was this added super recently? I remember searching for this a few mo the ago
Wait do people actually like this game? I feel like it doesn't hold up at all and was pretty mediocre when it first came out (outside of a few levels). It definitely didn't lack ambition but I think other retro star wars games stuck the landing way better. The novel was also pretty meh. Not the worst but not the best of the old EU. Another great DF Retro though.
Wait do people actually like this game? I feel like it doesn't hold up at all and was pretty mediocre when it first came out (outside of a few levels). It definitely didn't lack ambition but I think other retro star wars games stuck the landing way better. The novel was also pretty meh. Not the worst but not the best of the old EU. Another great DF Retro though.
Yea and combined with the fact that it had amazing visuals at the time(and sound design ripped straight from the movies).This was one of the most odd games I have ever played.
A mash up of genres, completely different from scenario to scenario.
Still loved it though.
I'll watch asap!
Wait do people actually like this game? I feel like it doesn't hold up at all and was pretty mediocre when it first came out (outside of a few levels). It definitely didn't lack ambition but I think other retro star wars games stuck the landing way better. The novel was also pretty meh. Not the worst but not the best of the old EU. Another great DF Retro though.
I bought it on GOG years ago. But I find it unplayable with the default controls and could never map it properly to my Xbox controller. I'm waiting for it to go on sale on Steam and plan on picking up again. Someone uploaded a guide to cap the game's fps and a controller layout you can download and use.STAR WARS™ Shadows of the Empire™
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... As Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliancewww.gog.com
ÂŁ1.69 in the gog winter sale
iirc it's capped to 60fps and is more difficult because of that, because of logic being linked to frame rate as John mentions in the vid. You may need to cap it at 30fps if you have trouble
I was wondering if Dark1x was going to cover this version. Is it a good port?
Yes I liked it. Warts and all. Would I want to play it today? No. But I always hoped we'd see a greatly improved sequel that built upon what worked: The gameplay and scenario variety, the adventurous tone of the story and of course the soundtrack.Wait do people actually like this game? I feel like it doesn't hold up at all and was pretty mediocre when it first came out (outside of a few levels). It definitely didn't lack ambition but I think other retro star wars games stuck the landing way better. The novel was also pretty meh. Not the worst but not the best of the old EU. Another great DF Retro though.
Yeah, being pc gamer (from ~1994) i found that this game aged pretty badly (unlike Dark Forces series, which i replayed recently), typical clunky console experience. But i played it only in 2018 for a first time.You're correct but apparently nostalgia has no bounds at this point.
This game was not good. Nobody thought it was good at the time, it was just a launch title with a really cool early level that was the best representation of a famous Star Wars battle yet made. People just played the Hoth snowspeeder part over and over again. All the on foot stuff is complete shit, the swoop bike stuff is terrible, and the Outrider stuff is like a discount version of Rogue Squadron. There's nothing this game does that other SW games haven't done better.
I finished Steam version with Dualshock 4 controller, even managed to setup aim gyro lol. Controls was serviceable (maybe apart from very first level, too twitchy)I bought it on GOG years ago. But I find it unplayable with the default controls and could never map it properly to my Xbox controller. I'm waiting for it to go on sale on Steam and plan on picking up again. Someone uploaded a guide to cap the game's fps and a controller layout you can download and use.
Capping fps to 30 fixed most of issues, also dgvoodoo can help with higher resolutions and text size.Steam version is pretty rough, still has a lot of legacy issues and limitations such as the cutscenes not displaying properly and text is almost unreadable when you select a resolution like 1920x1080.
Yeah I feel this was always the consensus, even on launch. People cared about Mario 64 and Pilotwings, not this.You're correct but apparently nostalgia has no bounds at this point.
This game was not good. Nobody thought it was good at the time, it was just a launch title with a really cool early level that was the best representation of a famous Star Wars battle yet made. People just played the Hoth snowspeeder part over and over again. All the on foot stuff is complete shit, the swoop bike stuff is terrible, and the Outrider stuff is like a discount version of Rogue Squadron. There's nothing this game does that other SW games haven't done better.
NTSC to PAL Conversion said:After completing the American and Japanese versions of the game, it was my task to convert the game so that it could run on the European PAL television standard. Being British, I had a vested interest in making sure that the conversion was a good one. This meant two things: first, that the game used the whole of the vertical resolution of the PAL display (625 lines vs. 525 lines of NTSC); second, I wanted to ensure that the speed of the PAL game was the same as the NTSC one, even though the PAL refresh rate is 50hz rather than 60hz.
Fortunately, when we started work on Shadows, we realized that one of the most important things to consider was that it had to be a time-based game, rather than a frame-based one. This would allow for update rates that could vary considerably depending upon scene complexity, as well as the simple fact that we didn't have any real hardware from which to measure performance characteristics. Essentially, the program keeps track of the absolute time between each update of the game. This value, which we called delta time, became a multiplicand for any movement or other time-based quantity. By this method, the game runs independent of the video refresh rate, with all objects moving and responding at the correct frequency.
The other issue had to do with the "letterbox" effect that is common to many NTSC to PAL conversions. In most cases, there is no extra rendering or increase in the vertical frame buffer size, leaving unsightly black bands above and below the visible game area. Since the vertical resolution is now greater than the original NTSC display, the aspect ratio will also change, causing the graphics to appear stretched horizontally.
While I wasn't willing to accept this, I had presumed that I couldn't afford the extra CPU time necessary to render a larger frame buffer, even with the extra time available due to the 50hz video refresh rate. There was also a question of the additional RAM usage required by our triple buffering of the frame buffer. My first attempt, therefore, was simply to change both the field of view and aspect ratios of the 3D engine.
This simple fix solved the "stretching" problem quite nicely, although the display remained letter-boxed, of course. Unfortunately, it also meant that any 2D-overlay status information remained "stretched." There was the potential that game play could be affected because the field of view, by definition, would affect the player's perception of the 3D world.
Again, this just wasn't good enough. What I needed was a solution that didn't require extra rendering, yet would fix the aspect ratio problems. After a little bit of research, I realized that I had discovered earlier that it was possible to change the size of the final visible display area on the output stage of the display hardware. In reality, it's possible to shrink or enlarge the display both horizontally and vertically. To compensate for the letterboxing, all I had to do was change the vertical display size by a factor of 625/525 or 1.19. Once I did this, I immediately had a full-screen PAL version. Or so I thought….
One of things about Shadows is that we had to compress everything in the game to fit it into the cartridge space available. This included the thin operating system that SGI provides as part of the development system. Therefore, upon machine reset, it's necessary to decompress this OS to run the game. To perform this decompression, we wrote a small bootstrap program, which introduced a small amount of time between the hardware being initialized and the OS starting. This lag introduced a onetime glitch on the screen as the video hardware started. Not very noticeable, except to me. After many late nights, I discovered a way to remove the glitch by directly accessing the Nintendo 64 video hardware registers.
Well, it's just the same as the original PC version with modern wrappers around it. I ran out of time for that, though, but it might have been interesting.
Yeah, the slight over spec is likely the issue. I guess the good thing is that it lets the cards run free without much of a CPU bottleneck.Another great video as always Dark1x ! Glad to see DF Retro return, and I love how in-depth these comparisons went.
This shows better image quality than a lot of games today!
Banding is such a distraction for me, and it still seems to be a problem for a lot of games despite the high precision buffers they're using now.
It's like they don't bother with good practices such as dithering at all, and assume the high precision will take care of it - which is not how things work.
I do feel that the video paints an overly negative impression of what PC gaming was like in the '90s though.
Things didn't seem that complicated at all - the Voodoo2 was the card to get. You only had to decide whether you wanted the extra 4MB for higher resolutions/SLI.
I didn't know anyone who was into PC gaming with a 3D accelerator other than a Voodoo2 at that time.
You have to remember that the Voodoo2 launched at $200, and a huge amount of competition at the time pushed those prices even lower.
Everyone seemed to want in on 3D accelerator production. You had companies like Creative Labs who were mostly known for their sound cards producing them, and mine was a Trust-branded card - a European company mostly known for producing budget PC accessories like keyboards and mice.
That's only ~$300 today after inflation, for the fastest card at the time by a large margin - a far cry from NVIDIA's $1200+ RTX 2080 Ti cards.
I'm not saying that it didn't happen, but I only recall people ever choosing other non-Voodoo cards for their 2D performance up until the Riva TNT2 / GeForce 256.
And your system is a little over-specced for the time period.
If I recall correctly, what I had at the time was:
I'm not sure what it had for a sound card, but it was soon replaced with a Sound Blaster Live! 1024.
- Pentium 166 MMX
- 16 MB RAM
- 400 MB HDD (which I think was soon upgraded to something like 2–4 GB)
- S3 Virge DX
- Voodoo2
The Voodoo2 was added after the fact to play 3D games, and I remember having to upgrade to 32 MB of RAM for Final Fantasy VII the next year.
I completely understand why you might not have a system that kind of spec (I'd probably want something even faster - I think there are some late P3/early P4s which still work well for Windows 98 gaming) but I suspect you wouldn't have had so many issues with the game running faster than it should on a P166 compared to a 733MHz PIII!
I never actually bought Shadows of the Empire, but I do remember playing the Hoth level demo quite a few times with this Gravis gamepad.
I have a Voodoo 1 (it's filmed in the video) but, alas, the drivers between Voodoo 1 and 2 are super finicky. Whenever I switch the two, I end up with hours of problems. It's very annoying and I just didn't want to go through that again since I was already tight on time. :-(Good video, really enjoyed it! Really great to see all of the debug options being used and a nice demonstration of how it ran on various PC GPUs...
... that being said, I was really disappointed to not see the Voodoo 1 here. I get that you only have access to so many GPUs, but the Voodoo 2 wasn't contemporary at all when the game came out. Voodoo 2 didn't launch until February 1998; a whole 5-6 months after the PC version came out and over 1.5 years after the N64 itself had launched. Voodoo 2 was also the absolute highest end of the highest end card available at the time; so not really representitive of what the PC experience was like circa 1997 (or even 1998 for most people); not to mention that the Pentium 3 didn't launch until 1999; so again, not truly representitive of the 1997 experience. I had a Matrox Mystique at the time, so there's no way I could've ever had really played SOTE to any decent extent lol!
But I get that its really hard to really, truly recreate the 1997 PC experience these days. You did a good job with the video overall though! Thoroughly enjoyable watch :D