Is an emulated "port" of a retro game as good/better than an actual port?

[partious]

30 minutes ago, Fry Crayola said:

In the context you're discussing, an emulated ROM is the original game, whereas a port is a different edition of the game, even if developed to be identical.

 

An emulated rom is the original game files but the fact that they're running through a software emulation layer seems significant.

 

I think it's interesting that we seem to be heading towards a situation where the unofficial emulation "community" is showing signs of movement away from/dissatisfaction with purely software emulation and towards fpga cores with things like the Mister and the Analogue machines, whereas the more official/legitimate options will just be to pay for a rom running on an emulator on your console or to buy a little plastic box that looks like a snes/megadrive and houses a cheap system on a chip running a software emulator.

Perhaps we'll eventually see offical fpga options, priced accordingly for those who care.

 

[Fry Crayola]

10 minutes ago, partious said:

An emulated rom is the original game files but the fact that they're running through a software emulation layer seems significant.

 

If it makes a tangible difference, which may be the case for everyone, or for some but not all, or for nobody. There's no inherent reason why software emulation is inferior to FPGA, nor any worse than running a native port if the hardware is up to the task.

 

Anyone who's played Xbox 360 games on Xbox One can attest to the power of good software emulation, albeit of similar hardware.

[Qazimod]

For me, it depends on the bells and whistles that come with the port, and whether or not the value they offer outweighs any issues with accuracy or performance. Also, if I have no frame of reference I'm even less likely to worry about accuracy (but then again I can understand how a dodgy port can cloud my opinion of a classic!)

[sir stiff_one]

22 hours ago, dumpster said:

Another good example is Daytona, Then I went into a Blackpool arcade that had the original 1993 machine and it's unbelievably low res and 30 fps and it stands out a mile.  The smooth hidef visuals don't impress when you play the new one, then you see the old one and it's only then that you see the difference

Daytona was always 60fps in the arcade. That’s why those games, VF 2 Hotd2, looked so amazing.

[Nick R]

2 hours ago, kensei said:

I miss ports in general. It used to be that versions of games running on different platforms could be very different. Different technologies, different teams, different design choices. The Switch has revived this a tiny bit, but for the most part these days the consoles are so similar, and similar to the PC it's the same engine with a few tweaks. 

 

Actual ports of retro games offer the possibility of interesting changes or improvements to something I've played before. As long as it's done respectfully, I'd rather have that. They can probably thrown in the emulated version too pretty easily anyway. 

 

Full ports do offer the opportunity for fundamental changes that either couldn't be done on the original hardware, or could only be bodged awkwardly into emulators. (Widescreen display support, online multiplayer, etc.)

 

But a game doesn't necessarily need to be ported in order to have substantial changes made to it. You can make big changes (bugfixes; new music, characters and levels) while still keeping it playable on a standard emulator or the original hardware. The many Sonic, Mario and Zelda ROM hacks/randomisers made by fans are proof that.

 

(And those fans usually only have access to disassemblies, not to the original source code that people working on official ports get to see!)

[dumpster]

14 minutes ago, sir stiff_one said:

Daytona was always 60fps in the arcade. That’s why those games, VF 2 Hotd2, looked so amazing.

Yep already apologised on page 1, I was thinking of Arcade Virtua Racing. The point still stands though, you play the HD releases and it only hits you how much better they are when you go back to the originals. The HD remasters are what your brain remembers the originals being. Halo CE is a great example. 

[dumpster]

Mr Do! On Snes is a good example. Ostensibly perfect, it is only when you play it that you see the game logic is totally different and nothing behaves as you expect it to.

[mushashi]

24 minutes ago, sir stiff_one said:

Daytona was always 60fps in the arcade. That’s why those games, VF 2 Hotd2, looked so amazing.

 

VF2 even specifically calls out the improvement over the original in the flyer (though some might consider that claim to technically be a lie... ). The home conversion plays just aswell because they didn't sacrifice that aspect of the game, not to mention being a very clever use of the target hardware's specific abilities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dudley]

5 hours ago, kensei said:

I miss ports in general. It used to be that versions of games running on different platforms could be very different. Different technologies, different teams, different design choices. The Switch has revived this a tiny bit, but for the most part these days the consoles are so similar, and similar to the PC it's the same engine with a few tweaks. 

 

Actual ports of retro games offer the possibility of interesting changes or improvements to something I've played before. As long as it's done respectfully, I'd rather have that. They can probably thrown in the emulated version too pretty easily anyway. 

 

Yeah, I did a short series on this with Sonic the Hedgehog, Sim City and Pac-Man and the answer of what the best version to play is now is rarely obvious.

 

Sonic for instance,  the Mega Drive version is nice but you can play it with lovely 3D backgrounds on 3DS, or with spin dash added and new difficulty levels on Switch.  Or on the PC you can play it in actual VR, either in cinema screen size or sat on the floor of what could be your childhood bedroom on a 14" TV.

[Dig Dug]

I think the efforts of studios like M2 have called into question the quality of emulated titles on the likes of the arcade archives and other such ranges.

 

Playing their Sega Ages titles on Switch, M2 is one of the few studios I know to have included full gameplay recording and options for things like turning slowdown on and off. They tread a very fine line between emulation and port, authenticity and genuine improvement. It’s a standard I think we’d do well to ask for more often.

[Camel]

Yeah not all emulated releases are equal. Going back a bit, the lovely Gunstar Geroes Treasure Box on PS2 is another good example of not just throwing a rom at an emulator. M2 again though.

[Nick R]

A question I've wondered about for a while: does anyone know how developers connect emulated games to modern online features that the original games would not have accounted for, like Achievements/Trophies and Leaderboards?

 

Do they essentially use emulators with "RAM watcher" features (like the ones that tool assisted speedrunners use) to check if the conditions for an Achievement have been met?

 

 

For example: Sega Vintage Collection: Streets of Rage has the Xbox Achievement: "Use the special moves and attacks of every character in every game (hidden characters excluded)."

 

Conditions like "has the player ever used attack X by character A, AND attack Y by character B, AND attack Z by character C?" are not events that the original games would have ever had any reason to check for and keep track of. (Let alone doing it across three separate games!) So assuming the ROMs used in the collection are unaltered copies of the MD originals, then the checks for those events can't be done as part of the normal execution of the games' programming, but must be be checked for by the collection's Mega Drive emulator, and then passed from there to Xbox Live like any other Achievement, right?

[Fry Crayola]

Yeah, if using an unadulterated ROM then you're going to be tracking known memory addresses, possibly together with the player's input if necessary. I imagine it'd be trivial to determine which character's in use (it's likely a flag somewhere in memory) and executing a special might be as straightforward as checking when a particular subroutine is executed.

 

Perhaps @Anne Summers knows a little about how Antstream does it?

 

 

[partious]

Does anyone know of any retro arcade ports from the current gen of consoles? Ports meaning not emulated.

 

I recenty learned that there's a port of the Killer Instinct arcade game on Xbox One, which I wasn't aware of and would have assumed to be an emulator even if I had known it was a thing.

 

Virtua Racing on Switch. Is this a port or a heavily tweaked emulation? I know this isn't really of much consequence to the user experience, I'm just curious about ports.

 

Zero Gunner 2- on Switch. I think they added the minus because the port is considered inaccurate? I have it on DC and couldn't spot the difference but I haven't played it that much.

 

Ikaruga on Switch. Didn't buy it since I have it on 360 (which people say is an inaccurate port) but I assume this is a port of the 360 or mobile version?

[SqueakyG]

Dear games industry: please port Outrun 2006 Coast2Coast to all current-gen systems, and please do this every generation. Thank you.

[Fry Crayola]

41 minutes ago, partious said:

Virtua Racing on Switch. Is this a port or a heavily tweaked emulation?

 

It's a port. 

 

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-virtua-racing-sega-ages-switch-analysis

[spanky debrest]

14 hours ago, partious said:

Zero Gunner 2- on Switch. I think they added the minus because the port is considered inaccurate? I have it on DC and couldn't spot the difference but I haven't played it that much.

 

Ikaruga on Switch. Didn't buy it since I have it on 360 (which people say is an inaccurate port) but I assume this is a port of the 360 or mobile version?

 

Zero Gunner 2 on Switch has the 'minus' because the Devs were open and candid about it being inferior to the DC game. They basically wrote the entire thing from scratch because source materials weren't available and they weren't able to squash a load of bugs and get it as close feeling / playing to the OG as they would have hoped. But at least it's now in wide-screen.

 

Ikaruga on Switch was said to have used assets / code deriving from both the mobile and 360 versions - which were themselves both fully rewritten. When I got around to playing both the 360 and Switch HD versions I did notice that many sections throughout the levels now 'transitioned'; the stitching between enemy waves and environmental effects wasn't as smooth or as well masked as they were on the DC.

[JPL]

On 14/02/2020 at 15:34, Dudley said:

 

This is true of course, if you haven't played Halo in years, the remastered version looks exactly like you remember Halo looking.

 

Then you press the button to switch the true original and your eyes start bleeding.

What is this shit?! 

[bplus]

On 14/02/2020 at 10:14, Fry Crayola said:

 

 

Another World could be used as an interesting case study of where one stands. The core game itself ran as bytecode on a virtual machine, so every port just needed to implement this machine and the interfaces for input and display. Hence, every version including the Amiga original is an emulation, with the machine being emulated one of Eric Chahi's design rather than a physical platform. The Switch version may not emulate an Amiga, but it's emulating something. With this game, we can recognise that the emulation typically takes best advantage of the host platform where it's needed - hence we have higher resolutions and frame rates on modern hardware while ultimately still being an emulation. 

 

 

 

 

Are you sure it ran as byte code on a vm? If it's anything like compiler design I understand, the code would be compiled down to byte code. And each target platform would have it's own implementation of a byte code compiler that would compile that down to machine instructions. This is isn't the same as emulation where each instruction is analysed on the fly and translated into native instruction(s).

Basically VMs in compiler design are a way of breaking the compilation process in two. Which means for each target platform you only need to reimplement half of it, the translation of byte code into native instructions.

 

(I'm not an expert but I wrote a toy compiler that does exactly this)

[Fry Crayola]

33 minutes ago, bplus said:

Are you sure it ran as byte code on a vm?

 

Yep: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php

 

The VM interpreted the byte code in real time on the host platform, rather than compiling it to native code offline and shipping that.

[bplus]

25 minutes ago, Fry Crayola said:

 

Yep: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php

 

The VM interpreted the byte code in real time on the host platform, rather than compiling it to native code offline and shipping that.

Oh! I stand corrected! Thanks.

[centurion]

  

On 14/02/2020 at 12:55, dumpster said:

I think it depends on the game.  Virtua Racing on the Switch is a rewrite that takes advantage of the host console, but what you end up with is a version of Virtua Racing that feels arcade perfect.  VRacing on Switch is exactly how I remember the arcade version, and you need to to back to the arcade before you see how much better the Switch version is. 

 

I remember this game having some kind of weird post-240fps, like they basically pushed the cathode ray tube so hard it started going backwards in physics or something, and sucked photons out of the room. No seriously, the edges of the screen and rendered objects started to go really black in gradient contrasts - I believe this is where Top Gear got the idea for their fuzzy black camera filter.

 

On 14/02/2020 at 15:34, Dudley said:

 

This is true of course, if you haven't played Halo in years, the remastered version looks exactly like you remember Halo looking.

 

Then you press the button to switch the true original and your eyes start bleeding.

 

Most of this game uses an inverse performance technique for immersion reasons. The framerate never drops to remind the players they're in a game, rather it adheres to simulation principles like the Boeing flight sim that was featured in the Krypton Factor gameshow. Halo has masses of data going on in certain sections, like in the beginning of Silent Cartographer with the big skirmish going on, trajectory of every bullet is cross-referenced to check wether they deflect off each other in mid air, and you can check this actually happens by watching slow motion replays of your game. Basic techniques for this are loosely derived from air traffic control, so for instance the amount of flying objects in an area automatically determines it to be a 'fly zone', otherwise if you shoot rifles in the air they would be calculated for collisions going across space and into the opposite ring segment, which eventually stops the game due to CPU overload of a few hundred thousand minature jets.

 

On 14/02/2020 at 16:18, Nobuo's Organ said:

Apropos of the topic, will The Master Chief Collection version of Halo CE have an option to emulate the slower, weightier-feeling PAL 50 version? That's the Real Halo for me.

 

Yeah so the frame-rate is actually about 12fps as with movies, but a Direct-X overlay makes it look faster. The rock solid 'tick rate' of the underlying engine is what helps massively with immersion, which in turn makes the scenario and monsters more intimidating. Most players have a World War 2 style freak-out when they're cut off by Covenant in various underground sections - this apparently being a base human instinct. Probably why Dungeons and Dragons was so popular.

 

On 14/02/2020 at 20:36, Mr. Gerbik said:

The obviously old but heavily stylized, almost abstract, environments in the original Halo still have their charm and are still atmospheric. While the Anniversary graphics are way too garish and overly detailed and busy to the point of being an eyesore - on top of that it loses the original moody atmosphere because it looks like you're playing Halo: The Eurovision Spectacular. They did a much better job with Halo 2 Anniversary imo

 

A lot of the abstraction hides that a lot of these weapons are pseudo-realistic, for example the needler rounds are actually feasible as minature smart missiles. Politics of this are odd, but by presenting what could become military technology as a kids toy, whoever poses as an enemy state to your state then sacrifces one of their own things as a kids toy, and generally this is how or why weapons don't keep developing into for instance, laser tanks or magnetic rail-gun fighter jets.

 

On 14/02/2020 at 21:13, Lyrical Donut said:

 

No. Just... No. 

 

No.

 

I could go on, but I'm all out of Nos.

 

Low res, maybe - but 30fps? Nggh. Nah.

 

I'm not even sure what the framerate is. Defies conventional classification and seems to be a Doc Brown madness invention.

 

On 15/02/2020 at 17:30, partious said:

 

An emulated rom is the original game files but the fact that they're running through a software emulation layer seems significant.

 

I think it's interesting that we seem to be heading towards a situation where the unofficial emulation "community" is showing signs of movement away from/dissatisfaction with purely software emulation and towards fpga cores with things like the Mister and the Analogue machines, whereas the more official/legitimate options will just be to pay for a rom running on an emulator on your console or to buy a little plastic box that looks like a snes/megadrive and houses a cheap system on a chip running a software emulator.

Perhaps we'll eventually see offical fpga options, priced accordingly for those who care.

 

 

I'm not entirely sure Mister is an FPGA since the primary component is an Arduino, but correct me if I'm being ignorant of something. I'm fairly sure that an IBM G4 processor has micro-fpga in it however, which is something you can't really buy for yourself since DARPA stole most of the contracts in recent years for something or other. A nice pinball machine maybe?

 

On 18/02/2020 at 13:03, bplus said:

 

Are you sure it ran as byte code on a vm? If it's anything like compiler design I understand, the code would be compiled down to byte code. And each target platform would have it's own implementation of a byte code compiler that would compile that down to machine instructions. This is isn't the same as emulation where each instruction is analysed on the fly and translated into native instruction(s).

Basically VMs in compiler design are a way of breaking the compilation process in two. Which means for each target platform you only need to reimplement half of it, the translation of byte code into native instructions.

 

(I'm not an expert but I wrote a toy compiler that does exactly this)

 

The Intel emulator I wrote years back had a patch to include compilations from a Pascal research compiler. It was supposed to advertise how good the paid version of this compiler would be, and had thus had really good performance, debugging and educational features, like it literally labelled every op-code with a tutorial so totaly noobs would understand what the futuristic shit-hot product did exactly. Well I then did some tinkering and had it compile library files which the emulator then loads in cellular fashion. This highly cyberpunk software did a bunch of weird and 'out there' things, like running a section of Doom to render a marine, and then applying the Quake wavey water effect, and could do so very slowly in mainframe fashion on a half-speed 186 CGA machine. Essentially I lied to the code about the host platform it was running on, or that Doom and Quake were now a wrestling tag-team and not generational rivals.

 

Ports? The Master System Streets of Rage is interesting for having the exact same AI code to the Megadrive, and arguably plays better due to tighter design. Super Mario DX was also considered better due to improvements in physics.

[dumpster]

On 14/02/2020 at 11:54, Mr. Gerbik said:

Not retro - or maybe it is by now - but that's why playing EDF2017, a 360 game, on the X is both awesome and, not quite right. It runs at a solid 60 so you completely miss out on those moments when the 360 would slow down to a crawl when a bazillion enemies would be exploding and firing at you from all angles and shit really went crazy. It added to the 'holy shit' feeling.

...and the gameplay is designed around this so those levels are sometimes much more difficult, bordering on impossible.  The Gradius ports for PS2 had options to remove the slowdown, and it's only when you've tried that you realise you need that slowdown because it's too hard without.

[dataDave]

On 16/02/2020 at 09:15, Dig Dug said:

I think the efforts of studios like M2 have called into question the quality of emulated titles on the likes of the arcade archives and other such ranges.

 

Playing their Sega Ages titles on Switch, M2 is one of the few studios I know to have included full gameplay recording and options for things like turning slowdown on and off. They tread a very fine line between emulation and port, authenticity and genuine improvement. It’s a standard I think we’d do well to ask for more often.

 
I agree. If everybody did ports as well as M2 no one would have anything to complain about.

[Fletch]

2 minutes ago, Fallows said:

 
I agree. If everybody did ports as well as M2 no one would have anything to complain about.

 

Oh my sweet summer child. Is this your first day on the Internet?