Do You Have Any Unpopular Gaming Opinions?

[PartridgeSenpai]

The biggest reason why there was slowdown in SNES shmups, is because Treasure and Konami wanted every single developer to program their games THEIR way. If there is anybody to blame for slowdown in SNES games, it's Treasure and Konami's fault.

But... Treasure never made any SNES games...
Do you mean just generally 16-bit shmups?

I think that was just generally a problem with the platform in later years though, especially with action games. Konami just happened to be making some of the best, most ambitious action games at the time, so they're the ones we remember. Even the Neo Geo slows down like hell with most action games, so I think it was more-so a problem with 5th gen consoles in general with pushing graphics far beyond what a screen could handle (hell, that's STILL a problem Xp).

[alienjesus]

The biggest reason why there was slowdown in SNES shmups, is because Treasure and Konami wanted every single developer to program their games THEIR way. If there is anybody to blame for slowdown in SNES games, it's Treasure and Konami's fault.

But... Treasure never made any SNES games...
Do you mean just generally 16-bit shmups?

Yeah, I don't get this argument at all.

I assume he means 'Treasure' when they were still part of Konami when discussing SNES, as Treasure never actually made or published anything for that console, but seeing as they were not an independent entity then and were held to the standards of Konami, it seems unfair to put the blame on Treasure for SNES slowdown.

As mentioned, there were plenty of SNES shmups developed or published by companies other than Konami, which this theory doesn't account for at all. Irem's R-Type games are notorious for slowdown on Super Nintendo.

[Aaendi]

That's because Irem used the same engine as Gradius 3 instead of writing their own engine.

[alienjesus]

That's because Irem used the same engine as Gradius 3 instead of writing their own engine.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that.

[Ack]

Konami wanted every single developer to program their games THEIR way. If there is anybody to blame for slowdown in SNES games, it's Treasure and Konami's fault.

Good to see Konami hasn't changed in 25 years.

[Aaendi]

The other strange this is that Konami (and all the companies who copied off of them) programmed their SNES games differently than how they did their NES and Sega Genesis games.

There were several tricks Konami used in their NES games to get around the limitations of the system, such as keeping bullets and enemies separated, using corner based coordinates, and doing collision with 16x16 tiles.

When Konami switched to the SNES, they considered all of these tricks "obsolete", but when they went to the Sega Genesis, they wanted to take full advantage of the system, so they reverted back to their old NES optimization tricks.

[Gunstar Green]

It wasn't just Konami though. Plenty of Capcom games have vicious slowdown.

[marurun]

That's because Irem used the same engine as Gradius 3 instead of writing their own engine.

Do you have a source for this information? I'd love to read more about it.

Thing is, though, the SNES hardware was more demanding to program for in some ways, like having to use only two sprite sizes and picking a video mode based on palettes and background layers. It was a finicky system. The Genesis CPU was just so much easier to extract performance from. Even Nintendo had trouble programming efficient collision routines, as evident in the slowdown in Super Mario World.

[Aaendi]

In order to show proof, I'd have to use a debugger to trace the ASM code, and then I have to find places where the code was copied. I've done it a while ago but I no longer have the data for it. I remember reading some articles from developers (I forgot what company) stating they disassembled Gradius 3, or copied from other Konami's games, or that programmers from Konami were friends with programmers from other companies and shared codes between companies. They were from a while ago, so it's hard to dig that up to.

[Sarge]

That's really fascinating, actually. This is the kind of stuff that appeals to me, given that I used to do a lot of embedded systems stuff. I really ought to delve back into that world.

I don't doubt there was some code-sharing going on. A buddy asks another how they got something to work. And I'm guessing that in the high-stakes dev environment, just getting it working right was of higher priority than eliminating slowdown.

That being said, I do wish the SNES had a beefier processor.