Topic: Virtual Console : 60fps on the N64?

[thejeek]

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]

[ThePerm]

heres how they did half-life - half-life 2...they wrote a conversion program

[Uglydot]

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.

[ThePerm]

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

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

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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.

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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..."

[thejeek]

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heres how they did half-life - half-life 2...they wrote a conversion program

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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.

[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?

[AnyoneEB]

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.

[ThePerm]

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.  

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

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.

[KDR_11k]

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.).

[thejeek]

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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.

[JonLeung]

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.

[thejeek]

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.

[KDR_11k]

I think Perm is volunteering for proving P=NP.

[thejeek]

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 :-)

 

[obscureownership]

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.  

[thejeek]

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]

[Jensen]

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.

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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

[getter77]

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.

[BranDonk Kong]

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.

[Jensen]

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.

[Ceric]

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.

[KDR_11k]

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.