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A tech demo thought to be lost in time from the GBA era has recently been discovered and preserved by the team over at Forest of Illusion.
The tech demo dates back to April 17th, 2004, when Denaris Entertainment Software made a pitch to Nintendo of Europe, using their own engine which showcases dynamic and adjustable perspective views featuring dual playfields.

The dump itself showcases a single track with several Mario Kart assets into it, like Mario being the playable character in a familiar track akin to those found in other Mario Kart titles.
Forest of Illusion also got a hold of the original ReadMe written by Manfred Trenz (founder and creator of the Turrican series).

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Source

 

[Sono]

Although I love primitive 3D tech, GBA and Playstation (and sometimes DS) have this "disgusting" effect when there is camera movement. I don´t know the term for it. Never seen it on N64 though.

tl;dr: It's probably the fact that there is no "antialiasing", and the screens are also too low-resolution on top of that, meaning all scaling effects (including the DS 3D unit) will look total garbage, no matter what.
I don't think there is an actual term name for it though.


Can't speak of the PS1, but pretty sure on the DS the vertex data is integers (that is, you can't have a vertex on a subpixel, so polygon movement will always look garbage), and on the GBA you have a whole other set of problems, but it also boils down to the lack of antialiasing on a low resolution display.

Although on the GBA, the ARM7 lacks a VPU (floating point processing unit, basically), meaning that you either emulate it in software (omegaslow), or you do it in fixed point (muuuuch faster, but loses precision no matter what).
Just by looking at the video linked a few posts before, they are undoubtedly using "mode7" graphics (which actually looks to be mode2 with an impossible 3rd layer for the HUD, but they are probably just using sprites for that instead), which means using affine transform (I won't detail that in this thread, sorry!), but it should have enough fixed point resolution to not look total garbage, so the problem in this case is definitely down to the low-resolution screen with a lack of antialiasing.

 

[UltraDolphinRevolution]

so the problem in this case is definitely down to the low-resolution screen with a lack of antialiasing.

True. But I also mean that e.g. walls change shape.

This is a GBA game. Every time the camera perspective changes slightly (turning or simply coming closer) the shape of the house changes as well.

 

[Cris1997XX]

True. But I also mean that e.g. walls change shape.

This is a GBA game. Every time the camera perspective changes slightly (turning or simply coming closer) the shape of the house changes as well.

That's because 3D calculations aren't precise. It's like the affine texture warping on PS1 (And to a lesser extent Saturn), but even worse

 

[Deleted member 585853]

WHAT

 

[UltraDolphinRevolution]

That's because 3D calculations aren't precise. It's like tAhe affine texture warping on PS1 (And to a lesser extent Saturn), but even worse

Ah yes, texture warping. How come I have not seen it on N64 though? If sb knows, enlighten me.

 

[ZoeLain]

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A tech demo thought to be lost in time from the GBA era has recently been discovered and preserved by the team over at Forest of Illusion.
The tech demo dates back to April 17th, 2004, when Denaris Entertainment Software made a pitch to Nintendo of Europe, using their own engine which showcases dynamic and adjustable perspective views featuring dual playfields.

The dump itself showcases a single track with several Mario Kart assets into it, like Mario being the playable character in a familiar track akin to those found in other Mario Kart titles.
Forest of Illusion also got a hold of the original ReadMe written by Manfred Trenz (founder and creator of the Turrican series).

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Source

First Randy's Quake demo then this. Are all the GBA-era devs going through their storage or something all at the same time? /joke

Jokes aside, this is a really cool find and I'm glad to see it preserved!

 

[Cris1997XX]

Ah yes, texture warping. How come I have not seen it on N64 though? If sb knows, enlighten me.

Because the Nintendo 64 has native floating point on its CPU, designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. That helps with 3D (And textures in particular) since calculations are much more precise than fixed point compared to the PS1, which divides each and every polygon in much smaller sections

 

[urbanman2004]

Although I love primitive 3D tech, GBA and Playstation (and sometimes DS) have this "disgusting" effect when there is camera movement. I don´t know the term for it. Never seen it on N64 though.

Are you referring to the inherent "wobble and warping" texture effect? I know the Duckstation emulator fixed this issue w/ their geometry correction feature "PGXP (Precision Geometry Transform Pipeline)".

 

[jamespoo]

this is amazing