Talk:Ballz

Discussion of topic subject
Untitled This game CHEATS! Dumaka (talk) 13:57, 23 January 2008 (UTC) The Mature Gamer Podcast sent me here!

Sega DSP chip

I worked on Ballz. I have no recollection of any special "DSP chip" being added to the BOM for the Sega or SNES cartridge to address tearing issues. Source? --Tedbarnett

The source is me. Sorry, I know we prefer sources we can reference, but I worked on the game too (I was a tester at Accolade at the time). The Sega version was great (well, they both were, really), but suffered from a great deal of sprite breakup. Sega said it'd have to be fixed before they gave it their approval. Apparently, the only way to do this was to add a DSP chip to the cart. The extra cost meant they had to cut something else, so they eliminated a number of sound effects (meaning they could cut one ROM, reducing cost). It was changed late in the production process, after it had been submitted to Sega once. What part of the game did you work on?

Please sign your posts. You can do this with 3 or 4 tildes (~~~ or ~~~~). The latter is preferred, as it also adds a timestamp. — Frecklefoot | Talk 14:38, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Dont you guys mean the Nintendo version? That one DID came with a DSP chip.

I'm quite sure you actually mean the SNES version. That one definitely had 8 MBit and a DSP chip, the SEGA version had 16 MBit. I've never heard about a DSP in the SEGA game before reading this "article". And there is still some sprite breakup in the Genesis version... doesn't look like they used a DSP. What do you think? -- Simon

Well, it's been a long time, but memory says it was the Sega version. But it could've been the SNES version. Whichever version it was, I think it was better with all the sound effects, sprite breakup notwithstanding. BTW, where did you hear about the SNES version having a DSP chip? It's not like it was announced on the packaging or anything. — Frecklefoot | Talk 16:32, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

DSP chips have been an issue for authors and users of SNES emulators for years, and for copier users years before that. Apart from a few extremely obscure Japanese titles, it's well-documented which games use DSP chips, and which ones they use (google something like "Ballz SNES DSP" and you'll get hundreds of pages). By contrast the only DSP chip anyone worries about on Genesis is the SVP (the chip used to do 3D rendering for Virtua Racing). --- Ex-Cyber

I was one of the programmers on SNES Ballz. It did indeed use the DSP chip, the same one used by Pilot Wings. (I even had to hand wire the DSP into our development system, which I still have). We had the option of either a 16MBit ROM or an 8MBit ROM and the DSP. We chose the DSP because the SNES CPU ran at half the speed of the Genesis, and was less capable as well. We didn't have to cut any features, we just compressed a lot of the data. I am a bit surprised that Ted doesn't remember that, we went with the DSP fairly early on. The Genesis version did not use a DSP, all of the math was done in the 68000. KevinSeghetti (talk) 07:31, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

ted said he didn't remember a DSP was used on either version *to address sprite tearing issues*. that is true, our use of the DSP on the SNES had nothing to do with sprite tearing (not even an issue on the SNES version).

i was the other programmer on the snes version. indeed, we (KevinSeghetti and I and PF.Magic) did decide to use the pilot wings dsp early on. however, when accolade agreed to publish the game, they gave us the option of either a 16Mbit cartridge (like the genesis version) or 8Mbit + DSP. with a simple, but fast lzss decoder, we were able to pack all of the sound and graphics assets on the cartridge. (as a sidenote, remember that all of the sound effects went through a BRR conversion process, which was used by the Sony sound DSP on the SNES, provided another form of compression not found on the Genesis cart).

i've deleted the entire contents of the DSP on the main page; after eliminating the inaccuracies, precious little real information remained.

Will Norris 15:53, 18 Jan 2010 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.165.158.164 (talk)

Sprite breakup

What is sprite breakup (at least I have a clue) and why does it occure? --Abdull 10:59, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Sprite breakup is when one frame from a sprite is drawn before another frame is "erased." It also occurs when a sprite starts to be drawn at a second location before it is "erased" from the first location. When this occurs, the sprite graphics appear jagged and flashy (in a bad way).

It occurs when the second frame or new location is drawn out of sync with the vertical refresh of the elctron gun in the monitor. It's kind of technical, but a monitor or TV displays the screen's image with an electron gun (at least in CRTs, I don't know how plasma screens do it). It moves from top-left to bottom-right. As it is repositioning itself from bottom-right to top-left, it is called the "vertical refresh" time. During this time, sprites are typically moved to their new position or display a different frame. If done during this time, they are successfully "erased" and when drawn on the screen on the next pass, look just as they should, with no breakup. If, however, a game changes the sprite's location out of sync with the veritcal refresh, sprite breakup can occur.

This is usually how sprite breakup occurs. But for Ballz, I think the breakup was a result of noisy DMA or some other thing. Otherwise, I don't know why they'd need a DSP chip. Anyway, hope this helps. — Frecklefoot | Talk 16:08, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Genesis and SNES graphics don't work like modern computer platforms - to the extent that sprites must be "erased", this is handled entirely by the sprite hardware. On Genesis sprite glitches are usually the result of having too many sprites on the same display scanline; regardless of the number of sprites that can be defined in VRAM, there is a limit as to how many sprite pixels can be displayed on one line, and exceeding that limit causes sprites over the limit to simply disappear wherever they overlap with the overcrowded lines. SNES has a much higher limit (its sprite hardware works somewhat differently from the traditional model employed by the Genesis VDP). I strongly doubt that the DSP has anything to do with this; the Genesis version has no DSP, and the one used in the SNES version couldn't have done the graphics rendering as it implements a high-level set of geometry manipulation routines. The internal code is fixed (i.e. a developer was not able to directly program the DSP engine with game-specific code) and it was intended for implementing games like Pilotwings and Super Mario Kart that needed to do more geometry calculations (primarily for generating the control values for the rotating/scaling background) than the weak SNES CPU could handle, not for rendering sprite-heavy games. --- Ex-Cyber

Well, like I think I stated, I was only a tester on this title, not a programmer and I just got the technical mumbo-jumbo from the lead tester, who probably converted what PF Magic told him into something he could grasp. When I asked him what the DSP chip was for, he said "I don't know," except that it related to sprite breakup.

Thanks for your input, Ex-Cyber, but please get an account (it's free) and sign your name (with 3 or 4 tildes (~~~ or ~~~~). The latter form is preferred, since it also adds a timestamp. Cheers! — Frecklefoot | Talk 16:01, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Ballz genesis box art.jpg

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BetacommandBot (talk) 06:38, 25 February 2008 (UTC)