Has buying retro died on Bordersdown?

[speedlolita]

So not 99% of consoles then

Handhelds are consoles now? :eyeroll:

[vanpeebles]

Yes lol

[Leon Retro]

American amiga games have a border but I reckon Europe produced more amiga games than the USA

The Amiga was almost a nonentity in the America, so there weren't many games made exclusively for the machine in that territory.

I haven't used an American Amiga, but I guess games running in 60Hz use more of the screen? PAL Amiga games often use around half of the screen with a huge border below the image. This looks terrible.

But there are Amiga games that use the full screen, so some devs recognised that as important. It's just a shame that many didn't. I think it was crazy not to make a European developed game full screen, because there were no excuses like it was an NTSC game running on PAL hardware.

It's just something that spoils lots of Amiga games for me. I like games to fill a 4:3 screen.

And another example of terrible PAL console game is Street Fighter 2 on the SNES. The huge borders really spoil what looks great on an NTSC machine.

[The Moleman]

The entire Retro market isn't what it used to be. I noticed CEX is diving back in and though I'm out of touch with retro valuations and how they're arrived at £185 for Frogger on the Gamecube seems ludicrous.

This was my wake up call to sell off all my crap but valuable games, it's not going to go on forever, a crash is possibly just round the corner so it's time to sell up the bulk of the untouched collection (around 500 games) and put that money into something I like.

[ZipZap]

But there are Amiga games that use the full screen, so some devs recognised that as important. It's just a shame that many didn't. I think it was crazy not to make a European developed game full screen, because there were no excuses like it was an NTSC game running on PAL hardware.

I'm not *that* knowledgable about the Amiga, but there may be a reason. In the Amiga days, CPU time /memory was still pretty tight. Games were made in assembly and coders were trying to squeeze as much as possible out of each frame. A lot resources are used updating the screen, so if you can get away with updating a bit less of the screen, you can use those resources to do other things (this is also probably why some games like Ghouls n Ghosts have large status panels). Most Amiga owners had come from the C64 which only has 200 lines (at least without programming tricks that are quite restrictive in what you can do), and most PAL console games of the time also had big borders. I'm guessing people didn't really know any better and over time 200 or so became the standard.

[J0e Musashi]

NTSC-J only for me. Always been my thing, and I find it difficult even nowadays to stray from that, despite how much cheaper it would probably be. Digital-only negates shipping as well as shipping costs, but I still cannot play certain games because I refuse to buy a US or European version. It’s probably a little stupid, but old habits die hard as they say. Japanese titles often have a delayed release nowadays, but I’m fine to wait it out.

My only respite is when Hong Kong NTSC-J titles have an English language option, but keep the Japanese button layout. I’d likely never have been the Souls fan that I am if not for that.

[J0e Musashi]

This was my wake up call to sell off all my crap but valuable games, it's not going to go on forever, a crash is possibly just round the corner so it's time to sell up the bulk of the untouched collection (around 500 games) and put that money into something I like.

Sell the valuable games too. More “other stuff” that you could buy.

[Leon Retro]

I'm not *that* knowledgable about the Amiga, but there may be a reason. In the Amiga days, CPU time /memory was still pretty tight

I'm not exactly sure how a video image is created and output from a computer or console, but it's clear that NTSC consoles, whether it's the NES, SNES, Mega Drive, PC Engine, output a full screen image, even if their actual internal resolution is lower than a CRT television.

Of course, there are a few NTSC SNES games that have borders to boost performance, but in general most NTSC 8 & 16-bit games fill a 4:3 frame.

With all of that in mind - it makes me think that the reason for lots of Amiga games using far less than a full 4:3 frame, has something to do with PAL rather than trying to make games run faster. I wouldn't think that so many developers delivered all sorts of games with a huge black border simply for a performance boost. No, it must have been to do with not optimising the image for the PAL format.

When Amiga games were optimised for the PAL format, they filled a 4:3 frame and looked far nicer. Huge borders really spoil lots of Amiga games for me. I think developers should have made sure a full 4:3 image was a priority back then, seeing the Amiga's main market was Europe which used the PAL format.

The reason PAL console games had borders, is because international companies didn't care much about PAL countries enough to optimise their games. Seeing most Amiga games were made in Britain and across Europe, which use the PAL format, there were no excuses not to deliver full screen PAL Amiga games. Maybe small borders might have been beneficial for some games, but the huge black borders typically found in Amiga games is just ugly and undermines the potential of a game to impress.

It's just something that bugged me back in the day - and still bugs me when I go back to the Amiga. Full screen Amiga games make me feel...

[ZipZap]

With all of that in mind - it makes me think that the reason for lots of Amiga games using far less than a full 4:3 frame has something to do with PAL rather than trying to make games run faster. I wouldn't think that so many developers delivered all sorts of games with a huge black border simply for a performance boost. No, it must have been to do with not optimising the image for the PAL format.

Have you ever coded for old computer hardware? Like I say, I'm not an expert on the Amiga specifically, but when coding games on 8/16 bit machines, optimisation is very important. Compromises were made all the time for a performance boost. 320 lines probably didn't seem a serious compromise in the days when most other PAL systems had borders and CRTs usually had overscan.

Why do developers of modern games use 30 fps? Because they can do far more between each frame. I'd prefer 60fps and lower graphical quality, but a lot of people don't even notice the difference. It's the same concept.

[Leon Retro]

Have you ever coded for old computer hardware? .

I've noted my observations, so it's clear to me that the problem with lots of PAL games having borders(sometimes a huge black border below the game image) seems to be lack of optimisation for the PAL format.

If it were simply down to devs trying to get a performance boost, why do so Amiga games - from simple puzzle games, to shoot 'em ups and slow adventure games suffer from the border issue? I think it clearly shows that lots of devs just didn't make sure to deliver full screen PAL games.

Also, as I mentioned - despite consoles like the PC Engine and SNES having an even lower than 320x240 resolution, most games for the systemS run full screen. So console devs usually made sure, like it was completely normal, to deliver games that filled a 4:3 frame, unless they were running on a PAL console.

So, as much as games could benefit from having borders to boost performance in console and computer games, most console games across 8 & 16-bit formats didn't have borders. Amiga games often did, which I'm pretty sure was to do with a lack of PAL optimisation.

Using an Amiga emulator though, you can force 'full screen', so that's a nice option to have these days. It's just annoying that when you use a real PAL Amiga, you often don't get a nice full screen image. Some games do deliver that though - and it really can make an Amiga game shine when it isn't spoiled by a huge border(s).

As I said - it's just something that's always annoyed me about the Amiga, because I think most games could have run full screen if the devs had put the effort in. If a NES can run games full screen, I'm sure there are no excuses for lots Amiga games having huge unsightly borders. It has to be down to devs not prioritising a full screen image.

[ZipZap]

I've noted my observations, so it's clear to me that the problem with lots of PAL games having borders(sometimes a huge black border below the game image) seems to be lack of optimisation for the PAL format.

If a game works on both PAL and NTSC, you may be correct. If a game doesn't work on NTSC, then it probably is PAL optimised, regardless of what you see on screen.


Again, I don't exactly know how programming an Amiga works, but my experience of assembly tells me that due to the extra lines, a PAL machine has more cycles per frame than an NTSC machine, and if those extra cycles are utilised (and if your game is aimed purely at the PAL market, there's no reason not to), it's going to cause problems with NTSC.

[Brad]

There are a bunch of reasons for borders on Amiga games:

Code for the lowest common denominator which is 200 lines of NTSC. This has to be the most common reason I'd think.

Dual platform development (Atari ST did not have more vertical resolution in PAL machines, unlike the Amiga).

Better graphics at the expense of smaller playfield e.g. Shadow of the Beast

If you played on a TV though you probably had horrid squashed graphics in the UK :-(

A few games used the full PAL mode e.g. SWOS

[_SD_]

I assume most Master System games were either developed for 50Hz or were PAL optimised, considering the console’s popularity in this region?

So do you get borders on a telly with a CD32 when playing Amiga games or did they somehow fix it?

[Brad]

Hard to be sure on this i.e. I can't find a definitive list but by the time the AGA Amigas arrived Europe was clearly the main region, with the US having completely moved on to the consoles. So, I *think* that many more AGA games, and therefore CD32 games, would have been developed in Europe with less consideration for whether the games would work on NTSC machines. That should mean less borders and more use of the full resolution. This is just a theory more than anything though. What I do know is that US Amiga fans tend to try and get PAL machines rather than NTSC machines across the board in order to achieve highest compatibility; a stark contrast to the retro console world.

Most Amigas (other than quite early models) can be switched between PAL and NTSC in software. Some of the older ones need a jumper change and some even older ones need a pin lifting and grounding or something. This also changes the 68000 CPU speed between approx. 7.09MHz (PAL) and approx. 7.16MHz (NTSC), even though most places list the clock speed as 7.14MHz (no idea why this inaccuracy has persisted).

[Mayhem]

When it comes to the C64 for example, the active area that Commodore imagined is exactly the same - 320x200. However as PAL has more scan lines than NTSC, the difference in what appears on your TV/monitor is the size of the borders. PAL displays have more border than NTSC displays.

Then people worked out how to disable the borders so you could utilise this extra area, and that's when the problems occurred, because you can probably figure out, most PAL titles that did this would get horribly confused on NTSC machines. On top, even though the CPU inside the PAL C64 runs slower than the NTSC CPU, it actually uses less clock cycles as a result, so you can get more done in the background. Modern titles such as Sam's Journey can't run properly on an NTSC machine because it's being pushed to the max and there's not enough spare CPU time to get everything done.

With those two factors in mind, and that most demos originate in Europe, the better model to own for the C64 is a PAL one. It's going to be an exception because most other machines have the NTSC model as superior.