General Games News - The Bear and Badger

davyK

Saturn emulation is getting better - probably good enough to at least try a game out before buying.

Price wise the big 1st party games are cheap but some of the shmups and versus fighters are expensive. However you can amass a great library for a reasonable outlay. Even in PAL most of the 1st party games got decent conversions - some say PAL Sega Rally is superior - I have both and it's certainly at least as good.

Many of its shmups are mame-able but some - like Battle Garegga , Game Paradise and Layer Section have more features as they aren't straight console ports.

That gizmo that bypasses the drive and security via the video CD port will be a no-brainer once that guy has it productised.

mistercrayon

The power for Comfortable VR (well for the eyes) is a pretty huge leap but in one of those weird invisible ways that feels like a nothing upgrade. A bit like getting wi fi or extra speed on the internet.

Diluted Dante

I'd say a lot of the stuff is invisible. The massive leap in RAM allows stuff that wasn't possible before, but you don't really notice. Something as stupid even as cross game chat.

regmcfly

It's wild that the Saturn was obviously so bespoke and crazy that 20 odd years on people still don't know how to emulate it 100%

GurtTractor

Yossarian wrote:

I’m just working off the types of jumps we saw in earlier generations. 8-16 bit felt like a huge jump. 16-32, similarly, since then it has felt like diminishing returns. And it’s not even a question of how ‘good’ the games are, it’s about what that extra power offers, whether a jump allows you to provide new experiences to the previous gen. The experiences on PS3-4 feel pretty similar. I haven’t played much this gen that feels like it couldn’t have been done on the previous gen with fewer shinies. It might technically be an order of magnitude, but the extra doesn’t seem to have opened up any new avenues for game makers. Maybe this is due to a paucity of ideas on the part of devs, but it’s definitely a thing.

We won't see a big change in experience until consoles rebalance the hardware with better CPU horsepower. PS5 should use AMD Zen cores which will actually be a huge leap, suddenly the types of games we have today will be possible to run at 60FPS, and the extra power can be used to create more complicated worlds and systems. GTA6 needs to hold off until then.

Moot_Geeza

regmcfly wrote:

It's wild that the Saturn was obviously so bespoke and crazy that 20 odd years on people still don't know how to emulate it 100%

davyK

regmcfly wrote:

It's wild that the Saturn was obviously so bespoke and crazy that 20 odd years on people still don't know how to emulate it 100%

It's a monster that takes some taming. In a recent Doom retrospective on youtube comparing all the ports, the first cut of the Saturn port was running at 60 FPS - better than the PC original -because the developer was using all of the processors. Carmack blocked it because one of the side effects was texture warping. The approved Saturn port was a jerky crippled mess and Carmack retrospectively expressed regret. Bit too late for that. Arsehole.

I suspect one of the main challenges of Saturn emulation is synchronisation due to having far more separate processors than other consoles.

Anything that wasn't built from the ground up tended to only use a subset of the resources available and thus it suffered from port-itis. Once the Playstation got traction it was then the primary build from which ports came, thus only cementing the PS further in the lead because of shit ports and also because Sega on its own couldn't keep up with the amount of content.

Japanese only games tended to be 2D in nature so played to its strengths. They were also built for the Saturn and so that's why the best of its library is only experienced by those looking to import.

Yossarian

GurtTractor wrote:

Yossarian wrote:

I’m just working off the types of jumps we saw in earlier generations. 8-16 bit felt like a huge jump. 16-32, similarly, since then it has felt like diminishing returns. And it’s not even a question of how ‘good’ the games are, it’s about what that extra power offers, whether a jump allows you to provide new experiences to the previous gen. The experiences on PS3-4 feel pretty similar. I haven’t played much this gen that feels like it couldn’t have been done on the previous gen with fewer shinies. It might technically be an order of magnitude, but the extra doesn’t seem to have opened up any new avenues for game makers. Maybe this is due to a paucity of ideas on the part of devs, but it’s definitely a thing.

We won't see a big change in experience until consoles rebalance the hardware with better CPU horsepower. PS5 should use AMD Zen cores which will actually be a huge leap, suddenly the types of games we have today will be possible to run at 60FPS, and the extra power can be used to create more complicated worlds and systems. GTA6 needs to hold off until then.

GTAV was designed to be compatible with the PS3 and 360. The fact that you’re suggesting that GTAVI should skip the Bone/PS4 gen entirely speaks volumes, IMO.

regmcfly

davyK wrote:

regmcfly wrote:

It's wild that the Saturn was obviously so bespoke and crazy that 20 odd years on people still don't know how to emulate it 100%

It's a monster that takes some taming. In a recent Doom retrospective on youtube comparing all the ports, the first cut of the Saturn port was running at 60 FPS - better than the PC original -because the developer was using all of the processors. Carmack blocked it because one of the side effects was texture warping. The approved Saturn port was a jerky crippled mess and Carmack retrospectively expressed regret. Bit too late for that. Arsehole.

I suspect one of the main challenges of Saturn emulation of synchronisation due to having far more separate processors than other consoles.

Anything that wasn't built from the ground up tended to only use a subset of the resources available and thus it suffered from port-itis. Once the Playstation got traction it was then the primary build from which ports came, thus only cementing the PS further in the lead because of shit ports and also because Sega on its own couldn't keep up with the amount of content.

What? That's wild.

Is there a good history / text of the 32 bit era? I enjoyed Console Wars, Service Games and Masters of Doom and others like that, but none of them really hit post 95.

Tempy

If you watch that vid, one huge problem is there are some very strange 'black boxes' in it which are weird and bespoke. Fascinating vid tho, especially as he explains his logic.

davyK

Would have been interesting if they had the chance to finish the Doom port to their original plan which might have addressed any issues as it was an early build. The intention was to port over all the PC levels intact. According to the video, most console ports are based on the Jaguar version which has cut down versions of the original levels.

EvilRedEye

regmcfly wrote:

Is there a good history / text of the 32 bit era? I enjoyed Console Wars, Service Games and Masters of Doom and others like that, but none of them really hit post 95.

Not sure there's a cross-system one. The guys that did the N64 Anthology are doing a PlayStation one. Perhaps ROM will do a book on the Saturn one day.

Facewon

I could do with this being good.

https://youtu.be/JUURZPqGZ1s

dynamiteReady

Vela wrote:

More shinies, yeah, beyond that? Not so much.

Errr, the dropping of Sony’s aspirations for the cell chip across its IOT, backdropped against the death of larrabee has killed off SPUs and locked us into generic CPU cores for the foreseeable. The GPU itself is an order of magnitude faster than RSX, and that’s not even touching on the bus bandwidth. An order of magnitude is a significant jump, however you slice it. Feel free to shift the goalposts to “oh but the games aren’t any better amirite?!??!” if you must, but PS3 -> PS4 was both a majorly significant architecture change (that desperately needed to happen in order to harmonise the dev pipeline so that PS didn’t get left out in the cold with ports of mainlined PC and Xbox dev) and a significant performance jump.

Ps4 can actually run the digital shop app unlike ps3. That's a pretty significant improvement. My non-tech impression of ps4 is that it's an enormous improvement on ps3 in every department. Smooth UI, reliable downloads, quicker loading.

Small aside, and I doubt it's still in service, but the US airforce once put together a cluster of 1500+ PS3s (the Linux running SKU) to make a bonafide supercomputer to crunch through ultra high res recon maps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

In it's day, it was cheaper to use PS3s over anything else for a specialised cluster of machines for vector processing. Those 8 SPUs acted a lot like how graphic cards do/did, but could be used to calculate any kind of data. At the time, graphics cards could only really process texture data (technically, you can use a graphics card to run a word processor, provided that every calculation produced a 2D image as an answer... Which gives an impression of how specialised the tech is).

Now-a-days though, thrifty CS departments are using graphic cards, and software like Cuda and OpenCL now make it (somewhat) easier to use GPUs in a similar way to what Sony intended with their SPUs.

It was quite an achievement at the time, but as Chump points out, the PS3s' dedicated GPU was a relative piece of shite, and the SPUs, while amazing, were hard to write custom programs for.

So it was hard for the average consumer to see the qualitative difference.

[Deleted User]

Facewon wrote:

I could do with this being good.

That’s one that, having seen a couple of minutes of, I’ve made a decision to blackout until it releases. Hopefully it turns out well.

(Although, I confess, it annoys me that the robot crickets eyes are the wrong way around.)