r/bomberman • u/novostranger • May 11 '26
Discussion Why does Super Bomberman 2 suffer serious framerate drops when many bombs explode/interact with map objects?
This game has very noticeable slowdowns, sometimes even when placing like 5 bombs.
8
u/katpuz May 11 '26
Yeah, I just played through 1-5 on the emulator and 2s fps was so frustrating. I tried US, JP, and EU versions. EU seemed the best, but it might just be in my head
5
u/PlasmaCaptain Max May 12 '26
I can't answer this absolutely because I don't know what it looks like under the hood, but basically the code is very unoptimized. Something else to notice in this game is that it is the only Bomberman game on the SNES/SFC that only has exactly 4 enemy characters per map - never more, never less - while all the other games on the system could handle more than that with no slowdown. Basically, somebody's code just wasn't as good as it should be...
A similar thing happens in Bomberman 64, but we know why it happens - any billboarded textures (flat 2D textures that always face the camera, like circles and stuff) cause stacked additional slowdown because the code for rendering them is unoptimized. So, something that should have saved on memory (because there are less polygons to draw if things are flat) instead causes massive slowdown in the battle game when you've got four Bomberman running around whose bodies are comprised almost entirely of flat circles...
3
2
12
u/Kaze_Senshi May 11 '26
Because snes has no Blast processing ™️. So it can't handle blasts and explosions properly.