Prince Of Persia Resolution Fix

[Marine Farinha]

EverythingMac is just the superior gaming platform. There's no bat autoexecs or sys configs to edit. You don't need to buy a "sound card" or a "video card". You don't need a complicated two button mouse. Everything just works. How can this be?

Could you or someone else explain the key assignment? I can't remember what the key assignment was, but am trying to recall. I don't remember it bothering me back in the day but am sure anything different from DOS style controls with mouselook would bother me these days. I remember preferring Ultimate Doom for Macintosh back in the day because of the better resolution and sound than the Pentium 90 with a Sound Blaster and Windows 95 that I was also running DOS Doom (and later Doom 95) on.

I am not at home right now so as i remember the basic keys that Macs use for Doom 1 and 2 are J,K,L,I for the movement, space for opening doors etc and F for shooting. Macintosh version of Doom has bigger resolution than Dos and the music quality is lot better than Sound Blaster. Dos version has incredible music quality with General Midi like Roland Sound Canvas. Regarding the keys i prefer the dos version and i tried to find if there's a way to change them but with no success. I think there's a program on www.macintoshgarden.org that do this. Technically Mac version is better. Heretic is also technically better on Mac and it supports the arrow keys.

I would like also to add that i have changed the quicktime settings on my Macintosh Performa 6116CD in order to use the Roland Sound Canvas SC88 for music. Doom (1 & 2) and Heretic use successfully the Canvas and the music sounds better.

I have played quite many versions of many of those games on the list, and I would say it's at least _HIGHLY_ (!) debatable, whether Mac versions of some of those games, like the 'Prince of Persia' games are better or not, or often, even on par.

Furthermore, if you really think a game is better on a given platform, surely you can easily write some REASONS and back up your pretty blanket-statement-like claim and not just write a list. I could write a list of all the games that are better on the C64 than Arcade, Amiga, Atari or any other platform, and just leave it at that, but don't you think there would, and indeed SHOULD be a bit of debate or at least conversation about it on a, I don't know, discussion forum? Maybe?

Prince of Persia's Mac version doesn't strike me as all that impressive. The higher-resolution stuff on Mac was often done in a 'cheating' way anyway - they left a lot of 'low res graphics chunks' thinking no one will notice, they upscaled from the lores instead of re-doing the graphics for hires, they used dithering to mask the fact they're actually lores graphics and so on.

Especially a game like Prince of Persia has so many versions made, it might be the 'most cloned game ever'. This means that no matter how good you think the Mac version is, there's bound to be a better version somewhere.

For example, Atari ST version added some kind of visuals, so it's 'better' than the Amiga version. But is it, really? Macintosh version didn't even add that color, and in fact, it REMOVED color by making the stones more uniform and less colorful, removing the atmospheric blue and the contrast between the shades, so now it looks more pale and flat.

The other point is, everything is suddenly cartoony, with a black line around everything, even the torches on the wall! Also, they 'redrew' everything, so the original style is gone, and the torches look like they're made out of glass, which is not only unrealistic, but distracting and uglier in my opinion.

The background bricks meant to create an illusion of a brick wall with only showing a few spots of bricks have weirdly shiny bricks, which is also distracting and ugly to my eye. The original has more uniform shade, which fits better.

I am only saying all this to point out that you can't just slap 'high resolution' and call it better. You would have to DEFINE what 'better' means. You could mean gameplay, you could mean 'experience', you could mean just visuals (and then it becomes highly debatable again, because gameplay should be king, shouldn't it?) and so on.

Look at Super Famicom's version of this game for an interesting example of 'lower resolution but generally considered a better experience'. It's more colorful, it has more interesting level design, it has less dull 'monotonous brick wall' asethetic, and it has different story and ground textures and such. It would be perfectly logical to call _THAT_ version the best, so 'better on a Macintosh' (better than where? Again, not defined) doesn't make sense and is just wrong.

Sure, if you enjoy 'cartoonified higher resolution', if you enjoy this type of 'improvements', you are free to think the Mac version is better, but don't think it won't be debatable, because there are other thing to consider. The lower-resolution versions actually do look more realistic, because they're not a big cartoon.

As a sidenote, why DO so many people make things 'cartoony' when they get the opportunity to raise the resolution? The same thing was done a long time ago with Worms. The original (and perhaps the best version of that game being the 'AGA Director's Cut', because it contains everything possible, and in the most luxuriously glorious graphics ever with AGA's color amount and beauty, plus the smooth, sub-pixel scrolling that Amigas can do - see, I at least explain my viewpoint when I call something the best) looks cool and cute at the same time, without being cartoonish.

When I heard there's going to be a higher-resolution version of this game, I was excited, imagining the same as Worms (or the AGA Director's Cut), but in higher resolution! To see this hand-crafted, talented pixel-magic done in a higher resolution - well, you don't often see that (not even in Mac games, sorry to say), so it was really exciting.... until I saw what they did.

You don't even have to guess, you know - they presented us NOT with the beautiful results of some talented artists' midnight oil, but some easily-done cartoon crap with thick black outlines and no artistic value whatsoever.

I am not saying Mac version of Prince of Persia has no artistic value whatsoever (it does), but I am saying there's -something- similar about them doing this. Some people just can't raise the resolution without making everything outlined, without creating a 'cartoon-look' for some reason. It's a pity, as what could have been done would've been... well, we'll never know.

I wouldn't call The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge particularly 'better', either. I don't think 'how you load a game' has anything to do with what game actually is better. It's easy to load all these games on DOSBOx or even real DOS PC (I have done both without any hassle), it doesn't require that much configuring. Try loading these Mac versions on a real Amiga, you need a dedicated harddrive partition, at least 030@50MHz (preferrably something faster), lots and LOTS of configuration and tinkering, all kinds of cumbersome file transfering...

You can always find difficulties in configuring or running things, emulating a Mac is just much of a hassle than running games on a real DOS PC. If you have the right hardware and know what you are doing, it's really not a problem at all.

We can also talk about music, sound effects and such, and while I do value samples and such things for sound effects, as basically a sample means 'unlimited sound', I do think something charming is lost when analog, live synth, or other live sound (play Falcon Patrol I and II on a real C64 to hear what I mean) is abandoned in favor of samples. General Midi music sounds a bit 'dead' to my ears compared to, let's say OPL3 or even some OPL2 compositions that 'try to sound like an instrument' - there's an incredible charm in a live sound that never ends but constantly changes, or an instrument that tries to sound like a real one but doesn't quite sound like a real instrument. It's like someone beatboxing - no way would anyone confuse a beatboxer with real drums, but it sounds charmingly similar.

So for these (and some other) reasons, I consider Mac versions 'colder', as they don't have 'live sound' but are always sample-based music, MIDI or otherwise. It can sound good, it can sound pleasant, but if we play Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, to my ear, those funky Yamaha synthsounds just sound that much more charming, cozy, pleasanta nd inspirational than just sampled actual instruments playing the same songs. Something crafted, something artistic, something quirky and uplifting is lost for 'clear, realistic mundaneity' - it's like replacing a beautiful victorian mansion with a dull office block. Sure, it's still functional and you can still live in it, but it's just not the same.

And in doing so, I don't think any rational people that do not have some weird nostalgy or emotions tied to Macintoshes, would agree with the list, or even the concept that Mac versions are better, without some really good explanations at least.

So you have more freedom to resize a window in some game? That could be a good argument, but I am not sure it would make the game better for everyone - maybe some people prefer the more easy-to-handle window with smaller amount of information to take in at any given moment.

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