Check out these screenshots for the "remixed" version of Excitebike.
How you think they've done it? Recoded the entire thing from scratch or have they been doing alot of patching?
http://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/rz ... D3PTzDUTG3
A highly customised/unique emulator, definitely.
Off-topic, sorta:
I'm still of the opinion that Nintendo and all these old-school companies are bringing back classics for two-faced reasons. There's the obvious fact that most present-day video games suck ass (us old codgers tend to prefer fun and good gameplay over fancy graphics; HEY, ANYONE WANT TO PLAY
BIG RIGS??), and as such a definite market demographic for classic games. Emulators paved that way for that market. But on the flip side, this "renews" (for lack of better term) copyright lawsuit legitimacy on classic games; companies can now claim, for example, that piracy of a NES game (ROM) made in 1989 has negative impact on their cash flow today. It saddens me how the whole "classic gaming" market is partially driven by ulterior motives.
America, fuck yeah, comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah!
I'm pretty sure it's not emulated. See this video (1:28, which it should start at):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds0sP_SqR88#t=1m28s
I've heard that the 3D slider doesn't just control the amount of 3D, but pulls back the camera to give you a wider view like the one seen in the video.
I read a statement earlier that I can't find now that specifically said it was remade from the ground up and only uses similar physics, graphics and sound.
The 3DS update that includes this game for free should come out sometime later today, most people are guessing late in the day, perhaps 12 hours from now.
In reply to koitsu, sure, they
can do that now, but do they actually take advantage of it? Has any company made a big deal out of emulated games? Microsoft Game Room, PS1 Classics, Virtual Console...have any of them given trouble to people who emulate, aside from the usual "patching out homebrew," where the blocking of emulation is incidental at best?
Wow haven't seen that video before. Seems like almost a different game compared to the original.
Y'a know, there are ways of enjoying classic games
without violating copyright law. The game companies don't like resell shops either tho, because they don't see a dime from them.
Not that I've much room to talk. I'm waiting for my PSX mod chip to come in so I can finish Chrono Cross
It's out now.
Pretty fun (as fun as Excitebike is).
Yeah it's nice. But I'm pretty sure now it's a complete rewrite but obviously with ripped graphics/sound effects (which is really loud btw).
I hope it's the first of many classic games on the 3ds shop for download that has been rewritten to be 3D. It adds a bit more value to the download then just letting me download unmodified Game Boy roms on an emulator. I see how they want to keep the 3ds virtual console all portable games, and the Wii personal console all console games, but I do wish they'd mix both. I'd like to see the GB games on the Wii's virtual console, and the console games on the 3DS virtual console.
Well... the 3DS is mixing both. Excitebike is an NES game, originally. Or do you mean you want unmodified console games as well?
I mean I'd like them to keep remaking NES (or SuperNES) games in 3D because it adds more value to the traditional virtual console game which is nothing more than a ROM and emulator. But also I notice on the Virtual Console that they only seem to offer Gameboy and Gameboy Color games on the 3DS and Console games on the Wii. I would like it if they would offer games for all systems on both Virtual consoles. For example Gameboy games on the Wii's virtual console and NES, SNES and Genesis games etc. on the 3DS virtual console.
Also for some reason paying to download a Super Metroid rom on my Wii seems more worth the money to me than paying to download a Super Mario Land rom on my 3DS. But if I could play Super Mario Land 2 on my Wii I might download that.
I got the chance to try out the 3D-version of Ocarina of Time this today, and I must say that I am pleasantly surprised with how the NDS 3D does its thing. If I didn't already have a still perfectly working original NDS, I'd definitely buy the new one along with Ocarina of Time on a whim.
All of this makes me wish that I knew more about how this 2D/3D-trickery really works as it ultimately has made me wondering about whether or not this effect to at least a certain level can be applied to older games, like SNES, NES, etc.
dr_sloppy wrote:
All of this makes me wish that I knew more about how this 2D/3D-trickery really works as it ultimately has made me wondering about whether or not this effect to at least a certain level can be applied to older games, like SNES, NES, etc.
You can't automatically create depth where originally there was none. It's like this guy that showed up here saying that his NES emulator would display games in red-blue 3D. Most of these old games don't have any depth information, and the few ones that do don't use a unified format, so there's no way to automatically create 3D images from 2D games.
Conversion to 3D is a game-per-game task, where you have to associate a depth to every on-screen element and use that information to generate 2 2D views slightly displaced from each other. Then you can present these 2 images in various ways (red/blue glasses, polarized glasses, special screens, etc.) that allow peoples' brains to join the 2 images into 1 3D image.
Thanks for the explanation, tokumaru!
I knew that there would be nothing automatic about this, but thought that perhaps some kind of simple 3D-effect could be applied somewhat easily (in theory only.)
I've never been one to care for such 3D-effects, but after today I can see that it's more than just a gimmick. Better have to search it up and see if I can't learn a little
about it. :-)
Anything with a 3D projection like Rad Racer or World Runner could fairly easily be ported like this by having the emulated NES generate alternating left and right eye views and then displaying both in 30 fps. Super NES games would be even easier: assign each emulated layer a distance value.
Couldn't you get a fakey 3D effect in an NES emulator by rendering the background layer twice: once in blue, shifted a few pixels left, and once in red, shifted a few pixels right?
Yeah, it would look kinda weird in games where sprites are used as background elements (e.g. hitting a ? block in Super Mario Bros.), but for the most part I think it'd look kinda neat. You could even get controversial and hijack an unused OAM bit to specify whether a sprite should be rendered in split red/blue (pushing it into the background) or not, and then people could hack a game's sprite engine to set these bits only for specific "background" sprite types.
BMF54123 wrote:
Couldn't you get a fakey 3D effect in an NES emulator by rendering the background layer twice: once in blue, shifted a few pixels left, and once in red, shifted a few pixels right?
Yeah, the most you could do automatically is put the sprites closer to the player than the background, because these are the only layers we have knowledge of on the NES. You could even use the "behind the background" bit the sprites have for a 3rd layer. But like you said, sprites are often used as background elements and vice-versa, and these situations would always interfere with the overall effect.
This is an interesting thing to try though. I would be interested in trying this feature if any emulator had it. Maybe it could even have a slider, like the one in the 3DS, to adjust the distance between the 3 layers.
Quote:
You could even get controversial and hijack an unused OAM bit to specify whether a sprite should be rendered in split red/blue (pushing it into the background) or not, and then people could hack a game's sprite engine to set these bits only for specific "background" sprite types.
This is actually an interesting idea. If we define a standard way to specify the depth of the sprites we could make new games with 3D effects that could be seen in emulators that have this feature but would be ignored by the NES.
tokumaru wrote:
If we define a standard way to specify the depth of the sprites we could make new games with 3D effects that could be seen in emulators that have this feature but would be ignored by the NES.
Does the string "vhpzzzcc" mean anything to any of you?
With "zzz" we could select one of 8 planes, which should be enough for some interesting effects. There must also be a way to indicate what plane the background is on, and this setting should be modifiable during rendering, for some really cool raster effects.
It would also be a good idea to be able to specify the absolute distance of each of the 8 planes, so that objects could move more smoothly in the Z axis instead of "jumping" from one plane to the next.
I know my comment will not be constructive and not really related 100% to this thread but it's more of a personal comment about the 3DS in general.
I tried many samples today at a game store. Resident Evil Mercenaries, Zelda OOT, One Piece, Fire fox. I tried all of them with either 3D or not. Except for the weird feeling that it gives you after a while to your vision, it didn't bring much at all to the game experience. Activating the 3D or disabling it was not much different in both case. There was no wow factor.
They took a risk and it was a flop. Now they have to drop the price. We're still too far for anything interesting with 3D yet. I'm waiting for anything better than that. It's just a supped up DS with a flacky 3D screen.
Sorry to hi-jack the thread. Maybe we I should have started another thread instead.