulator that displayed the actual game fps.
Zelda PAL: 16-17 Zelda NTSC: 20 Mario NTSC: 30
Anyways, I can tell just by playing Mario that it is quite a bit smoother than Zelda.
Do you have a source for your 20fps claim?
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: AnyoneEB on May 29, 2006, 10:00:53 AM
It would not make sense to create a new game engine. The Wii is plenty powerful enough to emulate the N64 at full speed. I do not know how many N64 games were tied to the clock, but for any that were not, the emulator could simply emulate higher clock-speed processors for higher frame rates. Maybe I was just not paying much attention, but I never remember being bothered by the framerates of N64 games.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: ThePerm on May 29, 2006, 08:29:20 PM
eh, writing a conversion program is not as hard as some would think, all you need is some knowlege on what data means what and there you go. Character models are made of polygons, which are made of vertices which are made of points on an xyz axis..if you know the names of the points then you can port that data
and if its so hard then how do indy devlopers write conversion programs. Iv seen stuff where you convert doom levels to quake levels, quake models to half-life models.
I'm not saying redo the whole game as in redo the art and the graphics. Those would look exactly the same. I'm saying port the resources to something powerful so that it: 1 runs better 2 supports future enhancements. Sometimes you find yourself in a mess, but its always useful make things more accessable.
i think I above gave resident evil 2 as an example of a good port. They didnt use the same engine that the psx game ran. They used the engine for a baseball game and just moved the resources over. What i'm hearing is that its hard? I doubt that. Nothing done on a computer is hard. It may take time, it may be stressful, but nothing is ever hard.
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: NinGurl69 *huggles on May 29, 2006, 10:28:55 PM
Quote Originally posted by: Jensen
Quote Originally posted by: Professional 666
No, Mario 64 on N64 (NTSC) runs at 20fps... of the 30 "displayed frames in a second," only 20 of them mattered (same goes for the 3D Zeldas).
I used an emulator that displayed the actual game fps.
Zelda PAL: 16-17 Zelda NTSC: 20 Mario NTSC: 30
Anyways, I can tell just by playing Mario that it is quite a bit smoother than Zelda.
Do you have a source for your 20fps claim?
Here's a couple image sequences from 30.00fps, single-field only, captures from Mario64 off my N64 and Master Quest off my GC. Since every 3rd frame was a dup, for the longest time I believed Mario64 was 20fps.
But I've changed my mind. I swapped Mario64 and Ocarina of Time (and viewed them on a TV rather than vidcap software) and realized Mario was a bit smoother. I see with my eyes that Mario64 runs at 30fps. "yes." But why aren't my captures agreeing?
Something had me fooled, so I spent the day investigating why. My vidcap hardware drops every 3rd frame in most N64 captures . After examining odd & even fields in several captures, I concluded that the N64 is weird. My hardware will drop a frame whenever it receives a field anomaly (like the split-second screen mess you might see when you turn device/console on or off); it needs an odd and an even field to store a complete frame, if a field is strange or missing, the frame gets dropped and the last recorded frame gets duplicated to fill the gap. This doesn't happen when recording from DVD players, VCRs, GameCube, Dreamcast, Cable TV, etc. -- only N64.
Since the N64 isn't capable of p.scan, it sends fields, not frames, to a TV display. If 3 consecutive frames are composed of 6 consecutive fields, i'm guessing the 5th or 6th field is either strange or missing in the pipeline. Maybe the odd set of fields are complete, and every 3rd field in the even set is "weird." TVs don't seem to care, yet my vidcap hardware isn't satisfied. Blasted machines.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: KDR_11k on May 30, 2006, 07:25:37 AM
Perm: Do you have any idea how much time that would take? You have to modify the engine and game logic for every single game that needs its framerate improved. Depending on the cleanness of the code that can take months. Since the N64 was supposedly a bitch to program for the code will probably look like one big mess, if it still exists at all (and in the latter case you'd have to binary-hack stuff. Good luck.).
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 30, 2006, 09:11:00 AM
Quote Nothing done on a computer is hard. It may take time, it may be stressful, but nothing is ever hard.
Have you actually ever done any programming? Lots of things are hard. I spent nearly three months writing a 3D rendering engine for 386 in the early nineties. To take an example, I sweated for over a week just coding a fixed point matrix multiply and matrix transform to use as few cycles as possible on a 386 and writing the triangle renderer supporting texturing and lighting using only fixed point and minimum number of multiplies was both timeconsuming and hard.
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: JonLeung on May 30, 2006, 09:22:31 AM
I don't think it's a question of how hard it is. If it's possible at all, it's really a question of if it's worth the trouble.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 30, 2006, 09:30:00 AM
I agree it's a question as to whether it's worth the trouble. If something is hard though, that tends to mean more time and more expense which obviously makes it less likely to be worth the trouble.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: KDR_11k on May 30, 2006, 10:34:12 AM
I think Perm is volunteering for proving P=NP.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 30, 2006, 10:40:46 AM
Yeah - I think you may be right :-)
To solve the N64 frame rate problem, all we really need is a program that will automatically fix all bugs in other programs, including itself. It's not hard to write but it might take a long time to run :-)
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: obscureownership on May 30, 2006, 11:17:28 AM
Guys, I'm sure all the problems you are mentioning isn't going to be true with the Wii. Emulators are not made by full time developers, they are typically made by homebrew and open source developers killing some free time.
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: thejeek on May 30, 2006, 11:22:54 AM
I'm sure Nintendo are quite competant to write an N64 emulator and to be honest, I'm not expecting problems with that, I'm just not expecting the experience to be vastly better than playing on a real N64.
Perm seems to be suggesting that Nintendo should rip the game content out from old N64 games and write new game engines instead of or on top of the emulator, in order to improve the game - for example to improve frame rate. I think that's a fine idea in principle and I agree it is indeed possible and probably has been done both for more recent, better structured games and for the odd N64 game. I don't think it's worth the effort for the majority of N64 games that will be offered on Virtual Console. In fact, I think it would represent a fair proportion of the effort of developing those games from scratch - rendering it economically impossible.
[EDIT: grammar + clarified]
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Jensen on May 30, 2006, 03:51:46 PM
Quote Originally posted by: ThePerm
All one would have to do is write an engine native to the Wii, this engine of course would not be wasted and would be used for multiple things: ports, new games, etc. Then using the source of the original games write a program that converts all the levels, textures, and character/item models into a more usable format
Emulators basically do that already. They convert all geometry and textures to Glide, OpenGL or D3D. Some emulators even let you replace textures with your own higher-res textures.
Quote then all they have to do is convert the"events" system into the new engines native format, and write the code for interaction. That simple
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: getter77 on May 30, 2006, 04:14:01 PM
All I know...is that I want the bugs...or at least the save game vanishing bugs....to be removed from Aidyn Chronicles.
Also, it'd be nice if the max res mode in hybrid heaven ran smoothly.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: BranDonk Kong on May 30, 2006, 05:24:14 PM
Emulators don't convert anything - that's the exact opposite of emulation. They emulate, as in, they don't trick an N64 game into thinking it's a PC game, they "trick" the PC into thinking it's an N64 - I know that's not the correct way to explain it, but it's the easiest. Yes, some N64 emus allow you to use ROMs that are hacked with new textures, but that's probably not going to happen on the Wii, it would be a waste of resources and time. Nintendo already has an excellent N64 emulator for the Gamecube, and it will surely run perfectly on the Wii, given the RAM and processor speed increases.
Title: RE:Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Jensen on May 30, 2006, 06:47:21 PM
There are only a couple of emulators that fully emulate video rendering....giving you exactly the same digital bits as the real system before the conversion to analog. There are none for 3d emulators that I know of, unless they are incredibly slow.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: Ceric on June 01, 2006, 02:44:56 PM
When there programming the emulators and the like what will happen is that Nintendo will look at what they have built in now. Then they'll see how much they can reuse for the new system. So in the end I think what is going to happen is that if you used the built in Nintendo tools then you'll probably see an enhancement due to better modern programming practices. If you rolled your own you may see an improvement because they'll probably allow it to run with more processing power so that some of your brute force solutions will go faster.
Nintendo has already stated that all will run at 480p. Besides that I highly doubt that Nintendo is making a conserted effort on the games themselves. They may clean up and improve all of there SDK given functions and tools, especially if they plan to let people program for the system using the NES,SNES,N64 styles.
Title: RE: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?
Post by: KDR_11k on June 02, 2006, 02:41:54 AM
You can't just increase a system's processing power and expect the games to run better. That messes up the entire timing.
Besides I don't think the N64 games used much of an API, from what I've heard they were mostly assembly language.
