recently been commenting about how slow mode7 is in mmf compared to on a snes and got me to thinking about what the nearest equivalent is to mmf in terms of a console. i think even just 2d stuff isnt as quick as a playstation for example, but mmf can do lots of cool stuff (transparency, antialias, etc). i know it depends to some extent on the pc running mmf, and that different systems are better at different things, and i'm also aware that console graphics are never very high res as they are only displayed on tvs, but i just find it amazing what old consoles could do given their hardware limitations.
i'm not talking about "whats the best console?" as thats been done to death already (the answer is clearly the snes), but which is most similar in performance to mmf on the average pc.
You have to remember that consoles only have a really basic OS and programs have direct access to hardware, so there's no need for drivers or anything. If a PC worked the same it'd probably be twice as fast. MMF games are full of runtime crap and stuff that generally slows it down too
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MMF is slow because its a high level, interpreted language.
It has a limited fps that will hopefully be removed (events are read 50 times a second). The Get/Set pixel routines are very slow.
Combine that with windows platform already hogging most of the resources and 640X480 scrolling view with huge playfields all loaded into mem and you have a formula for a slow game.
The SNES is compiled, uses a very streamlined OS, direct hardware acess and no slow surface based routines. It uses limited colors, low resolutions.
If you made your game in pure c++, used good optimization, ect you could do better 2d stuff then the snes .
In all honesty I think MMF was intended to make NES-caliber games. However since hardware allows for more stuff - like more sprites, more colors, rotation, mode 7, parallax, ect. We've reached a point where we're pushing MMF way past what it was expected to do... which I think is cool! Personally I enjoy seeing how hard I can punish it before it drops the ball on me.
But to answer the question, there's not a really good comparison to consoles; anything in 2D, MMF can do... at least within my realm of experience, and I've tried a lot of stuff with it :^) I think it's best for *making* games akin to SNES or Neo Geo - back in the glory days of 2D graphics - but it's more powerful than either of those systems. Ideally our games should be what 2D games would have been if they had continued to develop instead of being choked by polygon graphics.
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MMF mostly uses software rendering methods. If it used hardware directly, it would have no problem doing most of the things we want it to do now (antialiasing, scaling & rotation to name a few).
The Mode 7 object was coded using slow set/get pixel routines. It can be optimised to run 2x faster easily with MMF1.5, and I have no doubts that it'll be even faster in MMF2 with new interfaces it will (hopefully) provide.
I'd say the biggest slowdown besides using software rendering is that windows has so many useless processes, like explorer...that takes up way to much memory when it's doing nothing...one time it was using up 40 MB of space...seen worse, though, notepad once had a memory leak of 1 GB
As a boy, I wanted to be a train. I didn’t realize this was unusual—that other kids played with trains, not as them.
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