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[Wildebeest]

PC had 3D accel before SNES.

I'm talking about consumer, not specialist workstations. Star Fox was out before even Doom and used hardware accelerated 3d.

 

[CamHostage]

No one considers Keen one of the most important games, but it was a technical achievement, and a breakthrough for MS-DOS games in particular.

The other big thing, of course, was that it was kind of the big breakthrough game for the shareware model, which would completely take over the PC market for the next few years.

Right, people who weren't there don't understand that you didn't buy an IBM DOS PC if you wanted to play games. These were business machines; it said so right on the label. PC was for work, Apple was for schools, there were a bazillion European boxes in the middle, and if you wanted to game, you bought a Nintendo.

But families had taken-from-work PCs around the house,plus nerds at work wanted to kill time when the boss wasn't looking, so games happened. PC naturally gravitated towards flight sims and adventure games in the early days, and those for the machine's strengths; otherwise, companies ported (badly) everything they were making for other computer machines to keep shelves busy. The popular platformer genre on the Nintendo however was not viable. Keen helped marketers see opportunities for those popular platformer games to be made on PC finally. So Carmack was on the map now.

... It kind of wouldn't matter though, no real great platformers were made on DOS (as far as I would say,) and PC publishers never got their piece of the Nintendo pie. Instead, they made a new pie. Because of the shareware release system, the market sparked, and then when the REAL gaming revolution of FPS hit PC, everything changed. And Carmack was in the middle of all of that.

Keen wasn't the thing, but it was the thing that helped get to the thing.

 

[RoboFu]

Western developed games trashed Japanese ones. Basing this on platformers is ironic because the NES reintroduced platformers to young kids in a devolved form that removed the fast action, multidirectional, and rpg elements for a simple run and jump to the right of the screen.

All innovation in genres were on dos or other computers while consoles were oversaturated with the same type of game until 3D.

If you grew up with the NES, SMB3 to Mega Drive Sonic may look like innovation or evolution but if you were old enough or had a finger on industry information, you knew it wasn't.

All hardware postNES had been designed with scroll platform games in mind. Every other genre was horrendous and way behind the curve only seen as evolution by those growing up on those consoles.

One of the reasons why even some Japanese developers were hesitant to leave NEC PC-88, PC-98, and FM Towns.

Most people don't know that consoles were heading toward a casket fast in revenue in the early 1990s' prompting reports that PC would kill console gaming. 3D luckily broke the cycle.



PC had 3D accel before SNES.

Umm no pc 3D accelerator cards Where not a thing until the mid to late 90s. Consoles and arcades destroyed pc games until the mid 90s as far as hardware goes.

 

[jufonuk]

Umm no pc 3D accelerator cards Where not a thing until the mid to late 90s. Consoles and arcades destroyed pc games until the mid 90s as far as hardware goes.

This is truth. The PC was definitely a business machine with a few good looking games but clunky still. As much as prince of Persia had beautiful animation it scrolled only when you left the screen it was more of a platform puzzler with simple fighting elements. NES and SNES had amazing looking games that had fast responsive controls and the arcade was the place to Be the arcade was the benchmark. Once Doom came with its fast paced gameplay and graphic the masses realised how good PC’s could be then came Quake and games like decent appeared the PC started to come along leaps and bounds especially with 3D cards by the time of the Dreamcast a PC was the benchmark for graphics at home. Seeing as the Dreamcast was essentially an arcade system at home the PC was able to outperform it. Once the consoles started to get near to PC like quality well the arcades have died out. Still around for nostalgia but no where near tue level they were at least in the heyday.
Also the Dreamcast was power pc based?

 

[Spukc]

Don’t talk shit about keen boiii

 

[SScorpio]

Umm no pc 3D accelerator cards Where not a thing until the mid to late 90s. Consoles and arcades destroyed pc games until the mid 90s as far as hardware goes.

Arcade games with their custom hardware that could cost more than a PC, sure. But console? Maybe original 8086 PCs. But the 286 was 1982, and EGA was 1984, and VGA in 1987.

Consoles had an edge for things like smooth scrolling at the time. But tell me how console destroyed PC releases like 1990's WingCommander (worse 1992 SNES version, 1994 SegaCD), 1992's Ultima Underworld (1997 Playstation version), 1993's Doom that every console was racing to try to match. 1993's Xwing, 1994's TIE Fighter (but that's becoming mid-90s).

In the very early 80s you had the Ultima and Wizardy series which directly influenced the creation of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest which were seen as very stripped-down experiences versus what was on the PC.

 

[RoboFu]

Arcade games with their custom hardware that could cost more than a PC, sure. But console? Maybe original 8086 PCs. But the 286 was 1982, and EGA was 1984, and VGA in 1987.

Consoles had an edge for things like smooth scrolling at the time. But tell me how console destroyed PC releases like 1990's WingCommander (worse 1992 SNES version, 1994 SegaCD), 1992's Ultima Underworld (1997 Playstation version), 1993's Doom that every console was racing to try to match. 1993's Xwing, 1994's TIE Fighter (but that's becoming mid-90s).

In the very early 80s you had the Ultima and Wizardy series which directly influenced the creation of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest which were seen as very stripped-down experiences versus what was on the PC.

You have a very nostalgic view on wing commander 1. But with a 486 pc with 6 megs of ram! some still framed games benifited on pc a tiny bit, but not really that much.


pc emulated?:


snes emulated?:

 

[SScorpio]

You have a very nostalgic view on wing commander 1. But with a 486 pc with 6 megs of ram! some still framed games benifited on pc a tiny bit, but not really that much.


pc emulated?:


snes emulated?:

The PC version was much smoother than the SNES with much better music even if you just had Adlib sound and not an MT-32 like you can emulate nowadays. The SNES crawled during dog fights and there seem to be fewer models from different angles so the ships seem to just randomly float through space rather than quickly turning around in a dogfight. Then there's having a real analog flight stick versus a little dpad. It's still very impressive what they pulled off on the SNES. Also that 486 had to be slowed down to run the original Wingcommander, over 386 speeds and the game sped up when you only had 1-2 enemies left.

Consoles were great for platformers, but PC was king for RPGs, Strategy, and Adventure games. Over time new ideas were developed and genres were mixed and good games were everywhere. But the early days were a lot of experimentation.

 

[Draxon Gamer]

There are some misconceptions about the PC-DOS capabilities here. PC-DOS was much more powerful than any other consumer gaming platform of the time. These are examples of games that released only between 1990 and 1992:

DOS took everyone down graphically and nothing else was close since it set the benchmark, you brought a PC if you wanted the best at home.

As someone who loves the DOS era, I have to say that PC platformers were absolute trash.

Even the ones that have some sort of cult status (Keen, Jackrabbit, etc) are simply horrible, horrible garbage games down to every element of their design.

This is because platform games only became a major genre because of the NES. Run and Jump was the foundation of most games on the system, and the systems of the following generation.

I bring this up for a reason. For consoles developers were investing a lot of resources into their platform games to make sure their games looked like they were of higher production, because it was their bread and butter and the biggest genre.

On PC most platform games were created by indies many of which were associated with the shareware model, or publishers who were not spending the money for higher production.

Here is the original Duke Nukem in 1991 in shareware episodic format:



Here is Sonic the Hedgehog released the same year on the Genesis:



The difference is not the platform itself because PC is much stronger than the Genesis. The difference is the amount of resources and money a studio is willing to allocate for the development of a platform game. PC studios with 1 exception never took the platform genre seriously enough to release a platform game that would be comparable to Sonic.

When almost every platform game on DOS at the time came from the same set of companies or independent developers using the shareware model, you aren't going to get a Sonic the Hedgehog competitor on DOS. All the high production DOS games I posted earlier ended up that way because the studio invested resources into their games ensuring their production quality.

Here is another shareware platform game also from 1991 where the developer requests you to pay $15 for the full registered version:



Platform games saw the least investment on DOS, that is why the platform games released on it are not of higher quality. It's not that DOS was incapable because it was the strongest gaming machine available, but big studios simply didn't take the genre seriously enough to compete with consoles in that field, and based on dos platform sales they didn't need too.

When John Car made CK he wasn't praised for the games production, he was praised for how the game scrolled and his coding mastery. With his FPS games he was praised for both.

 

[Wildebeest]

Platform games saw the least investment on DOS, that is why the platform games released on it are not of higher quality. It's not that DOS was incapable because it was the strongest gaming machine available, but big studios simply didn't take the genre seriously enough to compete with consoles in that field, and based on dos platform sales they didn't need too.

When John Car made CK he wasn't praised for the games production, he was praised for how the game scrolled and his coding mastery. With his FPS games he was praised for both.

You are wrong. Platformers were a staple of home computing gaming since Pitfall and Donkey Kong popularized the concept at the start of the 80s. Same with other 2d genres such as overhead maze games, breakout clones, shoot em ups, and so on. The PC was just bad hardware to implement them on, even compared to something like the C64. It was not a matter of budget or there not being a market. As people have said elsewhere, whatever 3d magic the PC could do at the time was due to the expensive high-end CPUs they had, which most consoles and older home computers simply did not have.

 

[calistan]

PC-DOS was much more powerful than any other consumer gaming platform of the time. These are examples of games that released only between 1990 and 1992:

Isn't that It Came From The Desert on Amiga? From 1989?

 

[Clear]

You are wrong. Platformers were a staple of home computing gaming since Pitfall and Donkey Kong popularized the concept at the start of the 80s. Same with other 2d genres such as overhead maze games, breakout clones, shoot em ups, and so on. The PC was just bad hardware to implement them on, even compared to something like the C64. It was not a matter of budget or there not being a market. As people have said elsewhere, whatever 3d magic the PC could do at the time was due to the expensive high-end CPUs they had, which most consoles and older home computers simply did not have.

Well, strictly speaking what really made the difference was the fundamental nature of the display technology. Early home computers could do what they did because they primarily utilized tile/character-based screens as opposed to bitmaps. I say primarily because although the underlying even early home computers like the C64 had bitmap modes their usage was limited due to relative computational cost on the simple processers of the time.

Hardware scrolling is actually incredibly trivial, all it requires is the ability to offset the display in pixel increments. On the C64 for instance this was achieved by writing a value (0-7) into single 8-bit register per axis. That done, the expensive part is moving the entire display at the point the fine scroll value wraps around from 7 to 0, or vice versa. If you are working with a screen made up of a matrix of character tiles that's not too bad, but if it happens to be a raw bitmap then you are looking at a pretty hefty amount of data to be copied by the cpu.

Essentially what it all boiled down to was mitigating this processing cost by some means. As it turns out, the best way to deal with this is not just a matter of extra cpu grunt, its organizing the display data in an efficient manner.

The "magic bullet" that the PC got was byte-per-pixel graphics modes, certainly compared to the Amiga which utilized a system called bit-planes, where the colour of each displayed pixel was calculated from a number of layered bitmaps. i.e. 1 bit-plane is 2 colours as each bit can be on or off. 2 bit-planes together can resolve 4 colours, 3 resolves 8, etc.

So by the 90's when Doom was all the rage, poor Amiga coders found themselves tied up in knots having to simulate byte-per-pixel translation because doing it natively required 8x the work using Motorola CPU's that were clocked way lower than their Intel counterparts.

 

[Wildebeest]

Well, strictly speaking what really made the difference was the fundamental nature of the display technology. Early home computers could do what they did because they primarily utilized tile/character-based screens as opposed to bitmaps. I say primarily because although the underlying even early home computers like the C64 had bitmap modes their usage was limited due to relative computational cost on the simple processers of the time.

Are you talking about the higher resolution modes the C64 and Amiga supported, which were not commonly used for real time graphics? Lower resolutions were used for gaming, but they were still "bitmap" modes not text modes. Those bitmap modes did have hardware sprites. Amiga struggled later on because, as we both agree, I hope, the CPUs were very underwhelming compared to the new intel chips, and the "advanced" update to the graphics chip was a bit of a bodge job that didn't deliver.

Amiga had features like chips which would allow access to onboard memory for graphics without having to go through the CPU. A video co-processor which allowed for vertical synching with CRT displays and back buffers and other iconic effects such as changing colors for every scan line and separate scrolling of two bitmaps with the front transparent. But the C64 was not the same as it at all, since Amiga had no "text modes" which could be used for certain tricks where "blocks" of graphics information could be moved around in tiles. Amiga did sometimes struggle with 2d platforming games, but it wasn't considered simply a bad system for them, as it was for Doom clones. There was never even any hint of any 3d graphics co-processor in the Amiga board which could take advantage of the onboard RAM to create 3d effects without going through the CPU.

 

[Magic Carpet]

This was in the days when PC graphics cards had a stat for their 2d capabilities. Fill Rate was a thing. How many lines could your card draw. Some cards could not display games like The 7th Guest properly.

 

[Clear]

Are you talking about the higher resolution modes the C64 and Amiga supported, which were not commonly used for real time graphics? Lower resolutions were used for gaming, but they were still "bitmap" modes not text modes. Those bitmap modes did have hardware sprites. Amiga struggled later on because, as we both agree, I hope, the CPUs were very underwhelming compared to the new intel chips, and the "advanced" update to the graphics chip was a bit of a bodge job that didn't deliver.

Its less about resolution than mode. Resolution is just a linear ramp for the amount of data you are throwing around.

If the hardware supports tile-maps, better still tile-maps on multiple playfields like the 16-bit consoles then you get a ton of bang for your computational buck. For example although the screen display in pixels might be 320x200, if its composed of a grid of 8x8 pixel tiles from the code's standpoint you are just looking at a 40x25 array of bytes. Also, because these are tiles that the video chip is handling transparently then if you dynamically alter the contents of memory from which a certain tile takes its image data, then every element in the grid that is mapped to that tile changes simultaneously. So for example you can create simple parallax effects by hardware scrolling the tile-grid/playfield, whilst simultaneously software scrolling the character/tile image data at a different rate!

Sorry, I don't want to get too lost in the weeds reminiscing over these ancient "black-art" techniques, but if you were writing games back in the 80's and early 90's these sort of tricks were your bread and butter. However as soon as you got onto something like Amiga, or even more extremely different architecturally like PC... you really had to think again.

Same deal with hardware sprites because those from a programming standpoint are really quick and easy to manipulate as the video chip is doing all the hard work, but again the problem becomes you need to work around the limitation of what the hardware is capable of.

Amiga had features like chips which would allow access to onboard memory for graphics without having to go through the CPU. A video co-processor which allowed for vertical synching with CRT displays and back buffers and other iconic effects such as changing colors for every scan line and separate scrolling of two bitmaps with the front transparent. But the C64 was not the same as it at all, since Amiga had no "text modes" which could be used for certain tricks where "blocks" of graphics information could be moved around in tiles. Amiga did sometimes struggle with 2d platforming games, but it wasn't considered simply a bad system for them, as it was for Doom clones. There was never even any hint of any 3d graphics co-processor in the Amiga board which could take advantage of the onboard RAM to create 3d effects without going through the CPU.

Well here's the thing; the Amiga was pretty much unique in that it occupied a weird transitional place between the 8-bit character mapped approach or the tiled playfields of the 8/16-bit consoles, and the pure frame-buffer/bitmap approach of the PC.

It could do hardware smooth scrolling. As in apply an offset pixel-wise to the onscreen coordinates of display data, and it had limited hardware sprite capability. However it's signature feature was the hardware blitter, basically a custom processor for doing fast memory copies and simple bit-wise manipulation. Essentially it was an accelerator for software sprites and screen copying. Very flexible, but strictly 2d as all it could do was copy and perform basic boolean operations.

Where things got messy was the way the screen was laid out in memory. As I mentioned in my last post if you wanted to draw a single pixel onto a 16 colour screen it required 4 separate writes. Because 16 colours requires 4 bit-planes. Were the memory ordered in a byte-per-pixel format you could do the same job in a single write.

When you start trying to do 3D, even wire-frame 3D, you need fast access per pixel so it was absolutely crippling. This is also setting aside all the math you also need to do on a relatively low clocked 680x0 cpu!

Bottom line is that even if the Amiga could handle the math and logic side without issue, translating that result onscreen incurred a huge overhead as the output image needed so much work between frame-buffer and screen.

Eventually people figured out ways to mitigate this to a degree with copperlist and blitter tricks,. but it was a whole step that just wasn't necessary elsewhere.

The original hardware designers realized this early on and had intended it to be addressed with successor hardware, but sadly that was cancelled and replaced by the cheaper AGA revision which didn't change the paradigm and ultimately exacerbated the problem.

 

[Draxon Gamer]

You are wrong. Platformers were a staple of home computing gaming since Pitfall and Donkey Kong popularized the concept at the start of the 80s.

I have no clue why you're bringing up 80s computers in a discussion about 1990s PC-DOS. Did you skip over my comparison between Duke Nukem and Sonic 1 to illustrate the production differences?

Isn't that It Came From The Desert on Amiga? From 1989?

You are correct it is It Came From The Desert, but the PC-DOS version that released in 1990.

Where things got messy was the way the screen was laid out in memory. As I mentioned in my last post if you wanted to draw a single pixel onto a 16 colour screen it required 4 separate writes. Because 16 colours requires 4 bit-planes. Were the memory ordered in a byte-per-pixel format you could do the same job in a single write.

When you start trying to do 3D, even wire-frame 3D, you need fast access per pixel so it was absolutely crippling. This is also setting aside all the math you also need to do on a relatively low clocked 680x0 cpu!

This is correct. The Amiga was kind of like a transitional neogeo for computer gaming and was top of the pack in 1985 but once 1989 hit its design flaws were too much to ignore. Unfortunately Commodore did not bother looking into a way to transition out of their proprietary hardware with later releases, resulting in the same weaknesses that made 3D and faster games harder to make.

The Atari ST launched the same year as the Amiga but was closer to a PC which meant that hardware upgrades could be more expandable and the cpu had a marginally higher clock speed.

When you look at the numbers between the two the difference may not look very wide at first appearance, but that small difference mattered a lot. Take a look at these videos comparing the Amiga and ST versions of popular FPS game Cybercon III.





Those aren't minor differences there's a world of difference in performance between the two that is impossible to shrug off. It doesn't help that Cybercon has freelook vertically and diagonally. I believe it's the first traditional FPS game to have that.

 

[Wildebeest]

I have no clue why you're bringing up 80s computers in a discussion about 1990s PC-DOS. Did you skip over my comparison between Duke Nukem and Sonic 1 to illustrate the production differences?

It is true, in a way, that Sonic would have been possible on PC or Amiga with compromises. But that game was designed for the Megadrive hardware and the compromises for PC, at the time, would have been significant. There would also have been compromises for Amiga, but it would probably have come out better, I imagine. I just don't see how people who owned PCs at around 1990 were simply not interested in 2d action games with smooth animation, and I think you are just putting the cart before the horse. They were interested in them, but the software was just not up to standard, because the hardware was not suitable.

 

[calistan]

You are correct it is It Came From The Desert, but the PC-DOS version that released in 1990.

It's a weird example to use if you're trying to demonstrate how powerful the evolving PC platform was by the early 90s. I mean, it's identical to the version that ran on a computer that was fixed and unchanged since 1985.

 

[RoboFu]

Isn't that It Came From The Desert on Amiga? From 1989?

Yup and that’s the amiga opening not dos.

Here’s dos.

 

[Sentenza]

OK, that makes a lot of sense.


Why was IBM/DOS in the 80s so underpowered in comparison to Amiga though?

Generally speaking (in terms of overall computational power) it wasn't.
But at the time a standard PC architecture without graphical accelerators literally lacked the ability to manage sprites and scrolling at a hardware level.

 

[nkarafo]

Here is the original Duke Nukem in 1991 in shareware episodic format:



Here is Sonic the Hedgehog released the same year on the Genesis:



The difference is not the platform itself because PC is much stronger than the Genesis. The difference is the amount of resources and money a studio is willing to allocate for the development of a platform game. PC studios with 1 exception never took the platform genre seriously enough to release a platform game that would be comparable to Sonic.

It's not that, it's mostly hardware related.

In the early 90's, a DOS PC could have a much stronger CPU (such as a 386) and much more RAM but the Genesis/SNES still had better graphics hardware for scrolling and sprites. So it depends on the genre.

On PC you always had faster software 3D, bigger and more complex RPGs and strategy games while on consoles you had better platform, shmups and arcade action games that make heavy use of scrolling and sprites. No matter how much resources you would spend, there was no way for a DOS PC in 1991 to have such a lush and smooth platform game as Sonic, just how the Genesis/SNES couldn't have such detailed and smooth 3D games. Even with the FX chip, the SNES could barely touch the best looking 3D games and flight sims on PC at the time. I mean Starfox was a huge investment, a big SNES title, they even developed the FX chip for it.

IIRC, platform games on PCs became a thing in the mid 90's, when 486/Pentium CPUs were a thing and those were powerful enough to push smooth scrolling and sprites without dedicated hardware for the job. That's why you had decent ports of late 16bit console platform games during 1994-96.

So no, hardware limitations are a hard cap. Recourses can help but they can't do miracles. Even talent can only take you so far. The wizard John Carmack could only make a game scroll at half the rate most games on consoles would by any random developer.

 

[Sentenza]

For context back then a lot of "side scroller" native on PC used... well, very little actual scrolling. It was more common to have the Prince Of Persia/Another World/Flashback type of game where once reached the edge of the screen you just moved to a new one.
Which frankly depending on the overall design was often a better compromise than just having a shitty, choppy scrolling.

Amiga didn't have the limitation, for the record, so it was capable of very fluid scrolling, big sprites AND tons of "parallax levels".

 

[Draxon Gamer]

It is true, in a way, that Sonic would have been possible on PC or Amiga with compromises. But that game was designed for the Megadrive hardware and the compromises for PC, at the time, would have been significant.

You're mixing up production values and comparable visuals with game engine implementation, like Sonics physics which wasn't my point. If you look at Duke Nukem and Sonic 1 that both came out in the same year, even ignoring the engines there is a clear divergence in production.

It's not that, it's mostly hardware related.

In the early 90's, a DOS PC could have a much stronger CPU (such as a 386) and much more RAM but the Genesis/SNES still had better graphics hardware for scrolling and sprites. So it depends on the genre.

You are correct that developing comparable games graphically would be more difficult to reach on PC hardware, since PC is lacking the capabilities the two consoles have that helps developers produce those kinds of games regularly. I do not disagree with this.

My disagreement starts when you are using low production or independent shareware games to explain away the underlying problem and decided that those games are representative of PC's capabilities for the time between 1990 and 1992. In the 80s I would say fair point, but in the 90s it's not the hardware but the budget investment that is the problem in my opinion.

My biggest problem with anyone using your argument is you bypass the game studios themselves and skip right to the hardware when PC hardware through software and raw force could produce visuals on par with Genesis and Super Nintendo even if there are weaknesses elsewhere. Let's take a closer look at several DOS platform games released during the time.

Jill of the Jungle Ep. 1 (PC MS-DOS, 1992) (Longplay)

Full gameplay of Jill of the Jungle, a classic shareware game, which signalled the imminent emergence of famous software developer and publisher Epic Megagam...

www.youtube.com

As painful as it was to watch some of these, I had to list them to make my point clear. You can't really tell me any of these games listed had the effort and production put in to look pleasing to a console audience?

There are two reasons why I know the main obstacle in this case is not the hardware, and both of those are concrete reasons. The first is that Shmup games that play like the ones on consoles also require moving of tiles, several shmup games on DOS clearly have higher production than every game I just listed so if the problem is hardware then why are platform games the only genre suffering so badly from lack of production value on PC during that period on average?

The second reason is that in 1991 there was a 2D scrolling platform conversion done of the arcade game Joe and Mac. Joe and Mac was not the highest effort conversion but it showcased capabilities that were not seen in other platform games released throughout 1990 and 1992 on PC-DOS. The best part about this conversion is that it's a superior one to the conversion of the same game on the Amiga.

Joe and Mac is by far the most impressive scrolling platform game on DOS of what was released at the time, but wasn't a highly produced conversion with a budget to match. But that didn't stop this conversion from being good enough to look like a game you would see on a Genesis or Super Nintendo, and it steamrolls the Amiga conversion.

It is true that PC had limitations making things more difficult to achieve certain results, but it also had more raw horsepower so there's no excuse for why Jill of the Jungle or Elvira were the caliber of platform games released on PC the most, when PC could easily handle a game that looks 16-bit even with its flaws.

The only explanation is that the majority of PC developers had little interest in the genre to put enough money into development for highly produced releases, which exists on avergae for every genre on the PC EXCEPT platform games. The amount of overall platform releases is also rather small so you had slim pickings for platform games at the time, and making matters worse most releases in the genre were shareware. I don't dislike the model but for platform games in particular it seems to have done the most harm.

 

[nkarafo]

Draxon Gamer

I think you kinda overestimate the importance of production money. Yes, money can help with a lot of things, but again, it's not magic. You can pay your developers for more levels, more hand made animation sprites and the like, but you can't make DOOM run on the NES sort of speak, no matter how much money you throw at it. You see all those DOS platformers performing poorly and wonder why are they all such poor production value projects, assuming that's the only reason they performing poorly. I think it's the fact that DOS PCs at the time simply weren't good for this specific task. Maybe it's as simple as that.

I mean, look at DOOM, Carmack and iD software. DOOM was made by a small team of a handful of people. It wasn't really a game of blockbuster production values and in fact, it was also a shareware game. And yet, despite being a relatively small project by a small team, it became the de-facto state of the art game, technically, not only on PCs but on every system imaginable in late 1993. That's because a bunch of talented people, mostly Carmack, took advantage of the strengths PCs had (strong CPU) and made it sing. Earlier, the same person took a shot on making something the PCs are bad at and the result was Keen. Not bad, but still not as good as what consoles had. It's not because he didn't have money, he had passion and talent, which is more important. It's because PCs were bad at scrolling, simple.

There are a lot of non-platform PC games made by small teams that were not big production value projects and despite this, many classics have emerged. We saw great technical achievements in many genres. Just not with 2D platform games because the hardware was especially lacking there.

Yes, PCs had powerful CPUs, lots of RAM and fat hard disks, but those things don't matter much when your graphics hardware isn't made specifically for certain tasks. Look at Arcades for proof. These boards actually had crappy CPUs most of the time. A game like Black Tiger only has an 8bit CPU, yet most 16bit home systems would struggle to get an arcade perfect port. Then look at the Neo-Geo. It has a 16bit CPU, yet the much more powerful Saturn struggled to have a good port of Metal Slug and it even needed the memory expansion. Why is that?

It's because when you want to make a specific thing, you need a specific hardware feature. The arcades had custom graphics boards that could move 2D visuals with ease, despite their crappy CPUs. The Neo-Geo had the huge roms and a very powerful sprite engine that the more powerful 32bit Saturn would struggle to compete with it's slow CD ROM and reliance on small RAM that wouldn't fit all those sprites and animations. In the same way, the PCs had some powerful features but it lacked in the parts that make 2D games scroll fast and smoothly. At least until the CPUs reached a power level that was enough to brute force it.

As for Joe and Mac, you might be on to something there. Yes the scrolling looks smooth but if you look closely you will also see that it's very slow paced. The game looks like it's running on slow motion compared to the console versions. Plus, it's not a multi-scroller like Keen. So i'm not sure if it's a good example. I'm also not aware of good looking shmups on PCs at the time, are there any good examples?

 

[Draxon Gamer]

Draxon Gamer

I think you kinda overestimate the importance of production money. Yes, money can help with a lot of things, but again, it's not magic.

I don't want to seem disrespectful but I am not seeing anything in your response that tells me you read through my post because almost nothing in your comment is related to it.

I gave you examples of what the typical platform games looked like on DOS during that time which were low production mostly shareware releases, and showed with Joe and Mac that the PC could do much better than all of those other DOS platform games because Joe and Mac not only was graphically superior, but had other benefits like 3-parallax as well.

That was a conversion by a low grade publisher that still was not high production, but it showed that platform games such as Jill of the Jungle, Dark Ages, and Cosmos Adventure were not indicative of what PC-DOS hardware was capable of like the misconceptions claimed, and that they were nowhere close to reaching whatever limitations PC hardware actually had. The difference between Joe and Mac on DOS, and all those other DOS platformers is night and day, making it undeniable that the PC hardware still had higher highs than those other games showed. That was the entire point of my argument, but you didn't recognize that and compared Joe and Mac on DOS to Joe and Mac on console instead which isn't the same discussion.

Regrettably in your response here you completely skipped over this in favor of acting like I thought production was a magic bullet. I never once said or indicated that was the case and even repeatedly brought up that the PC would still have weaknesses even with higher production values, but you decided to go with the assumption that I did think it was a magic bullet but I'm not sure why.

I'm not overestimating, what happened was you didn't take the time to read my post to understand the point I was making, which was that DOS hardware was powerful enough to have the graphical appearance of a 16-bit console scrolling platform game, and it did as I proved with Joe and Mac. None of the other DOS games I linked videos for did the same, and Joe and Mac was a thrown together conversion by a small studio.

This means that the only reason why the majority of platform games on PC hardware during that time looked poor compared to even lower budget console platform games, is because none of the studios who released them put in the effort and investment to make those games appear to have higher production quality. That's not denying there are hardware limitations, but you're skipping over undeniable proof that was just provided to you to attack the hardware, in order to justify those other DOS platform releases when they simply aren't justified.

When other tile and sprite based DOS genres also have higher average production than platform games, and Joe and Mac showcases a generational gap in graphics compared to the other DOS platform releases, then I think you should consider taking a second look at your argument.

The truth is, we have never seen a single scrolling platform game on DOS with any reasonable investment put into it. It just never happened during the early 90s in any form. Platform games aren't the only ones that require moving tiles and sprites, but only platform games had this crux on DOS at the time. Shareware was also a negative factor because a lot of these low production efforts like Aldo, Dark Ages, and so on were able to make money and reach many people without any improvements. That gave developers less of a reason to put more investment into their games or 'episodes' overall. I mentioned before that Doom and Heretic were on shareware so I'm not against the model, but you should be able to see why that business model can have drawbacks, and platform games showed us one of those draw backs.

I truthfully doubt you believe that Dark Ages is an example of a platform game reaching the limits of PC hardware capabilities, and more investment into its production wouldn't do anything. Especially after seeing Joe and Mac which left all those other DOS games in its dust, but was still a low production affair.

 

[nkarafo]

I read your post and the last one and i still fail to see why you are so fixated with the production values. Your argument can still work without it and i also mentioned how low production value projects on PCs have shown great technical achievements.

Joe & Mac is better than the other PC platform games, that's all you need. This whole argument about low production values doesn't make sense. DOOM was a low production value project and it set the world on fire. I mentioned that but it got ignored.

So why all the other PC platform games look worse than Joe & Mac you ask? Maybe it's because Joe & Mac scrolls at a slower pace and only at one direction at the time. Unlike Keen, which scrolls fast and it's multi-direction, like most console games. Question is, do you believe something like Sonic, that's smooth, multi-direction and very, very fast, can be done on a 1991 PC? I still don't think so. Joe and Mac isn't a very strong case to make me think otherwise.

 

[Draxon Gamer]

DOOM was a low production value project.

Nothing about DOOM was low production.

DOOM was using cutting edge texture mapping techniques on an engine that could calculate on the fly that itself wasn't cheap. They brought several top-shelf Nextstep workstations that would cost $7000 each or more at the time, and had to commission people for additional assets, music, and whatever which wouldn't be done for free.



$500,000 isn't low budget especially when you have some of the best development equipment you can get.


In 1988 using the best tech they could on the NES as well as R&D on new tech to include in cartridges to complete Super Mario Bros 3, Nintendo spent $800,000 on the game itself.

In 1991 before Sonic released, in case the game would fail leadership had a $400 contingency plan to keep the company floating until they found other ideas to make up for Sonics possible failure.

How much do you think Jill of the Jungle cost to make? Aldo 1991 doesn't even look like it was made with more than $500. None of the PC platform games had even half these budgets. I would like to see a DOS scrolling platform game between 1990 and 1992 with a budget of $250,000 but I am pretty sure it doesn't exist. I can find these budgets for other budgets on PC however, which should be an indicator that something is wrong.

So why all the other PC platform games look worse than Joe & Mac you ask? Maybe it's because Joe & Mac scrolls at a slower pace and only at one direction at the time. Unlike Keen,

And the reason why you are ignoring the worse looking DOS platform games that also scroll slowly one direction at a time is?

My argument is perfectly sound, your resistance to it is completely confusing. Just like you claiming DOOM was low budget.

Question is, do you believe something like Sonic, that's smooth, multi-direction and very, very fast, can be done on a 1991 PC? I still don't think so. Joe and Mac isn't a very strong case to make me think otherwise.

Why are you inventing topics I never argued?

 

[Draxon Gamer]

Can't edit the post again for some reason but John himself said from Doom to Quake 1 they brought over $100,000 worth in NeXT computers.

(Also that Sonic part should say $400 million contingency plan)

 

[PaintTinJr]

Commander Keen is seen as a legendary franchise that 'proved' computers could have colorful scrolling platformers and is considered the series that launched ID Soft into celebrity status, leading to their work on Wolfenstein and Doom.

It's often considered one of the biggest technical achievements in gaming and an important milestone.

My question is: why?

Were there some DOS users who locked themselves from the outside world? Have these last few decades of poor journalism allowed this story to go unchallenged so long it stuck?

Let me show you why this shocks me in an extreme way.

Here is Commander Keen:

Here is an Amiga game from the same time:

What exactly are people saying that Carmack accomplished with Commender Keen?

I just saw a history video on a big game site that talked about how important Commander Keens impact was on the industry, and how Carmack used his magic fingers to produce something that no one else was able to do. It's a very common tale that's been around for decades.

But how do you look at Commander Keen next to a contemporary and still honestly believe that?

I don't see a single advantage Keen has over Spellfire. Keen looks like something a college kid threw together in his bedroom overnight for a college project. Due the next morning.

You can see the solution in the gifs. In Commander Keen you can see the whole screen moves smoothly per frame with the character like it does with any 2D console with acceleration silicon for compositing.

Even though the Amiga had a enhanced C64 2D acceleration capabilities like a blitter chip, you can still see the slight delay in the gif where the screen is supposed to scroll smoothly when the character reaches the limit, but it hitches momentarily before scrolling a quarter screen across. On Spectrums and other hardware without such acceleration the hitches were 1-3 seconds in length in most games, so to achieve that without more than a generic CGA or EGA framebuffer graphics card, probably just using direct assembly calls to update the framebuffer at that frequency in real-time was a big achievement IMO.

There was a 7 part gaming documentary on Netflix a few years back that had this very thing explained by idsoftware in one of the episodes.

 

[MonkeyClaw36]

Lol no, almost every gaming capable device including the IBM itself had better scrolling games than Keen.




I had considered this but then found these PC games came out the same time:




https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ4OOoc5DZY&pp=ygUNQ29udGludXVtIGRvcw==




https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3-DzlT68o4Q&pp=ygULRG9zIHplbGlhcmQ=

and compared them to Keen:



Even if we only limit this to PC and the same time it still falls behind other games.

Maybe fans of Wolfenstein and Doom like him so much (and forgot about Romero) that they wanted to stretch his success back a few years?



Is it? The games in the videos above seem to be better achievements imo.

Carmack cracked the smooth scrolling part when working at Gamers Edge. HE fucking invented smooth scrolling on PC.

Lookup Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement.
Dangerous Dave was made by John Romero, who also worked at Gamers Edge at the time.

John Carmack made his own game with this scrolling technique, called Commander Keen.
Before that, there was NO game on pc in which the background scrolled smoothly on a per-frame basis.

FACT

 

[AeonGaidenRaiden]

Your answer lies here. Basically first ever game on PC to have natural sidescrolling like Mario on NES.

 

[Clear]

Quite interesting how Carmack arrived at his solution, he explains here in this convo with Lex Fridman.

Seems like a very similar method to the pointer-scrolling method some of the better later Amiga games used, although as this basically operated on an undocumented feature I guess it shares more in common with some of the VicII hacks on C64.

 

[Futaleufu]

Nobody cared about IBM PC platformers back then because we were too busy playing games like Stunts