No More NES Slowdown/Flickering! - ADG Filler #91

[@lilwyvern4]

There's a beauty to the old 8-bit simplicity. They had such mealy hardware to work with, a well-optimized game required a much more skilled hand to run smoothly. Makes you wonder how we went to the moon with 4 KB of RAM, but a few browser tabs causes several gigs in a modern desktop PC to shudder and cry.

[@abadenoughdude300]

Shows the difference in approach between "built to work" and "built to get it over with". If only the consumer market required as much reliability and efficiency as the space program...

[@jaysistar2711]

PCs are made (and have always been made) with a strong CPU and lots of RAM. The idea is that where other machines use hardware accelerators, the PC will just use its CPU. The only area that this has proven difficult is graphics, which is why we still have GPUs in modern PCs, but most other "accelerators" have been eliminated by CPU or GPU software.

[@1everysecond511]

Just a heads up, the flicker option in question is now in the "video" settings and not in the "emulation" settings as of the latest version (0.9.9)

[@DeCendres]

Regarding the sprite limits, there is at least one major game which uses it creatively. In Super Mario 3, this is used to partially display the sprite of the world8 hand traps in the world map. Without the sprite limit, those hands would fully appear, go up and down and fully disappear instead of slowly creeping up.

[@destineerrush2632]

Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest also uses this effect when walking through poison marsh to make Simon's sprite appear partially submerged. Without the sprite limit, it just look like he's standing in front of it. For this game at least, mesen's option to detect when the limit is needed works here and it still renders properly.

[@Pixelmusement]

Interesting! Using the sprite limits to artificially create areas that sprites don't render within in order to make them slide in and out of things... pretty clever, actually! :o

[@wubdal7262]

Games that exploit sprite overflow bugs to create visual effects abound on Sega Genesis, most notably the Sonic The Hedgehog title screen relies on it but there's lots of other cases. It's prevalent enough that disabling sprite limits globally is actually kind of a bad idea.

[@BainesMkII]

I vaguely recall some NES game did similar for the character sprite when going down stairs through a background doorway. On the first line below the entrance, the game would put eight sprites at the far left of the screen for the sole purpose of intentionally clipping the character sprite to the door/stairway. Then the game just moved the character sprite down, and it looked like the character was going down the steps to the next area. If you disabled sprite limits in an emulator, then you instead saw the character sprite floating over the floor as it "descended".

[@SmeddyTooBestChannel]

@@BainesMkII you're probably thinking of Knightmare II: The Maze of Galious

[@hanselmanryanjames]

I feel like this video would have a chance to get a couple million views if the algorithm picked it up correctly. Really fascinating stuff, and has broad appeal. Really deserves more eyes!

[@Pixelmusement]

Me and the algorithm don't get along... and I'm OK with that; Just means I don't have to tailor my content to the whims of the masses and can make videos about whatever the heck I want to make! ;)

[@gblargg]

This kind of speedup is a great improvement to games with slowdown issues, without affecting their feel, or even causing many compatibility problems. It's applicable to so many systems, e.g. using it on N64 to make games like Perfect Dark run at 60 FPS.

[@JoeBee9]

I love how modders were able to fix this problem in certain SNES games as well by affixing the SA1 chip to the game allowing you to run it smoothly without adjusting any emulator settings (I put into Retroarch on my phone). The extra processing power from it really smoothed things out making the game noticeably more playable (especially for those who never played it before and can't stand the jank).

[@djnak7856]

Good news, you have much better odds than you think! Your answer is right if we care about the order in which the squares are picked. But the order doesn't matter, so your odds are actually 1 in 57,960/(5*4*3*2*1) = 1 in 483. Another way to look at it: we are choosing 5 squares out of 24 (25 minus the free space in the center) "24 choose 5" is (24*23*22*21*20)/(5*4*3*2*1) = 42,504 combinations. There are 12 bingos. 8 do not involve the center, so they would use all 5 choices. 4 bingos involve the center, so the bingo itself would only use 4 choices. The 5th choice would go into one of the other 20 squares. 4*20 = 80. Then add the 8 non-center bingos = 88 winning combinations. 88/42,504 = 1 in 483 :)

[@Pixelmusement]

...welp, not quite as impressive then but still pretty bad odds all things considered! :P

[@Your_Degenerate]

I certainly don't miss reaching around the TV to fiddle with the antenna/RF connection.

[@KitsuneZeta]

So development of Mesen (the emulator linked to by Pixelmusement) has been halted by the original developer, SourMesen. The last Official version put out has a few bugs, one of which I actually helped find the cause of from the source code side of it (specifically, the HDPackBuilder utility built into Mesen not saving images with the same format that it expects them to be in for HD Packs... which was caused by changes to not save screenshots with an alpha channel. seriously.). Mesen, being a free-and-open-source emulator, has been forked by other parties interested in continuing development, the one I've mostly been following has labeled their fork as "Mesen-X" and is maintained by NovaSquirrel. Pretty sure if I linked the github project for that, KZbin would eat the comment, but it shouldn't be hard to find it with that information. For users of RetroArch, a Mesen core is available. While you won't have the same granularity of settings, you do still have "Remove Sprite Limit" and 5 options for your overclock amount setting (None, Low, Medium, High, and Very High).

[@Pixelmusement]

I thought something seemed off about the download on the official page... I can post a link to the releases for Mesen-X as well. Also, for future reference, KZbin doesn't "eat" comments with links, they just go to a "Held for Review" buffer where they won't appear until I permit them to appear, and with relevant links which aren't self-promotion I will generally approve such comments. :B

[@KitsuneZeta]

@@Pixelmusement So today I actually learned that Sour has returned to the Mesen project... or rather, a project that is the unification of his Mesen-NES and Mesen-SNES emulators with support for Game Boy and PC Engine games as well. It's still under the "Mesen" name (the canonical github repository is now Mesen2 - the previous repositories are still archived), and the only change is where exactly the settings are. As of latest build (timestamped 2023/02/25 06:07:39), these settings can be found by going to Settings -> NES, and from there, the tabs you want are Overclocking and Video (if you click the Video section at the left, there's quick buttons in the General tab in that section to take you straight to the Video Tab for the system-specific sections). I'm not aware of how long this has been worked on, but I do know that there have been discussions of implementing some of the improvements from the Mesen-X and Mesen-SX forks as well as other forks that came up in the wake of the original hiatus. So anyone new coming to this should probably just grab the official Mesen distribution again instead of grabbing Mesen-X.

[@SA77888]

Brilliant, Ive been using Mesen literally for years and I never knew about these options. On my version I couldnt find the "remove sprite limit" option, but the overclocking options where there and using them has made a BIG difference to the megaman game Im playing atm, thanks.

[@Pixelmusement]

Some of the options may be moved around in later versions, as I believe a couple people have pointed this out in the comments, but they should still be there somewhere! :B

[@SA77888]

@@Pixelmusement Thank you mate, I found it, its under Video options, then advanced. This has made a huge difference.

[@Bondanalloy]

i am going to revisit some games this is like a new way to play ! awesome

[@bachelorsensei9437]

Thank you man, I am going to play Contra Force today.

[@wardrich]

As somebody who prefers OG hardware, it's always funny how much different it is to play emulated games with restrictions removed. I'm so accustomed to music lag, and trouble sections that it totally throws me off when it's no longer there.

[@RoninCatholic]

Played Mega Man 2 and liked it, got Mega Man 3 for Christmas? That was my situation too, though in the case of 2 our household already had it. Mega Man 3 is the first videogame that was specifically given to me, though, and that cartridge is still at my parents' house to this day.

[@Alianger]

You can do this for mega drive and other systems too. Although the effect in Regen (that's just what I tried it on I guess there's a better alternative now) is different depending on the game, for example in Another World it runs faster, in Road Rash the controls become less responsive, and in various games the music can get choppy.

[@shortcat]

Still worth it in Road Rash as original framerate is about 15. Slower turning even balances the difficulty affected by being able to see things better.

[@NattosoupStudio]

I haven't even heard of Mesen. I think the last NES game I emulated was Metal Storm with the Fceux a few years back. It held up well, but I might have to go through it again without slow down.

[@BainesMkII]

Mesen has a few nice things going for it. One thing that some people like is its support for "HD texture packs", which allow for both replacing the NES graphics with user-created higher resolution replacements, but also allows for adding additional frames to animations as well as audio replacement. Unfortunately, I think people only ever finished such texture packs for a handful of popular games, and the fancier efforts can be pretty demanding. kzbin.info/www/bejne/nJnTYayJe9N1a8k

[@nvcken]

So amazing, Is it released?

[@thuggeegaming659]

6:26 It might be possible to fix this particular flicker using romhacks rather than emulation hacks. Some games like Thunder Force IV on the Genesis also have intentional slowdown, and similarly, no amount of overclocking will "fix" it. Saturn version fixes it though.

[@yousefslimani99]

I Was trying to figure out how to fix these sprites flickering I Used "No Sprite Limit" But I Didn't Found any changes and Because of you I Finally Understand it Thanks a lot!😉

[@SteveMacSticky]

Interesting technical stuff

[@IlliniDog01]

The slow down on NES and other game systems when too much activity was on screen always felt like the pre-cursor to slow-mo in action movies during exciting scenes. The Wachowskis must have been console gamers.

[@SUNSHINE-t-m]

i've heard of homebrew devs managing to avoid flickering an dhave huge sprites on screen via custom mappers. Wonder how viable woudl it be to patch roms to take advantage or these more advanced mappers

[@Sheevlord]

It would probably require to rewrite the whole game or at least large parts of it.

[@webfly]

Thanks for The tips

[@olhoTron]

8:02 I dont think its a badly coded splite flicker, if my counting skills are still sharp, theres 19 entities on screen, 18 bubbles + the player, each entity is 4 sprites, 19x4=76... the game is hiding some bubbles per frame to get around the 64 sprite limit! They probably coded the rotation to get around both the 64 sprite total and 8 sprites per scanline limit at the same time

[@Pixelmusement]

I'm not saying the routine is bad just not "perfect", which honestly, going for perfection can sometimes be more trouble than it's worth and the only way we know it's not perfect is because we can use tricks to bypass the NES' own limitations. What they put in place is clearly good enough and that's what matters! :B

[@fixnix88]

What is the most accuracy emulation with flickering or sprite unlimited? Jackie Chan has many flickering

[@simonashtear2739]

Slowdown? In a Megaman game? Nah, that's just Megaman temporarily overclocking his internal processors so he has more time to react to dangerous situations. It only LOOKS like time is slowing down. Kidding aside, this is really neat to learn! I noticed some of it, as a kid, in TMNT 1 and 2 for NES but never really knew what the culprit was. I picked up some factoids from GDQ and Twitch speedrunners here and there. That Bubble Bobble code was clever as heck! Where did YOU learn all of this? Congrats on the 50-Up! ;)

[@Pixelmusement]

Capcom wishes they came up with Mega Man 11 back then. ;D

[@uribe_ramon]

Slowdown in Megaman game = speed gear activated

[@nacho7742]

With emulation we can play Metal Slug without slowdowns, is even harder but really pleasant 😂

[@luisjogos821]

honestly this is a must have for Megaman 3, game slows down to a crawl when there's, like, 2 sprites on screen lol

[@Pixelmusement]

Given the way MM3 slows down I don't think it's actually related to the sprites, at least, not directly. It seems more-so related to the specific kinds of entities being processed. For instance, Snake Man's snakes just absolutely DECIMATE the framerate when he launches them, yet they're just two tiny little things... :P

[@luisjogos821]

@@Pixelmusement yeah, the lag is weird. Btw is there any way to do this with Game Boy games? Megaman World 3, 4 and 5 seems to slowdown tremendously and I'm curious to see if it's possible to fix it with emulation tweaks.

[@Pixelmusement]

@@luisjogos821 Possibly, but Game Boy emulators can be a bit hit and miss in general. The best ones haven't been updated in ages and thus run into technical issues on modern Windows, while the current ones aren't yet up to the same level of quality and while they work fine for simply playing games they don't have lots of features to tinker with, at least, last I looked into what was available.

[@borissixthousand9522]

the remove sprite limit option has been moved, it is no longer under "emulation" but now under "video" but still in the advanced tab

[@borissixthousand9522]

still doesnt seem to remove all or even a lot of the blink out when allowing more than 8 sprites, or at least not in mega man 2

[@Pixelmusement]

@@borissixthousand9522 Many games have their own sprite optimizations in place, especially the Mega Man titles, so getting rid of the sprite limit can only do so much.

[@LegallyBlindGamer7926]

Your luck in that bonus game rivals that of ChuggaaConroy's luck in Pokémon. When he did a Let's Play of Pokémon Crystal, he found a Shiny Koffing. Now, he was looking for a Koffing to add to his team as a defensive wall. In Generation 2, the odds of finding a Shiny are 1 in 8,192. Now imagine the odds of finding a Shiny that actually fits well with your team!

[@Pixelmusement]

The very first shiny Pokémon I ever found was a super-low-power shiny Pidgey in the original Pokémon Rumble on the Wii... where you can't power them up or evolve them or anything... I didn't even know shiny Pokémon were a thing when that happened, as I had originally played Silver on a Game Boy Pocket with no colour and thus I never clued in that the "Red Gyarados" was actually alluding to a whole new mechanic. :P

[@hiuman6483]

Oh, this explains why I don't like Mega Man 3 as much as Mega Man 1 or 2! The slowdowns can make the player-input less responsive.

[@Pixelmusement]

It can actually happen in the first two Mega Man games as well, but those two aren't nearly as badly optimized so it's much less of an issue there. :P

[@NewYears1978]

My mesen doesn't have the sprites option does it require a specific version? I use default version in cluded with VMAN's Retrobat setup. I downloaded the newest from the github you posted and it also doesn't have the option.

[@Pixelmusement]

Look through the comments for this video as I believe people have mentioned that these options have simply moved to different tabs or parts of the interface, but they should still be there somewhere! :B

[@JustMikeRUS]

I used the download links from your description, but none of the versions have an option to turn off the sprite limiter.

[@Pixelmusement]

It's in the "Video" section now instead of the "Emulation" section but should still be there! :B

[@JustMikeRUS]

Thanks! It's really in the "Video" section. The window with options is so small that some of the text with the settings overlapped each other and because of this I did not notice this item.

[@Gargamellium]

About the last point (with bugs bunny birthday blowout), I think the slowdown is essentiel in some game anyway, it can make the game more easier, like Megaman 3, I know that because I played a little bit the ps1 version and it was almost unplayable because the slowdown was completely removed, because it was like if the slowdown in the original game was more like a kind of slow effect motion feature, and it made the game a lot more simple/easier to play and added a feedback effect in the feeling of the gameplay)

[@Pixelmusement]

It really does depend. With Mega Man III I find the slowdown often messes up my timing and it's not great that your inputs can get eaten sometimes when it's happening. Playing without the slowdown is weird and while it's harder to react to things I also find it easier to avoid making mistakes, so it all sort of balances itself out. :B

[@AlyxxTheRat]

Emulation is awesome

[@simonfarre4907]

I think a better way to put it then "being able to play old NES games on my turns instead of the hardware" is to say "being able to play old NES games the way they were imagined and intended to play" - because that's actually what it is. These games were imagined to run like this, which is why arcade games were still a thing for a while there, since arcades could be more powerful than the NES and therefore ran better. So the argument for emulation is; _of course_ you should play it emulated unless you're part of some weird speed running community or whatever.

[@siveon298]

Yeah I love overclocking emulators to get a new (sometimes better) experience. SNES has it too. Often though I just like having the option to fast-forward. Fast forward text you've seen, battles in RPGs, walking around. One cool feature you might want to check out are SNES widescreen hacks. Those are potentially game changing.

[@EdmondDantes224]

Although Widescreen hacks can also sometimes cause graphical glitches in games. I think Game Sack did a video that covered them once.

[@spartonberry]

I think the hate for Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout just comes from people taking AVGN at face value. I rented the game and think it's just okay. I want to say part of the problem is simply that it's Kemco. Kemco might now be known for making mobile RPGs that try to replicate the 16-bit era but I hear only kind of succeed. But in the '80s they were making games that were VERY often given license changes between regional versions. So I suspect BBBB might have been generic on purpose, just so Kemco could swap licenses between regions if they felt like it (though this was one of the few I think to actually keep its license intact in all regional variants). I didn't play BBBB as a kid, though I do have Roadrunner's Death Valley Rally for the SNES and while, from what I recall, I can BBBB feels more playable, RR had more design charm, it at least tried to put elements of the cartoons in it. Maybe that's a thing that happens when an adventure game company (ICOM) is suddenly forced to start making platform action games.

[@Pixelmusement]

That said, one of my favourite SNES games, Dragon View, which I've talked about before, also happens to have been published by Kemco in English-speaking regions and was also made by Kotobuki Systems, so not everything that came out of them was super-average! :B

[@SandCannon]

I found this video because I was actually playing Mega Man 3 and got frustrated with the slowdown. Airman's cyclones are SO hard to dodge with slowdown...

[@gaigeeeeeee]

If anyone knows how to do this on on a retropie please let me know!

[@KlausWulfenbach]

There are Shmups on Steam (and other platforms) that deliberately slow down the gameplay when there are a certain number of objects on screen as an intended feature. That's more about imitating the feel of old arcade hardware than imitating the NES specifically, but it's in a similar vein.

[@Pixelmusement]

With the added benefit that simulated slowdown is not going to suffer from missed inputs since it's just pretending to run out of power instead of actually running out of power! ;)

[@KitsuneZeta]

@@Pixelmusement I feel one to point out in particular in this respect is CAVE's DoDonPachi Resurrection, which started as an Arcade title (with a later "Black Label" version) and later received an Xbox 360 version with a few additional modes, including "Arrange A - Ver. L". This would eventually make its way to Steam (with all of its DLC - including the otherwise very limited "Black Label Arrange" mode), but that version would have one very notable issue with Arrange A: It lacked the slowdown it had on Xbox 360. What happened was that, unlike other modes, Arrange A didn't have any "Software Slowdown" integrated into it, meaning all of the slowdown seen on Xbox 360 was due to the Xbox not being able to keep up, and the exact amount of this slowdown varied between XBox system (remember: there were a few revisions of the 360, some of which performed better). As such, when it got ported to PC, that hardware slowdown ceased to exist. It would also eventually get a Switch Port, which is probably the best way to play the game now between having slowdown on Arrange A AND also allowing you to practice against every boss in Black Label mode. CAVE had issue with another modern port, the original Xbox 360 version of Deathsmiles, due to the people handling that port deciding to optimize out some of the slowdown in that game. An update was put out that actually reimplemented a lot of the slowdown that was optimized out after both CAVE and the playerbase complained about it.

[@sofokliiis]

Does super nitendo mini flicker?

[@sofokliiis]

Oh man instead of search I put a comment

[@Pixelmusement]

No idea; depends on how they handle the emulation. Someone else reading the comments may know though. :B

[@strangevision99]

I like the way emulation can imporve 3D systems too. Fixing some of the PS1 graphical quirks is an obvious one but just a resolution boost can really help a 3D game.

[@Pixelmusement]

Coupled with a game with widescreeen support this can virtually HDify a late 90s game! Wipeout 3 for instance plays REALLY well on a 1080p (or greater) monitor through emulation! :3

[@misconline]

la opcion deshabilitar limite de sprites se movio a video

[@Thrakus]

Was the NES sold under cost for being only 200$?

[@Pixelmusement]

Depends on how you measure the costs, but in terms of just the raw components it's made out of, almost certainly, though I don't believe the actual numbers have ever been published. :P

[@fastbreak333]

Winning real money usually has way lower odds, my friend. Best to stick to Bugs Bingo.

[@Disthron]

The sprite flicking was actually something developers did on purpose! They would constantly cycle the sprites priority so they would flicker instead of just disappearing entirely.

[@EdmondDantes224]

Today on Pixelmusement: Why emulators have their own leaderboards on speedrun sites.

[@Pixelmusement]

Generally speaking. ;D

[@EdmondDantes224]

@@Pixelmusement So, are there any MS-DOS games that are similar to Solstice? (Since Solstice itself is inspired by ZX Spectrum games like Knight Lore I would hope there's something like that on the PCs of us Americans)

[@Pixelmusement]

@@EdmondDantes224 Well... I covered Mystic Towers waaaaaaaaaaay back in Episode 29, but that was from the 90s. There has to have been isometric platforming games in the 80s for DOS but I'm not familiar with any right off the cuff.

[@EdmondDantes224]

@@Pixelmusement Doesn't necessarily have to be from the 80s really. I just started getting curious about this genre in general. I've always liked isometric adventure ever since playing Landstalker in the mid-90s. That said recently I've also been interested in Euro games as well. It's like, the cool thing about 80s-90s gaming is if you got bored of what Americans or Japanese were doing, there was another. Now, everyone's games look and feel the same.

[@MatthewHolevinski]

ya, there is NO AMOUNT of nostalgia, novelty, or any other feeling that ever in a billion years could ever make me load data off a cassette tape ever again, which frankly is about the same amount of time it takes to do so in the first place. God the 80's sucked.