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Post by 3vix6 on Jun 2, 2010 23:55:43 GMT -5
I think I might already know the answer to this, but I figured I'd ask those that probably know the capibilities of the 32x more than I do.
I saw that Wolf3d was ported to 32x, I just played it a little bit ago.. very cool!
This left me wondering if the 32x could handle some other games like for instance, Quake.
I'm thinking the answer is most likely no, but yet, since there there were only a handful of games for the 32x, it leaves me wondering if we ever saw the true potential of the hardware.
So, anyone think it could?
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Post by GiGaBiTe on Jun 3, 2010 1:43:08 GMT -5
You could probably get Quake ported to the 32x if you're a god in programming. About the best you could do would be this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOWZbydnlZEAssuming if you did get Quake ported, it would be like FPS'es on the Saturn and PS1 where polygons warped and distorted due to having to use affine texture mapping for performance reasons.
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Post by 3vix6 on Jun 3, 2010 1:55:18 GMT -5
Just curious more than anything... It's a really cool platform! A real shame that more wasn't done with it. (That and it's a shame that the Neptune didn't see the light of day, I probably would have bought one of those over a Saturn).
The Tech Demos are really impressive, the funny thing is that it gives anything that the Jag or the 3DO did a run for their money.
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Post by TheMVRules on Jun 3, 2010 10:47:58 GMT -5
But that's Zyrinx - The Sunsoft of 16 bit consoles.
The developers did not have enough times to do great 3d games for the 32X. But atleast, 32X had the best Mortal Kombat II port. Too bad the music isn't arcade-perfect. In fact, not even the notes are perfect. :-( Voices though. There wasn't many games that showed what the 32X sound chip could do...
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Post by 3vix6 on Jun 3, 2010 13:41:38 GMT -5
TheMVRulesNot to sound like too much of a noob, but seeing that these consoles don't use OpenGL or DirectX for 3d, how were people able to create 3d space? Are there any books on how to do it without using OpenGL or DirectX? I would think that it must either have taken a lot of work or Sega provided some libraries to do 3d. Is the sound in the demo going through the 32X Sound Chipset?
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Post by Deleted on Jun 3, 2010 14:01:14 GMT -5
3vix6It's not that much work, nor is it all that difficult. All you need to know is matrix mathematics .. Quake on 32X is a bit of a stretch though ( not enough juice ).
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Post by GiGaBiTe on Jun 3, 2010 16:25:09 GMT -5
3vix6It's not that much work, nor is it all that difficult. All you need to know is matrix mathematics .. Quake on 32X is a bit of a stretch though ( not enough juice ). You could probably get the bare levels running on the 32x if you stripped out radiosity. You'd have to do some tricks like add fog to prevent the SH2s from getting overloaded with polygons like in shub's pit, which is a pretty big area with lots of monster activity. having the HUD would reduce the 320x224 playing area a bit more so you could have some extra draw time.
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Post by TheMVRules on Jun 4, 2010 9:24:09 GMT -5
The 32X VDP is a framebuffer, not that different from a PC. But most games uses the Slave SH2 dedicated to 3D drawing. The SH2 is equivalent to a i386 in power, and the 32X has 2 of the SH2's. An monster if it wasn't for the crappy graphic chip... The successor, Sega Saturn also has 2 SH2's, but the Saturn also had 2 VDP's.
But you'll have to strip the stages off detail and maybe use some black borders to reduce the resolution if you want to port Quake to 32X.
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Post by jlf65 on Jun 4, 2010 14:38:35 GMT -5
The main problem with the 32X isn't power, it's ram. There's not enough ram to do many games, even when you throw as much as you can into the rom. That was the issue with Doom for the 32X - initial betas ran in "hidef" mode and looked great, but they ran out of ram as they implemented things, so they switched to lodef to cut the memory used for the display in half.
You need a ram cart of some kind to provide extra ram if you want to convert some games over to the 32X. Quake fits into that category - if you start with Quake DS (Quake highly rewritten to run on the NDS), you could make a playable version for the 32X as well... if you had the ram.
You can use the PSRAM in the Neo Myth flash cart for the MD if you know how. My latest menu for the Neo MD Myth can run in the PSRAM and allows for Myth-aware homebrew. That gives you an SD card interface, two MBytes of contiguous non-bank selected ram, or 1MByte non-bank selected ram + 7Mbytes of bank selected ram.
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Post by GiGaBiTe on Jun 4, 2010 16:59:13 GMT -5
The main problem with the 32X isn't power, it's ram. There's not enough ram to do many games, even when you throw as much as you can into the rom. That was the issue with Doom for the 32X - initial betas ran in "hidef" mode and looked great, but they ran out of ram as they implemented things, so they switched to lodef to cut the memory used for the display in half. You need a ram cart of some kind to provide extra ram if you want to convert some games over to the 32X. Quake fits into that category - if you start with Quake DS (Quake highly rewritten to run on the NDS), you could make a playable version for the 32X as well... if you had the ram. You can use the PSRAM in the Neo Myth flash cart for the MD if you know how. My latest menu for the Neo MD Myth can run in the PSRAM and allows for Myth-aware homebrew. That gives you an SD card interface, two MBytes of contiguous non-bank selected ram, or 1MByte non-bank selected ram + 7Mbytes of bank selected ram. What about putting the entire game on the SCD and making a 8M RAM cart to put in the cartridge slot?
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Post by 3vix6 on Jun 4, 2010 17:50:31 GMT -5
The main problem with the 32X isn't power, it's ram. There's not enough ram to do many games, even when you throw as much as you can into the rom. That was the issue with Doom for the 32X - initial betas ran in "hidef" mode and looked great, but they ran out of ram as they implemented things, so they switched to lodef to cut the memory used for the display in half. You need a ram cart of some kind to provide extra ram if you want to convert some games over to the 32X. Quake fits into that category - if you start with Quake DS (Quake highly rewritten to run on the NDS), you could make a playable version for the 32X as well... if you had the ram. You can use the PSRAM in the Neo Myth flash cart for the MD if you know how. My latest menu for the Neo MD Myth can run in the PSRAM and allows for Myth-aware homebrew. That gives you an SD card interface, two MBytes of contiguous non-bank selected ram, or 1MByte non-bank selected ram + 7Mbytes of bank selected ram. What about putting the entire game on the SCD and making a 8M RAM cart to put in the cartridge slot? I would think that would be a way that's most accessible to anyone wanting to play it (other than homebrew hackers). Yeah, one could use a cart and a rom image, but those are most bought by people for development and not for just a casual game. If there was a generic ram cart, it could be recycled for other Sega CD/32x games that would needed to meet more memory requirements. It also cuts down on distribution costs if someone was to release something for the unit. Besides, it would be way cool to see a game or two that utilizes both the Sega CD and 32x. ;-)
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Jun 4, 2010 20:02:54 GMT -5
How fast would be having RAM in the cart? Would it not cause timing issues?
Exactly how much RAM would require something like Quake on the 32X for acceptable performance?
Anyway, you can always take the TecToy/Duke3D way, and sacrifice textures to save resources - it will look UGLY, but performance will be better...
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Post by 3vix6 on Jun 4, 2010 20:16:48 GMT -5
haha.. Duke Nukem on the Genesis..
It was horrible though, there's only so much that one can sacrifice in terms of animation when it comes to a game like quake, before the game starts to really suck. Could you play quake at the frame rate that Duke Nukem 3d was on the Genesis?
Although, it was a real noble effort.. Almost like Tec-Toy's MK3 for the SMS. lol.. Where are those cool companies today that are willing to take such a risk. ;-)
You're right Tom, I would think that it would be a lot slower due to "principal of locality" compared to the onboard ram of the system.. Maybe if there was a swapping routine that would leave data at a lower priority on the cart and higher priority data in system memory. Almost like the swap space in an operating system... Just a thought.
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Post by GiGaBiTe on Jun 4, 2010 20:18:01 GMT -5
I would think that would be a way that's most accessible to anyone wanting to play it (other than homebrew hackers). Yeah, one could use a cart and a rom image, but those are most bought by people for development and not for just a casual game. If there was a generic ram cart, it could be recycled for other Sega CD/32x games that would needed to meet more memory requirements. It also cuts down on distribution costs if someone was to release something for the unit. Besides, it would be way cool to see a game or two that utilizes both the Sega CD and 32x. ;-) It's not that difficult to make your own RAM cart, especially if someone made a schematic. nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=3383.0You could easily saw up an old ISA card for the connector, use a prototype board for the ICs and glue logic, or if you're adventuresome, go out and buy a cheap PCB etching kit from radio shack. With that, you could easily have a 512k RAM cart.
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Post by jlf65 on Jun 4, 2010 22:54:22 GMT -5
I think the max you could do is 4MB without bank selection. That's enough for Quake DS, which is designed for NDS with 4 MB of ram. The ram would need to be fast enough to do a "standard" Genesis rom cycle, or about 80 to 90 ns. Using the SCD for data storage would work, meaning just a simple ram cart would be needed. I wish someone made a plain 4MB ram cart for use with SCD homebrew... I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
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