Games That Push System Limits

Retro Gaming with racketboy has a look at games that pushed the limits of gaming systems. At the end of every console's life, the last few games released for the system are (generally) the shiniest examples the hardware has to offer. The article's author starts with the Atari. From the piece: "I'm by no means a 2600 expert, but Solaris is definitely one game that comes up quite frequently in terms of innovative 2600 games. Considering the 2600 wasn't originally intended to do much more than play Pong variants, Solaris is a technical masterpiece with its sophisticated gameplay and relatively high resolution graphics. Although the game played much like a first-person space shooter, you can always see your ship at the bottom of the screen. The graphics for Solaris were first-rate as the multi-colored aliens are flicker-free and glide along smoothly, even when attacking in groups."

Comments

Game that pushed the System Limits ...

[neonprimetime]

I remember back when Microsoft game out with Solitaire ...

My Windows 95 machine could barely handle it ... kept freezing and requiring reboots.
So that's when I upgraded to Windows 98.

A lot easier to push a console in those days

[AuMatar]

Mainly due to the cartridge system. You could stuff extra RAM and processing units into the cartridge to expand the ability of the base console. Nothing like that in today's optical drives. Theats one of the reasons generations are so much shorter now- we were basicly buying upgrade hardware in each cartridge.

Re:A lot easier to push a console in those days

[AKAImBatman]

You could stuff extra RAM and processing units into the cartridge to expand the ability of the base console. Nothing like that in today's optical drives.

It's not like a modern system needs the extra components, though. They've got so much horsepower that any change would be pretty marginal. Thus you tend to get much more bang for your buck by trying to extract more out of tighter and better optimized code. On the Atari 2600 that wasn't an option since you:

a) Only had 128 bytes of RAM (the SuperChip in some carts added another 128)
b) Had 2-4K of ROM (without bankswitching tricks that later extended the carts)
c) Couldn't fit an entire screen of data in RAM. (That 6K in the SuperCharger really helped here.)
d) Had exactly 1 clock with which to draw to the screen for every three pixels.
e) Had slightly more than 1MHz of processing time to work with.
f) Had to draw the screen since you had no GPU to count on. (The TIA didn't do much more than plot swaths of pixels, I'm afraid.)

Back then you counted clocks for all you were worth. Today you count millions of lines of code for fun. My how times have changed. :)

Re:A lot easier to push a console in those days

[b1t r0t]

NES games basically had to do this from the start. It only had 4K of RAM, half being work (CPU) RAM, and half being video RAM. It used a name table/pattern table style graphics chip (a descendant of the TMS-9918, though not based directly upon it like the Sega and MSX video chips), which meant it didn't even have enough RAM for basic graphics! Instead, it relied on the cartridge to put the pattern table into a separate ROM chip, or to have a RAM chip if it just had to have pattern tables in RAM. While NES games didn't go quite as far as having a CPU in the cartridge like SNES FX games did, their mappers got pretty complicated in later games, such as Castlevania 3 as mentioned in TFA.

Atari 2600? Pretty much any game other than Pong and Combat was pushing the system, because of it's 1-D graphics chip that was optimized for those two games. Vertical scrolling was relatively easy, but the limit on what you could put on a scanline made horizontal scrolling hard. The real problem, though, was the 4K cartridge address space. Doing all those tricks took up space, and there aren't a lot of good games that aren't at least 8K bankswitched. (and quite a few bad games that are!) It is still to this day getting pushed to the limit in homebrew games (see atariage.com for examples).

Of the other popular systems of the day, the 5200 definitely didn't get pushed to the limit. Even though it was mostly compatible with the 400/800 line (easy enough to convert if you had source code), the 400/800 line didn't really get pushed until the XE era, after the 5200 died. Intellivision had some nice games in its later days, and I would say that they did in fact push the system. And the Vectrex was too niche and too late to get pushed to the limit.

While the 5200 got only one bankswitched game, the Colecovision died before it could get any. Like the 5200, it had 32K cartridge space. Its 16K VRAM and TMS-9918 graphics were really good for character-cell based games. Its only problems were small work RAM (1K) which could be partially made up for by using extra VRAM as secondary storage, and lack of colors (15 fixed colors, only one or two at a time, and not well-chosen ones like the C64 had). The Sega Master System (an expansion of the Colecovision-like SG-1000) video chip made up for this by doubling the max sprites per line, using 4-bit graphics (16 colors) everywhere, and having 32 palette registers.

Hmm, let's see... here's how much RAM they had, and how much space a game could take before having to use bank switching:

2600 - 128 bytes RAM, 4K cartridge space
INTV - about 1.3K RAM, possibly as much as 48K x 16-bit cartridge space, but with a wonky bus
5200 - 16K RAM, 32K cartridge space
CV - 1K RAM, 16K VRAM, 32K cartridge space
Vec - 1K RAM, at least 40K cartridge space
NES - 2K RAM, 2K VRAM, 40K cartridge space (usually 32K ROM/8K RAM)

continuing with newer systems...

[DJ_Duffy]

I'd say stopping at the SNES is too bad bacuse other more recent systems showed how it pushed the performance of the system:

SNES: Stunt Race FX....which also used the FX chip (2nd game to use it) Sega 32X: Virtua Fighter...worst looking version of the series, but at least you didn't need a Saturn to play it. N64: Perfect Dark...pushed the N64 a little too hard..almost unplayable at some points. N64: Resident Evil 2...huge game for the N64..I'm suprised they managed to fit it all onto a cartridge at all. Playstation: Gran Turismo 2, Metal Gear Solid...both just grabbing all the PSOne had left for performance.

DKC

[dreemernj]

Donkey Kong Country for SNES. Mmmmm that game was too good. And the first SNES game I know of to use the scanline trick to push the max on screen colors from 256 to 4096.

No, I'm afraid you really don't for two reasons.

[Valdrax]

1) Developers cannot know what the capabilities of your laptop are. They have to generalize for many, many hardware configurations, and any attempts to push the envelope of systems currently available risks making your system requirements too high for the game to sell. My PC does not equal your PC. My PS2 does equal your PS2.

2) Developers can assume that a laptop sold the year after yours will be more powerful than yours. What is a limit today is not a limit one year from now.

These two things combine to mean that PC developers cannot really push the limit of a PC because defined limits don't exist.

Pushing the limit of a console is truly a feat of wizardry because you're constantly striving to get more and more out of the same hardware instead of just coding for machines that don't yet exist or aren't yet common. On the other hand, there's an incentive to go all out since you are rewarded for hitting the limits of a system by increased sales instead of punished by decreased sales. It's an entirely different way of programming for an entirely different market.

A system with an add-on like a hard drive for an Xbox, a network card and hard drive for a PS2, or a memory pack for an N64 is not the same as an upgrade for a PC. In essence, what you have is an entirely new system. Console games are coded under the expectation that either:

A) You cannot assume that the hardware is there and the game cannot rely on it.
B) The game requires the hardware and will not run without it.

In other words, two systems with or without an added capability are essentially two completely different consoles, and pushing the limits of those systems works completely differently. You'll note that because of lower market penetrations of Console++ over Vanilla Console, most games written for add-on hardware are commercial flops.

Re:Elite

[grahamwest]

Mode 4 at the top (2 colour, 320 pixels wide) and mode 5 (4 colour, 160 pixels wide) at the bottom. They didn't actually use the full screen width so they took less than 10KB of memory (and correspondingly less resolution). The BBC Master version used mode 1/mode 2 for 4 colour and 8 colour respectively.

Other games had used the trick of changing the video registers partway through the frame (via an interrupt) although only to change the colour palette. Elite was the first to change the bit depth and so on as well, effectively changing the display mode. They also had the timing so rigid that there was no need for a black 'gutter' between the two states, as most other games needed.

I've no idea about the keyboard buffer, but the game used about every trick in the book so it wouldn't surprise me. Elite was so far ahead of its time I think cutting edge graphics and a deeper in-game story (ie. taking all that backstory from the novella and making it count in the game itself) would be enough to make it a viable product today. Convincing the retailers and money-men about a space game is a tougher proposition.