Looks like Castlevania: SoTN is coming to the 360...

There is no way Sony will allow Konami to emulate a PlayStation on Microsoft hardware :lol:

 

As long as the PSX BIOS isn't included, there isn't shit Sony could do about it. Emulators aren't illegal, and Konami owns the rights to the game.

 

If it is mame does a much better job its not quite right

 

Taucias:

As Alchy said, as long as they don't use the BIOS (several PSOne emu's on the PC do not, including PCSX which plays SotN) then they can do whatever the hell they want. There is precedent, as Square used the emulated SNES ROM image for the PSOne version of ChronoTrigger as well as for the Final Fantasy PSOne ports from the SNES.

As for the look, i'm not worried. I'm sure they will offer various aspects (4x3, stretched 16x9) and the 360 supports everything from 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i so somthing should look just fine and dandy.

 

The PSX doesn't have enough RAM or CPU power for that, surely. I assumed they were just sloppy ports.

 

No, it is emulated, but very tricky style ;-) As I understand it they dynamically loaded various parts of the ROM image as needed as opposed to loading the whole thing into memory (as you said, impossible on the PSX) and used speed hacks all over the place. Unfortunatly this method resulted in long (even by PSOne standards) load times as it did this.

In fact, the emulation wasn't perfect, and there are a few instances of "slow-down" and music not sounding quite right....

But see for yourself, just pop the PSOne ChronoTrigger disc into your PC and the ROM image is there to be copied off, and works in ZSNES and Snes9x...

 

Fair shout, that's proof enough for me. I wonder if they'd lost the source code? Might be why there's never been a GBA port, although they could've pulled a similar trick there surely...

 

But it does NOT support 240p -- the resolution that it, and most old 16-bit and 32-bit 2D games are run in. So no... will not look "dandy" by a stretch. It could look liveable with some filters that most PC emulators have, to at least emulate the low resolution, but of course, won't. Once again, the free/illegal alternative method of playing the game yields better results than the legal alternative.

As for the the emulation versus port question, if you think all of these games are being re-written and re-compiled to be part of X-box live, I can only say "pass the bong". Almost nothing that can be emulated is ported.

 

Heh, if you connect your 360 to your TV using the RCA jacks and play SotN I can damn well guarantee it looks nearly identical to the PSOne hooked up the same way. I would very seriously doubt with a 2d game that there would be much noticable difference, and really, 320x240i via RCA and 640x480i via RCA is just nitpicking, and I daresay in a blind test with 2 TV's displaying the same game you would have great difficulty chosing the correct one...

Also, not all of the "classic" games appear to be emulated though.

Gauntlet, Joust, Robotron, and Frogger all have updated graphics (redrawn sprites and player fields)...

And obviously all the 'new/just for XBLA/ exclusive' titles are ground up, same as any other 360 title ... (Geometry Wars, etc)

 

Are you sure these aren't just later console ports being emulated?

 

A 240p source when sent to a standard NTSC TV is displayed as 480i. Everything and anything with a RF, Composite or S-Video output displays on a NTSC TV in 480i.

-hl718

 

here is a picture taken of Ketsui, running through S-Video. It is noticeably worse than it's RGB counterpart (colors bleed, etc), but it is not interlaced. The only time an image will be interlaced is if the TV does not support 240p, and interlaces it itself. Other than LCDs, I've never heard of these TVs, but am no guru so won't say they do not exist.

 

Color bleed is a chroma issue that has *nothing* to do with resolution.

If it's an NTSC signal, it's 480i. And if it's running through S-Video, it's interlaced. NTSC simply cannot display a 240 progressive image. You can try to fake it by creative use of the interlaced frames, but you're still pushing out an interlaced signal as soon as that data leaves the video encoder chip on the system.

Just because it is generated as a 240p internally and in VRAM doesn't mean that it's 240p when it leaves the system.

-hl718

 

Yes, quite sure. One other possibility is that they are being emulated but the n ewer sprites/playfields are beind dran "on top of" the emulation to make them look better, though that sounds like overkill. So they are either ports or "emudx" style emulation.

 

Can you please find me some source to back this up? I've taken a picture of NTSC S-video displaying 240p output. I took pictures but didn't post of NTSC RGB display 240p... looks similar, but much better looking (hence, my post about the colors). Both are clearly 240p. Also, what about all these American arcade games? They run in NTSC RGB at 15khz, non-interlaced.

Here's some quick google findings:
Source

Source

Source

Later in that same thread:

EDIT: Finally, I will admit that it does seem a bit silly to get all worked up about resolutions if you're using RCA, and to a lesser extent S-Video. These are miles down the evolutionary ladder for 15khz display, but that's beside the point for this argument.

 

x

 

Easier to show than explain. Do you by any chance have the Gunstar Heroes Treasure Box, or one of the other recent Sega Ages 2500 games? These come with ALL resolutions:

240p
480i
480p
480p + fake scanlines (this is the filter I suggest XBL use for those w/ HDTVs -- it will at least try to emulate how the games originally looked. Obviously not hard to implement.)

If you have a CRT display, you should be able to see the difference between 240p/480i quite easily.

This is a good article on scanlines, and how they work in different modes.

 

How about the NTSC spec itself? NTSC is an interlaced format. That's just the way it is. You can look at any tech reference to see it. Just because some forum posts claim it can do 240p doesn't make it so.

Many people get confused on how different formats work, especially when comparing analog and digital formats as well as comparing a computer signal to a TV signal. Hell, I've heard people claim they were outputting 600i to their TV because the computer screen was set to 800x600 and the TV out was active. If you don't know much about the format, then it sounds plausible but once you start to learn about how the signal is sent and displayed the claim becomes a source of amusement.

-hl718

 

I'd like to see in the spec where it says that. I've shown a picture of NTSC S-video display in 240p. My supergun also outputs NTSC RGB (also 240p). ALL 15khz arcade games in Japan are NTSC, and with very few exception (Atomiswave games being almost all of them) use non-interlaced progressive signals.

 

Playing street fighter on 360 i have not noticed any washed out look, and on the hd screen on the front it looks fine actually. The only thing they used in this port to help cope witht he higher res acordding to a capcom rep in a video interview with gamespot is up the color to 32bit.