Porting Disaster: Difference between revisions

* The original release of the [[Sega Genesis|Sega Mega Drive/Genesis]] versions of ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (video game)|Sonic 1]]'' and ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog 2|Sonic 2]]'' on the iPhone. The original iPhone's hardware may well have been plodding for a modern smartphone, but it still had a 400 MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM versus the Megadrive's 7.6 MHz CPU and 64''KB'' of RAM. Yet both ''Sonic 1'' and ''Sonic 2'' were awful, stuttery messes compared to the originals despite running on vastly superior hardware. (Supposedly this was because Sega dropped barely modified [[ROM]]s of the original games into an incredibly inefficient and badly ported/optimized emulator - various third party/jailbroken solutions have produced significantly better results.)

* The port of the original ''[[Mega Man X]]'' on iOS. The sprites have been redrawn at a higher resolution, which sounds good, except that instead of actually hiring decent artists to redraw the sprites, like they did with ''Super [[Street Fighter II]] Turbo HD Remix'', most of the sprites look like Capcom just ran the SNES sprites through some kind of graphical filter software. No new colors or detail have been added, making quite a few of the sprites look ''worse'' than the SNES version. Some of the animations have lost frames, looking choppier than the original, some of the music is lost, and the visually interesting graphical font used in the SNES version is replaced with a boring generic font. The levels don't scroll smoothly anymore, rather being divided into discrete sections with loading between them. How an almost 20 year old game can be ported to a platform with immensely superior hardware and end up running worse is just mind-boggling.

 

== Disastrous ports to PC operating systems ==