Does Metroid usually lag badly when a lot of sprites are on screen?

[Arkanix38]

Hi,

Have been playing through Metroid for the first time on my Twin Famicom and have noticed a significant amount of lag when in Mother Brain's chamber and in some other areas with high sprite count. Is it normal for the fps to drop so low? (sitting around 4 FPS in some parts from the looks of it)

[BaconBitsKing]

It happens with a lot of Famicom games. A lot of games try to help with lag by making the sprites flicker when there are a lot on screen. I don't own Metroid, so I don't know whether or not it does this.


Welcome to Famicom World!

[Arkanix38]

Thanks for the Welcome! But yeah, the low FPS is making beating Mother Brain an absolute nightmare.

[MaxXimus]

Semi related. I have been playing Rockman X and X2 on SFC and holy crap the lag gets bad. Sometimes you can't even shoot the blaster the lag is so bad. It's not uncommon in older games with weak CPU etc. as was mentioned there is a flicker trick some games use to unload sprites from memory to make room for new ones to ell with lag, so just imagine how bad it would be if they didn't do that. I imagine the ges would eventually just lock up.

[P]

I think the flicker trick is mainly to get around the 8 sprites per scan-line limitation of the Famicom PPU. But yeah if a lot of logic is running at the same time, things will "fall behind schedule" and it will lag, totally normal.

[Great Hierophant]

Hi,

Have been playing through Metroid for the first time on my Twin Famicom and have noticed a significant amount of lag when in Mother Brain's chamber and in some other areas with high sprite count. Is it normal for the fps to drop so low? (sitting around 4 FPS in some parts from the looks of it)

Are you playing the cartridge version or the disk version?  I read that the disk version is less prone to slowdown during the fight against the Zeebites and Mother Brain in her lair.  It seemed to be so when I played it on my Disk System.

[Arkanix38]

Are you playing the cartridge version or the disk version?  I read that the disk version is less prone to slowdown during the fight against the Zeebites and Mother Brain in her lair.  It seemed to be so when I played it on my Disk System.

FDS Version. I have noticed that considerably more Zeebites are drawn per screen than on the NES Version. Watching a few playthroughs I have noticed that there are only 3 spawned per screen at any time (probably to prevent the FPS Drop).

[Zycrow]

That battle can be stressful even without software issues - I recommend freezing the Rinkas that fly around, that way you both keep more from spawning and prevent lag from all the moving sprites.

[P]

Seems many things with enemy patterns was cut in the NES version: https://tcrf.net/Metroid.
The escape song has a Kid Icarus-like section added in the NES version though.

[Arkanix38]

That battle can be stressful even without software issues - I recommend freezing the Rinkas that fly around, that way you both keep more from spawning and prevent lag from all the moving sprites.

Thanks, will give that a go next time I load it up. At least its really bloody easy to get health and missles by killing Metroids.

I think I was freezing them before but they were unfreezing too quickly to allow me to shoot off a few missles at Mother Brain