Castlevania: Diminuendo of Dithering

[ArugulaZ]

Random: Even The Mega Drive Might Get Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night Before Switch

"It is not by my hand that I am once again given flesh"

www.nintendolife.com

Someone is making an adaptation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for, of all things, the Sega Genesis. It's worth noting that this will take creative liberties with the source material, just as Vampire's Kiss did with Rondo of Blood. However, the designer is hoping to capture the spirit of the original while making it fit within the confines of the Genesis hardware.

The plan is to include eight linear stages each for both Alucard and Maria. Colors are drastically cut back, but the designer claims that both the buttery animation and the massive bosses are possible on Sega's 16-bit system. Yes, that includes Granfalloon, which is shown in all its fleshy, decayed grossness in a proof of concept video. It's a background object and not a sprite, but still, it's pretty impressive.

 

[Phantoon]

They're planning to do it as a level based thing though, which really rips the point out of it for me. I'd love to see the game de-made, but the linked map is probably the one bit I wouldn't be willing to sacrifice.

I suspect that quite a lot of the game could be replicated (must hasten to add that I'm not a programmer here), but Legion might be a bit much for the 16 bit machines.

 

[Phantoon]

Having watched the video, I think Legion might actually work. It's going to be interesting!

 

[Mogri]

That's an incredible adaptation of the Symphony graphics. I wouldn't have guessed you could do that.

 

[Phantoon]

The drop in colour depth is much more obvious in dark scenes or rendered bits, but yeah, it's really impressive

 

[ArugulaZ]

It's this image that blows my mind. Look at this! (If the link works; otherwise you can't look at this.)

As for the simplified level designs, I can forgive that. I know taking the Metroid out of the world's first Metroidvania is jarring, but keep in mind that the original game is incredibly dense with collectibles and play mechanics, and taking a more linear approach means the developer doesn't have to deal with hundreds of items, weapons, and spells. One item in the original SOTN is a peanut, which Alucard has to catch with his mouth to earn a small hit point bonus. One spell used in conjunction with the leather shield summons a cow. They're fun, inconsequential bonuses in a game filled with them, but you can squeeze all that stuff on a compact disc. On a Genesis cartridge and with a single designer, probably not so much.

I suspect that with this more streamlined design, Alucard will have one unchanging weapon, a handful of subweapons, and no inventory, so you're not digging through your collection of lemons and parfaits and brass knuckles and power of sires to find the specific item you need. I can live with that. I'm more worried about the animation and movement looking right. Right now, it very much doesn't, and it's going to take a lot of careful programming to get the game up to IGA standards. Even the recently released and thematically similar Demons of Asteborg isn't at that level of quality.

 

[Sarge]

I suspect that much of the game, with more time and resources, could definitely make the jump to Genesis (or SNES). Yes, there would be nips and tucks here and there, but I think almost all of the experience would absolutely be doable. And even size constraints aren't really a problem these days; while the Genesis typically had 4 MB for cart space (you could go higher if the CD or 32X aren't present) and the SNES could address a bit more than 15 MB, one would assume you could just use a chip to bankswitch more memory in just like the NES.

A game I feel starts bordering on SotN's visual quality in some ways (albeit without as many extras) is Demon's Crest. That game looks and sounds fantastic, and that's just with 2 MB.

Regardless, this is super cool and I'm excited to see how it turns out.

 

[Phantoon]

I suspect that much of the game, with more time and resources, could definitely make the jump to Genesis (or SNES). Yes, there would be nips and tucks here and there, but I think almost all of the experience would absolutely be doable. And even size constraints aren't really a problem these days; while the Genesis typically had 4 MB for cart space (you could go higher if the CD or 32X aren't present) and the SNES could address a bit more than 15 MB, one would assume you could just use a chip to bankswitch more memory in just like the NES.

I was just going to make this point! If you strip out the FMVs, voice acting and CD audio then it's a much more manageable size. And with much cheaper memory nowadays you can do things on the 16 bits that would've been impossible in the day.

It would be compromised, there's things that won't work on the older hardware at all, but I bet you could get it working with some compromises

 

[Mightyblue]

I mean, cases like this are exactly what the compression/streaming chip used in Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia were for, and there's probably tons of microprocessors you could use for that purpose today.

 

[Sarge]

SNES would actually be even easier if one were to use the MSU-1 chip that Near designed and the SD2SNES implements. No size constraints on those files that I'm aware of, and you could just use the original audio and video, converted to the format that expects. There are apparently implementations of similar functionality on the MegaSD and Mega EverDrive Pro for Genesis as well, although I assume that's tapping into the Sega CD side of things for that functionality.

 

[Gaer]

I am actually quite interested on a level-based reimagining of SOTN.

I really am looking forward to seeing how this turns out if Konami doesn’t shutter this instantly before release.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Yeah, I'm in that same camp. I can't count all the formats where I can play Symphony of the Night... there's the PSOne, the Playstation 3, the PSP, the Vita, the Xbox 360, and the Xbox One. If I want to extend that to the gray market, there's no end of Android and X86 devices that will play this game. Plus there's the avalanche of Metroid-vanias that have been released in the years since. I'm just over this format, man. I'll start a search action game and almost invariably abandon it halfway through. The lone exception has been Iconoclasts, and that's because there's an easy mode that smooths out the rough patches.

My only issue with a level based SOTN is that the designer will have to start from scratch, and it's likely that his level designs won't be as good as those in a classic Castlevania. Symphony of the Night has a crapton of long boring hallways where you'll walk past one screen, kill some weird monster, and repeat, three or four times. Genesis Symphony will have to have a tighter, more varied structure, and I have doubts that Pigsy will come up with stages and set pieces that stand out the way Rondo or Castlevania 4 or even Bloodlines did. (It'll be better than Haunted Castle, though. Almost everything is.)

 

[Mogri]

where I can play Symphony of the Night... there's the PSOne, the Playstation 3, the PSP, the Vita, the Xbox 360, and the Xbox One. If I want to extend that to the gray market, there's no end of Android and X86 devices that will play this game.

Android has it on Google Play, no gray necessary.

 

[Phantoon]

SNES would actually be even easier if one were to use the MSU-1 chip that Near designed and the SD2SNES implements. No size constraints on those files that I'm aware of, and you could just use the original audio and video, converted to the format that expects. There are apparently implementations of similar functionality on the MegaSD and Mega EverDrive Pro for Genesis as well, although I assume that's tapping into the Sega CD side of things for that functionality.

I feel like this would be cheating, somehow. It's effectively making a PlayStation game run on an original PlayStation (the SNES CD). It's going onto non-existent hardware.

If I were doing it, which I'm not as I have no skills, I'd limit myself to a Super FX or an SA-1.

 

[Sarge]

Yeah, that's sort of what it was intended to be, replace what would have been the SNES CD. Granted, it doesn't take the Sega CD route and add another processor to the mix - it's more like the PC Engine Duo, just enabling a big ol' chunk of CD data (and again, yeah, pretty much what the SNES CD was going to be). I can see the argument for using period-authentic hardware, though, for sure. I'd rather see how it turns out on the base system.

SA1 is wild, though, because it's a much, much bigger boost than MSU-1. You get a whole other CPU, clocked even higher than the main SNES CPU. (And I love what Vitor Vilela is doing with that chip.)

 

[ArugulaZ]

Kind of off-topic, but I was gonna ask... do those SA1 games work on the Super NES Classic?

 

[Sarge]

I don't know if the modified ones work specifically - I haven't tried them. But I do know that SA1 emulation is in Nintendo's emulator, as Super Mario RPG and Kirby Super Star are there. And I know for sure that Kirby's Dream Land 3 also works (with some display issues without patching that I don't believe are SA1-related). I'm willing to wager they will work.

(I'm guessing if they don't, you can probably use RetroArch, although I like to use canoe when I can.)

 

[Phantoon]

You get a whole other CPU, clocked even higher than the main SNES CPU.

It's 4x faster too, so it's effectively a 5x faster system. The SA-1 is nuts. With the SA-1 the question kind of morphs from "could the SNES run Symphony of the Night" to "how well could it run it" I guess.

I've been wondering what bits the SNES would struggle with. Textured coffins at save points are almost certainly out. The first Dracula fight (both phases) would be likely fine as the Dracula sprite looks no bigger than other SNES bosses and the background is a Mode 7 job with a mode switch for the status bar (like how F-Zero mode switches half way down the screen). It'd help with the guesswork if I knew the first thing about SNES programming, obviously!

 

[Sarge]

Ha, me too. I only know what I've heard from discussions between people that are way, way smarter than me.

With the SA1, I don't know if limited 3D would be out of the question, given what Vitor did with Race Drivin'. Of course, my guess is that you'd probably just fake it with pre-rendered sprites, especially if space isn't an issue.

I don't know if stuff like Galamoth would be rough with the SA1 or not - seems like the Super FX would be more ideal in that case, since Yoshi's Island used it for rotational effects. Or, again, just fake it with lots of pre-computed rotations, although a boss that big would likely need to use background layers instead of sprites.

 

[Phantoon]

Yeah, from my position of limited knowledge I think that the Super FX would be required for that. I think sprite scaling would be necessary for the cooler effects.

My mind was blown recently when I found that Yoshi's Island had no polygons in it whatsoever. The dropping drawbridges and tumblers are some kind of line effect. This video goes into various limit pushing SNES games, with Yoshi's Island being one of the last examples.

 

[Sarge]

Great video. Yeah, I didn't know that wasn't polygons, but that technique got used in a lot of games on Genesis as well. The Coding Secrets channel has a lot of stuff that Traveler's Tales did with the hardware in the day. It also kinda surprised me when I found out that the Axelay scrolling wasn't Mode 7, too.

 

[Phantoon]

Not only was Axelay's effect not Mode 7, you could do it on the NES:

I love it when incredibly smart people can do stuff like this. I hope this version of Symphony of the Night gives us something mind blowing.

 

[Sarge]

Yeah, that's super cool. It's pretty impressive what folks did and can do with scanline effects.

 

[ArugulaZ]

The creator of Genesis SOTN plans to use this 16-bit rewrite of the song Dracula's Castle in his game. I can't say I prefer it to the one in the Playstation original, but it'll do in a pinch.

 

[Phantoon]

I think it's pretty good! I'd love it if Savaged Regime gets involved, he's a master with the Mega Drive sound chip

 

[Sarge]

I think it's pretty good! I'd love it if Savaged Regime gets involved, he's a master with the Mega Drive sound chip

So much this. Dude is an absolute master of that hardware.

Another good choice would be ChiptunedRaijin, he's got some nice chops on Genesis, too.

 

[Phantoon]

I hadn't heard of ChiptunedRaijin, that's impressive work.