Why couldn't the PSX handle Neo Geo games well???

NeoField

NeoField

Rugal's Thug
Joined
Sep 14, 2017
Posts
91
I remember playing Samurai Shodown 3 on the original PSX back when I was a kid and absolutely loved it... then 20 years later I played it next to the Neo Geo AES version and was shocked how terrible the PSX one was.

Looking back almost every Neo Geo port sucked on the PSX, just curious was the PSX not powerful enough to handle it? Or were they just shitty done ports that weren't done well?
 
Gentle Ben

Gentle Ben

NAM-75 Vet
Joined
Nov 30, 2009
Posts
1,022
Cunty Cactus said:
Not enough RAM ?
Click to expand...

Yup. When loading from an optical disc, the amount of RAM limits how many game elements can be loaded at once. Not a problem on the AES, as loading from a cartridge is almost as fast as loading from RAM, so a lot more games could just run practically right from the cartridge.
Memory chips were very expensive in the 90's, which is ONE reason the AES carts were so expensive.

Same reason so many 3rd party developers didn't support the N64...manufacturing carts (and the memory they required) cost a lot more than CDs.

So you have limited memory trying to make a game look as much like the AES/MVS version as you can, but there's just no way the PSX could handle as many onscreen sprites as the NG. Storage was better (at the time) on CDs, but the transfer rate was (IS) much slower than from RAM.
 
Last edited:
Ip Man

Ip Man

BBLLOOOO__HHAARRDDDDDD!!!!,
15 Year Member
Joined
Aug 14, 2006
Posts
4,334
i always loved the 32 bit era ports of snk and capcom games. sure some of them suck comparing them now, but back then, being able to play samurai shodown 4 on the ps1 was pretty sweet.

this is also how i discovered the sega saturn. i found out that the saturn ports of arcade games were (at the time) what we called arcade perfect. to me they were arcade perfect. being able to play the marvel vs games where there was no load times and having the ability to switch between characters was all i needed. i never questioned it.

some time back, appleidog was trying to convince me on how bad the saturn port of metal slug was, but i couldn't see the difference.

the 32 bit era of ports was a great way to get the arcade fix at home and they served their purpose well imo.
 
NeoField

NeoField

Rugal's Thug
Joined
Sep 14, 2017
Posts
91
Interesting, the RAM limits makes a lot of sense. I remember my friend had some PSX demo disk that only had the first level from Metal Slug, loaded every 30 sec or so. My friend had the Saturn with X-men vs Street fighter, I remember having to switch the action replay thing at the right time or it wouldn't work. But yeh Saturn did arcade ports great for the time. Nothing beats the power of the NEO GEO AES!!!
 
Kid Panda

Kid Panda

The Chinese Kid
Joined
Jun 13, 2010
Posts
12,514
Saturn Ports that used the ram carts fared better than the PSX ports. Waku Waku 7 still sucked on the Saturn though.
 
Tanooki

Tanooki

War Room Troll
Joined
May 24, 2016
Posts
1,745
One thing not being brought up, but maybe better not (I've never tried them) are the few NeoGeo ports to the PC Engine CD format.
 
egg_sanwich

egg_sanwich

Windjammers Wonder
10 Year Member
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
Posts
1,379
Tanooki said:
One thing not being brought up, but maybe better not (I've never tried them) are the few NeoGeo ports to the PC Engine CD format.
Click to expand...

These required the Arcade Card aka more RAM as well
 
A

acblunden2

Rugal's Thug
Joined
Nov 1, 2015
Posts
90
We kind of take 3D graphics for granted these days, but back then polygons was a big thing. PSX was designed from the ground up for drawing polygons on the fly. For that era, it did it incredibly well. As I recall from reading Next Generation and other magazines from that time, the reason for that is for PSX to render 2D, they had to draw each image as polygons, then texture map the 2D graphics to those polygons. Took a while for programmers to get good at that and even then, the low VRAM caused sacrifices to be made with frames of animation.
 
andsuchisdeath

andsuchisdeath

General Morden's Aide
20 Year Member
Joined
Oct 2, 2003
Posts
7,576
NeoField said:
Looking back almost every Neo Geo port sucked on the PSX, just curious was the PSX not powerful enough to handle it? Or were they just shitty done ports that weren't done well?
Click to expand...

Have you played every Neo port on the PSX? I doubt it.

Your youtube channel sucks!
 
D

Dochartaigh

Edo Express Delivery Guy
Joined
Mar 25, 2017
Posts
337
Any of you ever try these PS1 games on the PS2? Games like the super-popular Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is nearly unplayable once you reach the inverted castle on the PS1 the slowdown can be so bad - but plays perfectly fine on a PS2 (and thankfully the PS2 plays most all PS1 games perfect).
 
P

pegboy

Armored Scrum Object
Joined
Sep 27, 2013
Posts
268
Dochartaigh said:
Any of you ever try these PS1 games on the PS2? Games like the super-popular Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is nearly unplayable once you reach the inverted castle on the PS1 the slowdown can be so bad - but plays perfectly fine on a PS2 (and thankfully the PS2 plays most all PS1 games perfect).
Click to expand...

I noticed something similar back when I was still trying to play ports instead of using MAME. The PS1 port of Strikers 1945 II (Japanese version) had many areas with slowdown (especially parts of stage 7 if I recall) when played on a PS1. However, when played on a Japanese PS2, there was no slowdown at all. I was under the assumption that games would play exactly the same on a PS2, and maybe most do, but there are certainly some that run much better on the PS2 versus the PS1.
 
Ip Man

Ip Man

BBLLOOOO__HHAARRDDDDDD!!!!,
15 Year Member
Joined
Aug 14, 2006
Posts
4,334
kind of off topic, but talking about bad ports, capcom vs snk 2 on the gamecube looked like shit. it's like watching a recording of a recording of a vhs tape. visuals were soo blurry. and playing with the gamecube controller wasn't very pleasant either.
 
fake

fake

Ned's Ninja Academy Dropout
15 Year Member
Joined
Jul 26, 2008
Posts
11,003
pegboy said:
I noticed something similar back when I was still trying to play ports instead of using MAME. The PS1 port of Strikers 1945 II (Japanese version) had many areas with slowdown (especially parts of stage 7 if I recall) when played on a PS1. However, when played on a Japanese PS2, there was no slowdown at all. I was under the assumption that games would play exactly the same on a PS2, and maybe most do, but there are certainly some that run much better on the PS2 versus the PS1.
Click to expand...

I'd imagine that it's just due to the extra RAM. The PS2's sound chip was the PS1's CPU, wasn't it? So processing power should be the same, but if the system can dump more data into RAM, it should run with fewer hiccups. In the case of a fighter, where actually game assets are either dumbed down (lower sprite dimensions, fewer lighting / shading effects, etc.) or have been removed altogether, the change of hardware obviously won't change anything.
 
O

oliverclaude

General Morden's Aide
Joined
Feb 3, 2013
Posts
7,688
If you played the 16-bit ports first, you knew the PS1 could handle them quite acceptable. The cost/benefit ratio and fine asts included.
 
P

powerflower

Banned
Joined
Mar 17, 2013
Posts
1,034
benjammin1701 said:
So you have limited memory trying to make a game look as much like the AES/MVS version as you can, but there's just no way the PSX could handle as many onscreen sprites as the NG. Storage was better (at the time) on CDs, but the transfer rate was (IS) much slower than from RAM.
Click to expand...

Regarding sprites the PSX is far more powerful than the NG, to be exactly 4096 sprites on screen at 60fps. At least my G-Darius PCB ( which is based on the PSX chipset) demostrates this in the service menu with sprite balls. Now give the Neo some "intelligent" sprites like the Helis in Ultimate Tiger (the PCB uses a TMS DSP for that I think) and look how it craps up like in Last Resort 2nd stage. It hasn't the raw power (MIPS) like the PSX.

To be fair, the PSX has to create backgrounds from "sprites" like the Neo, with the difference that they are just textured polygons without Z-Axis. It's called the "sprite mode".

Some say that PSX is even stronger in this department than the "sprite wizard" Saturn (over 16000 sprites at once, BUT at what framerate). I doubt that b/c when you look at Terra Diver PSX...But again Saturn had 5 BG layers with all fancy stuff. Even Saturns sprites arent sprites in a classical way.

The reason the PSX was so lame for NG titles was just the lack of memory that can be accessed at any given time to be displayed immediately.

Give that thing 800MBit of ram and see how it smokes the Neo in everything 2D related ;)

Neo was a clever, easy to handle and cheap
design to pull out as much graphical effects as possible with limited resources. Look at System32, it dwarfes the Neo. However it would be interesting how good System32 can handle fluid animations?
 
Last edited:
Gentle Ben

Gentle Ben

NAM-75 Vet
Joined
Nov 30, 2009
Posts
1,022
benjammin1701 said:
... loading from a cartridge is almost as fast as loading from RAM, so a lot more games could just run practically right from the cartridge.
Memory chips were very expensive in the 90's, which is ONE reason the AES carts were so expensive.
Click to expand...

Black Fly said:
The reason the PSX was so lame for NG titles was just the lack of memory that can be accessed at any given time to be displayed immediately.
Click to expand...
Maybe my explanation wasn't as in depth as yours, but does the layperson really need that much depth?
If someone doesn't understand basic stuff like the difference between optical discs and cartridges as far as data transfer rates go, do you think they really need to know about all that?

You're like the douchebag who always has to say, "Well ACTUALLY..."
 
NeoGeo64

NeoGeo64

Zero's Secretary
Joined
Sep 25, 2013
Posts
152
Because the Neo Geo was the most powerful 2D console ever created, and nothing could handle it's demanding games.

Also, by the way, what's a PSX? Where is the "X" in Playstation 1?
 
HeavyMachineGoob

HeavyMachineGoob

My poontang misses Lenn Yang's wang
10 Year Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2011
Posts
5,841
It was a 90s marketing thing. It was cool to tack X onto things.

Also, don't forget that back in the 90s, there was only one PlayStation, made no sense to call it a PS1. It was either PS or PSX, like what was perpetuated in the magazines and advertisements.
 
P

powerflower

Banned
Joined
Mar 17, 2013
Posts
1,034
benjammin1701 said:
Maybe my explanation wasn't as in depth as yours, but does the layperson really need that much depth?
If someone doesn't understand basic stuff like the difference between optical discs and cartridges as far as data transfer rates go, do you think they really need to know about all that?

You're like the douchebag who always has to say, "Well ACTUALLY..."
Click to expand...

How about letting that person decide how much in depth is good for him? ;) The only douchebag here is you for deciding what is good and not so good for others:dragf:

And yes , ACTUALLY the PSX can handle way more sprites than the Neo. So you should have learned something today too;) System11 HW can display 4096 8x8 pixel sprites, end of story.

Maybe not yet... It would be interesting if SpriteMode can handle those 4096 + big textures for the BGs. The "stripes" (no typo) Neo uses have their advanteges building big chunks of bitmaps but when it comes to many small sprites like in shmups the Neo shits its pants. Or far worse like "A.I." sprite enemies in Shock Troopers 2...

Then we have sprite scanline restriction on the Neo which sucks a little since BGs eating up that limit too. Look how smart bombs "flicker" (or sprite loss on scanline level) at bosses in Neo XYZ, never saw flicker on PSX...
 
Last edited:
Gentle Ben

Gentle Ben

NAM-75 Vet
Joined
Nov 30, 2009
Posts
1,022
Black Fly said:
How about letting that person decide how much in depth is good for him? ;) The only douchebag here is you for deciding what is good and not so good for others:dragf:

And yes , ACTUALLY the PSX can handle way more sprites than the Neo. So you should have learned something today too;) System11 HW can display 4096 8x8 pixel sprites, end of story.

Maybe not yet... It would be interesting if SpriteMode can handle those 4096 + big textures for the BGs. The "stripes" (no typo) Neo uses have their advanteges building big chunks of bitmaps but when it comes to many small sprites like in shmups the Neo shits its pants. Or far worse like "A.I." sprite enemies like in Shock Troopers 2...
Click to expand...
You have a point. My apologies for letting my ego provide a knee-jerk reaction.
Having said that, I don't think there was ever a question that the PS could handle sprites better than NG. I think that was implied (maybe I'm wrong?) in the question: "It SEEMS like the PS should've been able to handle anything the NG had, so why were the ports so bad?"
The bottom line answer to that IS the lack of RAM. When you have a 50Mb cartridge that acts as its own RAM expansion, there was just no way the PS could load that many game assets into 2Mb RAM.
Again though, sorry for starting shit when you were basically adding to what I said, not contradicting it.
 
P

powerflower

Banned
Joined
Mar 17, 2013
Posts
1,034
Hey thanks for solving "our" problems! Ego can be annoying at times i know that too well from myself :) I take that douchebag back, my stupid ego...

Yes that small ram isn't good for big 2D stuff even with big Mask Roms and loading 50MB from CD to ram should be even more fun than NeoCD. SNK was very clever in ditching expensive VRam completely and let the cart acting as such. The 64KB VRam I learned lately is only there for the fixed layer. Really strange but lovely HW.

Greets
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top