Topic: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?

[Edfishy]

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*

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

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.

Framerate patterns:
numerical digit = "one unique frame"

N64 and GameCube, Ocarina of Time:  20fps converted to ~30fps (for NTSC TV display)
1 2 2 3 4 4 5 6 6 7 8 8 9 10 10...

N64 emulator, Ocarina of Time:  20fps converted to 60fps
1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 6 6 6 7 7 7 8 8 8 9 9 9 10 10 10...

[maybe]  

[thejeek]

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?

[ThePerm]

if nintendo had a small team that just ported all their games..they could port every n64 game to Wii VC in 2 years

[KDR_11k]

thejeek: The former, I think.

[thejeek]

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)

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

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.

[thejeek]

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]

[Shecky]

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.

[KDR_11k]

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.

[Edfishy]

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.

[KDR_11k]

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.

[mantidor]

I thought that MM glitches happened because it was the only Zelda game that used the expansion pack.

[Svevan]

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.

[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.

[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.

[ThePerm]

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

[Nick DiMola]

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.

[ThePerm]

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.

[18 Days]

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.

[ThePerm]

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.

[thejeek]

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.

[ThePerm]

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.  

[thejeek]

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.

[ThePerm]

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.