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JoshuaJSlone at 05:01, 25 October 2007

2007-10-25T05:01:09Z

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Recently with talk of SF4, some people have posited both that they hope it's a 2D game, and they hope it focuses on X360/PS3 so it can be a super ultra 2D masterpiece.  Really I don't think there's a lot to be gained there that wouldn't be done on Wii.  Sprites could be even larger, but going to Wii could be as simple as a mass resize operation.  The limiting factor for 2D fighters anymore doesn't tend to be the hardware, but just how much time they'll put into drawing a multitude of large colorful sprites.

Anyway, I was wondering to myself what sort of 2D fighterness Wii could do, and the real limiting factor for tons of sprite work would seem to be memory.  I'm not sure how fast/accessible the 64 MB chunk of RAM in Wii is, so for calculation's sake I decided to stick with the main 24 MB of 1T-SRAM.  Since that part was unchanged from GameCube, my objective really became what sort of 2D fighter could GameCube do; whatever Wii could do would be a superset of this.

As my baseline fighter example, I picked Street Fighter II Turbo on SNES.  Not the arcade original, but for a scaled-down version considered pretty decent.  SNES appears to have something like 128 KB of main RAM with 64 KB of video RAM, but I'm not positive whether a fighter's entire sprites were loaded into memory at once; speedy carts could be trickier that way.  To get a maximum size for the entirety of a fighter, I took the game's ROM size (2.5 megabytes) and divided by 12, the number of characters.  Of course, this really also includes sounds, music, code, and so on, but I can be positive I'm not ''under''estimating, which is the key thing.  So 2.5 MB divided by 12 is about 0.208 megabytes.  So as a baseline for a theoretical GameCube fighting game, two SNES SFII Turbo type combatants should take up .417 megabytes of RAM or less.  If the majority of the 24 MB of main RAM can be spent on them, there's potentially room for over 50 times as much data.

So for 2D fighting fanciness, what would be the memory-eaters?

Let's double the character resolution both ways, to transform them from SNES to 480p proper.  Four times as many pixels, four times as much memory used.  '''4x'''

Let's double the color depth.  The original was probably something like 16 per character, which would make this one 256 per.  Or from 32 to 1024.  Whatever.  Double the color depth is double the bit depth is double the memory used.  '''2x'''

Let's make things smooth and triple the frames of animation.  Of course triple the frames would mean triple the memory.  '''3x'''

So those changes put together, we get 4x2x3='''24x''' as much memory used as the SNES counterpart.  So even using my overestimation of 0.417 megabytes of RAM for two fighters, that would work out to... 10 megabytes being used for characters of crazily higher detail and smoothness.  There's tons more RAM left for growth, too, so they could easily handle having more new types of animations, or to be made even bigger, or whatever.  As I said near the top, it's creating the sprites that's more an issue than the hardware.

GameCube 2D Fighter Calculation - Revision history

JoshuaJSlone: 1 revision imported

JoshuaJSlone at 05:01, 25 October 2007