Team Andromeda
Member
You make good points but let's face it had NCL gone with CD the N64 would have had FF7
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Saturn Was "More Powerful Than PlayStation" Claims Argonaut Founder
- Thread starter Togh
- Start date
There's been a lot of digging into the technical side of things, including posts from at least one industry veteran. I actually enjoy these types of discussions a lot, and even when biases are involved it oftentimes just facilitates better clarification.
cartman414
Member
Did you even read the article I linked bro?
Nintendo were heckled into signing the contract for the CD-ROM, with a false assurance it wouldn't be used for games. It was also right before Sony formed their first dev studio, and just as they started becoming a megalith (acquiring CBS Records and Columbia Pictures).
And you're right. Nintendo COULD have worked with Sony. But that would mean Sony occupying Nintendo.
Team Andromeda
Member
NCL approached SONY they didn't have a gun to their head and were forced to do a deal with SONY. but NCL didn't do their diligence until near the end of the contract when they found out about SONY looking to take the money from CD Rom's sales, but that was for the Playsation
NCL had loads of CD manufacturers they could have approached for an N64 CD drive and manufactured the CD drive and discs. Why NCL didn't have Philips make a CD drive for the N64 is beyond me
PaintTinJr
Member
I actually think Nintendo used Sony to do the research and stall for a next-gen release knowing they could just kibosh the system to invalidate the contract and go with someone else at a better deal and rate - like Philips with the CD-i - if Sony succeeded.
Where I think Nintendo messed up, was that the rights Sony had extended to any Nintendo next-system - if I'm understanding correctly - even if it wasn't made by Sony, and this is where the CD-i getting Zelda and Mario - on a system that had a newer version of the SuperFX chip from Argonaut Software - came into play, and I think Nintendo thought they'd got round the contract initially, only to probably be informed by legal that the CD-i wasn't a next Nintendo console to satisfy Sony's claim and that the N64 with any CD-drive would have granted Sony the same rights in the original contract, effectively putting Nintendo in a bind to do the N64 gen with no means of using a CD without Sony having contractual rights over licensing on disc.
What is interesting is that the same contract style of R&D that Nintendo had entered with Sony was repeated with adjustment for Panasonic to supply the opposite rotation mini-DVD GD-Rom Drive for the Gamecube along with Panasonic making a "play station Snes" styled device with the Panasonic Q
FF:Enhanced_Reality
Member
I'm sure PlayStation had it's strengths over the Saturn but I mean Sega did shit themselves and ramp up the hardware when they heard the capabilities of the PlayStation, that's not new news in the slightest. Also, the Saturn had expandable memory, though it wasn't used much, it had its advantages.
But it was horrible to develop for much like the Jaguar. So it's strengths didn't really get utilised and Sega weren't big on sharing development intel or decent documentation. In a way it's very much their own fault.
But it was horrible to develop for much like the Jaguar. So it's strengths didn't really get utilised and Sega weren't big on sharing development intel or decent documentation. In a way it's very much their own fault.
Team Andromeda
Member
I think it was the other way around myself. I think SONY used both SEGA and NCL and probably had plans all along to make their console , but given that NCL publicly announced that they had done a deal with Philips to make a CD-Drive for the SNES I think we can conclude that SONY couldn't stop NCL from having someone else make CD drives for NCL consoles. NCL do all that only for in the end Philips to make a CD Drive for the Jaguar and not the Snes or N64, while NCL wasted its time with the pointless N64 DD
Also, the Panasonic Cube was no different from SEGA allowing JVC to make the Wondermega and JVC to make V Saturn or Hitachi the Hi and Navi 'multi-media Saturns. That move did wonders for SEGA as it allowed them to break NCL holder on retail in Japan and they were able to use JVC and Hitachi shops and distribution to help sell the Saturn at the start.
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PaintTinJr
Member
How would Sony have used Sega with the Nintendo PlayStation CD situation, I'm not following?
As for the deal, the article states:
“Sony, Nintendo’s Partner, Will Be a Rival, Too,” read the headline of a New York Times piece on June 1, following the conference. “While Sony and Nintendo have collaborated on the machine, Sony will clearly become a competitor of Nintendo,” read the piece. “Sony confirmed yesterday that it had retained all licensing rights for any compact disk game developed for the new system.”
So a new Nintendo system, not an addon for the Snes, not a 3rd party Philips CD-i with a handful of Nintendo 1st party IP games, but a new Nintendo system had to be made and either grant Sony the licensing rights accidentally signed away even for games on that system, or forgo using CDs for that entire console cycle, to then be able to recover the rights for the following machine like they did with the N64.
and it is possible that the reason the Cube has a Optical drive intentionally incompatible with Mini-CD is because Sony might have been able to argue their rights extended to that system too, but given what the article said about cartridge CD-ROMs with copy protection chips, it was probably more to subvert piracy because the drive spins in reverse and is of mini optical format, rather than straight DVD.
cartman414
Member
Since you appear to be too lazy to read the article I linked, here's part of it:
Team Andromeda
Member
I don't need to read the article mate or watch YouTube vids. The story has been told years before and it's clear that NCL didn't quite to their homeworld on checking the deal they signed with SONY
Overlooking that, there was nothing stopping NCL looking to other's to produce a CD drive for NCL systems SONY didn't not have exclusive rights to CD-ROM
Its was a mistake by NCL not to give the N64 a CD-Drive and I think most people can see that.
You look at the PS1 and the styling and joypad are so Nintendo never mind what SONY would learn what was needed to make a console and what tools for development given the PS for the SNES was going to be much more than a simple Drive add on for the system but also a stand-alone system too
Phil Harrison even told EDGE that the deal they did with SEGA for the SEGA CD was a bit of a piss-take and more about SONY learning how the CD development process was done.
Not that takes away from what a bad move it was for NCL to look to had a CD Drive for the N64 even if it was just a add-on
PaintTinJr
Member
You really do need to read the excellent sourced article in full with quotes from many vetted sources correcting 99.9% of people's take on the deal.
And Sony learnt nothing from Nintendo in how to style it and definitely nothing from the awful ergonomics of the NES/SNES controllers, that certainly didn't win design awards like the PlayStation controller. And from a hardware manufacturing standpoint Sony's product warranty failure rates across all their products would have been 100x lower than the NES/SNES, and it was styled like a futuristic record player/toploader video recorder with the grey flip lid and was a cheaper coarse mat grey consistent with the lavish hi-end products they did at the time like this Hi8 CCD VX3 Camcorder from 1995. So the PS1 styling was all Sony.
The wiki makes no mention of Sony for the MegaCD, and CoPilot only confirms they supplied the drives in the model 1 and were replaced by JVC, so they were hardly using Sega, they just wanted to sell more product and Sega was a consumer. Sony pioneered CD, so it wasn't like they were learning anything from Sega, when the technical aspects of the device came from Sony itself, and were established years before,
You'd have to supply the specific quote from Edge, and even then it's from a non-hardware guy like Harrison, when the Drive itself would have been supplied by Sony Electronics before Harrison probably even started.
RoboFu
One of the green rats
lol WHAT!? The PlayStation is colored like a snes with a complete snes controller rip off with grips.
They basically got mad and said if they want to break our deal we will just steal everything from the snes.
diffusionx
Gold Member
Sega fans are delusional
PaintTinJr
Member
I'm guessing you too haven't read the article, and forget that the entire world of electronics for Sony was using that colour tone, Trinitron TVs, etc.
The SNES and PlayStation controller have completely different design paradigms. The uncomfortable kidney Snes pad is designed with an asymmetric layout and the PlayStation controller is designed with a symmetrical aesthetic to fit a hand like a glove and has distinctly different sets of shoulder buttons for game use like driving games, compared to the total after thought of the Snes' shoulder buttons. Even the symbol meanings for PlayStation to combine colour, shape and meaning into the buttons lead to the pad winning design awards.
The internal electronics of the pad is like day and night different, one looks like an old crystal radio set and the other looks like a PCB out of a ...highend Walkman of the time or a PlayStation controller, as that was the benchmark of the time.
If you said it was vaguely derivative, like all pads are except for the N64 controller, then yeah, but stealing, is just nonsense, it's worlds apart.
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PaintTinJr
Member
Was interesting to see Nvidia CEO in the VF direct for VF5US 2.0 PS4/Revo and VF6 announcement saying their partnership with Sega started them off with the NV1 chipset that was in the VF1 arcade.
It was interesting to find out their first PC accelerator card used the NV1 and had built-in features for easy porting of Saturn games, and had the exact same limitation for only doing quad rendering and couldn't do meshes with a texture, and had to do one primitive per texture which made for woeful performance even on PC. In theory, the port of Tomb Raider on the Saturn was already finished long before as a PC version running on the NV1.
Would be interesting to see if John from DF could locate such an old card and run it up on Win95 with a 486SX 33Mhz and 486DX100 or P120 to see if Tomb Raider was CPU bound on the NV1 from draw calls or GPU bound.
diffusionx
Gold Member
those old GPUs are very rare and very expensive
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Now, the question is why John from DF would spend $2500, even of Richard's money, to test Tomb Raider 1's bottlenecks? Again, nobody really cares.
PaintTinJr
Member
Are you sure one Sega fan doesn't want to really show the power of NV1, cough, cough,those old GPUs are very rare and very expensive
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Now, the question is why John from DF would spend $2500, even of Richard's money, to test Tomb Raider 1's bottlenecks? Again, nobody really cares.
cireza
? 
It’s pointless because Tomb Raider doesn’t support hardware rendering on the NV1. Hell the list of games that do support NV1 are basically a handful of Sega Saturn ports that don’t support much else, so not much point in trying to benchmark it.
Unless someone convinces XProger to port Open Lara to it.
Unless someone convinces XProger to port Open Lara to it.
PaintTinJr
Member
Pretty sure it would just need a wrapper for the opengl or directx on the windows95 game to redirect to directx 1.0 calls
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s_mirage
Member
IIRC the NV1's D3D support was basically garbage and almost useless.
It doesn't matter anyway; the original Tomb Raider ran in DOS and needed specific patches for 3D cards.
PaintTinJr
Member
What is pretty interesting about this NV1, is that DirectX 1.0 was built specifically to use it as its first device, and Doom95 was specifically built to launch DirectX 1.0 with it offering (CPU)software DirectX 1.0 features via a specific DLL, and a hardware accelerated DirectX 1.0 on the NV1 via specific DLL, as this was a time when graphics API wars were big and games were easily hacked to get glide, opengl or directx support, typically by copying and renaming a DLL or two.
Something I regularly found myself doing with games that were removing glide support in favour of worse performing and worse looking - losing the glide lighting - on 3DFX, so I'm pretty sure the Doom95 NV1 dll, copied and renamed in Tomb raider for the DirectX dll would add NV1 acceleration support.
Ironically Doom95 looks and renders on the NV1 how it should on the Saturn - with maybe just PC CPU/RAM uplifting everything - if Carmack and Co hadn't inadvertently done a deal for Doom95 rights that then probably prohibited VDP1 acceleration on the Saturn version.
Something I regularly found myself doing with games that were removing glide support in favour of worse performing and worse looking - losing the glide lighting - on 3DFX, so I'm pretty sure the Doom95 NV1 dll, copied and renamed in Tomb raider for the DirectX dll would add NV1 acceleration support.
Ironically Doom95 looks and renders on the NV1 how it should on the Saturn - with maybe just PC CPU/RAM uplifting everything - if Carmack and Co hadn't inadvertently done a deal for Doom95 rights that then probably prohibited VDP1 acceleration on the Saturn version.
PaintTinJr
Member
Take your own advice.
You are either being disingenuous - which would be my bet - or you can't remember the graphics API wars where software rasterization ranked higher than early DirectX, and games had a launcher that had bindings for some of:
software, in house render,
software opengl,
software directx,
h/w directx version/s,
hw opengl version/s,
and hw 3dfx glide.
The game folder typically had an appropriate DLL for each option, and yes you could typically switch out the DLLs for the standardized APIs because the bindings were the same from no major versions, or the developers had written the renderer in such a decoupled way that it would enumerate capabilities from the (Dynamic link library)DLL and fall back.
Here's a much newer launcher (TR3) than I wanted to screen grab but it still shows how decoupled the renderer was for this newer game that still shared the limits of the Saturn, PS1 and 2D PC acceleration or 3DFX/Rage/NV1 that still didn't have a zbuffer., so games still made it optional.
I remember clearly and you can't take a dll from Doom95 and expect to get hardware acceleration on Tomb Raider.
This is beyond dumb man, like it's not even close to how if fucking works.
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PaintTinJr
Member
Clearly not, because that's exactly how the 3dfx Glide wrapper or Opengl wrapper readme told you how to enable those APIs because if a game didn't ship with the API redistributable DLL for your graphics cards preferred API, but had support in the .EXE that is exactly what you did to use that API on your GPU.
The DirectX DLLs in most games from that era are generic copies of the redistributable ones. And as Doom95 was customised for the NV1, it is unlikely those DLLs wouldn't substitute, for a generic DirectX 1-3 DLL, as the game had decoupled rendering all the way back to software, but had support for Opengl and DirectX, so the developers were maximising the supported hardware and enumerating capabilities from DLLs, blindly expecting a DLL map calls to supported hardware resident in your PC - or crash the launcher or the PC when you didn't have the hardware.
Man, no man, I pitty the people who actually fall for what you are saying in this post here.
A wrapper told you because that's how a generic API wrapper works, which is not the same as render specific DLLs from TR3 they won't work in any other game at most is maybe compatible with TR2.
There's plenty of Glide exclusive games surely you just need to get a DLL from a DX9 game to get full DX9 support! The community is so stupid writing Glide wrappers for Diablo 2, they should have just copied DLLs from Doom Eternal, *bam* instant Vulkan support....
Even small things, Doom95 is customized for NV1 or DirectX 1 was built with the NV1 in mind... like hell show me where you got that info, fucking show me one source for this (and no CoPilot and ChatGPT don't count). It's hard to parse through your posts because there so many small and big things that are absolutely unfounded that it's almost impossible to form a coherent reply, you just take wild outlandish theories from unrelated concepts that the end result is a narrative that make 0 sense.
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REDRZA MWS
Member
Team Andromeda
Member
I don't because that article is heading light on any new info on a story that the likes other print mags covered in detail decades ago. Also, the flip top lid was done out cost savings and what SONY would have seen with other CD gaming systems like with how SEGA and 3DO were able to reduce costs by going to the flip lid instead of more expensive the front loader model for the Mega CD and 3DO. You look at the basic layout of the PS1 system the pad and its colour it's straight from the SNES
In the end had NCL done their due diligence they would have never got into such a mess with the SONY deal in the 1st place over revenue per disc. Not that in anyway excused how NCL allowed SONY to humiliate themselves by going ahead with their CES speech while NCL had already done a deal with Philips behind their back.
No CD for the N64 lost the system a ton of Japanese support from the SNES era and lost it FF7. The days when Nintendo fans could boost their system by having the best Japanese RPGs were well and truly over. The N64 was dire for Japanese RPGs. All that was on NCL
PaintTinJr
Member
This is what CoPilot said about the redistribution of DirectX 1.0 which are what Doom95 was built against.
This was the terms of all DX runtimes, and Opengl/Glide wrappers that were their runtimes. So given that many games were built with the renderer decoupled from the software API interface that did the rendering and the HALs (DirectX runtime, Opengl Runtime/wrapper and Glide Runtime/Wrapper). So the games enumerated the APIs and then dynamically mapped calls for all the APIs they had anticipated.
If - and it is likely because the game is Win95 compatible - Tomb Raider can run on Win95 ver 1.0 that has DirectX 1.0 integrated using its DirectX software support, adding the Doom95 DLL/s for rendering to the folder should provide the game with hardware acceleration on the abstracted NV1, Or the software DLL/s once replaced with Doom95 DLL/s renamed should be able to do it.
Just read you update about Glide exclusives, which is a typical strawman from a poster like yourself that argues in bad faith, by starting all arguments against the person, rather than their view. Some games were genuinely exclusives in which the renderer wasn't decoupled from the API use and stubs with mappings for other APIs weren't present, but the example I'm talking about had decoupled fully, and even Doom95, had software and HAL renderer output options, in different DLLs, so we know it was implemented correctly against the DirectX 1.0 standard, we know Tomb Raider had stubs with mappings for all, so but for illegal use of the DirectX 1.0 standard by Doom95 or Tomb Raider failing to enumerate its DirectX features in its DLLs correctly, and correctly map them, it should work
This was the terms of all DX runtimes, and Opengl/Glide wrappers that were their runtimes. So given that many games were built with the renderer decoupled from the software API interface that did the rendering and the HALs (DirectX runtime, Opengl Runtime/wrapper and Glide Runtime/Wrapper). So the games enumerated the APIs and then dynamically mapped calls for all the APIs they had anticipated.
If - and it is likely because the game is Win95 compatible - Tomb Raider can run on Win95 ver 1.0 that has DirectX 1.0 integrated using its DirectX software support, adding the Doom95 DLL/s for rendering to the folder should provide the game with hardware acceleration on the abstracted NV1, Or the software DLL/s once replaced with Doom95 DLL/s renamed should be able to do it.
Just read you update about Glide exclusives, which is a typical strawman from a poster like yourself that argues in bad faith, by starting all arguments against the person, rather than their view. Some games were genuinely exclusives in which the renderer wasn't decoupled from the API use and stubs with mappings for other APIs weren't present, but the example I'm talking about had decoupled fully, and even Doom95, had software and HAL renderer output options, in different DLLs, so we know it was implemented correctly against the DirectX 1.0 standard, we know Tomb Raider had stubs with mappings for all, so but for illegal use of the DirectX 1.0 standard by Doom95 or Tomb Raider failing to enumerate its DirectX features in its DLLs correctly, and correctly map them, it should work
But either way, taking a step back from the simplicity of this solution, you strangely seem concerned about that potentially working and exposing something.
We have clean room rebuilds of Mario 64,WINE/Proton on linux, emulators for PS2, PS3 and PS4, Ubershaders on Dolphin and people X-ray photographing 4-6nm chips, today to uncover things.
3D Graphics API's in their infancy like DirectX 1.0 used with a 350nm NV1 GPU and interfacing it with a very basic 3D game (by today's standards) to hardware accelerate it is child's play for experts doing this type of stuff previously mentioned, so why are you so bothered about what might be uncovered if this became a project?
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PaintTinJr
Member
New information from vetted primary sources 10-20years later still trumps unsubstantiated rumours of the time ran by games magazines.
Team Andromeda
Member
At the end of the day, we know why NCL broke up the deal and it was over revenue over the CD. You'd like to think NCL would have checked that basic detail at the start of the PS deal
It's not like SEGA was allowing JVC to take all the revenue from CD sales on the Mega CD (insert sales joke here)
That is a side show from NCL not having a CD drive for the N64 which cost NCL Japan and FF7 and that's on NCL and their stupid stance over the medium on the N64.
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PaintTinJr
Member
But it clearly wasn't. Them not checking is because they never had any intention of doing more than buying time, using Sony to do all the top tier R&D to prove or disprove it could work and trade off of the reputation of Sony as a partner of a coming accessory.
Even the poor quality of Nintendo's first party IPs on Philips CD-i looks like it was done to reputationally damage perception of CD's importance for gaming IMO.
Team Andromeda
Member
Cealriy it was with SONY looking to take the dosh from CD game sales You would have thought NCL would have nailed down that basic aspect and got it right at the start of the contract.
The contract was poor and the way NCL looked to eject itself from it was very piss poor and not very Japanese But that's a sideshow for a system a drive that never made it out
The N64 was out and instead of having a CD Drive or a CD Add-on NCL wasted its time and money over the crap that was the N64 DD. Had that been a CD drive it would have been such a different story and the N64 would have had Suare and no doubt a number of quality Japanese RPGs on it, even the 3DO had more Japanese RPGs on it than the N64.
nkarafo
Member
The 64DD would still fail if it was 64CD. Maybe not as spectacularly but when was the last time a console add-on was a major success?
Square would just stick to the established Playstation. The base N64 wasn't even selling that well in Japan to have a big enough base for an additional addon.
Square would just stick to the established Playstation. The base N64 wasn't even selling that well in Japan to have a big enough base for an additional addon.
PaintTinJr
Member
The real problem with the contract wording IMO was that Nintendo seemingly needed to have a 'new' system release and either go with Sony for CD, or skip the CD format for that generation entirely to recover their contractual independence - even had Sony walked back the inherited rights to all license fees from 3rd parties for games on CD on the N64. And IMO that's why 64DD was a serious plan and CD wasn't coming to the N64.
In hindsight I think short of PlayStation messing up their relationships with 3rd parties, the gen was always going to be a loss for Nintendo and the N64 with it weird controller and poor texturing capabilities.
Copilot, of fucking course, not a single credible source and there are plenty of Glide exclusive games that also have a software renderer that have a “decoupled renderer” as you said, but even with a specific example it’s bad faith…lol ok
If it’s that easy, then do it, show me with a single example. If it’s as trivial as you are making out take one game grab the “stub” dlls from one a give the other magic api compatibility.
I’ve worked on a compatibility layer for early DX games, so I’m interested in seeing how your trivial solution is. I’m not bothered by it, so I’m fully aware of how to do it, I’m expecting you to do it and see how wrong it is.
And again, don’t avoid the issue, show me a single source stating that DirectX 1 or the Doom95 targeted or had customizations for the NV1, and not fucking CoPilot which has a habit of hallucinating. Don’t weasel around this.
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Team Andromeda
Member
So it was NCL fault and like I said they didn't do their due diligence a bit like how Leicester Football club was able to get one over the Premier League.
That aside if N64 had had a CD Drive you and I know it would have had far more RPGs and I doubt FF7 would have gone to any other system and Square would built the game around the N64.
PaintTinJr
Member
I definitely think it would have been a tough decision for them, but the n64 would have had to gain serious market share with that change, first by not be years late in the UK market.
Pragmatism would have won out IMO, and PlayStation not being in competition with Square to sell software, or would prioritise Square's launch over their own and the rapid market expansion by PlayStation, I think at best the n64 would have got a good version but with less content than PlayStation.
Nintendo don't care at all about third party games selling well like PlayStation and the way they did little to help third parties with the expense of cartridges which they controlled, tells me Square preferred PlayStation at that moment.
Redneckerz
Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
DoomWiki editor here, lets solve this little Doom mystery, right?
Doom95 is rather infamous for being one of the worst ports in existence since it doesn't even suppot DeHackEd (But one of its good things, just like WinQuake/GLQuake, is that it is surprisingly forward compatible), but here are the stats:
- There is no known evidence of renaming rendering DLL's so that Doom95 suddenly gains support for specific chips or that Doom95's DLL's suddenly enables hardware support in other games.. If there is, PaintTinJr has to provide some receipts.
- However, renaming a Doom95 DLL scenario is possible when you want Doom95 to play on modern Windows. Its DLL, DPLAY.DLL, is also present in Windows System32, as DPLAYX.DLL. Renaming it to DPLAY.DLL and copying it over to the Doom95 installation folder.
- Other solutions include copying over the DLL from say DXGL to Doom95. Or a modified dgVoodoo DDRAW.DLL.
This is correct, this is generally how wrappers or compatibility layers work on Windows, every executable will give priority to DLLs on the current folder over system. You can then write a wrapper an API like as you stated dgVodoo or even DXVK/DXGL, and then place it on the folder of the application it will give priority to that DLL. The DPLAYX.dll stems from when MS broke backwards compatibility in DX10, their solution was to keep the old around and add an X to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, its a common solution to old DirectX games. And this method is used for more than just DirectX, stuff like KernelEx, WineOnWindows, the dotnet9x project, even x360ce work this way.
But here we are talking about DLLs that either mimic what the game is expecting or are general wrappers for system APIs, that are written specifically to transalate their calls. TR3 is not going to have an OpenGL, DirectX or software wrapper, they are going to have 3 renders each taking calls from the game engine and targeting each respective APIs. Fumbling around with DLLs, even if they are isolated into their own individual DLL which is not a guarantee, from one game into the other won't work because Doom95 or any other game won't have a clue of what to do with it, at most it would work with TR2 or TR4 but even then I doubt it would 100% binary compatible.
EDIT: After double checking a fresh TR3 install, it has 2 renders software or Direct3D hardware rendering, as expected no general usable DLL, both renders are compiled to the EXE:
But the challenge is still up, if he can find a game, any game, that gains API support from another game's dll file he is free to name it and show it.
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Redneckerz
Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
Careful now, because i do know that Techland's Crime Cities OpenGL driver worked miracles around older cards in games like Quake, whereas the official GPU driver would often perform worse.
Do note that this is an exception and not applicable today, but some older cards do get better support from specialized DLL's from certain games.
As for enabling or NVI support in Tomb Raider? Doubtful. The only one i can think of that sort-of could work is Mechwarrior since that game provides a ton of specialized drivers.
Oh yeah, but Techland did their own OpenGL to D3D wrapper (well miniGL as it only implement the APIs idTech used), but as you said the exception rather than the norm but I am wrong on that there is at least one example of it. MW2 at least the Windows versions had their own bespoke render for each API AFAIK, there might one with a wrapper pre-packaged, not sure. A lot of MW2 versions exist.
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Team Andromeda
Member
Let's be serious here if the N64 had FF7 then market share was almost a given and if you went the CD route you wouldn't have the issues of expensive carts and the N64 would have had a ton more support and RPG's
Square even said when they they told the press FF7 was no longer coming to N64 space was the issue
I think most people can see it was a royal cock up by NCL, just like SEGA America cock up of going backing Carts with the 32X
cireza
Member
The future is humans discussing in forums by copy/pasting AI answers.
PaintTinJr
Member
Tomb Raidier(1 when originally released) shipped with DirectX 2.0 DLLs which was B/C with 1.0 and had identical functional calls with DirectX 1.0, and merely had more functions with new calls and better performance IIRC.
But replicating the file structure from an old original copy would require a cab extraction or the installer actually ran on Windows 95 (release 1) - so the installer didn't intercept these files as newer windows installers do.
Unless Doom 95 didn't accelerate in hardware on an NV1 it showcased on at Microsoft's Doom 95 launch party, or the development wasn't consistent with required developer use of the DX Runtime, and DirectX 1.0 was linked directly into the EXE, or NV1 support was hardcoded and didn't use any of DirectX's HAL and maddening enumeration, then switching one or more DLL files from the game should be possible.
But short of having a time machine to recover prior setups from decades ago, it is hard to prove these things. As far as I can remember the Turok game(and its demo which I used) was originally 3dfx exclusive, and the demo was eventually updated with Opengl and DirectX support, but Glide was removed, and the only way to restore glide to get the Gouraud shading and lighting back of Glide and lost performance was to replace the Opengl.dll - (or dlls) with the renamed Glide ones, and then glide could be reselected in the launcher.
I might have the version of Tomb Raider demo wrong, or maybe it applied to 1 and 2, but you could do something similar with those, but it may have been adding back in opengl support, because it certainly never had the shading of launch Glide exclusives like Shadows of the Empire - easily visible in the shading on the brown walls walking up the canyon - or Turok.
I also seem to recall Quake 2 by default has no ability to use Glide, until the Glide2x.dll file was unpacked into the folder, and this is also the same for Quake3.exe, corroborating my point that support for APIs within quite a lot of games wasn't always just what was listed, as devs trying to sell to as many customers with hardware acceleration as possible, even if they didn't always list support, provided you could trick some games to bind in the API dll, it would unlock that API support the developers already had provided in the exe/
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PaintTinJr
Member
AI is just effectively web search 4.0, and like old yahoo/google the quality of the answers relies on the user's Google-fu. Garbage-in, garbage-out still applies
SenkiDala
Member
No and no ?
The buttons are not colored like the snes buttons. And the snes (and n64 that came out after the PS) have 2 shoulder buttons while PS controllers have 4 since the first one.
So steal what ? No cartridge, different controller, different console design, different hardware. I've seen better rip offs.
Damn Nintendo and SEGA fans are so delisionals... I love SNES and the Saturn, the sat is an AWESOME system with dozens of crazy good games, but man, after all those years, still trying to twist the reality...
The old way to explain the situation is still the best way : PS1 is better for 3D and Saturn is better for 2D. Done.
Geometric-Crusher
"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
the new way is better - PS1 is better for 3D and super efficient for 2D.
Someone may ask - but what about the Saturn? simple, just a poorly designed videogame that failed
SenkiDala
Member
Yes the PS1 is efficient for 2D for sure but in some nervous games like shmups or 2D vs fighting the Saturn sometimes get better results.
The Saturn was thought for 2D and as usual SEGA was taken by surprise like "what ? oh the new thing is 3D ? are you sure ? ok let's add a 2nd ship that can do a little 3D, I give you 3 months"... With that it mind the result isn't that bad. And in the end what matters if the quality of the games. Does the Saturn have great games ? Yes, plenty.
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