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Incredible graphical tricks in classic games - Your questions answered! | White_Pointer Gaming

White_Pointer Gaming

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Once again, viewer questions about how classic games worked will be answered, this time we are revisiting games from previous videos to answer new questions about them! A number of different platforms including PC Engine, Master System, Game Boy, Mega Drive and Super Nintendo are covered. What incredible feats of software engineering will be unveiled on this occasion?

0:00 Intro
0:26 Art of Fighting (PCE)
3:54 Road Rash (SMS)
8:15 Ranger-X (MD/Gen)
11:23 The Lawnmower Man (MD/Gen, SNES, GB)
16:25 Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble (SNES, GB)
18:55 Contra III: The Alien Wars (SNES)
22:21 Super Metroid (SNES)
24:15 Conclusion

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20 Comments

@andyknowles271 1 year ago

That road rash tile viewer makes my brain melt. to actually get the full on landscape effect working with all that craziness going on is an achievement in itself

@tonybarnes2920 1 year ago

Oh wow. I worked with Gary for years and still consider him a friend (which I can't say for many of my bosses over the past 40 years - lol). He was an awesome boss and programmer on Star Trek DS9 The Fallen, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Wars EP3 Revenge of the Sith. Somehow it never came up that he did the port of Road Rash. Crazy.

@jojobizadTRASH 1 year ago

11:37 for those having a hard time reading that name, it means "recycling bin" in spanish.

@mindlessmeat4055 1 year ago

I love learning these old tricks. People were so clever.

@claudiosacchi3720 1 year ago

Seeing road rush running so smooth on the SMS is quite impressive

@AliançaRetrô 1 year ago

"The Lawnmower Man? Pfft! What a name."
*seeing the game: HOLY SHOUT

@flygonbreloom 1 year ago (edited)

AAAA I'M SORRY FOR DRIVING YOU INSANE :D

I'll try to think of another impressive as heck Master System game to poke you with in the future. I really appreciate this one being analysed hahaha. There is some insanely clever games out there making the most out of a surprisingly restrictive featureset-wise VDP.
Part of the reason Road Rash SMS impressed me so much is because the SMS's VDP upload bandwidth is surprisingly slow, adding a FIFO and DMA to the Mega Drive VDP was more important than one can ever realise.

@Billnyot 1 year ago

I've been dying to see how Phantasy Star does its first person dungeon crawling segments on the Sega Master System

@BrianM_3rd 1 year ago

It's bending my brain trying to ignore the "3D" effect in Lawnmower Man and actually spot the tiles stretching! It's a wonder a trick like this didn't invent an entirely new genre all by itself.

@summerlaverdure 1 year ago

i love seeing all these old effects explained, thank you for making these videos!

@eleanorburns8686 1 year ago

Fantastic to finally get the insight into Road Rash on the SMS. Astonishing to think a single programmer managed to achieve all that. Have you ever done a disassembly like this on the assets of the original Phantasy Star? I'd love to know how they actually did the 3D dungeons in that, whether any actual realtime 3D is at work (Opinion seems to be divided).

@Nirakolov 1 year ago

The subreddit wants to know how the ending "The End" animation for NES Final Fantasy was done

@reshpeck 1 year ago (edited)

After seven years this channel is starting to blow up with the views but only 19k subs? We gotta fix that!

@hobbified 1 year ago

"Papelera de reciclaje". Papelera is a wastepaper bin, but "de reciclaje" makes it the recycle bin, just like the win95 icon they have for an avatar.

@Sinn0100 9 months ago (edited)

I believe developers simply flipped between separate resolutions to get the zoom effect in Art of Fighting. I believe this is also why it isn't as smooth as real scaling.

Road Rash- You say it is running at the same frame rate but...the Genesis original looks like it is running much faster. Try looking at Road Rash 2 or 3 while driving a turbo bike and you should see a huge difference. I'm betting the dev kept it as close as they could with the rat bikes but once the good bikes are available they won't be running closely together.

@ToyokaX 1 year ago

The lawnmower man bit reminds me of how ray marching is done in modern shaders. A very similar "layering" effect is achieved, and it turns out the tiling can be done much the say way.

@Midekai 1 year ago

I absolutely love seeing the creative ways these devs pulled this stuff off

@iacon0425 1 year ago (edited)

I believe Chrono Trigger does the same thing as Super Metroid and Contra III for some of its attacks. It's interesting because whenever it does this it has to disable other BG3 effects it has going, like Textboxes and certain water effects.

@Ibisian 1 year ago

ngl that effect for Lawnmower Man on the GameBoy is pretty awesome, I don't think I've ever seen anything that impressive on that handheld before now.

@eukarya_ 11 months ago

I have a petition: Toy Story Racer for the Gameboy Color.
Just, like, the game in general, that games looks amazing for the platform, with a surprisingly convincing 3D perspective, changing elevations, quite detailed environments for the hardware...
I can imagine some of the tricks being used, but still, I would like to see a breakdown of some of the effects of that game.