One of the most successful and beloved installments of the Capcom franchise, Resident Evil 2 almost miraculously made its way from the first PlayStation to the Nintendo 64 in an unprecedented conversion.
PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Two contemporary consoles that are as beloved as they are tremendously different in terms of their internal structure, hardware, and components. Machines that many of us consider wonderful and that left us with a multitude of classics and simply unforgettable titles, almost all of them exclusive to each system. And because? Well, because of what I just told you: the enormous differences between one and the other, starting with the format in which their games were present: CD-ROM and cartridges.
And what was one of the few exceptions to this that I mention? The shocking, the terrifying, the awesome survival horror Resident Evil 2. This masterpiece appeared on PS1 in early 1998 to leave all Sony console gamers jaw dropping. A captivating and excellent adventure in all its aspects that, a year and a half later, was brought to Nintendo 64 before the utter disbelief of almost any human being… and that includes members of Nintendo itself. Considered one of the most incredible and outstanding ports never made in the entire history of video games, this engineering work was carried out by Angel Studios (that is, the current Rockstar San Diego). Of course, they were not alone, since they received help from the Factor 5 and Capcom Production Studio 3 teams to carry out specific tasks.
There were many inconveniences that the nine members that made up the North American studio had to overcome in order to carry out the task entrusted to them by the Street Fighter company. A collaboration that, by the way, was the first established by Capcom with a study of non-Japanese origin. And the hardest was transferring all the content that was housed on the two CDs on which the original PlayStation title was released onto a Nintendo 64 cartridge. In other words, it was necessary spend about 1.2 GB of memory at 512 megabits (64MB).
The director of this project, Chris Fodor, and Jamie Briant (Lead Programmer), were the two basic pieces that led this project that had a budget of one million dollars, a fairly high figure at that time, and more to be a conversion. But of course, it was not a simple port… quite the opposite.
The first thing Fodor and Briant were clear about was that they didn’t want to cut anything from what was captured in the original game. Characters, stages, enemies, objects… everything had to fit on the Nintendo 64 cartridge. Even the Full Motion Video sequences! 15 minutes of FMV footage They “eat” too much memory, so this format was hardly used by any game that ended up on the Nintendo console. These scenes had to be massively compressed (165:1), using various techniques (such as chroma subsampling and frame skipping) to reduce resolution and bandwidth almost imperceptibly on a CRT screen; and using the Reality Signal Processor of the console to generate a kind of false triple buffering as it was called. Yes, those cutscenes were ultimately moving at 15fps (half of those recreated in the PS1 version) and weren’t quite as sharp, but they were still more than decent in quality.
The end result of this titanic effort made by Angel Studios is obviousRegarding the artwork, the developers came to the conclusion that it was impossible to touch up each element of the original game individually (2D sprites, backgrounds, collisions, objects…). For this reason, what was done was to create a code that encompassed all the assets of the original work so that they were “understandable” by the console, thus saving many hours of work. It was also chosen to use variable resolution for the different backgrounds, so some were a little more blurred, although in return the number of polygons of the 3D characters was increased.
Another very important problem that Angel Studios recognized that it overlooked at first was that linked to the issue of sound. The PS1 title included over 200 audio cuts, all of which needed to be converted to another format. The main problem they encountered is that they did not have experience in this specific field, nor did they have the necessary tools to carry out said transfer in an efficient manner. In fact, the software they had took about ten minutes to process each change made to each sample in order to be able to listen to the result of said sound permutation later. And that’s where it came into play. Chris Huelsbeck and his Factor 5 teamspecialists in taking advantage of the sound chips of Nintendo consoles.
Its powerful Musyx tool, which was used by other development studios outside the German company, made it possible to achieve a truly remarkable quality in the audio tracks. And not only that, since as Musyx was compatible with the Dolby Surround technologyvery cutting-edge at the time, were able to include it in this Nintendo 64 edition, something that was not even contemplated in the PS1 installment, quite an achievement.
The end result of this titanic effort made by Angel Studios is obvious and, today, it is considered a work of craftsmanship and one of the most incredible conversions ever made. A version that was worse in certain areas compared to the original edition (sound quality, color range, sharpness of the scenarios…) but that, in return, had some notable improvements such as more detailed characters and fewer teeth. saw, shorter loading times, Dolby Surround and extra content such as unpublished reports that were scattered around the stages and that enriched the narrative. A historical cartridge and, also, highly valued, given that currently the price of one of them in perfect condition is quite high.
#technically #impressive #Resident #Evil #unknown