Anybody remember the Asute level with blinking obstacles ? Mindblowing gameplay !
Welcome to the fantasy zone !
Playing a game on a modern platform (including MAME running on a PC) adds about 100ms of latency, minimum. That's not a ton of latency, and games can still be plenty fun, but it's on the threshold of being noticeable and even if we're not conscious of that input lag, it's just not the game as that "I'm wired directly into the machine" feeling of a true zero latency setup.
http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...
(of course, even in an all-analog setup, there can be latency, but not on the order of 100ms. at least not on the hardware side of things)
Here's a video recording to really jog those memories; make sure to watch at 60fps! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLOf2StF_zY
However you really need to look at the cabinet design too, which was really cool: https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9660
I'm kind of laughing because it's simultaneously like...
(a) impressive that they even pulled this off
(b) you might almost have to know what the original Space Harrier is "supposed" to look like in order to recognize what the heck is going on there
The fascinating thing is that the C64 port was actually fun. It's decently fast, all the core gameplay is there, and it's got way more stuff moving and happening at once than you normally ever saw on the C64, or any 8-bit system really. There were quite a lot of crappy 64 ports of much less technically impressive games (Karnov and Ikari Warriors come to mind), so the fact that they (or him, I think this was a one-man effort like most C64 games) managed to make it work is kinda mind-blowing.
And I just learned that this was the somewhat-rushed UK release--the programmer apparently tweaked it a lot for the US release, adding striped ground textures, better projectiles, much better running animations, and improved sound effects, among other things. Wow.
The graphics were mind-blowing. Big part of why I became a programmer, even though I went down a different path than game development.
Those big, bright, detailed sprites moving around with hardware-accelerated scaling at a smooth rock-solid 60fps!
There had been nothing like that before.
I mean, we'd sort of seen all this before. There had been wireframe vector 3D games like Battlezone. And even in 1986 it's not like we'd never seen psuedo-3D scaling effects before; even the arcade version of Pole Position from ca. 1982 had smoothly-scaled sprites.
But nothing had ever come remotely close to putting it together like Space Harrier. The entire screen was filled with a mindbending number of these huge scaling sprites, and the sprites themselves were as wild as the pseudo-3D motion: dragons, mushrooms, robots, and other bizarrities all rendered in a color palette that was much more nuanced than many games that had come before, predominantly rendered in that signature 1980s "Sega" look that used vibrant colors sparingly amongst predominantly pastel shades, a look that was beautiful and functional.
Love reading interviews like this, where the devs talk about how hardware limitations shaped their design decisions.