I love the irony (or maybe honesty?) of the company's name (Copysoft).

For your next filler episode you should review Wacky Kart 😉

Calvero wrote:

For your next filler episode you should review Wacky Kart ;)

...that would make for a 1 to 2 minute long filler. :P

Does the video give a true impression of the frame rate compared to the game running on DOSBox? If so, the frame rate is really bad. I had SMK back in the day, so I guess I'm spoiled.

Great Hierophant wrote:

Does the video give a true impression of the frame rate compared to the game running on DOSBox?

Yes. >_>;

Mind you, if you go up to 100 cc at the default speed setting, it becomes comparable to Wacky Wheels in terms of framerate and controls, but it's still a lot more twitchy due to the problems with failing to read keypresses sometimes, while reading light taps as two keypresses other times. :/

Hilarious quip you made at the end there, Gemini. 😉

I only remembered playing Skunny Kart a few times back then. Apart from the music and graphics, I didn't really like it that much. One thing that really pissed me off was the keyboard controls. You couldn't remap them, and you had no choice but to put up with those stupid pre-sets that are so awkward to use. I want to find the idiot who thought that CTRL and ALT were great for steering, SHIFT for acceleration, and TAB for your powerups, so I can knee them in the balls. The only game controller I had for my old PC was a Gravis Gamepad which didn't really last long if I remember. And it also didn't feel nice to use, if I remember that correctly. 😕

Wacky Wheels was nice, but Nintendo put way more attention to detail and playability with SMK. At least that much can be said.

switchblade wrote:

Wacky Wheels was nice, but Nintendo put way more attention to detail and playability with SMK. At least that much can be said.

They also kinda did it first, at least in terms of that perspective style and gameplay.

Though the other thing too is that the SNES' graphics processor was able to do stuff a typical computer couldn't and can sort of be thought of as "hardware acceleration" in that sense, even though it was very rudimentary by today's standards. Actually, many early consoles and computers (at least, computers designed specifically for home users like the C64) had SOME kind of graphical acceleration in place, such as hardware-level sprite handling or the ability to draw tilemaps to the screen. Even though PCs had so much more power behind them, they lacked these basic graphical features, which is why it took so long for PC gaming to catch up to console gaming in terms of quality... at least in terms of 2D stuff. :B

Even nowadays, hardware acceleration on PCs is specifically tailored for 3D. You'd be surprised how quickly you can run out of graphics RAM when trying to do 2D stuff like frame-by-frame animations in HD and high-res backgrounds and whatnot, among other things. :P

I obviously know SMK was the first game to kick it all off.

The funniest thing about SMK is the fact that the game had to rely on a custom chip, the DSP-1, to handle certain graphical effects alongside the typical MODE7 background layer. Wacky Wheels and Skunny Kart had to try and mimic all of this without the advantage of custom chips and built-in special background modes. In a way, "VGA7" is actually much more impressive when you think about it. You have to consider the limitations of the VGA mode that the original programmer had to put up with, compared to Nintendo where they could just somewhat "cheat" by adding custom hardware to the game cartridge to get the desired results.

If I recall correctly, the Amiga was the first home computer I know of to actually use hardware acceleration (an early implementation of a modern-day GPU), so to speak. Games like Leander and Shadow of the Beast for the Amiga could never hope to look or feel as good if they ever got ported to DOS.

I think you guys may be giving Wacky Wheels too much technological credit. Wolfenstein 3D came out around 2 years earlier and mainstreamed texture-mapping of flat, orthogonal surfaces. Wacky Wheels / Mario Kart have only one surface that needs to be textured: the ground plane. The rendering of game world objects was already done for game world objects in Wolf3D as well, via scaled 2D sprites (some of which are directional).

HunterZ wrote:

I think you guys may be giving Wacky Wheels too much technological credit.

I was just trying to illustrate the different paradigms between PC and console games at the time and how, even now, optimizations play a big role in what is and isn't possible. More than once I've seen someone jump onto the Allegro.cc forum complaining about how they can't believe their framerate is so terrible in their 2D project despite having super-powerful graphics hardware, and one of us has to be like, "Yeah, that's normal. GPUs are optimized for doing 3D stuff, not 2D stuff. Here's what you need to do to work around this."

For instance, one of the biggest bottlenecks people often run into when making a hardware accelerated 2D game has to do with the source texture you're drawing from. The fewer times you have to switch your source texture, the higher your framerate will be, almost to the point of ludicrousness. Rendering 1,000 sprites with the same texture will often be faster than rendering 50 sprites each with completely different textures. So to get around this, you either put all of your textures onto a single large texture ahead of time, or page them all into a single texture automatically when loading, then you draw pieces of that large texture instead of different individual textures, thus completely avoiding the need to tell the GPU to switch to using different textures. :B

And yes, there are plenty of indie game developers out there who don't actually know how to do stuff like this, producing 2D games which SOMEHOW manage to not get 60 FPS on perfectly capable hardware. Heck, there's even a few commercial developers who screw this up... >_>;

HunterZ wrote:

I think you guys may be giving Wacky Wheels too much technological credit. Wolfenstein 3D came out around 2 years earlier and mainstreamed texture-mapping of flat, orthogonal surfaces. Wacky Wheels / Mario Kart have only one surface that needs to be textured: the ground plane. The rendering of game world objects was already done for game world objects in Wolf3D as well, via scaled 2D sprites (some of which are directional).

Wacky Wheels and Wolf 3D are very different games. I was merely comparing the graphical engines between Super Mario Kart and Wacky Wheels/Skunny Kart. I never mentioned anything about WW being a technological achievement; just clever programming with limited resources (which it is in comparison to Super Mario Kart).

Then again, I suppose Wolfenstein 3D is a much more perfect example of a technological achievement by very clever programming. And no, do not even get me started on that bloody port to the SNES. The less said about THAT, the better. 😀

Rendering 1,000 sprites with the same texture will often be faster than rendering 50 sprites each with completely different textures.

It's not related to 2D graphics but textures in general. Open GL works as state machine, and after setting texture you can draw it's fragments with one function call. Changing texture requires setting up a lot of things and calling a Draw() function. Draw calls have large overhead on CPU and are one of the PCs bottlenecks. Consoles with lightweight OpenGL or DirectX implementation can use more Draw calls per frame than PCs with similar hardware. AMD's Mantle is designed to allow more draw calls per frame and it gives the best results on slower CPUs that can't keep up with fast GPUs.

If I recall correctly, the Amiga was the first home computer I know of to actually use hardware acceleration (an early implementation of a modern-day GPU)

Almost every home computer had some sort of hardware acceleration. 8-bit computers often had hardware scrolling and sprites, C64 is a good example. You can compare Sega Genesis, Amiga 500 and Atari ST. All of them are powered by M68k CPU but Atari ST had worst graphics and sound capabilities without any accelaration hardware.
PC of the time were build to display static hi-res text and images. CGA or EGA had enough memory to address every pixel on screen. NES or C64 had to use tiles with 3-4 colors per tile. VGA was the first mainstream PC graphics card with some sort of acceleration. It featured hardware scrolling but only in one plane, and sprites had to be done in software. PC had one advantage: fastest CPUs and a lot of RAM that could be used to create texture mapped 3D graphics. PC were perfect for raycast engine used in Wolfenstein 3D and later Doom engine. These engines required fast CPU to calculate all maths, a lot of ram to store textures and graphics card that could easily address every pixel on the screen.
Consoles lacked CPU power and their GPU were designed to display tiled graphics. Wolfenstein 3D had ultra low resolution on SNES, and Doom uses custom chip to aid all the heavy processing. Amiga 1200 had slightly better CPU and although GPU was superior than VGA in terms of 2D animated graphics, it lacked when game wanted to draw every pixel individually.

Wacky Wheels isn't the only game that used a software Mode 7. Jazz Jackrabbit bonus stages use similar technique, with lower res texture but with smooth animation even on 386SX. SuperKarts is quite interesting. It's engine is very similar to Wolfenstein 3D with 90 degrees wall corners but also features texture mapped floors.

ishadow wrote:

Rendering 1,000 sprites with the same texture will often be faster than rendering 50 sprites each with completely different textures.

It's not related to 2D graphics but textures in general. Open GL works as state machine, and after setting texture you can draw it's fragments with one function call. Changing texture requires setting up a lot of things and calling a Draw() function. Draw calls have large overhead on CPU and are one of the PCs bottlenecks. Consoles with lightweight OpenGL or DirectX implementation can use more Draw calls per frame than PCs with similar hardware. AMD's Mantle is designed to allow more draw calls per frame and it gives the best results on slower CPUs that can't keep up with fast GPUs.

Well yeah, I was just generalizing since not everyone here is gonna know these kinds of intricate details. ;)

That's actually one of the interesting things about making any sort of hardware accelerated program in general. You write all this code to tell the GPU to do stuff, and then at some point you sit back and think for a moment, "Wait... all the code I'm writing to tell the GPU what to do is being executed on the CPU..." The exception of course being vertex/fragment/geometry shaders, since those are programs which are executed on the GPU itself at various points of the rendering pipeline, but even then you still need to use the CPU to tell the GPU when to execute those shaders. :P

This is a big part of the reason why early 3D graphics accelerators were often limited by the speed of the system, since the CPU still needed to offload all of that rendering data to the GPU. It can also often surprise people that GPUs are typically slower than CPUs, running at lower clock speeds, yet they're so much faster for graphics because of the extreme amount of parallelism they're performing in order to push out billions of pixels per second. You can't get away with that with a CPU because often, each operation you perform is reliant on the results of previous operations. But when you're dealing with graphics, the result of how to draw one pixel typically does not affect any of the other pixels being drawn, so extreme parallelism works wonders. :3

Gemini000 wrote:

Calvero wrote:

For your next filler episode you should review Wacky Kart 😉

...that would make for a 1 to 2 minute long filler. 😜

I have one word : Trilogy!

Gemini000: Great episode, and yes 😁 I know what game it was , damn great 😀 anyway As long you do not begin babbling (on every bloody episode) about you are a part of P*tre*n, then I am okay with your episodes. Cause I think it is beginning to be a big begging business . Yeah I know there are no jobs and all that. So that is not what I am hinting at.

WolverineDK wrote:

As long you do not begin babbling (on every bloody episode) about you are a part of P*tre*n, then I am okay with your episodes.

Don't worry, I'm well aware of the number of people out there who disdain that sort of thing. It'll only be about once a month when people will get reminded of my Patreon stuff because of new Patrons being shown in the credits or the monthly Q&A videos I have planned which tie in with that.

My long term goal for making money is game creation, as it always has been, since there's pretty much no way I could ever make a livable income from ADG alone, given its niche appeal.

Gemini000: You are a cool dude 😀 Keep up the good work 😀

I guess this is a break week since there's no episode? I forget whether it was mentioned during the last episode.

*nods* Same with next week. I'm following the schedule I set around the end of 2012 where I would do new videos on the first three Saturdays of every month so that I'd have time to work on other projects and give myself a break from all the video work. This month has five Saturdays so that's two weeks I have to work on other stuff instead of just one! ;)

Been doing work on my next game, as usual. Design work is FINALLY going smoothly now and I'll be getting back to programming within the next few days! :D

Also planning out what I want to do for my commemorative video since I hit my first milestone on Patreon. One fan suggested I cover a non-DOS game that's a sequel to one of my favourite DOS games and I kinda like that idea... but choosing which to look at is TOUGH since there's so many great sequels: Descent 3, System Shock 2, EarthSiege 2... all of which I just realized don't use roman numerals in their titles. :B

Related to Patreon too, the first Monday of every month is now going to be for Q&A videos!

Sounds good, thanks.