It seems like it was acceptable for NES games to have scrolling and scanline glitches, but not so much for the SNES and Genesis era games. Are there any other old systems that were known for having graphical glitches, besides the NES?
The Atari 2600 had the "comb" at left and even more sprite flicker than the NES.
Most of the time, things that look glitchy are tricks meant to make the console do things it wasn't designed to. I bet there are examples of glitchy behavior on the SNES and Genesis when they are trying to do things they weren't supposed to. I'll see if I can think of anything when I'm on my PC.
Still, most of the NES glitches could have been avoided if developers had spent a little more time adjusting the timing of various effects and polishing their engines, but time and money constraints must have prevented that.
tepples wrote:
The Atari 2600 had the "comb" at left
In a lot of cases this can be avoided or hidden.
Quote:
and even more sprite flicker than the NES.
Not much can be done about this other than designing the games according to the hardware limitations from the start.
Check out the colour attribute clash on pretty much any ZX spectrum game. Developers just didn't care too much about it on that system and tended to just walk all over it. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlMZsTlOYuE
No, I'd say the Playstation or Saturn were the glitchiest in my experience. They both had disappearing / badly-joined polygons with textures that warped like corrugated cardboard as they came at you.
Many Game Boy games were so lazily programmed that the screen scrolling was not synchronized with the position of the sprites.
Wario Land among them. But it wasn't all that noticeable until Super Game Boy allowed looking at things through a screen other than a slow-ass LCD.
So Atari 2600 (comb, and flicker in ports of games from more powerful systems), ZX Spectrum and Apple II (attribute clash), NES (attribute wrapping and scroll split mistiming), and Saturn/PS1 (polygon popup and no perspective correct texture mapping).
The Apple II had pretty glitchy games, due to lack of vsync and it only having bitmapped graphics with a relatively slow CPU. Sound was likewise pretty rough.
tokumaru wrote:
I bet there are examples of glitchy behavior on the SNES and Genesis when they are trying to do things they weren't supposed to.
Sonic games cover up CRAM modification artifacts ("color dots") caused by bus conflicts when water is onscreen. They also use sprite flicker to allow Sonic's sprite to be visible with the water sprites still covering the entire screen width. Pause the game, and rather than flickering, the game switches to 320px worth of water sprites, and if you put Sonic on the same scanlines, you'll notice he disappears on the same lines as the water.
Plus, there are always the infamous color dots in the bottom border that are seen in many games at the point where they rewrite the palette for the next frame. Note that the capture is old and crappy, from before I acquired a composite cable. NTSC console referenced, not sure about the dots on PAL. I know there are others here who might know, however
Nope, the PC wins this round. Poorly programmed modern games make the PC the glitchiest system ever. NES games were tiny and simple compared to what we have today on modern systems. Over the years developers have gotten lazy with badly written engines (Crysis) and their 'we've got the money so who cares if its bugged' (Assassin's Creed). All because PCs are so powerful nowadays they can slack off.
LocalH wrote:
stuff about Sonic
Oh, and Sonic 2 has a couple of scanlines at the bottom of the screen that don't scroll with the rest of the tilemap (in Emerald Hill Zone, at least). I don't think that's a hardware issue though, just a silly programming mistake.
I maintain my opinion that most of these glitches can be avoided with careful programming, but not everyone is willing to apply the extra effort, be it for time/money constraints, laziness or even ignorance.
WedNESday wrote:
Nope, the PC wins this round. Poorly programmed modern games make the PC the glitchiest system ever. NES games were tiny and simple compared to what we have today on modern systems. Over the years developers have gotten lazy with badly written engines (Crysis) and their 'we've got the money so who cares if its bugged' (Assassin's Creed). All because PCs are so powerful nowadays they can slack off.
Most games these days are bottlenecked because of the GPU, not the CPU. And since often times you can't optimize GPU code much more than what most people know, how the hell is Crysis badly programmed?
One inefficiency I've read about is that some engines overtessellate what doesn't need to be tessellated. Another is using primitives other than triangle/quad strips; I've read that GPUs aren't so efficient at handling fans and isolated triangles. Yet another is overly complex shaders.
@Alegend45
Bad programming has nothing to do with how powerful your PC is.
Crysis had amazing graphics but system requirements that exceeded what you experienced. Sadly, they toned down Crysis 2 so much it was nothing more than a console FPS.