Yeah, I only learnt this in the last couple of years after seeing a video of how it was done on NES and then looking up how it was then done on SNES too.
I did back in the 90s when the first emulators were coming out and they didn't quite have layer blending down just yet. I actually liked Super PunchOut like that, but in other games like Chrono Trigger your progress would be stopped dead when you got to 2300 AD; nothing but fog 😂
Really interesting how the developers used the transparency to make some really cool effects. I didn't recognize some of the games. Would have been helpful to have the names of the games as you showcased them.
@@jaysharpESQUgh! No. You really don't want to play that. It's terrible. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein based on the movie that came out around the same time. God awful.😂
That's not entirely accurate. Something translucent is something that allows light through but does not allow you to see what is on the other side. Like frosted glass. Something that is transparent, even if only partially, allows you to see what is behind.
@@jmbenettiI remember Zsnes being the first one doing transparencies. I think ZSNES v. 4 was the one. Can't remember the year, I think it was 98. Suddenly a lot of games became playable like Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger.
@@gabrieldias3479 I didn't remember that, but I used SNES9x before Zsnes then I switched to Zsnes for years, can't remember if it was for performance or maybe because it had more accuracy or transparencies. My first Chrono Trigger playthrough was on Zsnes, years after I sold my SNES. I remember fondly that emulator.
Your videos give me ideas when creating podcasts and even help consider approaches for visual tricks for my own overlays and animations, so thank you for your work. Great channel!
The high resolution mode ONLY applied to BG layers.. not sprites. So it's a bit dubious to generically say it had a high res mode, without mentioning it doesn't apply to sprites.
I mean, I'm specifically talking about background modes and I don't think I ever implied sprites were part of that, but I guess it doesn't hurt to clarify this kind of thing. Thanks for the comment!
@@WhitePointerGaming I mean in general. It always gets portrayed as a "general" higher res in videos and discussions, when it's only the BG itself. People naturally think that if the video output is higher res, that it's ALL higher res unless otherwise stated. The exception would probably be people that grew up with the C64 hahah. Anyway, not being applied to sprites.. in some ways it's a good thing. It's not all bad. The SNES sPPU doesn't have enough bandwidth to fetch highres sprites (or a line buffer large enough for it), etc. Meaning showing the existing sprites fetched and rendered to the sprite line buffer would basically have half the horizontal screen coverage/real-estate in pixels. Because they didn't do this, I'd say that's a pretty strong indication that the primary purpose for high res BG modes was most likely highres kanji support. The horizontal interleaved mode ("pseudo high res") could have been there as their attempt at transparency before the color math sections were added in later development? Unclear.
I first got wind that transparency in SNES wasn't actually that, but they make the colors look that way, from the SNES guide book that came out alongside with the console's introduction (made by Nintendo). It's great to finally see the technical details behind this! And yeah, this was a good amount. I may want to go into further tech details... but, not today!
Mode 5 does not have "severe color limitations" (not as many people think). The 1st layer has 8 palettes of 16 colors per tile, which gives a total of 128 colors (actually 120 colors because the 1st color of each palette is transparent), while the 2nd layer has more limited colors, being 8 palettes of 4 colors, which gives a total of 32 colors (24 colors because the 1st color of each palette is transparent). The mistake is that people confuse color per tile with the total number of colors.
It's interesting and ironic how Nintendo seems to now have this perception as a company who makes weaker hardware compared to the competition but that's definitely a fairly recent phenomenon. Even if you go back as far as the NES people forget that it's Famicom technology was conceived in late 1981 or early 1982 and was supposed to come out I think in late 82 but due to hardware bugs they pushed it back to July 1983. Most systems both computer and console used primitive hardware by comparison with a max of between 8 and 16 colors on screen with single color sprites that were often layered to fake having more colors. The NES could do 25 colors on screen and featured horizontal hardware scrolling which was advanced for the time. Same thing with the Super Famicom, that technology was pieced together 1987 and it's prototype was publicly shown in Japan in 1988 despite it's 1990 Japan and 1991 US release. I digress, but overall just the base SNES even without enhancement chips was remarkable compared to it's contemporaries.
Yeah, the NES, SNES, N64 and GC were all significant advancements in technology at the time (it's often misunderstood just how powerful the GC was). While Nintendo has always tried to innovate and introduce new ways of playing, the philosophy of not trying to compete directly on raw power only really started with the Wii. Mind you, that was almost 20 years ago now!
@@WhitePointerGaming Yeah for a long time people just assumed the original Xbox was better graphically since it more easily did higher resolution and had the faster Pentium III clock speed to rely on, which to be honest even I fell for the hype for a time, but in reality it's not true. The ATI flipper could pump out nearly 10 Gflops along with it's custom TEU or Texture Environment Unit while the nVidia GPU in the Xbox was just above 7Gflops. It's impossible to know or simulate a comparison but I now question if the Xbox could pull of the fidelity of certain breakout GC titles like Metroid Prime, Rogue Squadron 2, and Resident Evil 4? I know Spiderman The Movie performed slightly better with frame rates on Xbox but again I chalk that up to CPU horsepower more than anything.
I don't have any experience with the GC, but whenever I see footage from GC games they have, in my opinion, aged way better than their competition like the Dreamcast and even the powerful PS2. The original Xbox didn't age badly, but I think GC looks better (even for today's standards) GC had a pretty powerful hardware.
Interesting enough, the N64 wouldn't be able of additive blending effects which made the visuals suffer a lot while they tried to do all these visual FX on the SNES.
I'm not actually saying "Snez" with a 'z' sound (which I understand was common in the UK) but "Sness" with an 's' sound (which was common in Australia). :)
Thanks for providing an explanation to something I had noticed as a kid, and was always curious about (the transparent ghost not being transparent on top of another)! Your channel and videos are great!
12:37 OK, how was THIS done? Those helicopters certainly seem like they're scaling in Mode 7, but at different rates and moving in different ways... on one background layer?? Another shot of the choppers a few seconds later also has the telltale shimmer of scaling effects, even as they *overlap.* There's some real dark magic here.
The first instance might be using a rare "sub-mode" of mode 7 called EXTBG. Basically it creates an extra layer that is identical to the first (it's more complicated but that's the jist of it). The helicopters are being scaled with mode 7, and 2 helicopters are being created using the EXTBG feature. It wasn't used very often but this is one case where it was. The two layers can't scale or scroll independently though so they are needing to scale and scroll it in such a way that both helicopters appear on screen at once with one slightly behind the other. There's an additional third helicopter that briefly appears on the right of the screen but that's a separate part of the background layer. The other shot at 12:49 doesn't have any scaling going on, the choppers are just sprites that are moving across the screen at slightly different speeds and directions.
From what I can see, the ability to display multiple scaling helicopters at once is done here by effectively changing or splitting the background mode part way down the screen using HDMA, although this time just to the same Mode 7 again, which is why the helicopters are separated by their vertical position on the screen. No independently scaling helicopter will ever be on any of the same horizontal scan lines as another while scaling for this reason, unless they're actually just scaling exactly the same as the one across from them, so it's really a larger single image with two helicopters drawn into it that's scaling all at once across that horizontal slice. In principle, you could split the background many times down the screen like this and have many more scaling objects than you see here, just with the limit of one on any horizontal scanline or multiple scaling basically in unison per scanline. If that makes sense. It's technically how the they do the two-player split screen Mode 7 levels on Contra III: ruclips.net/video/MCu68aVipcc/видео.htmlsi=8bcwQYs-R_7UowpG&t=401 Or the split screen mode in Street Racer: ruclips.net/video/j18y3sc3fIQ/видео.htmlsi=FPd2nnyPuHMyUyXZ&t=52 Those two examples have a little black bar separating the two views there, but that's for another reason. The ending of Rendering Ranger R2 uses a similar effect on the ending scene with the scaling planet and spaceship on-screen at the same time: ruclips.net/video/Tl7D25I6yDc/видео.html And Turtles in Time does similarly when you see two Turtles scaling and rotating independently as they fall through time also: ruclips.net/video/-JW-9QPKG-g/видео.html Just imagine there's an invisible horizontal line always separating multiple instances of Mode 7 scaling objects at once, and never the twain shall meet, unless they are just scaling the same as the ones across from them horizontally like all the particles at the end of Rendering Ranger during the explosion: ruclips.net/video/Tl7D25I6yDc/видео.htmlsi=2l0zTdl5_8pqpqzJ&t=4380 I think this ability to show multiple scaling/rotating objects on-screen is definitely an underused feature of the SNES. Note: From what I understand, EXTBG is what allows you to have sprites be either below or on top of different parts of the same single Mode 7 background layer by setting the priority of the background to either high or low on a per pixel basis, as you can see when the characters pass under the bridge in Contra III below: ruclips.net/video/MCu68aVipcc/видео.htmlsi=2Ialfn4oW42iAAm-&t=353 And even better example of that is this boss from Super Turrican 2 that shows the player moving behind individual teeth of the giant sandworm, even though those teeth are drawn on the same background layers as the rest of the creature: ruclips.net/video/5CFd7qc_EjY/видео.htmlsi=PiI7cPw-Oy90TSHI&t=1144
@@inceptional Dynamic frame rendering was such a powerful technique, but oh so always unintuitive. Big uses: Horizontal split line, parallax or wobble (scanline shift) ; vertical perspective (scanline scale & skip) ; multiplying sprites or planes (re-using slots), including tiling them ; increasing colors (palette modification)… Am I missing any?
@@musaran2 I guess using it to create static HUDs on one part of an otherwise likely scrolling background/foreground layer. Many NES games did this with the single background there, and the SNES is capable of similar. That might be covered in one of the methods you mentioned though.The HUD and Krang are actually on the same BG layer in Turtles in Time for example: ruclips.net/video/i9eZ3JAWjfo/видео.htmlsi=axny1kqV1bCjxxub&t=176 Turning on/of transparency on a per line basis, so you could start with say an opaque mountain background at the top of the screen and then half way down turn on colour math for semi-transparent water. I'm sure that's possible, and I presume is how Maxwel did it in the shmup level he's working on, which I created the art for. I'll link a video of my own GM8 test below, but Maxwel's version is slightly different on his Twitter channel, so it's possible he actually achieved the effect slightly differently to how I understand it, albeit with the same end result ultimately: ruclips.net/video/v72EeSQuGio/видео.htmlsi=jhHkAuVLV2O5m2Fj Cheating with the Main/Sub screens to effectively force background layers into priorities above other background layers that normally wouldn't be possible. You can usually only switch high/low priority between BG4 and BG3 directly and then BG2 and BG1 directly, but not switch priority between say BG3 and BG2. But, by abusing the Main/Sub screen, you can effectively set BG2 above BG3 on specific scanlines if you like, as one example. In an early build of my Mode 0 shmup, programmer LMPuny used this to force the rows of cars that were on BG3 in front of the bridge road that was on BG2: ruclips.net/video/Rse4ItsnC2A/видео.htmlsi=oOIlekdoUyn_Bnv1 Note: There is a trick that's only available in Mode 1 to bring BG3 in front of all other layers, which was most often used for displaying HUDs in many SNES games, but that's not the same thing I'm talking about here that you can also use in Mode 0 for example. Drawing window/shape masks, along with changing the backdrop colour per scanline to achieve some interesting shapes that can even be used as fake background elements/layers, such as the two large chess pieces in my mockup example: ruclips.net/video/hGtZ_1MMh60/видео.html Those are some I can think of off the top of my head anyway. And you've touched on some of them or aspects of them in the video already, but maybe there's a couple of examples there of interest to you. By the way, random thing that popped into my head while watching the video above again and the section around the use of SNES' proper high-res mode(s): I just wanted to link this example of an in-development SNES shmup that shows it using Mode 5's 512x448i mode during full gameplay with full colour, multiple background layers, window/shape masks, transparency, loads of enemies and bullets and stuff on-screen, and all at a solid 60fps without any enhancement chips, just so people understand it's truly a proper mode that can be used for full quality games like every other mode on SNES: ruclips.net/video/1AGMEZvU14g/видео.htmlsi=8uiZSJf9LEE1PHeN&t=1535
@@inceptional 1) Old status trips were a simple form of screen splitting. Note: Surprisingly VGA was capable of splitting, BUT only once per frame and only reset to default. So old PCs basically only used it for this, like Doom. 2) And reflections! Thought I suspect some hardware could not reverse scanline stride, and it had to be reprogrammed per scanline, or outright faked with duplicate graphics. 3) I thought such small Z-tricks were sprites masquerading as plans overlaps. I hadn't thought enough. 4) The "math layer" seems unique to the SNES. Shame, it made a lot of sense in a world struggling with fill rate and bandwidth. Today's brute-force rendering is simpler, but we lost so much.
Man even the GBA couldn't handle most of these tricks, I play Donkey Kong Country on the GBA and even though it had more contents than the Super NES version, it does lose a lot of the effects that the Super NES was able to pull off. The second level in DKC is a clear example of that, the rain and storm effects looks and sound realistic in the Super NES original but on GBA it produce the rain just fine but the storm effects is gone making the level felt unnatural.
Your video opened my eyes. I always assumed the Snes used 1 bit Alpha Transparency. Something I used in pygame for my own little games. Very cool video, thanks !
Correction: in a tile bitmap, palette index 0 is always treated as transparent. That is technically 1-bit (on/off) transparency. The color math that SNES games are using is technically 15-bit transparency, since the 15 color bits of a mainscreen pixel (5 bits per RGB channel) are combined with the 15 bits of the corresponding subscreen pixel. An example for seamless transparency is in Chrono Trigger's 2300 AD era, when the "'Guardian" boss in Arris Dome is defeated.
The examples you've shown as averaging are actually all additions, except for Punch Out. You can tell by the presence of black that when added results in nothing, and brighter colors get their luminosity summed with the other screen, useful for clouds (note they are grey not full white) and water.
Averaging is closer to real life transparency, because it's as if you make 2 planes transparent (halfing every value, white goes closer to grey, colors get duller) and then overlap them. Addition sums the brightness of the 2 planes, black becomes full transparent but what is bright becomes brighter and often "burnt" because the result is over the dinamic range.
When DLP projectors use the same interlacing technique you (they) call pseudo high resolution, they call it "wobulation". I wonder if this is where they got that idea.
it annoys me that most emulators don't take the blending a CRT did into account. It makes the games looks so much worse than what they are supposed too.
By not taking the screen into account, or even worse by trying to 'improve' the picture, emulators frequently make games look a lot worse than they should. It affects everything from colors, to sharpness and blending. Modern official emulated re-releases, like the Contra Collection, suffers from this too.
It's not really the CRT doing it but band limiting in composite encoding. If you use component or RGB cables you won't see the same effect and even with S-Video it won't be as prominent.
Now *why* would you use psuedo-hires mode for 50% transparency when there's already another mode that does 50% blend between main screen and subscreen? Because when you use the 50% blend transparency mode, sprite palettes 5-8 get transparency and sprite palettes 0-3 don't. But when you do 50% transparency by using the psuedo-hires mode, the effect is applied the same way to all sprite palettes.
It also, in theory, frees up the colour maths circuit to apply other transparency effects, but I don't think any games actually took advantage of this.
Hi-res mode (psuedo or normal) and color math can't really be used at the same time, because hi-res mode is already drawing both the main screen and subscreen at the same time. But you can still do color math with a fixed color.
Hires mode isn't exactly doing 50% blending on a composite display. Rather it's more like the chroma is blended while the luma isn't really, although that's still a bit of an oversimplification. That's why you could get both hires text and blending at the same time, it's a matter of what sorts of colors are used and not whether or not it's "pseudo" highres or not.
(Re: The high res modes,)And here you show why I am all in on shaders that are all in on phosphor dot emulation, rather than scanline imitation. The scanlines were just how the game systems output the data. That "warm antialiasing" that us old-heads talk about was from phosphor dots that brought the raster-lines to life, and a fairly low resolution in comparison to even CRT monitors of the time.
Also, CRTs does not blend the pseudo high res together like in emulation. If you viewed it over composite, it has all kinds of composite interference in it. It's noise-y and grain-y. It's not a nice looking blend either.
Well, yes, but not in the way you might be thinking. It wasn't the case where PPU-1 controlled the main screen and PPU-2 controlled the subscreen or anything like that. The two PPUs worked together to create these effects. The very simplified explanation is that PPU-1 handled the backgrounds and sprites and PPU-2 handled everything else. It's more complicated than that but the main point is they were always working together.
@@WhitePointerGaming so it wasn't a specific function like other 2 GPU systems??? I wonder how fast the bandwidth is between the 2 PPUs to handle all that communication.
again it's not an alpha blending, you have a similar effect on the Saturn it's able to make semi opaque sprite, same thing for the snes it was build in on the hardware on a special mode. thanks for the memo !!!
You say in the beginning that the SNES can't do real transparency but only simulate it. But what is real transparency then? Isn't it color averaging even in real life? My question is genuine, not like I'd like to correct someone on a subject I don't know.
"Real" transparency uses an alpha channel as the transparent channel, but the SNES doesn't do this. There's no alpha channel. Mind you, it's as real as it got in that generation, there wasn't anything else that got remotely close to it until the 5th generated started. So for all intents and purposes, in comparison to the competition, you can say it's real, but on a technical level, it's essentially simulated transparency because of the lack of an alpha channel.
@@WhitePointerGaming Hmm yeah I get the concept of alpha channel. But in the end, even on modern hardwares, isn't the transparency done internally by averaging the colors between them according to the alpha values?
@@mrnuage I think it's one of those things that due to the never-ending fanboy wars people have really started to get obsessed with the exact inner workings and technical definitions of how an effect like this is achieved to use in system arguments versus just what they're seeing on-screen ultimately. They don't ever want to concede a point to the other system, even when one system patently trumps the other in some area, so they turn the debate into some technophile talk to detract from the real point. Note: I'm not even remotely suggesting that's what the video creator is doing, as I can tell they're very reasonable and objective about this stuff, and in fact seem like they're probably a fan of the SNES. Really though, it's transparency. But, if someone wants to argue otherwise to feel better in some SNES vs Genesis argument, they could technically say it's not "real" transparency. Even though literally no transparency on a simulated computer system is real transparency; they're all just variations of artificial ways of simulating transparency when all is said and done. Either way, SNES' version of transparency was dang impressive and visually lovely for its time, and beyond the level you'd be seeing on most other commercial systems on the market at the time too. :)
@@inceptional The author of the video doesn't seem to be a fanboy at all. He also made another video about genesis tricks. That's the reason I asked here, that's not to prove a point or anything, I was just technically curious.
A similar point applies to the race tracks in F-Zero or Mario Kart. Usually people claim they are "fake 3D". But they look exactly like a texture mapped polygon would have looked! F-Zero 99 actually uses them. The math that is used is different, but in the end any effect is just manipulating pixels on the screen. In this sense everything is equally real/fake if the end result looks the same.
1:43 Just want to point out something here with the colours mentioned per layer, as it does something I see often and unintentionally makes it seem like the number mentioned is how many colours each layer can display rather than each tile. For example, in Mode 0 each layer is limited to 3 visible colours per tile but actually 24 visible colours total per layer and an overall total of 96 visible colours for all layers on-screen. And I think understanding it like that paints quite a different picture. It's just a pet peeve of mine, as I think people have greatly underestimated what is possible in Mode 0 for a long time due to a misunderstanding of its actual limitations and indeed full capabilities there, which is because most of the resources online are unfortunately a little confusing. You can see an example of just what's possible with the backgrounds in Mode 0 on my own RUclips channel in my video called "SNES Mode 0 [zero sprites used] Test". I think there's a whole lot of mostly untapped potential there. And the colours you mention above for the background modes are per tile in all cases similarly. The background colours are almost always separate from the sprites too, which have an additional 128 colours entirely of their own, and can use 15 visible colours per tile there. You can also still use standard effects like colour math (transparency), row/line/column scrolling, mosaicing, window/colour masks, interlacing, HDMA, etc, in most modes too. Also, although it is true that the 512x448i high res mode on SNES was almost never used, I think it's also still very much true and fair for anyone to say that it is entirely capable of running proper full games in that mode, and ones with far superior colour to that seen in RPM Racing (close to full colour really), as the upcoming indie project Rex Nobilis by Kulor very effectively demonstrates. It's just a shame that very few developers indeed have ever fully exploited what this mode is actually capable of even to this day.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Not a particularly good game it must be said, I talk about it a bit more in this video: ruclips.net/video/rSLemERBQ9s/видео.html
It's as real as it got back then. I didn't say it was fake, I said it was simulated. It's technically simulated cause it's missing an alpha channel but nothing else at the time was able to do anything like this and needed to use other techniques that were definitely faking it.
7:57 OK, now you're just regurgitating info straight from Wikipedia and not even factually correct info. There was NO performance hit on the SNES using the high res modes. This was only a problem with emulators. The real problem was that high res graphics took up more space. Even limited colors weren't a problem, as the color palette was very wide. It's why Megadrive and SNES games using 16 color palettes look better than PC EGA games that also use 16 colors. You can choose a color palette with more emphasis on a certain color tint. 9:15 You don't even need an HDTV. A quality CRT TV with the console connected via SCART could also show that high resolution.
To be fair to the video creator, I don't think he's trying to be remotely misleading or lazy or whatever here. It's just that some of the deeper facts around how all this stuff works on SNES are really convoluted and confusing and actually kinda easy to miss unless you really go digging. So, most people don't really understand that the high-res mode on SNES is actually capable of graphics with a level of colours and quality that no normal person just looking at them would have any inkling there was a reduction in the colours per tile in one of the layers vs some of the other modes, because overall it can still show basically the same total amount of colours on-screen and such. Most people just see RPM Racing and think that's how games in that mode can look and play, when in reality games in that mode can look as good as the majority of other normal resolution games and play exactly as brilliantly as the very best SNES games if desired. If only more SNES developers actually bothered to show this then it would all be quite obvious at this point.
@@inceptional It's not that convoluting. It's as simple as getting a PAL SNES and a PAL TV. Crappier TVs benefit the most from RGB. RGB from my DVB-T2 set top box looks almost like PC VGA on a crappy Soundcolor CRT!
@@fungo6631 I'm not sure if you thought I was responding in relation to showing real SNES footage or whatever, but I was just talking about the fact that I don't think it's that shocking most people aren't fully aware of the potential of SNES Mode 5 high res and such.
How many of you knew that Little Mac in Super Punch-Out!! (4:32) was actually a background? :)
Yeah, I only learnt this in the last couple of years after seeing a video of how it was done on NES and then looking up how it was then done on SNES too.
That figures
I did back in the 90s when the first emulators were coming out and they didn't quite have layer blending down just yet. I actually liked Super PunchOut like that, but in other games like Chrono Trigger your progress would be stopped dead when you got to 2300 AD; nothing but fog 😂
I expected color averaging, I did not expect addition and subtractive abilities. Super cool!
Really interesting how the developers used the transparency to make some really cool effects. I didn't recognize some of the games. Would have been helpful to have the names of the games as you showcased them.
i especially wanna play the 'Prince of Persia' Skeletor game shown at 4:44!! WHAT is THAT!?
@@jaysharpESQUgh! No. You really don't want to play that. It's terrible. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein based on the movie that came out around the same time. God awful.😂
What people keep referring to as transparency, should be called translucency, as that would be the correct term.
That's not entirely accurate. Something translucent is something that allows light through but does not allow you to see what is on the other side. Like frosted glass.
Something that is transparent, even if only partially, allows you to see what is behind.
Some very nice exampls and details there.
Explains why early SNES emulation struggled with transparency effects.
They struggled the most on DOS-based emulators running in 256 color mode; there was no headroom for these effects.
In addition even 16 bit color mode had some overhead since the 555 pixels had to be extended to the 565 color palette of the PC SVGA/VESA standard.
@@soundsparkI remember using SNES 9x on windows before it had implemented transparencies. I only learnt about emulators for MS-DOS years later.
@@jmbenettiI remember Zsnes being the first one doing transparencies. I think ZSNES v. 4 was the one. Can't remember the year, I think it was 98.
Suddenly a lot of games became playable like Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger.
@@gabrieldias3479 I didn't remember that, but I used SNES9x before Zsnes then I switched to Zsnes for years, can't remember if it was for performance or maybe because it had more accuracy or transparencies. My first Chrono Trigger playthrough was on Zsnes, years after I sold my SNES. I remember fondly that emulator.
Nintendo really understood what tools were needed to make good games, and where to make the biggest investments.
Your videos give me ideas when creating podcasts and even help consider approaches for visual tricks for my own overlays and animations, so thank you for your work. Great channel!
The high resolution mode ONLY applied to BG layers.. not sprites. So it's a bit dubious to generically say it had a high res mode, without mentioning it doesn't apply to sprites.
I mean, I'm specifically talking about background modes and I don't think I ever implied sprites were part of that, but I guess it doesn't hurt to clarify this kind of thing. Thanks for the comment!
@@WhitePointerGaming I mean in general. It always gets portrayed as a "general" higher res in videos and discussions, when it's only the BG itself. People naturally think that if the video output is higher res, that it's ALL higher res unless otherwise stated. The exception would probably be people that grew up with the C64 hahah.
Anyway, not being applied to sprites.. in some ways it's a good thing. It's not all bad. The SNES sPPU doesn't have enough bandwidth to fetch highres sprites (or a line buffer large enough for it), etc. Meaning showing the existing sprites fetched and rendered to the sprite line buffer would basically have half the horizontal screen coverage/real-estate in pixels. Because they didn't do this, I'd say that's a pretty strong indication that the primary purpose for high res BG modes was most likely highres kanji support. The horizontal interleaved mode ("pseudo high res") could have been there as their attempt at transparency before the color math sections were added in later development? Unclear.
I first got wind that transparency in SNES wasn't actually that, but they make the colors look that way, from the SNES guide book that came out alongside with the console's introduction (made by Nintendo). It's great to finally see the technical details behind this! And yeah, this was a good amount. I may want to go into further tech details... but, not today!
Mode 5 does not have "severe color limitations" (not as many people think). The 1st layer has 8 palettes of 16 colors per tile, which gives a total of 128 colors (actually 120 colors because the 1st color of each palette is transparent), while the 2nd layer has more limited colors, being 8 palettes of 4 colors, which gives a total of 32 colors (24 colors because the 1st color of each palette is transparent).
The mistake is that people confuse color per tile with the total number of colors.
It's interesting and ironic how Nintendo seems to now have this perception as a company who makes weaker hardware compared to the competition but that's definitely a fairly recent phenomenon. Even if you go back as far as the NES people forget that it's Famicom technology was conceived in late 1981 or early 1982 and was supposed to come out I think in late 82 but due to hardware bugs they pushed it back to July 1983. Most systems both computer and console used primitive hardware by comparison with a max of between 8 and 16 colors on screen with single color sprites that were often layered to fake having more colors. The NES could do 25 colors on screen and featured horizontal hardware scrolling which was advanced for the time. Same thing with the Super Famicom, that technology was pieced together 1987 and it's prototype was publicly shown in Japan in 1988 despite it's 1990 Japan and 1991 US release. I digress, but overall just the base SNES even without enhancement chips was remarkable compared to it's contemporaries.
Yeah, the NES, SNES, N64 and GC were all significant advancements in technology at the time (it's often misunderstood just how powerful the GC was). While Nintendo has always tried to innovate and introduce new ways of playing, the philosophy of not trying to compete directly on raw power only really started with the Wii. Mind you, that was almost 20 years ago now!
@@WhitePointerGaming Yeah for a long time people just assumed the original Xbox was better graphically since it more easily did higher resolution and had the faster Pentium III clock speed to rely on, which to be honest even I fell for the hype for a time, but in reality it's not true. The ATI flipper could pump out nearly 10 Gflops along with it's custom TEU or Texture Environment Unit while the nVidia GPU in the Xbox was just above 7Gflops. It's impossible to know or simulate a comparison but I now question if the Xbox could pull of the fidelity of certain breakout GC titles like Metroid Prime, Rogue Squadron 2, and Resident Evil 4? I know Spiderman The Movie performed slightly better with frame rates on Xbox but again I chalk that up to CPU horsepower more than anything.
I don't have any experience with the GC, but whenever I see footage from GC games they have, in my opinion, aged way better than their competition like the Dreamcast and even the powerful PS2.
The original Xbox didn't age badly, but I think GC looks better (even for today's standards)
GC had a pretty powerful hardware.
I finally understand how this works! It’s been bothering me for only 30 years.
Interesting enough, the N64 wouldn't be able of additive blending effects which made the visuals suffer a lot while they tried to do all these visual FX on the SNES.
Soooo happy you refer to the console as a SNEZZ!!!! 🥳 🇬🇧
Annoys me when people refer to it as a S N E S !!! ITS A SNEZZ!!!!
I'm not actually saying "Snez" with a 'z' sound (which I understand was common in the UK) but "Sness" with an 's' sound (which was common in Australia). :)
Thanks for providing an explanation to something I had noticed as a kid, and was always curious about (the transparent ghost not being transparent on top of another)! Your channel and videos are great!
Thank you, glad I was able to satisfy your curiosity :)
12:37 OK, how was THIS done? Those helicopters certainly seem like they're scaling in Mode 7, but at different rates and moving in different ways... on one background layer?? Another shot of the choppers a few seconds later also has the telltale shimmer of scaling effects, even as they *overlap.* There's some real dark magic here.
The first instance might be using a rare "sub-mode" of mode 7 called EXTBG. Basically it creates an extra layer that is identical to the first (it's more complicated but that's the jist of it). The helicopters are being scaled with mode 7, and 2 helicopters are being created using the EXTBG feature. It wasn't used very often but this is one case where it was. The two layers can't scale or scroll independently though so they are needing to scale and scroll it in such a way that both helicopters appear on screen at once with one slightly behind the other. There's an additional third helicopter that briefly appears on the right of the screen but that's a separate part of the background layer. The other shot at 12:49 doesn't have any scaling going on, the choppers are just sprites that are moving across the screen at slightly different speeds and directions.
From what I can see, the ability to display multiple scaling helicopters at once is done here by effectively changing or splitting the background mode part way down the screen using HDMA, although this time just to the same Mode 7 again, which is why the helicopters are separated by their vertical position on the screen. No independently scaling helicopter will ever be on any of the same horizontal scan lines as another while scaling for this reason, unless they're actually just scaling exactly the same as the one across from them, so it's really a larger single image with two helicopters drawn into it that's scaling all at once across that horizontal slice. In principle, you could split the background many times down the screen like this and have many more scaling objects than you see here, just with the limit of one on any horizontal scanline or multiple scaling basically in unison per scanline. If that makes sense.
It's technically how the they do the two-player split screen Mode 7 levels on Contra III:
ruclips.net/video/MCu68aVipcc/видео.htmlsi=8bcwQYs-R_7UowpG&t=401
Or the split screen mode in Street Racer:
ruclips.net/video/j18y3sc3fIQ/видео.htmlsi=FPd2nnyPuHMyUyXZ&t=52
Those two examples have a little black bar separating the two views there, but that's for another reason.
The ending of Rendering Ranger R2 uses a similar effect on the ending scene with the scaling planet and spaceship on-screen at the same time:
ruclips.net/video/Tl7D25I6yDc/видео.html
And Turtles in Time does similarly when you see two Turtles scaling and rotating independently as they fall through time also:
ruclips.net/video/-JW-9QPKG-g/видео.html
Just imagine there's an invisible horizontal line always separating multiple instances of Mode 7 scaling objects at once, and never the twain shall meet, unless they are just scaling the same as the ones across from them horizontally like all the particles at the end of Rendering Ranger during the explosion:
ruclips.net/video/Tl7D25I6yDc/видео.htmlsi=2l0zTdl5_8pqpqzJ&t=4380
I think this ability to show multiple scaling/rotating objects on-screen is definitely an underused feature of the SNES.
Note: From what I understand, EXTBG is what allows you to have sprites be either below or on top of different parts of the same single Mode 7 background layer by setting the priority of the background to either high or low on a per pixel basis, as you can see when the characters pass under the bridge in Contra III below:
ruclips.net/video/MCu68aVipcc/видео.htmlsi=2Ialfn4oW42iAAm-&t=353
And even better example of that is this boss from Super Turrican 2 that shows the player moving behind individual teeth of the giant sandworm, even though those teeth are drawn on the same background layers as the rest of the creature:
ruclips.net/video/5CFd7qc_EjY/видео.htmlsi=PiI7cPw-Oy90TSHI&t=1144
@@inceptional Dynamic frame rendering was such a powerful technique, but oh so always unintuitive.
Big uses: Horizontal split line, parallax or wobble (scanline shift) ; vertical perspective (scanline scale & skip) ; multiplying sprites or planes (re-using slots), including tiling them ; increasing colors (palette modification)…
Am I missing any?
@@musaran2 I guess using it to create static HUDs on one part of an otherwise likely scrolling background/foreground layer. Many NES games did this with the single background there, and the SNES is capable of similar. That might be covered in one of the methods you mentioned though.The HUD and Krang are actually on the same BG layer in Turtles in Time for example:
ruclips.net/video/i9eZ3JAWjfo/видео.htmlsi=axny1kqV1bCjxxub&t=176
Turning on/of transparency on a per line basis, so you could start with say an opaque mountain background at the top of the screen and then half way down turn on colour math for semi-transparent water. I'm sure that's possible, and I presume is how Maxwel did it in the shmup level he's working on, which I created the art for. I'll link a video of my own GM8 test below, but Maxwel's version is slightly different on his Twitter channel, so it's possible he actually achieved the effect slightly differently to how I understand it, albeit with the same end result ultimately:
ruclips.net/video/v72EeSQuGio/видео.htmlsi=jhHkAuVLV2O5m2Fj
Cheating with the Main/Sub screens to effectively force background layers into priorities above other background layers that normally wouldn't be possible. You can usually only switch high/low priority between BG4 and BG3 directly and then BG2 and BG1 directly, but not switch priority between say BG3 and BG2. But, by abusing the Main/Sub screen, you can effectively set BG2 above BG3 on specific scanlines if you like, as one example. In an early build of my Mode 0 shmup, programmer LMPuny used this to force the rows of cars that were on BG3 in front of the bridge road that was on BG2:
ruclips.net/video/Rse4ItsnC2A/видео.htmlsi=oOIlekdoUyn_Bnv1
Note: There is a trick that's only available in Mode 1 to bring BG3 in front of all other layers, which was most often used for displaying HUDs in many SNES games, but that's not the same thing I'm talking about here that you can also use in Mode 0 for example.
Drawing window/shape masks, along with changing the backdrop colour per scanline to achieve some interesting shapes that can even be used as fake background elements/layers, such as the two large chess pieces in my mockup example:
ruclips.net/video/hGtZ_1MMh60/видео.html
Those are some I can think of off the top of my head anyway. And you've touched on some of them or aspects of them in the video already, but maybe there's a couple of examples there of interest to you.
By the way, random thing that popped into my head while watching the video above again and the section around the use of SNES' proper high-res mode(s): I just wanted to link this example of an in-development SNES shmup that shows it using Mode 5's 512x448i mode during full gameplay with full colour, multiple background layers, window/shape masks, transparency, loads of enemies and bullets and stuff on-screen, and all at a solid 60fps without any enhancement chips, just so people understand it's truly a proper mode that can be used for full quality games like every other mode on SNES:
ruclips.net/video/1AGMEZvU14g/видео.htmlsi=8uiZSJf9LEE1PHeN&t=1535
@@inceptional 1) Old status trips were a simple form of screen splitting.
Note: Surprisingly VGA was capable of splitting, BUT only once per frame and only reset to default.
So old PCs basically only used it for this, like Doom.
2) And reflections!
Thought I suspect some hardware could not reverse scanline stride, and it had to be reprogrammed per scanline, or outright faked with duplicate graphics.
3) I thought such small Z-tricks were sprites masquerading as plans overlaps.
I hadn't thought enough.
4) The "math layer" seems unique to the SNES.
Shame, it made a lot of sense in a world struggling with fill rate and bandwidth.
Today's brute-force rendering is simpler, but we lost so much.
Man even the GBA couldn't handle most of these tricks, I play Donkey Kong Country on the GBA and even though it had more contents than the Super NES version, it does lose a lot of the effects that the Super NES was able to pull off. The second level in DKC is a clear example of that, the rain and storm effects looks and sound realistic in the Super NES original but on GBA it produce the rain just fine but the storm effects is gone making the level felt unnatural.
It's also possible that the DKC port wasn't done by people who knew the GBA very well. The port is generally regarded as not very good.
Your video opened my eyes. I always assumed the Snes used 1 bit Alpha Transparency. Something I used in pygame for my own little games. Very cool video, thanks !
that was very advanced computing power at that time, even arcade games did not have transparency in it
Correction: in a tile bitmap, palette index 0 is always treated as transparent. That is technically 1-bit (on/off) transparency.
The color math that SNES games are using is technically 15-bit transparency, since the 15 color bits of a mainscreen pixel (5 bits per RGB channel) are combined with the 15 bits of the corresponding subscreen pixel.
An example for seamless transparency is in Chrono Trigger's 2300 AD era, when the "'Guardian" boss in Arris Dome is defeated.
@@shinyhappyrem8728 , awesome. Thanks for update !
The examples you've shown as averaging are actually all additions, except for Punch Out. You can tell by the presence of black that when added results in nothing, and brighter colors get their luminosity summed with the other screen, useful for clouds (note they are grey not full white) and water.
Is there a practical use case for averaging?
Something like washing out colors into a narrower range?
Averaging is closer to real life transparency, because it's as if you make 2 planes transparent (halfing every value, white goes closer to grey, colors get duller) and then overlap them. Addition sums the brightness of the 2 planes, black becomes full transparent but what is bright becomes brighter and often "burnt" because the result is over the dinamic range.
Isn't this main and sub screen method how the ghosts were drawn with transparency in the first Luigi's Mansion on Gamecube?
When DLP projectors use the same interlacing technique you (they) call pseudo high resolution, they call it "wobulation". I wonder if this is where they got that idea.
Best console alltime
This was super interesting
it annoys me that most emulators don't take the blending a CRT did into account. It makes the games looks so much worse than what they are supposed too.
It's a difficult thing to emulate accurately.
By not taking the screen into account, or even worse by trying to 'improve' the picture, emulators frequently make games look a lot worse than they should. It affects everything from colors, to sharpness and blending.
Modern official emulated re-releases, like the Contra Collection, suffers from this too.
It's not really the CRT doing it but band limiting in composite encoding. If you use component or RGB cables you won't see the same effect and even with S-Video it won't be as prominent.
Now *why* would you use psuedo-hires mode for 50% transparency when there's already another mode that does 50% blend between main screen and subscreen? Because when you use the 50% blend transparency mode, sprite palettes 5-8 get transparency and sprite palettes 0-3 don't. But when you do 50% transparency by using the psuedo-hires mode, the effect is applied the same way to all sprite palettes.
It also, in theory, frees up the colour maths circuit to apply other transparency effects, but I don't think any games actually took advantage of this.
Hi-res mode (psuedo or normal) and color math can't really be used at the same time, because hi-res mode is already drawing both the main screen and subscreen at the same time. But you can still do color math with a fixed color.
@@Dwedit: that might be why Kirby's Dreamland 3 did hi-res mode.
@@Dwedit Can you still use the colour math on the sprites in the high res modes?
Hires mode isn't exactly doing 50% blending on a composite display. Rather it's more like the chroma is blended while the luma isn't really, although that's still a bit of an oversimplification.
That's why you could get both hires text and blending at the same time, it's a matter of what sorts of colors are used and not whether or not it's "pseudo" highres or not.
can you please add the names of the titles for every game you show screenshots of?
The SNES had some pretty impressive hardware. I’d love to see how it’s CPU compared to the SEGA MegaDrive/Genesis.
You should like my newest video :) ruclips.net/video/RwdgaBnd9U0/видео.html
(Re: The high res modes,)And here you show why I am all in on shaders that are all in on phosphor dot emulation, rather than scanline imitation. The scanlines were just how the game systems output the data. That "warm antialiasing" that us old-heads talk about was from phosphor dots that brought the raster-lines to life, and a fairly low resolution in comparison to even CRT monitors of the time.
Also, CRTs does not blend the pseudo high res together like in emulation. If you viewed it over composite, it has all kinds of composite interference in it. It's noise-y and grain-y. It's not a nice looking blend either.
I remember the pseudo high-res blend in Jurassic Park looked pretty flawless on my old CRT on original hardware.
Is this why the SNES has two PPUs??? I was always wondering what the 2nd PPU was doing.
Well, yes, but not in the way you might be thinking. It wasn't the case where PPU-1 controlled the main screen and PPU-2 controlled the subscreen or anything like that. The two PPUs worked together to create these effects. The very simplified explanation is that PPU-1 handled the backgrounds and sprites and PPU-2 handled everything else. It's more complicated than that but the main point is they were always working together.
@@WhitePointerGaming so it wasn't a specific function like other 2 GPU systems??? I wonder how fast the bandwidth is between the 2 PPUs to handle all that communication.
again it's not an alpha blending, you have a similar effect on the Saturn it's able to make semi opaque sprite, same thing for the snes it was build in on the hardware on a special mode. thanks for the memo !!!
You say in the beginning that the SNES can't do real transparency but only simulate it. But what is real transparency then? Isn't it color averaging even in real life? My question is genuine, not like I'd like to correct someone on a subject I don't know.
"Real" transparency uses an alpha channel as the transparent channel, but the SNES doesn't do this. There's no alpha channel. Mind you, it's as real as it got in that generation, there wasn't anything else that got remotely close to it until the 5th generated started. So for all intents and purposes, in comparison to the competition, you can say it's real, but on a technical level, it's essentially simulated transparency because of the lack of an alpha channel.
@@WhitePointerGaming Hmm yeah I get the concept of alpha channel. But in the end, even on modern hardwares, isn't the transparency done internally by averaging the colors between them according to the alpha values?
@@mrnuage I think it's one of those things that due to the never-ending fanboy wars people have really started to get obsessed with the exact inner workings and technical definitions of how an effect like this is achieved to use in system arguments versus just what they're seeing on-screen ultimately. They don't ever want to concede a point to the other system, even when one system patently trumps the other in some area, so they turn the debate into some technophile talk to detract from the real point.
Note: I'm not even remotely suggesting that's what the video creator is doing, as I can tell they're very reasonable and objective about this stuff, and in fact seem like they're probably a fan of the SNES.
Really though, it's transparency. But, if someone wants to argue otherwise to feel better in some SNES vs Genesis argument, they could technically say it's not "real" transparency. Even though literally no transparency on a simulated computer system is real transparency; they're all just variations of artificial ways of simulating transparency when all is said and done.
Either way, SNES' version of transparency was dang impressive and visually lovely for its time, and beyond the level you'd be seeing on most other commercial systems on the market at the time too. :)
@@inceptional The author of the video doesn't seem to be a fanboy at all. He also made another video about genesis tricks. That's the reason I asked here, that's not to prove a point or anything, I was just technically curious.
A similar point applies to the race tracks in F-Zero or Mario Kart. Usually people claim they are "fake 3D". But they look exactly like a texture mapped polygon would have looked! F-Zero 99 actually uses them. The math that is used is different, but in the end any effect is just manipulating pixels on the screen. In this sense everything is equally real/fake if the end result looks the same.
1:43 Just want to point out something here with the colours mentioned per layer, as it does something I see often and unintentionally makes it seem like the number mentioned is how many colours each layer can display rather than each tile. For example, in Mode 0 each layer is limited to 3 visible colours per tile but actually 24 visible colours total per layer and an overall total of 96 visible colours for all layers on-screen. And I think understanding it like that paints quite a different picture.
It's just a pet peeve of mine, as I think people have greatly underestimated what is possible in Mode 0 for a long time due to a misunderstanding of its actual limitations and indeed full capabilities there, which is because most of the resources online are unfortunately a little confusing.
You can see an example of just what's possible with the backgrounds in Mode 0 on my own RUclips channel in my video called "SNES Mode 0 [zero sprites used] Test". I think there's a whole lot of mostly untapped potential there.
And the colours you mention above for the background modes are per tile in all cases similarly. The background colours are almost always separate from the sprites too, which have an additional 128 colours entirely of their own, and can use 15 visible colours per tile there. You can also still use standard effects like colour math (transparency), row/line/column scrolling, mosaicing, window/colour masks, interlacing, HDMA, etc, in most modes too.
Also, although it is true that the 512x448i high res mode on SNES was almost never used, I think it's also still very much true and fair for anyone to say that it is entirely capable of running proper full games in that mode, and ones with far superior colour to that seen in RPM Racing (close to full colour really), as the upcoming indie project Rex Nobilis by Kulor very effectively demonstrates. It's just a shame that very few developers indeed have ever fully exploited what this mode is actually capable of even to this day.
I do actually have a note there in the top right of the screen to say that the colours are per tile :)
@@WhitePointerGaming LOL Okay, that one is totally on me there. Haha. My bad. Apologies.
No worries, maybe I should have made it more noticeable. You still raise some good points!
@@WhitePointerGaming As do you, my good sir.
It's not even new.
The NES already was only 4 colors per tile, but a palette pick per tile.
anyone friends with m'man Bones can tell me the name of the game at 4:44??
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Not a particularly good game it must be said, I talk about it a bit more in this video: ruclips.net/video/rSLemERBQ9s/видео.html
Calling this transparency "fake" makes me wonder what would qualify as real transparency in a computer program.
It's as real as it got back then. I didn't say it was fake, I said it was simulated. It's technically simulated cause it's missing an alpha channel but nothing else at the time was able to do anything like this and needed to use other techniques that were definitely faking it.
7:57 OK, now you're just regurgitating info straight from Wikipedia and not even factually correct info. There was NO performance hit on the SNES using the high res modes. This was only a problem with emulators.
The real problem was that high res graphics took up more space. Even limited colors weren't a problem, as the color palette was very wide. It's why Megadrive and SNES games using 16 color palettes look better than PC EGA games that also use 16 colors. You can choose a color palette with more emphasis on a certain color tint.
9:15 You don't even need an HDTV. A quality CRT TV with the console connected via SCART could also show that high resolution.
To be fair to the video creator, I don't think he's trying to be remotely misleading or lazy or whatever here. It's just that some of the deeper facts around how all this stuff works on SNES are really convoluted and confusing and actually kinda easy to miss unless you really go digging. So, most people don't really understand that the high-res mode on SNES is actually capable of graphics with a level of colours and quality that no normal person just looking at them would have any inkling there was a reduction in the colours per tile in one of the layers vs some of the other modes, because overall it can still show basically the same total amount of colours on-screen and such. Most people just see RPM Racing and think that's how games in that mode can look and play, when in reality games in that mode can look as good as the majority of other normal resolution games and play exactly as brilliantly as the very best SNES games if desired. If only more SNES developers actually bothered to show this then it would all be quite obvious at this point.
@@inceptional It's not that convoluting. It's as simple as getting a PAL SNES and a PAL TV. Crappier TVs benefit the most from RGB.
RGB from my DVB-T2 set top box looks almost like PC VGA on a crappy Soundcolor CRT!
@@fungo6631 I'm not sure if you thought I was responding in relation to showing real SNES footage or whatever, but I was just talking about the fact that I don't think it's that shocking most people aren't fully aware of the potential of SNES Mode 5 high res and such.