This would be an interesting topic that hasn't been discussed much. How were graphics downscaled in arcade to home conversions.
In some cases, poorly. See "Mario's Shame, Early Home Ports" on
this page.
I meant like Street Fighter 2 going from it's 384x224 resolution down to 256x224, without messing up the tile grid.
Fighting game sprites themselves were often resized down from hand-drawn animation cels, using high-quality scaling algorithms, and then had outline effects (aka "
selout") applied.
It often wasn't scaled down, actually, but remade from scratch, both graphics and gameplay, to make just something that would resemble the original.
I recall that I've read in some old computer mags that devs of ports of arcade hits to home computers often had nothing but the access to the arcade unit to work with, and sometimes it was just video recording of the gameplay. No source code, design docs, etc. Sometimes video recording was used to get the original graphics as base to draw on.
Some fighting game ports (Super Street Fighter series, IIRC) did not scale down the graphics. Instead they kept the original graphics and panned around the screen as needed, making the characters take up proportionally more of the screen.
This is the main reason I've given up doing both C64 and NES versions of the same game.
It would be SOOO hard to downscale everything to fit C64's inferior graphics that it would be a major headache for every single thing from sprites to background.
I think Konami did very well when porting Contra, Super Contra and Gradius II. You can see how much effort they put into Contra and Super Contra, they are very different from the arcade.
They did well when porting Contra to some systems, but go check out the C64 version (or heaven forbid, the DOS version). Other games were the same way, check the various non-NES Castlevania ports, most of them suck.
qbradq wrote:
Some fighting game ports (Super Street Fighter series, IIRC) did not scale down the graphics. Instead they kept the original graphics and panned around the screen as needed, making the characters take up proportionally more of the screen.
What port was this? On PS1 and Sega Saturn they did not scale the graphics or anything like that. But on SNES and Genesis the graphics were not the same as the arcade due to the 256x224 resolution which was not only used because SNES was limited to it (Genesis could do 320 width) but also because it takes less cartridge memory to store the "scaled down" graphics. I think it's wrong to assume they ran it through a program and scaled the graphics down. They just took the source art and redid it for the 256x224 screen space of the 16bit consoles. And it turned out very well. Also PC-Engine/Turbografx uses the same graphics, the same resolution, even though the console could actually run in the native Arcade resolution or atleast one more similar to the 32bit console ports. But it didn't as the larger graphics would again require much more memory to store.
MottZilla wrote:
qbradq wrote:
Some fighting game ports (Super Street Fighter series, IIRC) did not scale down the graphics. Instead they kept the original graphics and panned around the screen as needed, making the characters take up proportionally more of the screen.
What port was this? On PS1 and Sega Saturn they did not scale the graphics or anything like that. But on SNES and Genesis the graphics were not the same as the arcade due to the 256x224 resolution which was not only used because SNES was limited to it (Genesis could do 320 width) but also because it takes less cartridge memory to store the "scaled down" graphics. I think it's wrong to assume they ran it through a program and scaled the graphics down. They just took the source art and redid it for the 256x224 screen space of the 16bit consoles. And it turned out very well. Also PC-Engine/Turbografx uses the same graphics, the same resolution, even though the console could actually run in the native Arcade resolution or atleast one more similar to the 32bit console ports. But it didn't as the larger graphics would again require much more memory to store.
They might've used a scaled down version as a reference when redrawing the background and characters.