The Underutilization Of The SNES

[CaryMG]

"Donkey Kong Country" with it's ray traced graphics & CD quality sound ....

"Stunt Race FX" with it's polygonal freespace engine ....

"Out Of This World", "Wing Commander" & "DOOM" -- computer smash hits ported effortlessly to the SNES ....

This machine was way ahead of the pack & it's time.
The worlds that could've been created & explored ....
*sigh*

Imagine "Damocles" -- an AMIGA landmark -- on the SNES ....













I was so psyched about making a 3D polygonal world to explore for the SNES that I wrote Nintendo a letter asking how you go about making games for it.
They were nice enough to write back & say that you give them the game on a floppy, they play it & see if it's worthwhile, then give you permission to make cartridges.
I wrote again remarking that I thought -- at the dawn of the "Nintendo64" -- the SNES never reached it's full potential.
They responded again & said they completely agreed! lol

So what do you guys think?
Was the SNES the greatest "Golden Age" console that was never used all it's power?


Later!

[Blanka789]

In all fairness, it did compete with the Saturn and Playstation before the N64 came out. And who knows, maybe they were waiting to use that kind of power in conjunction with the cd-rom add-on.

[roushimsx]

Heh, i think nostalgia is getting the better of you, man. The Doom port and Stunt Race FX, both of which had to use custom chips to even run, ran like pure crap. Hell, Doom used TWO SuperFX ccores running at 10.5mhz each and still ran and looked like ass.

and as has been said in previous threads, Donky Kong Country didn't do anything special for its graphics...they're just sprites. The artists may have raytraced them on a development machine and then built the sprites from the renderings, but that doesn't mean the SNES did anything special because ...hey...sprites are sprites! I mean, if you think it did something special because it displayed those, imagine how powerful it was do be able to display those hand drawn graphics in Yoshi's Island! There's a bunch of animators living in the SNES and SuperFX2 hand drawing stuff to your screen!

...or not.

[fishsandwich]

I agree with you, man. I think the SNES had some more juice in it but was a complicated machine... therefore, developers had a tougher time with it then they did the simple Genesis. Remember the slowdown of early shooters and sports games? Deveopers finally got the hang of the machine at the end, but I don't think too many games pushed it to its limits.

I think more advanced FX chips (or a combination of several chips) would have brought out even more cool SNES goodness. I so wish Comanche had come out. I saw a video of it running at a TRU demo station and I wanted to play it so much, even if it did look like shit. I know that adding a bunch of expensive chips to a cart really doesn't qualify as "pushing the hardware" but it's still cool... I don't know of any other console that used extra chips in its carts to achieve extra performance like the SNES did. The Genny only did it once with Virtua Racing. There were a bunch of chipped SNES games.

BTW... i'm not a Nintendo OR Sega fanboy. I have both colnsoles and recognize they both has their own respective strengths and weaknesses. Both are awesome systems.

[badinsults]

The Snes did have some rather complicated games. For instance, look at Super Metroid. The compression schemes that were used to get the varied environments in are so crazy, that there is a loading time between each room. Then there is games like Tales of Phantasia that have incredible voice acting. Or what about Dragon Quest 6, quite possibly one of the largest games ever made.

[jajaja]

Please fix the screenshots Want to see.

[zerohero]

Um Donkey Kong, and Diddy were not sprits last time I checked. They used a technique where they just "wire mapped", the 3d characters. So when you play the game, the characters were fully 3d. The backgrouind was semi 3d, more 2d ish etc. That what they said on the Nintendo Power Tape I have.

[evildead2099]

... "DOOM" -- all PC smash hits ported effortlessly to the SNES ....

Hardly. I agree with roushimsx:

Heh, i think nostalgia is getting the better of you, man. The Doom port and Stunt Race FX, both of which had to use custom chips to even run, ran like pure crap. Hell, Doom used TWO SuperFX ccores running at 10.5mhz each and still ran and looked like ass.

If you want to talk about an underutilized device, talk about the 32X or the Sega CD. SNES hardware was milked pretty well; the console was even treated to a (legit) port of Street Fighter Alpha 2!

[CaryMG]

Pics are fixed now.
Sorry about that ....


Later!

[MegaManFan]

I'm going to disagree here, I'm a disagreeable sort of chap to agrees to disagree about anything not agreeable, so can we agree on that? But seriously, no. The SNES was fully utilized and reached it's potential. How can I say that? Not only are a lot of my all-time favorite video games on the platform, SNES games routinely get ported to the Advance and are still just as much fun on the small screen. So I say nay - Nintendo got it right and everything the SNES was meant to do, it did do. If you disagree write some homebrews for it.

[hydr0x]

Um Donkey Kong, and Diddy were not sprits last time I checked. They used a technique where they just "wire mapped", the 3d characters. So when you play the game, the characters were fully 3d. The backgrouind was semi 3d, more 2d ish etc. That what they said on the Nintendo Power Tape I have.

no, they are sprites, and the backgrounds are just your standard snes layers too

[CaryMG]

If you disagree write some homebrews for it.

Not that I disagree, but how do I write homebrews for the SNES?

Man -- I've an absolute TON of way cool 3D polygonal enviornment ideas!


Later!

[Sothy]

why the hell would you do 3d stuff on snes?

I agree its a cool system but go back and look at the framerates on 3dish games like star fox and stunt race.

and donkey kong country was 2d sorry. It was pretty but not 3d.

[dementia_]

Rendering Ranger looked as good as Pulstar or Blazing Star for the Neo. The SNES had a lot of untapped power.

[zerohero]

So did anyone actually get to play this game Damocles? How was the fram rate? I remember games like that moving real slow at times.

Anyway, if they could pull that off on a 16 bit console, and the game still plays well, and is detailed, then I must say it had some extra un tapped potential at the time.

Which makes me wonder why It couldn't produce arcade perfect ports like the Neo Geo? I mean I know the Neo Geo had a two processors to handle difference aspects of the system, but if the snes can produce games like this, then it should be able to do the later :/

[hu6800]

It took 3 Nintendo systems and 3 Sega systems to compete with the Turbografx 16+cdrom .

[Blanka789]

It took 3 Nintendo systems and 3 Sega systems to compete with the Turbografx 16+cdrom .

Could you explain this?

[hydr0x]

Not that I disagree, but how do I write homebrews for the SNES?

just learn snes/65c816 assembly, if you want to do it you should know something about x86 assembly already

[hydr0x]

Which makes me wonder why It couldn't produce arcade perfect ports like the Neo Geo? I mean I know the Neo Geo had a two processors to handle difference aspects of the system, but if the snes can produce games like this, then it should be able to do the later :/

couple of reasons, first, it just can't handle that big (in Mbit) cartridges, which means that even with the best compression routines you can't get as much data into one game

then you have the obvious gpu differences (not too mention the fact that the neo geo has a faster cpu)

the neo geo could do a lot more sprites at the same time, far more colors at the same time and the max sprite size was bigger iirc

[CartCollector]

Well, there never was anything that used that bottom expansion port. So, maybe you could put a 65C816 down there with 16 megs or so of SRAM... Or maybe even an ARM7 (I'd reccommend the LPC2106), using those GPIO pins for some extra RAM space, maybe even for some co-processors... like other ARM7s...

Use those with a cart with a 2-SuperFX chip mapper, and that would be awesome. But I'm probably dreaming here.