When I was programming demos on ST, the most important (yet tacit) rule we had was the “one VBL rule”. All demos had to run in one VBL = Vertical BLank, i.e. in one frame, i.e. at 60 Hz (or 50 Hz on european machines). It was just unthinkable not to run in one frame, we’d have been the laughing stock of the whole ST scene.Games however, didn’t bother - partly because it was more complicated to create a full game than a demo, partly because demomakers at the time were kind of more talented / advanced / stubborn than their counterpart game programmers. The result anyway, is that most Atari ST games ran at very poor framerates. The only ST games I can remember running at 60 Hz were Goldrunner, Return to Genesis, Bio-Challenge, and the out-of-this-world Enchanted Lands. Needless to say, those programming pearls shone like stars compared to the mass of pale-looking ST games. Sometimes the game only worked because it was fast. Could you imagine Goldrunner running at 30 Hz? I can’t. They can’t either.
The main reason why I liked console games so much more at that time, was because they all felt better. Smoother. More polished. And, you guessed it, they all ran “in one VBL”, i.e. at 60 Hz. Alex Kidd? Gynoug? Shadow Dancer? Thunderforce III? Zillion? Power Stone? Soul Calibur? Etc, etc, they all ran at 60 Hz, because it was the norm. And for me it was a proof of quality, I could buy a console game my eyes closed and be sure it would fly on my machine.
Nowadays…. Sigh.
It makes me grin when some programmers tell me things like “Pierre, 60 Hz is for PC games! On consoles the hardware is not as powerful, so the typical target framerate is usually 30 Hz”. …… What a load of BS. “Typical” for PC programmers trying to port their stuff to consoles, certainly. Just drop your super heavy, super generic, super bloated, super dynamic deferred-lighting, reduce the useless post-processing effects, and maybe things would run better on your “less powerful” hardware.
Consoles = 60 Hz, else go back to the drawing board.
May 4th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Pierre, just for the record, I just came back from the Outline demo party (”a party optimised for atari computers”!). The golden rule of 50Hz is dropped since some years now but not forgotten! So inside the compos you could see “old skool” demos (1vbl) and “new skool demos) (>1vbl).
I agree with you that 1vbl is a ultra super cool thing, but a) Some effects look crap in 1vbl, b) the old st can’t cope with newer style effects (Just imagine people still doing scrollers and sprites or display only 1 3d cube on screen…. we’d have shot ourselves in the face from boredom
May 7th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Well, I do not think this rule is THAT much forgotten.
Look at most Nintendo games on handheld.
Hardware does help but…
It still seems to be the golden rule, even on a DS.
May 10th, 2008 at 11:54 am
The >1vbl demos ggn mentions look atrocious, as a general rule, so that kind of supports your point
May 11th, 2008 at 7:50 am
First frame was always a sign of good quality. Sometimes I had to drop to the second frame (porting PS2 games onto the PS1.. wasn’t fun).
What we always tried to avoid was to disable vsync at all. That looked horrible.
Wearing my gray Devcon2000 t-shirt at the moment btw..
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 am
The good old times
But I agree and disagree with you on that point… Nowaday games are becoming more complex, and the freedom given to the player is so big that we can’t estimate what’s going on the cpu. But for simple games like fighting or racing games, we can still apply this rule.
September 20th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Well, running low framerate makes things seem heavy. People start noticing details. About one C64 demo which was basically a glorified video player the author said: “well, it’s slow and it jerks, so IT MUST BE REALTIME!!!”
I have also appreciated Shenmue on Dreamcast, with its slow going city scenes. 20-30 fps? Oh ok, that’s alright, it looks more like a calm movie than like a game anyway.
However, when i see simple racing games on xbox, then xbox360, which run at “stable” 30 fps… makes one puke. I don’t know the reason, but it doesn’t seem to be cpu-bound. It may be either GPU-bound or some idiocy of layers which is hard to analyze.
Romain: i don’t have first hand experience but i heard that DS gives you some hard limits in the amounts of drawing you can do… you will either run out of the geometry buffers you are given or will risk having a completely undrawn block on the right edge of your screen. Considering the system is not exactly inviting to do extensive game logic either, anything but 60hz would just be insane.
and hello parapete!