After Watching the Nintendo Gamer's Summit The DS Has..

Goldni

Regular
..really impressed me. After actually seeing games in motion rather than poor quality screen grabs, the graphics look very very nice indeed. Super Mario 64 DS runs at 60 fps instead of 30. And the character models are higher poly count. Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt (the packed in demo) looked incredible..even on the blown up big screen. Imagine how it'll look on the high res lil DS screen(s). Tons of cinemas utilizing both screens simultaneously. One showing a different camera angle than the other. It's extremely ingenious direction by the designers.

Another game that I was going to ignore has now made it's way onto my prebought list. Spider Man 2 by Vicarious Visions. It's all original for the DS. Watch the hour long presentation and discuss here. EA showed Madden and Tiger Woods. In the golf game the bottome screen has a large golf ball that you 'spin' with your stylus after you've made your swing. How 'fast' you 'spin' the ball and in wich direction determines the direction that your ball will spin when it hits the ground. It was really cool to see. Also the stylus swing is pretty neato.

What I first thought was another stupid Ninty gimmick now seems like pure genious in innovation now. I can't wait.
 
Are you entirely sure about that? My impression is that the use of 16-bit color was far more common on the N64. Even on the Gamecube, 16-bit color is quite common.
 
Goldni,

What about the filtering, or lack thereof? No quality loss? I've been steadily becoming more and more intrigued by this little gizmo the more I hear about it.
 
Are you entirely sure about that? My impression is that the use of 16-bit color was far more common on the N64. Even on the Gamecube, 16-bit color is quite common.

I'm fairly certain that game was running in 24 bit color an the n64 was capable of that. That's what the programmers told me back in teh day it launched. On the cube I thnk any game that has antialiasing runs in 16 bit color as well.

I can recall this because I have a 16bit versus 24 bit argument with the programmer. I said 16 bit was enough for the time and all he could do was rave about the N64's graphics capabilities.
 
Most titles on N64 showed lots of dithering in alpha textures, hinting at a 16-bit screen buffer. Turok, Goldeneye etc etc. There wasn't much in the way of alpha blending in Mario64 so I don't remember seeing any in that game.

One game that was curiously devoid of dithering was wave race, making me believe it was indeed running in 24-bit mode. Then again, it had very bad framerates, which may have been an indication why relatively few games used 24-bit... Also, with only 4MB memory, I guess many devs cringed at having to spend the additional RAM.
 
If I recall Perfect Dark was the first to run in 24 bit color because of the RAM expansion pak.

Natoma, good question. The videos showed just how bad screen grabs could make a game look. The games in motion look really good. We here this alot in the industry but afa the DS; screen shots don't do the games justice. Just like the PSX did'nt take good screen shots, so as the DS. Remember the first time we saw Tony Hawk running on tht little PSOne screen? It looked totally waaay better on tht little LCD screen rather than on a 20" TV. Same goes for DS. So some of the blown up shots and vids really don't show the entire 'picture' if you will.
 
Quake2 ran in 24bit if you had the expansion pak.

One thing I remember hearing was a Nintendo promo video at ToysRUs talking about the N64 graphics...it specifically said "21bit color output".
 
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