What is so special about SNES mode 7?

[Gorf]

What's really hilarious is that the Jaguar's blitter can emulate all of these effects of all the consoles released before it and do them in higher color and resolution not to mention the
superior and realistic smoothness of angle transitions. And that is just one of the
Jaguar's chips. Yet the retard Nintendull fan boys still can't get over it. That particular
Mode & effect put a real hurting on the systems bus BTW too. It was not like you could
do much more interesting AI and game logic while that particular piece of hardware
hammered the performance of the system. And Yes RT, other systems were doing the
same thing or similar with some clever coding IN SOFTWARE!

[TL]

Oh no doubt, compare Super Mario Kart on the SNES with its on cart DSP to Atari Karts on the Jaguar and it's night and day:

[align=center:14d3sm4x]SNES Longplay [110] Super Mario Kart

Atari Karts (Jaguar) - Part 1[/align:14d3sm4x]

[onthinice]

How does the Wii compare to the Jaguar, Laird?  :71: :21:

[Rogue Trooper]

How does the Wii compare to the Jaguar, Laird?  :71: :21:

Harsh!, now a Gamecube with a Ram pack.......Now your talking Wii graphics.

:-)

[Rogue Trooper]

Oh no doubt, compare Super Mario Kart on the SNES with its on cart DSP to Atari Karts on the Jaguar and it's night and day:

[align=center:1cfdbg6g]SNES Longplay [110] Super Mario Kart

Atari Karts (Jaguar) - Part 1[/align:1cfdbg6g]

C+VG certainly did at review as did many others judging by the Jaguar reviews thread....

:-)

[Rogue Trooper]

Slight, well..major tangent, but what the hell.

Talking of Mario Kart:

Reminds me of the 'bitch-fight' that broke out after Shigeru Miyamoto  'dissed' people like David Jaffe putting guns on cars in games like Twisted Metal, Jaffe responded with: 'You know, honestly, i've been too busy recently trying to figure out why the fuck go-karts shoot banna peels'

:-)

[TL]

Slight, well..major tangent, but what the hell.

Talking of Mario Kart:

Reminds me of the 'bitch-fight' that broke out after Shigeru Miyamoto  'dissed' people like David Jaffe putting guns on cars in games like Twisted Metal, Jaffe responded with: 'You know, honestly, i've been too busy recently trying to figure out why the fuck go-karts shoot banana peels'

:-)

 

[Aaendi]

It always bugged me that there was so much hype over rotation and scaling, but it was only allowed to do 1 BG layer at a time, and it couldn't rotate or scale sprites.  I wonder if the SNES was originally planned to support more advanced rotation/scaling and it was ditched because of cost.

[TL]

It always bugged me that there was so much hype over rotation and scaling, but it was only allowed to do 1 BG layer at a time, and it couldn't rotate or scale sprites.  I wonder if the SNES was originally planned to support more advanced rotation/scaling and it was ditched because of cost.

Really good question Aaendi! I hope you don't mind, but I merged your topic with another that covers some similar points as I feel this really adds to the discussion.

What I find most interesting about that point is that Sega had been using scaling in their arcade games for years and Atari/Tengen had started using it too with games like Pit-Fighter and Road Riot. Then when the Atari Lynx came out in 1989 that had full hardware scaling and rotation abilities built in, and it was a handheld!

I really can't find any logical reason why they didn't implement the feature fully, just as I can't find any reason for the 8-bit bus. It always seemed that for everything good Nintendo did with a console they always made a couple of strange choices that crippled the hardware in some way.

[Aaendi]

I found a few websites that state the SNES prototype had an advanced 3D graphics chip, that was scraped at the last minute, but added back into the Pilot Wings cart due to time constraints.  If that means the DSP-1 was the same as the "advanced 3D graphics chip," then it would've been extremely underwelming to begin with.  The DSP-1 was just a simple math coprocessor that just helped the CPU with 3d geometry.  There wasn't any graphics manipulation or pixel plotting.

It could be that the guy who wrote the article got it confused with another chip that was scraped, or it could be that the DSP-1 was originally an advance 3d graphics chip, but itself got stripped down before it was cut from the SNES entirely and became the DSP-1 chip in Pilot Wings.

[SnakeEyes]

Oh no doubt, compare Super Mario Kart on the SNES with its on cart DSP to Atari Karts on the Jaguar and it's night and day:

[align=center:2bfbzacc]SNES Longplay [110] Super Mario Kart

Atari Karts (Jaguar) - Part 1[/align:2bfbzacc]

While I totally agree that Mose 7 is overrtaed. Mariokart is still 10 times the game atari karts is, no matter what the games are doing technically.

[SnakeEyes]

What's really hilarious is that the Jaguar's blitter can emulate all of these effects of all the consoles released before it and do them in higher color and resolution not to mention the
superior and realistic smoothness of angle transitions. And that is just one of the
Jaguar's chips. Yet the retard Nintendull fan boys still can't get over it. That particular
Mode & effect put a real hurting on the systems bus BTW too. It was not like you could
do much more interesting AI and game logic while that particular piece of hardware
hammered the performance of the system. And Yes RT, other systems were doing the
same thing or similar with some clever coding IN SOFTWARE!

Completely agree 100%, the Jag could do all of those things and it had potential, it is just a pity that despite all the amazing things it could do that no-one could use them to release a few more decent games for the system.

It does seem a bit silly to go on about how a 64bit system iis more technically better than a 16 bit system though.

[Aaendi]

Found that old Thunderhawk MCD preview where details of it's Mode 7 effect are given.

SNES used single processor for Mode 7, quite slow hence so many games that use Mode 7 have extra DSP etc on-board cart to speed things up, MCD has twin processors, so graphics take no time to draw, way faster than SNES in this dept, plus it enables texture mapping.

SNES scrolls in 1 axis, MCD in 2...


Thunderhawk a great example of the MCD hardware being used to great effect, 2-Axis scrolling enables the chopper to bank+yaw and then the objects like buildings, towers etc are scaled sprites to match the angle the horizon is at when your tilting, plus the 3D chips handle the ground detail as well.

Just  a crying shame so few games came out that used it in such a manner.

I don't know where you got your information from, but that's not how Mode 7 works.  Mode 7 isn't slow, it's just limited.  It's fast enough to render a full screen rotating scaling background layer at 60fps, but that's all it is.  A rotating scaling background layer.  The DSP is just a stupid chip that helps the CPU calculate geometry.  It doesn't help the PPU generate pixels any faster.

[TL]

The DSP was there to help the CPU, so it didn't have to process so much data, which did ultimately make it faster. But I get your point about it not really being much to do with graphics.

[Aaendi]

Here is a Gunstar Heroes SNES demo that actually does sprite rotation in software, with one soildier having a chain of rotating balls connected to him.