Battle of the Ports

[Mayhem]

Just to go along with what's been said, from having played them back at the time, the SNES version was lacking the blood, but was the better conversion in general imo.

[Yakumo]

I think they are all **** I do remember people going on about how much better the MD version was to play back in the day though.

[Nu-Eclipse]

I think they are all **** I do remember people going on about how much better the MD version was to play back in the day though.

I'm not saying that MK1 was an outstanding game at all (SF2 all day every day for me), but It has definitely aged better on the SNES.

[Yakumo]

That is true. At least the SNES version still looks OK but these days you can sure notice that low resolution audio.

[Solar]

The audio would probably have been 16bit 32khz, same as the arcade, in fact the chances are they just crossed the audio straight to the SNES without resampling it.
It was that crap hardware filter that Nintendo added that just ruined the audio, couldn't notice it back in the day, but it has aged very badly.
Early games/developers would have used a development kit without the filter and probably never actually played music back on a real snes, they wouldn't have heard how bad it made it

[nakamura]

Depends on the game. Konami certainly had no issues with clear sound.

[CMcK]

SNES audio always sounded muffled. Kind of daft having sampled based audio when you only have small capacity carts to store games on. The hardware filter was necessary to hide the low quality samples. Ruined some cracking compositions. And seems even worse next to good clear FM audio.

[nakamura]

I just don't agree at all. Yes there are some extremely muffled games but also many incredible sounding ones.

Vortex
Turrican
Contra
Castlevania
Secret of Mana
Chrono Trigger
Donkey Kong Country
Act Raiser
Rock N Roll Racing

And so on. The MD was extremely limited technically but also produced some amazing stuff.

[Anpanman]

Rock and Roll Racing is one of my favourite games, great commentary.

Thanks for the Densha comparisons by the way.

[Yakumo]

New Battle of the Ports coming within the next 24 hours.

[importaku]

Yes yes yeeeees

[Yakumo]

It's actually uploading now but since I'm about to go to bed I wont be posting a link until I come from work. But you can see it on YouTube in about 30 minutes.

[importaku]

It's live now, hurrah. I have been really looking forward to this one

[importaku]

Another good episode, the MD version wasn't glitched the arcade extra version has the same black backgrounds. One thing that annoyed me with a lot of the of the home computer ports is they totally removed the final 3 islands meaning you never got to see the proper ending as after all 7 diamonds were collected you just got the bad ending and that was your lot.

Still one of my claims to gaming fame is i can clear rainbow islands on one credit, that includes all 10 levels with the diamonds in order to get the secret doors to appear in the boss rooms it's a massive task to do and i have only managed it a couple of times but it was satisfying as hell. Probably one of Taito's greatest games even now there are powerups so rare that you will only see them a few times in all the times you play as they are triggered by doing very specific things in the game like collecting a red potion so many times or after playing 500 games, i love just how many secrets are hidden away in that game.

I remember been the poor kid amongst my friends i had to make do with the spectrum version while i was super envious of my friends amiga version, lol at the poor speccy been unable to do the colour orange so having to make the orange diamond flash between red & yellow

[Yakumo]

Thanks for posting the video link, Jason.

You've got some skill being able to complete Rainbow Islands in 1 credit that's for sure. The bosses always kill me without fail