F-Zero courses from a dead Nintendo satellite service restored using VHS and AI
F-Zero courses from a dead Nintendo satellite service restored using VHS and AI
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.
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.
levels could have been recreated manually from watching the footage alone.
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.
