SNES ACM graphics? - NESdev BBS

SNES ACM graphics?
by oRBIT2002 on 2009-02-05 (#42890)

Back in the days when Donkey Kong Country was released there was a big hype about it. This "new" ACM (Advanced Computer Modelling) technology that made the games look like 64-bit.

Obviously the graphics were rendered in 3D, not that exciting really.
But did this ACM-technology include anything else than just 3D rendered graphics? Since the game is "only" 32megabit I suspect they might have some nice compression technology to allow those amounts of graphics, but that's my own theory.
Anyway, anyone knows more? Just curious..

by tepples on 2009-02-05 (#42892)

Subject edited so that people don't confuse it with an Audio Compression Manager codec for SNES BRR audio.

by blargg on 2009-02-05 (#42897)

I think it was partly the depth-reduction algorithm that converted a millions of color image to 32 or so.

by MottZilla on 2009-02-05 (#42900)

In the end all graphics were reduced to 4bpp (16 color) SNES tiles. The technology is in the process of taking those 3D renders and getting them down to usable standard SNES graphics.

by Celius on 2009-02-05 (#42928)

One thing I've always found kind of odd was how they had so many frames of animation. Even with Donkey Kong Land on GB, everything moves so smoothly.

I would think they use some sort of compression, either that or they reuse the tiles REALLY intelligently.

As a side note, you say it's 32 megabit. I don't mean to be an ass, but why not say it's 4 Megabytes? What's so special about a megabit anyways?

by BMF54123 on 2009-02-05 (#42942)

"ACM" was just a marketing term (like Blast Processing) used to hype the game's extensive use of pre-rendered 3D graphics, something which was relatively new to console games. None of the three DKC games used any special mapper hardware or anything.

by MottZilla on 2009-02-05 (#42946)

Celius wrote:
One thing I've always found kind of odd was how they had so many frames of animation. Even with Donkey Kong Land on GB, everything moves so smoothly.

I would think they use some sort of compression, either that or they reuse the tiles REALLY intelligently.

As a side note, you say it's 32 megabit. I don't mean to be an ass, but why not say it's 4 Megabytes? What's so special about a megabit anyways?

Depending on VRAM usage ofcourse, but I doubt compression was used on sprites, but maybe background tiles. Or, maybe none at all. VRAM would have to fit alot of sprites if you were to compress them as real time decompression wouldn't be doable. You could always open it in a tile editor.