F-Zero courses from a dead Nintendo satellite service restored using VHS and AI
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/02/f-zero-courses-from-a-dead-nintendo-satellite-service-restored-using-vhs-and-ai/Open linkView original on lemmy.world166
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Good to know the industry have been killing their games even before I was born. Great work restoring it.
It's not exactly killing a game, it was never released outside of Japan - and even there it wasn't widely purchased.
The sad thing is the US SNES did actually have a port for this on the bottom, I always wondered what that was for.
It's just as much game killing than any live service today. Satellaview relied on server connection, there's no official lasting copies that anyone can own.
Were they full priced games as well?
It was a service, but my point is less how much was paid, but that much of it is dead and gone. A completely free game that shuts down its servers and becomes unplayable is still a loss to our culture.
Then Nintendo did a bad job of preserving it. The game could be an expensive eShop download now...
As do most live service publishing companies. That is the whole problem. They aren't bothered by simply looking bad for not preserving them.
It is in the sense that you had to delete the downloaded game to play another, it's why it's hard to preserve these satella games.
Yes but this was also around 30 years ago when data storage was smaller and more expensive.
The biggest SNES games were only a couple of megabytes. Super Mario World is only 512 kilobytes is size. It was certainly possible to archive the complete collection which is 1.7GB uncompressed. In 1992 IBM introduced archival storage tapes that 2.4GB of data.
Always impressed by the lengths people will go to preserve game history and more than a little concerned about them getting cease-and-desisted by Nintendo. At least it looks like it's already on the Internet Archive, so that's good.
From the sounds of it, the AI wasn’t really necessary for this as the levels could have been recreated manually from watching the footage alone.
Not necessary but definitely a helpful timesaver.
I disagree, it absolutely was necessary. The AI tool it was based on (Graphite) creates a frame-perfect emulation of control inputs. While it would technically be possible to manually do it, doing so wouldn't be practicable. Even with the tool, it would take much more effort to actually build the level around the player view, and if they automated that then fair play to them.
You don’t need player inputs to work out the scale and shape of a map.
Again, you're ignoring what is practicable. You could in theory rewrite the game from scratch, but that's just not practicable.
People manually recreate shit all the time for a hobby.
And an F-Zero course is far less complicated than say a 1:1 recreation of a city in Minecraft. Shit having those round sprites on the border of the map already give you a perfect staging point for scale.
Maybe but it would also be immensely more time consuming. Why not use AI to accelerate the process?
Have at it then.
The point was to explicitly not just eyeball it but to be as close to pixel perfect as possible. A manual recreation may have been very accurate but certainly not 99.9%.
Your method would be a remake, this is restoration of the original.