At around 6:20, when talking about the solid background colour, I say "At the very back, you had a solid background colour. This could have been set to any available colour but was usually blue or black. This was set in stone and couldn't be changed." I understand the way I worded this might be a bit confusing, and may be interpreted as meaning that the actual colour couldn't be changed once set (which isn't true). So to clarify, what I meant was that it was always the bottom-most layer and it was set in that position. This is what couldn't be changed. Thanks for watching and all of your feedback!
man i miss the days where every console was different and brought something new and unique to them that would dazzle and amaze. i honestly cant remember any recent consoles that have done what the mega drives parallax, snes mode 7, transparencies, and sample based music, and pcengine cd (and mega cd which was a upgrade over the normal mega drive). now everything is the same ol same on every console. well the new 3ds xl for me was awe inspiring as i adore stereoscopic 3d and wished theyd converted more classic games for it like M2 did with the sega games.
Yes! I really loved the vareity back then. Really enjoyed SNES music and color and the Genesis speed and Sega classics. Pilotwings and FZero. Streets of Rage and Golden Axe. Loved them both equally.
The 16bit era was indeed the most interesting time in video gaming, I'm glad I whitnessed it. I'm not even interested in the majority of new releases, ideas from back then just get reused and it's all kind of the same real looking hi-res mish mash.
Once programmable pixel shaders became a thing with the 360 and PS3 hardware specific graphical tricks largely disappeared, as it allowed programmers and artists full control over how every pixel on screen rendered. Developers no longer create techniques that take advantage of certain fixed function features exclusive to a console, because the fixed function pipeline as a whole no longer exists as GPUs can be programmed as developers see fit, just like the CPU.
Nintendo is still making hardware that could require special tricks to push the games into better graphics. The thing is, most companies don’t put that kind of effort in anymore
@@MaxOakland Not true, The switch is above ps3 and xbox360 spec and can do pixel shaders with ease. This means it can have control of every pixel being rendered to screen.
Now we should do a vid on the 3D superscalars in the Sega CD. There are only about 12-13 games out of over 200 titles that made use of the powerful ASIC-DSP.
Of the big four 16-bit consoles, the Mega Drive was also, while limited, best at rendering simple polygons on the screen, without helper chips. Scaling and rotation of sprites was possible through clever programming. Road Rash II shows scaling for the entire screen, more noticeable when the camera zooms out after finishing a race, and with all the rolling hills, simple physiscs, random traffic, many opponents (with different behaviors) and obstacles going on, it's a miracle the game is still very playable, even with the low frame rate. Also, the Streets of Rage games on the harder difficulties and some shooters show many animated sprites of different sizes on the screen, one of the console's strong points. Lastly, the console's sound chips are more flexible than a lot of people give 'em credit for. Check out the Overdrive demo by Titan made for original hardware to hear for yourself. The visuals are well done as well.
Facts. Also, you know what's funny? I've been visiting some old Super NES vs Mega Drive threads, and I was so surprised that NOBODY (as far as I saw) brought up the Road Rash games. It's like those games are more forgotten than Rendering Ranger R2, because at least that was brought up. I have a theory. There WERE some people in those threads I've seen that have known about Road Rash all along, but were naïve about what made the Road Rash games special as MD games, and/or were hesitant on bringing them up, because they had a feeling, or knew their precious SNES would struggle with games with that rendering style. Either way, I think it's safe to say that they dodged multiple bullets, or should I say bombs, because those games (not to mention Hard/Race Drivn, Steel Talons, Outlander, F1, Test Drive 2, Zero Tolerance, etc.) are mind blowing.
Closest thing the system had to helper chips through its lifetime was the occasional dev looking at the the Z80 being used for sound and saying "Hey, maybe we can offload a bit of crunching to this chip"
@@TS-yz3ud The SMS did a version a Road Rash.. I have no doubt the SNES would have no trouble doing the same haha. Those games, while they do have their fans, were US garbage with crappy frame rates (until the 3DO version came along). I shook my head every time I saw that Genesis Road Rash advert in the mags.
Great video. The FPS is done with raycasting; the Devs created their own bitmap mode withe one of the 2 planes. They also probably used the 256pixel wide mode you talked in the video. The columns drawn with raycasting are 2 pixels wide (if you want to cast 128 rays) or 4 pixels wide (64 rays)
Without proper research, these are my ideas: 1. They used 320 pixel mode, but they render the game to only a small part of the plane A, which greatly reduce the resolution. They render into the patern table. 2. They probably use bsp in the same way as the snes wolfeinstein did instead of simple raycasting. 3. They scroll plane B for a skybox effect.
So, about that SNES comparison right... For one, The SNES CPU's clock speed normally depended on what cartridge the system was using, it would only run at 3.58 MHz if using a FastROM cartridge, but those were actually more expensive to manufacture, so A LOT of games shipped on SlowROM carts, which capped the clock speed at 2.68 MHz... And then there's the whole issue of like... Rendering graphics eats into CPU time, not just for the SNES, for basically all systems from that era and prior, the CPU can't really do all that much while a frame is being rendered, (though the SNES in particular really was built to squeeze out as much code as possible during a frame's render time thanks to HDMA) and if I'm not mistaken, increasing the horizontal resolution also impacted performance because of that, so while the SNES can output either 256, 320 or 512 pixels horizontally, it very seldom made sense to use the higher horizontal resolutions because well... Not only was its CPU slow, it was often kneecapped by the cartridge, whereas that wasn't nearly as much of an issue on the Mega Drive because its CPU is plenty fast enough, so most games had no reason NOT to render at 320 wide, if it could do 512 wide like the SNES can, it'd probably have no reason not to go there either...
I always liked the MD/Gen palette. Yes, it's smaller than the other 4th-gen machines, but it had this interesting moody quality. And that, in turn, permeates most games published for it, to some extent or another. So MD/Gen games tend to have a very distinct vibe to them that's almost always recognizable. I kind of miss when console quirks allowed them to have a genuinely distinct look. See also: later-era VCS/2600 games and their eye-popping use of raster effects and TV-signal hackery, like no other console could do.
I have genuinely always disliked the Genesis palette. I actually find it makes so many games just look ugly, which I guess is why so many fans of the system tend to laser in on technical feats when talking about its graphics most of the time. Thankfully, it is is possible to get some actual good aesthetic and colour results in the right hands, which Treasure seemed pretty adept at, so it's not a deal breaker. But, really, it's a definite weak point of the system imo.
I always appreciated the Genesis having "High Definition Graphics" emblazed right on the console itself. Even as a kid I knew that resolution mattered. Games were more colorful, usually had more realistic sound, and sweet mode-7 on SNES. But, the sharper visuals (especially with the rca cables), speedier gameplay, and *blood* won me over.
@@WhitePointerGaming Transparent is not a color because it only shows the color underneath. And even if it were one, it would only be 62 colors because three times transparent would not be three different colors. With Shadow and Highlight, the number of colors you can choose from increases from 512 to 1407.
@@yasminesteinbauer8565 16 color palette only has 15 visible colors (when not using S/H in the last palette). 4 x 15 = 60. Add +1 because there's a backdrop color.. and thus you get 61 colors capable of all having "unique" colors. But they won't be unique colors. No not only won't they be unique like 90% of the time, but 4 subpalettes means you need to share a lot of colors between objects. That's why out of 61, it's usually 35-45 colors on screen. Shadow/Highly doesn't automatically give you 1407 colors on a per pixel basis... so saying that it increase it is SUPER misleading. It comes with a ton of limitations; only sprites can "highlight".. and they can't highlight other sprites. Same for 'shadow' on a sprite. Only the last sprite palette can do both S/H, and it loses two color slots to do it (and can't be applied to other sprites). Shadow mode is applied WHOLESALE to the entire image when enabled. High priority tiles break out of it (which is what you see in Bloodlines for the long hallway), but you don't get per pixel control on this.
@@TurboXray I am talking about theoretical values. I said that if you counted transparency as a “color” (which I don't), it would still only be 61+1=62 “colors”, since 3*transparent would be the same “color” three times. The fact that these numbers are only achieved in practical use in rare cases is another matter. And yes, the color palette from which you can choose increases with S/H to a maximum of 1407 unique colors. If you use sprites for masking, you can also apply this on a pixel basis. For example, the game Toy Story uses this technique to increase the number of colors in the images between levels. Apart from that, I am fully aware of the limitations.
I always loved that since the Genesis did not have the same graphical and sound chops that the SNES did it instead had to thrive on its grit and simply running the games better. After all, the Genesis's CPU didn't just run at a higher clock speed, but the whole system was built around a 16-bit data bus as opposed to the SNES's 8-bit data bus. Consequentually DMA transfers, while crude in implementation, were FAST, literally "blasting" data at the memory at speeds up to 4x faster than the SNES. This is of course where the term "blast processing" comes from.
"Blast processing" was actually referring specifically to a direct memory access technique with the digital-to-analogue converters during a scanline interrupt to draw 256 colour-static images. It's similar in concept to the raster effects I talk about in the video. Despite the marketing department deciding they loved the phrase and dropped it at every opportunity, I don't think any commercial games actually used the technique, mostly because it didn't work reliably on all iterations of the hardware.
@@WhitePointerGaming Yeah, it wasn't until recent times where "Blast Processing" was even truly figured out and exploited properly on Genesis to be able to reliably display those higher-colour images, and it apparently still takes up basically all the CPU resources and even stalls the sound engine, along with having some visual artifacts and the horizontal resolution effectively being cut in half in order to achieve the effect too. This being important when you realise that this overhyped and much boasted [usually in Genesis vs SNES arguments] "Blast Processing" capability still falls quite a ways short of the quality of image the SNES can display in standard Modes 3 and 4 at 8bpp with 256 colours chosen from the 32,768 master palette, and that the SNES can also display high colour images like this during normal full 60fps gameplay if desired too. So, really, Sega brainwashed everyone with that whole "Blast Processing" marketing spiel back in the day, and it's clearly stuck ever since. The reality however is that the SNES' Colour Blasting is capable of greater feats in that regard, especially with anything that involves displaying lots of lovely colours on-screen in whatever way. Of course, that's just one of the ways the SNES was always at an advantage over the Genesis, which is true in reverse too regarding some of the ways the Genesis was always at an advantage over SNES. "Blast Processing" though has certainly done a lot of manipulating and distorting of the narrative around these two consoles over the years, that's for sure. I guess kudos to the Sega marketing team on that one.
@@inceptional to be clear the Genesis was faster, and it wasn't even close. There were even a few games that managed to pull off polygonal graphics without an expansion chip, and that can't have been easy. In games where frame rate mattered, the Genesis reigned supreme, but when the depth of the experience and the special effects needed to be dialed up to 11, the SNES was ultimately superior to the capable but inferior Genesis. That said, having a faster CPU did give it more flexibility in terms of effect complexity than an un-enhanced SNES, but only to the limits that could be attained with its more limited color palette.
@@WhitePointerGaming Yeah, there's a clip on the RUclips video "Let's play Star Trek: Starfleet Academy - Starship Bridge Simulator - 26" that shows it doing some decent polygons on the stock system there.
I appreciate videos like this because even though I'm familiar with the types of graphics the Genesis can do and grew up with the system both as a child in the early 90's through adulthood I still learned a lot by watching this video. For a very long time up until the last 10 to 15 years the only system that got thoroughly discussed was the NES and systems especially with regard to the Genesis had no digestible information on it with the exception of some emulation author diaries or reads. Those were helpful but without graphical examples to accompany it or in best case scenario watching video examples like this it was difficult to wrap your mind around each of the concepts. I understand high level programming and occasionally I dip my toe in the low level pool of information but I'm far from an expert in understanding disassemblers, memory viewers and many debugging tools but would play around and examine any that were available in certain emulators to hopefully catch something new. My favorite thing to do lately was I discovered in Exodus it has a sprite outline feature that puts visible wire frames around each sprite tile on the fly frame by frame so you can quickly identify which is or isn't a sprite and is super helpful. I believe that's maybe what you were using when talking about the background planes because it also shows boxes around mid-frame adjustments and scrolling. When I found out the Genesis only had 16 more sprites than the NES and Master System I was baffled as to how so but programmers could cleverly work around that limitation since each sprite was adjustable from as small as 8x8 to as large as 32x32. It was fascinating watching how Capcom composed the meta sprites with the Genesis and Super Nintendo in different ways with their Street Fighter ports. I'm understanding now too that just because the Super Nintendo can do 128 sprites, and can have sprites as large as 64x64, it's greatly held back from it's full potential since the SNES can only do 2 sprite sizes at a time as opposed to fully featured like the Genesis can.
But you can choose one, or like you mentioned, two certain sprite sizes and make all the unused pixels full transparent (SNES is capable of real transparency), by overlapping them you can create the illusion of sprites in many more different sizes.
A low-res 256x224 mode on the Genesis also gives a different pixel aspect ratio. 320 width mode has narrow pixels that are 91.4% of the width of a square pixel. While 256 width mode has fat pixels that are 114.3% the width of a square pixel. This also has the side effect that fewer tiles are needed to cover the screen, so more screen area can be covered up by sprites without dropping them.
IIRC the low res mode has a lower horizontal sprite limit. But fewer tiles are required to fill a screen, still, which is why it was often used for title screens and cutscenes even in games that otherwise ran at 320x224.
@@TurboXray Yes -- it makes sense to use it in ports of games originally made for, say, the SNES or PC Engine. You would avoid squished sprites without having to redraw the graphics. I can't, off the top of my head, recall any such instances but I'm sure there are some.
This actually works somewhat in reverse, as the Genesis displays less sprites and sprite pixels per scanline in 256x224 mode than it does in 320x224 mode. In both modes it can still cover 100% of the screen with sprites though. But, in 320x224 mode it can display more sprite pixels horizontally than SNES (320 on Genesis vs 272 on SNES), which is important in certain situations, whereas in 256x224 mode it actually falls short of the SNES that can display 272 sprite pixels (and 32 sprites) per scanline vs the Genesis 256 sprite pixels (and 16 sprites) per scanline. So, really, Genesis is better sticking to 320x224 mode in most cases other than maybe for convenience when porting a SNES game to Genesis.
You don't have to apologize for calling it 'Mega-Drive'; and nevermind anyone from the U.S. or Canada who might complain about you calling it that; you don't have to listen to their complaints. Because 'Mega-Drive'/'Genesis' are one in the same. So you don't need to apologize for what you want to do and what you don't want to do. It's your Channel, your Video, you decide what you want to do and what you want to say and or establish on your Channel. I'm an American btw in case you're wondering! Anyway, I subbed to your Channel as well. Take care :)
One of the things that made many consoles of this era (including the Genesis and SNES) powerful was the ability to change the video chip registers on a per-scanline basis. So many amazing graphical effects were done via that mechanism.
I find it very interesting how many older games are almost tech demos. Gaming was much more interesting when developers were really pushing the hardware to do new and interesting things versus today's games that only give us (slightly) incremental increases in visual "realism". Watching videos like this helps me find classic games to add to my backlog. (Does anyone need more on the backlog??)
There is indeed some primitive transparency going on on MegaDrive with Shadow & Highlight mode, and this is a very interesting topic to cover. You could set in a palette a single color that would be white or black, and would trigger transparency. Basically, any pixel using that white/black color would instead display the below pixel but brighter/darker. What is even more curious about this, is that it allows displaying intermediate gradients that are not available in the 512 base palette. It had a lot of limitations though, so it was not used a lot. It was pretty common for shadows (example : helicopter in Desert Strike, fighting games). Ristar and Vectorman use Highlight mode as well I think, first boss for Ristar and the second (water) stage for Vectorman with the rays of light.
Thank you for this video. I realy like that technical stuf. Lighter and darker colors of the palette were used to create transparency-like effects in later games (light streaks in Vectorman underwater level for instance). Recently I've learned that those colors could be apply to sprites to make them look transparent without dithering.
When you were talking about the resolution differences, I was thinking, "Oh, that explains the criticisms made in Console Wars." Your shoutour to them was a wonderdul coincidence.
I always wanted to know how they did that one room in Bloodlines, where they split the screen into five rows, and had your character teleport between them. This video has helped explain that longstanding mystery to me, and genuinely shows how much effort and technical skill Konami was showing in their games on the Genesis.
I would love to hear about software scaling on the Genesis. I know developers utilized said programs for games like Red Zone, which featured everything that was said to be impossible on the Genesis all at once. I'm also very interested in hearing about Road Rash and Zero Tolerance.
I haven't looked too closely at Road Rash, but Zero Tolerance, which I show at the end of this video, uses a raycasting engine similar to Wolfenstein 3D.
What's funny is seeing dithering used in games like Monster Hunter World. Its noticeable at 720p or even 1080p but at 4k it looks like a transparency. It was mostly used on the gathering I assume to lesson their impact on performance but I thought I've seen it used in other modern titles as well. Sparingly but definitely there. Makes one wonder about the true impact of transparency on modern graphics.
I appreciate your explanation of the dithering technique, but your example at 8:50 doesn't really do it justice. I actually have a Mega Drive and a CRT and the effect looks indistinguishable from actual transparency.
Yeah, it wasn't perfect but it was the best I could do as I don't really have a setup that could record good quality footage from a CRT. Hopefully it still gives a good idea of the blending the TV did.
"the effect looks indistinguishable from actual transparency" That's not true. The luma signal is NOT an exact multiple of the chroma signal, which is why you get "rainbowing" with dithering in a lot of cases on the MD over composite. And with RGB, the dither pattern WILL show through (CRT or not). The only way you could get "indistinguishable" transparency, is if the two pixels perfectly blended together... but that would mean your effective resolution was 160px and not 320px across. You don't get both; it's either one or the other.
I don't know if it's truly indistinguishable from proper transparency in all examples, but I can tell you for sure that I played the Yoshi's Island 4 level in Super Mario World many times as a kid and never noticed until I saw it again recently as an adult in emulators and such that it wasn't in fact using the SNES' actual transparency capabilities there. So, yeah, even though I never paid much attention to this kind of faux transparency effect in Genesis games back in the day, I think it can certainly look convincing enough that most people wouldn't be able to tell much of a difference most of the time to be honest. I was playing with I think high quality S-Video cables [possibly Euro SCART] and a really nice Toshiba CRT back in the day though, so I think they probably played their part in the overall effect too.
You missed my favourite feature which was probably the hilight and shadow mode. Definitely used well in Ranger X, Vectorman, etc. Even that poltergeist game used it to have your ghost look transparent.
So I have an ask. I am the combat designer for a new (as of this writing we are nearing completion) Neo-Geo game, Vengeance Hunters. I am a software dev by day, but i'm .net/c# so I am not experienced much with C that our game is being programmed in. I also have read the the NGDevKit documentation for the system. So I get what it can do. What I do not get is why a lot of what the Mega Drive/Gen can do, the Neo-Geo seems to be weak at. Mostly in regards to the different scrolling areas. Also, NG has scaling and deformation, but only from a larger art asset shrunk to a smaller asset and back up. However, I was told that this was not very performant. I'd love to see a comparison of what the MD can do vs. what the NG can do. The pros and cons of either, where they excel and where they are limited. I always thought that the Neo-Geo can do almost anything. And I found out that it seems like it is very very good at very particular things, and pretty awful at others.
That's very interesting. They are quite different machines, the MD has 80 sprites up to 32x32 in size with 20 on a line limit and 2 hardware background planes. Iirc the ng has 381 16 pixel wide x 512 pixel height sprites with 96 on a line and no backgeound planes. So it has to use some of its sprites for backgrounds and likely it would be more difficult to do things that are easy on the Genesis for example line scrolling. I'm terms of background scrolling layers and granularity of scrolling I think things would be easier on the Genesis as it had hardware for plane scrolling, tile level scrolling and line scrolling for both planes. The ng can attach sprites and give them as a single object so planes scrolling would be easy and cheap but more granular scrolling may be an more difficult. The neo geo had loads more colors , more sprites on a line , can downscale objects , has a much faster 68k processor. I'm writing a game for genesis using sprite multiplexing techniques to surpass hardware limits which is getting into neo geo sprite number territory you might want to look me up on twitter and have a look, the game is called Lufthoheit.
@@shannonbirt9267 Yeah, I saw your videos. Could not find you on Twitter. And yup, you described a lot of the issues we've ran into where the MD/Gen simply makes it better/easier in some areas where a person might believe the NG would be dominant.
Hello to Trinidad! Great to have you around. Did you guys know this console as the Genesis like North America, or was it called the Mega Drive for you? Please spread the word to help the channel grow :)
@@WhitePointerGamingthanks i definitely will ! It was called the genesis here too, the relative few that I saw. Which may seem kind of strange given that Brazil is closer to us than the USA ! You'd think sega would have been more popular here given that. I suspect that most people got their stuff from relatives in the US or Canada. The Sega master system wasn't even a thing here and I only ever knew of one rich kid who had one in the country. Despite that I was still a Sega fan and had a genesis...years after it was already obsolete of course. I was retro before it was cool !
@@WhitePointerGaming Definitely ! Also it was called the Sega Genesis here, with most people getting stuff from relatives in US and Canada rather than the much nearer Brazil where Sega was really popular.
Always interesting, I apprechiate this kind of content and I'm glad I discovered your channel. The Megadrive was my first console and it's one of my all time favourite systems, together with the SNES and NeoGeo. 16bit era still rules!
something ive always wondered about: why megadrive games usually on average used more frames of animation than snes games? ive noticed that looking at spritesheets of some games that came out on both, or exclusives for sega always usually had more frames. im thinking of 2 konami games, contra hard corps vs contra 3, or castlevania bloodlines vs castlevania 4 or dracula x (snes). i wonder if it had something to do with the size of the game ram, or maybe the faster cpu in the sega? of course looking at dracula x pcengine cd vs castlevania dracula x snes spritesheets is crazy! they really went all out for the pcengine cd game. i know theyre not the same game and of course cd has way more space than a 8 or 16 meg game but its really cool. of course theres exceptions to the rules and all, and for the record i adore ninty and my snes, tho by 1993 i had all 3 consoles and cd adaptors and man the world was glorious! i loved em all!
It probably just has to do with esoteric differences between how MD/Gen and SNES handled memory management. That said, one contributing factor could be the MD/Gen's smaller color palette. That would have made sprite data more compact as well.
It has to do with the fact that the snes only has access to 2 x 8 kb frame banks for sprites at any one time . The genesis can use near the whole 64 kb of vram for sprites and is not segmented in any way. The snes sprite system was crippled in many ways, only two sprite sizes on screen vs 16 for genesis for example this often totally negated the raw number of sprites that the genesis had 80 vs the snes 128 also. The genesis could readily outperform the snes on the sprite side of things and regularly showed this. The genesis also has about a 20 percent benefit In dma speed so can upload graphics to vram faster than the snes for streaming animations etc. The snes can handily beat the genesis in some areas , color for example but sprite handling is not one of them.
@@jasonblalock4429Not really - the SNES (in its most used graphics modes at least) and Mega Drive both used 16 colour tiles/sprites (4 bit). The SNES just had more palettes available at once.
@@shannonbirt9267That simply isn't true. SNES games like Super Smash T.V., Space Megaforce, Rendering Ranger R2, 3 different Parodius games, and plenty of others proved otherwise. Space Megaforce often has full screen scaling and rotation effects that pass behind the player score and other info. The SNES can only display one layer when in mode 7. This means all of that stuff is constructed of sprites. I still can't figure out how they pulled off the first level boss. Either they somehow got the system to not update the backdrop that was already there or they literally constructed it out of sprites too as their is a rotating sphere in the center of the boss' huge body that is clearly the real background layer.
Contra 3 on SNES was 8 meg. Contra Hard Corps was 16 meg. Both Castlevania 4 and Bloodlines were 8 meg but they prioritized different animations. There is literally just 1 frame of animation for swinging with your whip in Bloodlines while Castlevania 4 has several and the character is much larger. Their are a number of unique animations for walking up and down steps in Castlevania 4 as well. Bloodlines look like they are just using certain frames from your walk cycle. If you want to see very smooth animations on the main character of a SNES game check out Konami's The Adventures of Batman and Robin, any of the DKC games, etc. Final Fight 3 and The Ninja Warriors have tons of animation on a number of huge characters all running at once.:)
I always preffered the smoother snes color palette. Genesis felt crude most of the time, to me at least. Alas, the programming tricks of the genesis were simply amazing! Good programmers are history's unsung mathematical gods.
@@WhitePointerGaming Yeah, the PS1 is definitely a more complex system, so I get it. Anyway, what is the name of the scrolling shooter shown at the beginning? Looks pretty cool to me :D
You don't seem to have mentioned the Megadrive's 68000 CPU being 16-bit (with 32-bit registers), with 16-bit RAM and a 16-bit bus to the cartridge. In the SNES all of those things are just 8-bit. The SNES's CPU is pretty hopeless for more than it's intended purpose, slinging bits around it's custom graphics hardware, which was very decent. The SNES CPU is back-compatible with the 6502 used in the NES. Originally there were rumours of back-compatibility with NES games, but they dropped that. The choice of CPU might be down to that, because otherwise it's a terrible, slow, useless microprocessor. The 68000 meanwhile was used in arcade games at the time, the Megadrive is pretty much cut-down arcade hardware.
The 32X can also use all colours simultaneously. You can see this on the option screen of Space Harrier, which uses a promotional artwork consisting of thousands of colours.
What I meant by that was that it was always the bottom-most layer. It was set in that position and couldn't be changed. I didn't mean that the colour couldn't be changed, though I can see the way I worded it could be a little confusing.
HAM was a special video mode for the Amiga in which for each new pixel, two channels (in HSV colorspace) would be *held* in their current values while the third would be *modified* . This allowed a gamut of 4096 colors while still taking up only 6 bits per pixel. The cost was, for sudden color changes where two or more channels needed to be updated, you got color artifacts. The Genesis did not support HAM in any way, shape, or form. The Amiga supported raster interrupts as well, particularly through the use of the Angus chip's Copper; many more than the Amiga's nominal simultaneous 32 colors could be displayed through careful Copper programming.
The Megadrive was capable of transparencies under certain conditions and used them in a fair few games bitd. Examples include the main player sprite in 'Haunting starring Polterguy', 'Rambo 3 (Helicopter spotlight in intro), Mortal Kombat (fighters shadows), Landgrisser 2 (in battle) and loads more. I think most of these were achieved through clever use of the shadow and highlight mode. There is a recent demo showing the large 'Boo' boss from Super Mario World running on Megadrive but showing two transparent 'Boo's' moving around the screen and when overlapping having a double transparency. It's on RUclips, it's very impressive and well worth checking out.
@@TurboXray Yes i know but great effect though and does the job. It should really have been used more bitd. Have you seen the two ghost, Mario world demo someone did on Twitter? Managed to get two giant 'Boos', transparent and overlapping on the Megadrive. There was also a single transparent 'Boo' done on the PC Engine demo. Both very impressive and great work by the guys that did it.
This is all explained in my latest video: ruclips.net/video/YWtZO1TC9G8/видео.html - it's still not actual transparency or translucency, just shadow and highlight creating a fake effect.
So how DID they do that FPS shooter? The way they did it on Toy Story was very impressive, and used much more of the screen. They "cheated" by mirroring the screen halfway across, vertical mirroring. Since the walls were symmetrical in that dimension on purpose. I can only imagine the way they did it, in this un-named game, was with raw CPU power. The Atari ST, running the same CPU but with a chunky bitmap screen, ran a simple FPS, though years after the computer was popular, called "Substation". It was Wolfenstein-esque and mostly full-screen. I give up, you tell me!
Great video. I do have one minor complaint though. The impression many seem to have in comment sections of videos of this nature is that the Genesis could do effects that the SNES couldn't. Every one of these graphicsl tricks can be found in a number of SNES games.
Yeah, that's a good point, though I think it bares mentioning that many of these tricks, while possible on SNES, aren't used all that often. Some games make use of them, but it's not particularly common, probably because the SNES had a lot of other graphical toys for developers to play with (eg there wasn't much point in combining vertical and horizontal scrolling to create tilts because mode 7 could do that much better). However they are used extensively on the Mega Drive.
@@WhitePointerGaming Agreed. They weren't used as often but there is a helicopter that tilts forward in Time Trax on the SNES just like the unreleased Genesis version. There is an iceberg that rocks back and forth in Prehistoric Man though I think that only does vertical slices if I recall. Both Axelay stage 4 and Macross Scrambled Valkyrie (don't remember the stage number) switch color palettes to essentially double the colors with a layer of water. The SNES version of Sparkster does the whole reflection in the water thing like Castlevania Bloodlines, except it looks even better with some additional effects. I think too often people just assume something is being done on SNES with one of the built in functions like transparency or rotation but those effects have there own set of restrictions so sometimes it actually makes more sense to do some effect the same way they do it in Genesis games.:)
@@davidaitken8503 Yeah, and, having personally looked at hundreds of SNES games to specifically find similar uses of these types of effects there, I can say it's more cases than likely most people think. It's just often nowhere near as obvious as on Genesis and not quite as prevalent either, as I think Genesis developers tended to really embrace these kinds of visuals effects as a way to balance out the [Edit: Generally much nicer colours], typically more actual overlapping background layers, and obviously the widespread use of Mode 7 on SNES. I actually wish more SNES developers had used the combination of both the SNES-centric effects and the Genesis-centric effects more often, as it really does have the potential to produce some really impressive results.
@@inceptional The limited color palette of the Genesis couldn't compete with that of the SNES and even Turbo Grafx 16. It isn't as necessary to run extra graphical effects when you can paint more beautiful and detailed artwork. Capcom would often have large pieces of art as a backdrop, such as clouds in the Minks level of U.N. Squadron, or the waterfalls at the end of Armored Armadillo's level in Mega Man X. The water effect during that one boss fight in Ranger X is interesting, but I don't know if I would call it better looking than some detailed, beautifully drawn pixel art. While I do agree with you to some extent, there is such a thing as going overboard with graphical effects and losing sight of what is actually more visually pleasing too.
In hindsight, I think I find the MD more impressive than the SNES. Everything achieved on the MD came down to coding skill and the sheer brute force of the CPU. This isn't to diminish the SNES, which is a fantastic machine by all metrics, but it's just these graphical tricks were almost a given on the SNES, and it had the extra chips to help. Developers for Sega just had to code these kinds of things without special hardware.
This is a beginner-level explanation that is completely redundant if you already have some familiarity with how console hardware works. Also, it has several mistakes I won't bother to correct, just be warned that the guy is re-telling information from elsewhere with some errors and omissions. Otherwise, nice work, useful if you belong to its intended audience. Nowhere as deep as Retro Game Mechanics Explained, or Coding Secrets. Just a friendly warning. P.S. Just as an example to show that I'm not talking out of my ass: * The official number of simultaneous colors is not 64 but 61, because one color of every palette is transparent and there is background color, separately. so, we have (16-1)*4+1=61 * 32x can display all 32768 colors simultaneously, not just 256, with no effort, unlike SNES, but this only applies to its own separate layer of graphics that has no graphics acceleration for doing anything similar to what the base hardware can do easily. And attempts to bring PC-level games to 32x are crippled by its RAM size that is too small for any advanced graphics/audio and by the cost of bigger ROMs. Very misguided hardware.
This was only meant to be a high level overview so obviously if you are already familiar with it you'll get little benefit from this. In this context the 64 colour thing is just easier to explain (4x16=64, plus the transparent ones don't show up as transparent when you view the palettes), but I do go into why it's technically only 61 colours in another video. Same thing with the direct colour mode of the 32X and its other capabilities, that's also explained in another video. I recommend people go and watch Coding Secrets in this very video if viewers want to go into more detail, and I've recommended other channels like RGME and Pigsy in other videos as well.
@@WhitePointerGaming Sure, saw that video already. Just this one felt not very informative and occasionally incorrect. I'm not doing emudev anymore for roughly 20 years though, just sometimes refreshing my memory with the stuff I previously missed/ignored. As I said, my prob with your video was that it was obviously not the original source for most of the info and therefore felt redundant. Sorry.
Don't apologise, yanks don't apologise for calling it the genesis and it is refreshing to hear it called the Mega Drive for once. Even more refreshing is hearing the snes called just that and not the es-en-ne-es. I'm beginning to think all British youtubers that cover retro gaming was not around in the 80s and 90s (coupled with ninty not having much of a presence in Europe until later) and that's why they only repeat what yanks have said.
@@WhitePointerGaming Yes, that's how we pronounced it back then but with RUclipsrs it seems to be drying out in favour of en-ee-es or es-en-ee-es which just seems like more work.
No. It has two background layers. You can assign a chunk of one of them to be used as a static HUD instead though, but at the cost of being able to display any actual background visuals on that layer where you've chosen to use it as a fixed HUD instead. Outside of using sprites to fake extra layer elements, you can never show more than two overlapping background layers at once on Genesis. And, since I think I know why you mentioned this, you can display up to four actual full-screen fully-overlapping background layers at once on SNES.
No. It doesn't. The window layer is there simply to avoid having to use horizontal interrupts to reposition the screen for a HUD.. because the MD doesn't have a scroll list for Y values like it does for X. It also inherits this from the SMS. Gameboy also has this, and IS considered more of a pseudo 2nd BG layer *because* you can give a horizontal and very offset.
2:11 The lower resolution on Mega Drive/Genesis is imo not a great option to use over the 320x224 resolution in most cases due to the fact that, obviously, it runs in the lower resolution that means the Genesis no longer has any display advantage there, and also the fact it reduces the max on-screen sprites on Genesis from 80 to 64 (so now down to only half of the SNES' 128 max), the max sprites per scanline from 20 to 16, and the max sprite pixels per scanline from 320 to 256, which is now even less than the SNES' 32 sprites and 272 sprite pixels per scanline (Genesis normally has an advantage with the sprite pixels per scanline in 320x224 mode). So, really, in 256x224 mode, the SNES beats the Genesis almost across the board other than raw speed, as it already has the way more colours, proper transparency effects, up to two times as many background layers, built-in Mode 7, HDMA, and now also both more sprites on-screen max (which is always the case anyway) and more sprites per scanline and sprite pixels per scanline too (which is one of the few meaningful advantages the Genesis actually has over the SNES normally), along with the exact same resolution there as well. It's also worth noting that every effect you see the Genesis doing here, by using the likes of row/line/column scrolling, background tile priority, dithering, using raster effects and palette swaps to increase on-screen colours even more, using some layer element to create a static HUD and so on, can also be done on the SNES as standard as well, and in some cases actually better, such as being able to vertically column scroll to a finer granularity and a smoother effect (every 8 pixels on SNES vs every 16 pixels on Genesis). Plus, even though the Genesis can use shadow/highlight mode to increase the on-screen colours in some ways, it is a very limited-use feature that isn't as clear or easy a colour increase as it sounds. This is similar to how the SNES has a standard background feature in some background modes called Direct Colour that allows it to display a whopping 2048 colours on background 1 alone, which is alongside another 128 totally separate colours for background 2 and the additional standard 128 totally separate colours for sprites on top of that too (and that's even before any colour math or HDMA backdrop gradients are used to increase the colours even further), but that also has similar caveats in terms of how it specifically works. The Genesis definitely does have some advantages over the SNES though, like the faster CPU and the normally higher horizontal resolution and higher sprite pixels per scanline that come with that, and a couple of other things too. But, dropping down to 256x224 resolution is not something I would recommend, especially if the idea is to try and match or even surpass what the SNES is capable of. Genesis should stick with the 320x224 resolution in most cases, as that's where pretty much all of its strengths lie and where it is then able to properly compete with the SNES in some [but not all] ways and even surpass it in a few important areas.
@@andresdigi25 Just reading up all the developer manuals, documentation and online sources about the general inner workings and specs of each system, as well as working on a bunch of SNES concepts myself and even having a few of them coded up in conjunction with some SNES programmers. And, right now I'm currently working with another SNES programmer who's make a shmup for the system, and I'm creating some art and doing a little bit of level design.
@@Troll_On_RUclips Tell that to Woodfrog as he works on Till & Hat, Maxwel Olinda as he works on his new SNES shmup, Kulor as he works on his new SNES shmup, rumbleminze as he works on his many direct NES to SNES ports, infidelity as he works on his many direct NES to SNES ports and Super Mario Bros. Maker for SNES, The new 8-Bit Heroes as they work on the "SNESmaker" development tool, Something Nerdy Studios as they plan to make a game for SNES after completing Former Dawn, id and Randy Linden software as they work on the SNES Doom Definitive Edition as well as an "FX3" chip and new rumble controller for SNES, Kannagichan as he works on Super Dan, the team brining Cooly Skunk to SNES properly, the team brining Shockman Zero to SNES properly, Voultar who made the SNES Edge-Enhancer bringing super sharpness, Landsat as he works on Triple Impact, Straynus as he works on Cronela's Mansion for SNES, Proteus as he works on his SNES port of Bloodlines, Bitmap Bureau Ltd. as they work on multiple new SNES games for 2025, etc.
@@inceptional i am a big fan of snes and 16 bits machines in general. I am a developer but only focus on high level and with some experience in python/js game libraries. Can you give me a recommendation where to find more in depth tech information about the snes? maybe a book, or the name of the manual, or a game tutorial? Thanks
Why are you appologising to USA for calling it what it is??? It IS the Mega Drive. Might be better appologising to the rest of Australia for not pronouncing Sega like the rest of us!! 😂 No one here ever called it sayga, it was always seega. In Australia, we say it as we spell it!
I admit I did say "Seega" back in the day, but corrected myself sometime in the early 90s once I heard the game startup jingle which always sang "Sayga" :P
@@WhitePointerGaming i know what it said yes, but this is Australia, and you're apparently Australian, you didn't correct yourself. Simply because they feel they need to reinvent the wheel at every step of life doesn't mean we need to follow their lead!! 😄
@@CaseTheCorvetteMan Uhh, hello? Australia saying "seegah" is Australia "re-inventing" the pronunciation while the rest of the world pronounced it how it was. The rest of us cringe when we hear an Aussies say "seegah". It's true lolol.
Sure, the Super NES was half as fast clock for clock, but due to all the specialized hardware, it was essentially accelerated to around the Genesis/MD's raw performance, because the Super NES was doing MORE per clock than the Genesis/MD was. :p Honestly the MD was more like somebody took an '80s EGA card, gave it more RAM (thus a better colour palette) and bolted on a CPU for good measure, whereas the Super NES was actually a game machine, in the truest sense of the word. It was a CPU (as well as related components) specifically designed for running games.
True. It was Segas philosophy when it came to their game consoles. From the SG1000 to the Dreamcast they all had chips available in the market. The only one I'm unsure of is a chip in the Sega Saturn called the SCU. I think it is a DSP like chip that might have been customized for Sega.
As I point out in the video, you can't just compare the raw numbers due to all of the rest of the differences in the hardware. The SNES had a lot of specialised components that were designed to take load off the CPU. But the Mega Drive did still run slightly faster than the SNES at the end of the day. Also the 68000 inside the Mega Drive was used for a lot of gaming applications, such as arcade machines, gaming-focused computers like the Amiga and X68000, and later consoles like the NeoGeo, Jaguar and Saturn.
all very true. i think nintendo's mistake was in the early stages of sfc development the cpu had been intended to be backward compatability with the famicom, and when they decided not to do bc it was too late to change the sfc cpu. well that and developers cheaping out and using the slowrom to save a buck. heck some games have fastrom compatibility and were changed before production to slowrom but still have fastrom code that just needs to be activated to get rid of slowdown. maybe nintendo underestimated how cheap some developers were and thought theyd choose the fastrom lol. well that and nintendo's games used game specific chips (dsp, spc-1, fx, fx2 etc, like their nes mappers) that made the games themselves have the extra power to run said games, which offloaded the cost of performance onto the game carts themselves. the only game i know sega did that with i believe was virtual racing with their svg chip. love your vids btw and subbed!
wasnt the dreamcast bespoke chips? i recall they had nec i think make a custom chip and didnt tell them they had 3dfx doing the same, and actually were going to choose the 3dfx chips till someone leaked that info which made the 3dfx stock go higher and pissed off sega and nec. and sega went with the japanese company as was custom then, for japanese companies to go with japanese companies over abroad companies. i believe at the time the dreamcast protos were referred to as project katana and project black belt. @@BubblegumCrash332
The MD/Gen was absolutely a real game machine. The M68000 was used in a huge number of computers, consoles, and arcade machines. Also, it was extremely well-understood by programmers, because of its widespread use. That made it much easier for devs to jump into MD/Gen development, especially those coming from the Amiga and Atari ST gaming space.
I grew up in the US (though born and once again live in Melbourne) and I still cringe every single time I hear a RUclipsr call it the "Genesis". Yuck. What a garbage fire of a name. Mega Drive is way better
At around 6:20, when talking about the solid background colour, I say "At the very back, you had a solid background colour. This could have been set to any available colour but was usually blue or black. This was set in stone and couldn't be changed." I understand the way I worded this might be a bit confusing, and may be interpreted as meaning that the actual colour couldn't be changed once set (which isn't true). So to clarify, what I meant was that it was always the bottom-most layer and it was set in that position. This is what couldn't be changed. Thanks for watching and all of your feedback!
man i miss the days where every console was different and brought something new and unique to them that would dazzle and amaze. i honestly cant remember any recent consoles that have done what the mega drives parallax, snes mode 7, transparencies, and sample based music, and pcengine cd (and mega cd which was a upgrade over the normal mega drive). now everything is the same ol same on every console. well the new 3ds xl for me was awe inspiring as i adore stereoscopic 3d and wished theyd converted more classic games for it like M2 did with the sega games.
Yes! I really loved the vareity back then. Really enjoyed SNES music and color and the Genesis speed and Sega classics. Pilotwings and FZero. Streets of Rage and Golden Axe. Loved them both equally.
The 16bit era was indeed the most interesting time in video gaming, I'm glad I whitnessed it. I'm not even interested in the majority of new releases, ideas from back then just get reused and it's all kind of the same real looking hi-res mish mash.
Once programmable pixel shaders became a thing with the 360 and PS3 hardware specific graphical tricks largely disappeared, as it allowed programmers and artists full control over how every pixel on screen rendered.
Developers no longer create techniques that take advantage of certain fixed function features exclusive to a console, because the fixed function pipeline as a whole no longer exists as GPUs can be programmed as developers see fit, just like the CPU.
Nintendo is still making hardware that could require special tricks to push the games into better graphics. The thing is, most companies don’t put that kind of effort in anymore
@@MaxOakland Not true, The switch is above ps3 and xbox360 spec and can do pixel shaders with ease. This means it can have control of every pixel being rendered to screen.
Now we should do a vid on the 3D superscalars in the Sega CD. There are only about 12-13 games out of over 200 titles that made use of the powerful ASIC-DSP.
Of the big four 16-bit consoles, the Mega Drive was also, while limited, best at rendering simple polygons on the screen, without helper chips. Scaling and rotation of sprites was possible through clever programming. Road Rash II shows scaling for the entire screen, more noticeable when the camera zooms out after finishing a race, and with all the rolling hills, simple physiscs, random traffic, many opponents (with different behaviors) and obstacles going on, it's a miracle the game is still very playable, even with the low frame rate. Also, the Streets of Rage games on the harder difficulties and some shooters show many animated sprites of different sizes on the screen, one of the console's strong points. Lastly, the console's sound chips are more flexible than a lot of people give 'em credit for. Check out the Overdrive demo by Titan made for original hardware to hear for yourself. The visuals are well done as well.
Facts. Also, you know what's funny? I've been visiting some old Super NES vs Mega Drive threads, and I was so surprised that NOBODY (as far as I saw) brought up the Road Rash games. It's like those games are more forgotten than Rendering Ranger R2, because at least that was brought up. I have a theory.
There WERE some people in those threads I've seen that have known about Road Rash all along, but were naïve about what made the Road Rash games special as MD games, and/or were hesitant on bringing them up, because they had a feeling, or knew their precious SNES would struggle with games with that rendering style. Either way, I think it's safe to say that they dodged multiple bullets, or should I say bombs, because those games (not to mention Hard/Race Drivn, Steel Talons, Outlander, F1, Test Drive 2, Zero Tolerance, etc.) are mind blowing.
Closest thing the system had to helper chips through its lifetime was the occasional dev looking at the the Z80 being used for sound and saying "Hey, maybe we can offload a bit of crunching to this chip"
@@Naedlus I wonder if anyone thought of running an old BASIC on half the screen
@@TS-yz3ud The SMS did a version a Road Rash.. I have no doubt the SNES would have no trouble doing the same haha. Those games, while they do have their fans, were US garbage with crappy frame rates (until the 3DO version came along). I shook my head every time I saw that Genesis Road Rash advert in the mags.
@@charliekahn4205 gross.
Great video.
The FPS is done with raycasting; the Devs created their own bitmap mode withe one of the 2 planes. They also probably used the 256pixel wide mode you talked in the video. The columns drawn with raycasting are 2 pixels wide (if you want to cast 128 rays) or 4 pixels wide (64 rays)
Without proper research, these are my ideas:
1. They used 320 pixel mode, but they render the game to only a small part of the plane A, which greatly reduce the resolution.
They render into the patern table.
2. They probably use bsp in the same way as the snes wolfeinstein did instead of simple raycasting.
3. They scroll plane B for a skybox effect.
Other line effect megadrive could pull was reusing sprite registers, enabling it to use more than the theoretical limit of 80 sprites.
So, about that SNES comparison right... For one, The SNES CPU's clock speed normally depended on what cartridge the system was using, it would only run at 3.58 MHz if using a FastROM cartridge, but those were actually more expensive to manufacture, so A LOT of games shipped on SlowROM carts, which capped the clock speed at 2.68 MHz...
And then there's the whole issue of like... Rendering graphics eats into CPU time, not just for the SNES, for basically all systems from that era and prior, the CPU can't really do all that much while a frame is being rendered, (though the SNES in particular really was built to squeeze out as much code as possible during a frame's render time thanks to HDMA) and if I'm not mistaken, increasing the horizontal resolution also impacted performance because of that, so while the SNES can output either 256, 320 or 512 pixels horizontally, it very seldom made sense to use the higher horizontal resolutions because well... Not only was its CPU slow, it was often kneecapped by the cartridge, whereas that wasn't nearly as much of an issue on the Mega Drive because its CPU is plenty fast enough, so most games had no reason NOT to render at 320 wide, if it could do 512 wide like the SNES can, it'd probably have no reason not to go there either...
I always liked the MD/Gen palette. Yes, it's smaller than the other 4th-gen machines, but it had this interesting moody quality. And that, in turn, permeates most games published for it, to some extent or another. So MD/Gen games tend to have a very distinct vibe to them that's almost always recognizable.
I kind of miss when console quirks allowed them to have a genuinely distinct look. See also: later-era VCS/2600 games and their eye-popping use of raster effects and TV-signal hackery, like no other console could do.
I have genuinely always disliked the Genesis palette. I actually find it makes so many games just look ugly, which I guess is why so many fans of the system tend to laser in on technical feats when talking about its graphics most of the time. Thankfully, it is is possible to get some actual good aesthetic and colour results in the right hands, which Treasure seemed pretty adept at, so it's not a deal breaker. But, really, it's a definite weak point of the system imo.
I love these videos. Its so interesting how devs got so much out of the limited hardware. I couldn't imagine programming a whole game in assembly
I always appreciated the Genesis having "High Definition Graphics" emblazed right on the console itself. Even as a kid I knew that resolution mattered.
Games were more colorful, usually had more realistic sound, and sweet mode-7 on SNES. But, the sharper visuals (especially with the rca cables), speedier gameplay, and *blood* won me over.
10:30 The base limitation is actually 61 since 3 of those (1 for 3/4 subpalettes) are fully transparent
Nice vid!
I mention the 3 assigned to be transparent. "Transparent" is still a colour though ;)
Yeah but it's easily misunderstood unless one knows how that works@@WhitePointerGaming
@@WhitePointerGaming Transparent is not a color because it only shows the color underneath. And even if it were one, it would only be 62 colors because three times transparent would not be three different colors. With Shadow and Highlight, the number of colors you can choose from increases from 512 to 1407.
@@yasminesteinbauer8565 16 color palette only has 15 visible colors (when not using S/H in the last palette). 4 x 15 = 60. Add +1 because there's a backdrop color.. and thus you get 61 colors capable of all having "unique" colors. But they won't be unique colors. No not only won't they be unique like 90% of the time, but 4 subpalettes means you need to share a lot of colors between objects. That's why out of 61, it's usually 35-45 colors on screen. Shadow/Highly doesn't automatically give you 1407 colors on a per pixel basis... so saying that it increase it is SUPER misleading. It comes with a ton of limitations; only sprites can "highlight".. and they can't highlight other sprites. Same for 'shadow' on a sprite. Only the last sprite palette can do both S/H, and it loses two color slots to do it (and can't be applied to other sprites). Shadow mode is applied WHOLESALE to the entire image when enabled. High priority tiles break out of it (which is what you see in Bloodlines for the long hallway), but you don't get per pixel control on this.
@@TurboXray I am talking about theoretical values. I said that if you counted transparency as a “color” (which I don't), it would still only be 61+1=62 “colors”, since 3*transparent would be the same “color” three times. The fact that these numbers are only achieved in practical use in rare cases is another matter. And yes, the color palette from which you can choose increases with S/H to a maximum of 1407 unique colors. If you use sprites for masking, you can also apply this on a pixel basis. For example, the game Toy Story uses this technique to increase the number of colors in the images between levels. Apart from that, I am fully aware of the limitations.
I always loved that since the Genesis did not have the same graphical and sound chops that the SNES did it instead had to thrive on its grit and simply running the games better. After all, the Genesis's CPU didn't just run at a higher clock speed, but the whole system was built around a 16-bit data bus as opposed to the SNES's 8-bit data bus. Consequentually DMA transfers, while crude in implementation, were FAST, literally "blasting" data at the memory at speeds up to 4x faster than the SNES. This is of course where the term "blast processing" comes from.
"Blast processing" was actually referring specifically to a direct memory access technique with the digital-to-analogue converters during a scanline interrupt to draw 256 colour-static images. It's similar in concept to the raster effects I talk about in the video. Despite the marketing department deciding they loved the phrase and dropped it at every opportunity, I don't think any commercial games actually used the technique, mostly because it didn't work reliably on all iterations of the hardware.
@@WhitePointerGaming Yeah, it wasn't until recent times where "Blast Processing" was even truly figured out and exploited properly on Genesis to be able to reliably display those higher-colour images, and it apparently still takes up basically all the CPU resources and even stalls the sound engine, along with having some visual artifacts and the horizontal resolution effectively being cut in half in order to achieve the effect too. This being important when you realise that this overhyped and much boasted [usually in Genesis vs SNES arguments] "Blast Processing" capability still falls quite a ways short of the quality of image the SNES can display in standard Modes 3 and 4 at 8bpp with 256 colours chosen from the 32,768 master palette, and that the SNES can also display high colour images like this during normal full 60fps gameplay if desired too. So, really, Sega brainwashed everyone with that whole "Blast Processing" marketing spiel back in the day, and it's clearly stuck ever since. The reality however is that the SNES' Colour Blasting is capable of greater feats in that regard, especially with anything that involves displaying lots of lovely colours on-screen in whatever way. Of course, that's just one of the ways the SNES was always at an advantage over the Genesis, which is true in reverse too regarding some of the ways the Genesis was always at an advantage over SNES. "Blast Processing" though has certainly done a lot of manipulating and distorting of the narrative around these two consoles over the years, that's for sure. I guess kudos to the Sega marketing team on that one.
@@inceptional to be clear the Genesis was faster, and it wasn't even close. There were even a few games that managed to pull off polygonal graphics without an expansion chip, and that can't have been easy. In games where frame rate mattered, the Genesis reigned supreme, but when the depth of the experience and the special effects needed to be dialed up to 11, the SNES was ultimately superior to the capable but inferior Genesis. That said, having a faster CPU did give it more flexibility in terms of effect complexity than an un-enhanced SNES, but only to the limits that could be attained with its more limited color palette.
The SNES also managed to push polygons without the use of the SuperFX chip in a few games.
@@WhitePointerGaming Yeah, there's a clip on the RUclips video "Let's play Star Trek: Starfleet Academy - Starship Bridge Simulator - 26" that shows it doing some decent polygons on the stock system there.
I appreciate videos like this because even though I'm familiar with the types of graphics the Genesis can do and grew up with the system both as a child in the early 90's through adulthood I still learned a lot by watching this video. For a very long time up until the last 10 to 15 years the only system that got thoroughly discussed was the NES and systems especially with regard to the Genesis had no digestible information on it with the exception of some emulation author diaries or reads. Those were helpful but without graphical examples to accompany it or in best case scenario watching video examples like this it was difficult to wrap your mind around each of the concepts. I understand high level programming and occasionally I dip my toe in the low level pool of information but I'm far from an expert in understanding disassemblers, memory viewers and many debugging tools but would play around and examine any that were available in certain emulators to hopefully catch something new. My favorite thing to do lately was I discovered in Exodus it has a sprite outline feature that puts visible wire frames around each sprite tile on the fly frame by frame so you can quickly identify which is or isn't a sprite and is super helpful. I believe that's maybe what you were using when talking about the background planes because it also shows boxes around mid-frame adjustments and scrolling. When I found out the Genesis only had 16 more sprites than the NES and Master System I was baffled as to how so but programmers could cleverly work around that limitation since each sprite was adjustable from as small as 8x8 to as large as 32x32. It was fascinating watching how Capcom composed the meta sprites with the Genesis and Super Nintendo in different ways with their Street Fighter ports. I'm understanding now too that just because the Super Nintendo can do 128 sprites, and can have sprites as large as 64x64, it's greatly held back from it's full potential since the SNES can only do 2 sprite sizes at a time as opposed to fully featured like the Genesis can.
But you can choose one, or like you mentioned, two certain sprite sizes and make all the unused pixels full transparent (SNES is capable of real transparency), by overlapping them you can create the illusion of sprites in many more different sizes.
A low-res 256x224 mode on the Genesis also gives a different pixel aspect ratio. 320 width mode has narrow pixels that are 91.4% of the width of a square pixel. While 256 width mode has fat pixels that are 114.3% the width of a square pixel. This also has the side effect that fewer tiles are needed to cover the screen, so more screen area can be covered up by sprites without dropping them.
IIRC the low res mode has a lower horizontal sprite limit. But fewer tiles are required to fill a screen, still, which is why it was often used for title screens and cutscenes even in games that otherwise ran at 320x224.
@@todesziegeAnd porting games that were made with 256px in mind
@@TurboXray Yes -- it makes sense to use it in ports of games originally made for, say, the SNES or PC Engine. You would avoid squished sprites without having to redraw the graphics.
I can't, off the top of my head, recall any such instances but I'm sure there are some.
@@todesziegeThere are a few. Valis 3 is one of them.
This actually works somewhat in reverse, as the Genesis displays less sprites and sprite pixels per scanline in 256x224 mode than it does in 320x224 mode. In both modes it can still cover 100% of the screen with sprites though. But, in 320x224 mode it can display more sprite pixels horizontally than SNES (320 on Genesis vs 272 on SNES), which is important in certain situations, whereas in 256x224 mode it actually falls short of the SNES that can display 272 sprite pixels (and 32 sprites) per scanline vs the Genesis 256 sprite pixels (and 16 sprites) per scanline. So, really, Genesis is better sticking to 320x224 mode in most cases other than maybe for convenience when porting a SNES game to Genesis.
You don't have to apologize for calling it 'Mega-Drive'; and nevermind anyone from the U.S. or Canada who might complain about you calling it that; you don't have to listen to their complaints. Because 'Mega-Drive'/'Genesis' are one in the same. So you don't need to apologize for what you want to do and what you don't want to do. It's your Channel, your Video, you decide what you want to do and what you want to say and or establish on your Channel. I'm an American btw in case you're wondering! Anyway, I subbed to your Channel as well. Take care :)
Thanks for the comment and sub :)
I'm so glad I found this channel! Nobody would complain if your videos were at least double the length.
Wow🎉! Thanks for reviewing Sega Mega Drive technical capabilities! I hope that you will cover more features of Sega MD hardware in next videos...
One of the things that made many consoles of this era (including the Genesis and SNES) powerful was the ability to change the video chip registers on a per-scanline basis. So many amazing graphical effects were done via that mechanism.
I find it very interesting how many older games are almost tech demos. Gaming was much more interesting when developers were really pushing the hardware to do new and interesting things versus today's games that only give us (slightly) incremental increases in visual "realism". Watching videos like this helps me find classic games to add to my backlog. (Does anyone need more on the backlog??)
There is indeed some primitive transparency going on on MegaDrive with Shadow & Highlight mode, and this is a very interesting topic to cover. You could set in a palette a single color that would be white or black, and would trigger transparency. Basically, any pixel using that white/black color would instead display the below pixel but brighter/darker. What is even more curious about this, is that it allows displaying intermediate gradients that are not available in the 512 base palette. It had a lot of limitations though, so it was not used a lot. It was pretty common for shadows (example : helicopter in Desert Strike, fighting games). Ristar and Vectorman use Highlight mode as well I think, first boss for Ristar and the second (water) stage for Vectorman with the rays of light.
My latest video covers this exact topic :) ruclips.net/video/YWtZO1TC9G8/видео.html
Thank you for this video. I realy like that technical stuf.
Lighter and darker colors of the palette were used to create transparency-like effects in later games (light streaks in Vectorman underwater level for instance). Recently I've learned that those colors could be apply to sprites to make them look transparent without dithering.
Dynamite Headdy and Ranger X are great games for “how did they do that?” type visual effects.
When you were talking about the resolution differences, I was thinking, "Oh, that explains the criticisms made in Console Wars." Your shoutour to them was a wonderdul coincidence.
Zero Tolerance was a Sega Classic!!!
Yea, I played the hell out of it. A great title!
I always wanted to know how they did that one room in Bloodlines, where they split the screen into five rows, and had your character teleport between them. This video has helped explain that longstanding mystery to me, and genuinely shows how much effort and technical skill Konami was showing in their games on the Genesis.
I would love to hear about software scaling on the Genesis. I know developers utilized said programs for games like Red Zone, which featured everything that was said to be impossible on the Genesis all at once. I'm also very interested in hearing about Road Rash and Zero Tolerance.
I haven't looked too closely at Road Rash, but Zero Tolerance, which I show at the end of this video, uses a raycasting engine similar to Wolfenstein 3D.
James Pond 3 did some software sprite scaling, and other cool tricks. And Puggsy also had some smart visual effects, and a really cool physics engine.
What's funny is seeing dithering used in games like Monster Hunter World. Its noticeable at 720p or even 1080p but at 4k it looks like a transparency. It was mostly used on the gathering I assume to lesson their impact on performance but I thought I've seen it used in other modern titles as well. Sparingly but definitely there. Makes one wonder about the true impact of transparency on modern graphics.
I appreciate your explanation of the dithering technique, but your example at 8:50 doesn't really do it justice. I actually have a Mega Drive and a CRT and the effect looks indistinguishable from actual transparency.
Yeah, it wasn't perfect but it was the best I could do as I don't really have a setup that could record good quality footage from a CRT. Hopefully it still gives a good idea of the blending the TV did.
"the effect looks indistinguishable from actual transparency" That's not true. The luma signal is NOT an exact multiple of the chroma signal, which is why you get "rainbowing" with dithering in a lot of cases on the MD over composite. And with RGB, the dither pattern WILL show through (CRT or not). The only way you could get "indistinguishable" transparency, is if the two pixels perfectly blended together... but that would mean your effective resolution was 160px and not 320px across. You don't get both; it's either one or the other.
I don't know if it's truly indistinguishable from proper transparency in all examples, but I can tell you for sure that I played the Yoshi's Island 4 level in Super Mario World many times as a kid and never noticed until I saw it again recently as an adult in emulators and such that it wasn't in fact using the SNES' actual transparency capabilities there. So, yeah, even though I never paid much attention to this kind of faux transparency effect in Genesis games back in the day, I think it can certainly look convincing enough that most people wouldn't be able to tell much of a difference most of the time to be honest. I was playing with I think high quality S-Video cables [possibly Euro SCART] and a really nice Toshiba CRT back in the day though, so I think they probably played their part in the overall effect too.
You missed my favourite feature which was probably the hilight and shadow mode.
Definitely used well in Ranger X, Vectorman, etc.
Even that poltergeist game used it to have your ghost look transparent.
You'll like my latest video :) ruclips.net/video/YWtZO1TC9G8/видео.html
@@WhitePointerGaming Oh wow thanks, worth the wait.
So I have an ask. I am the combat designer for a new (as of this writing we are nearing completion) Neo-Geo game, Vengeance Hunters. I am a software dev by day, but i'm .net/c# so I am not experienced much with C that our game is being programmed in. I also have read the the NGDevKit documentation for the system. So I get what it can do. What I do not get is why a lot of what the Mega Drive/Gen can do, the Neo-Geo seems to be weak at. Mostly in regards to the different scrolling areas. Also, NG has scaling and deformation, but only from a larger art asset shrunk to a smaller asset and back up. However, I was told that this was not very performant.
I'd love to see a comparison of what the MD can do vs. what the NG can do. The pros and cons of either, where they excel and where they are limited. I always thought that the Neo-Geo can do almost anything. And I found out that it seems like it is very very good at very particular things, and pretty awful at others.
That's very interesting.
They are quite different machines, the MD has 80 sprites up to 32x32 in size with 20 on a line limit and 2 hardware background planes.
Iirc the ng has 381 16 pixel wide x 512 pixel height sprites with 96 on a line and no backgeound planes. So it has to use some of its sprites for backgrounds and likely it would be more difficult to do things that are easy on the Genesis for example line scrolling.
I'm terms of background scrolling layers and granularity of scrolling I think things would be easier on the Genesis as it had hardware for plane scrolling, tile level scrolling and line scrolling for both planes.
The ng can attach sprites and give them as a single object so planes scrolling would be easy and cheap but more granular scrolling may be an more difficult.
The neo geo had loads more colors , more sprites on a line , can downscale objects , has a much faster 68k processor.
I'm writing a game for genesis using sprite multiplexing techniques to surpass hardware limits which is getting into neo geo sprite number territory you might want to look me up on twitter and have a look, the game is called Lufthoheit.
@@shannonbirt9267 Yeah, I saw your videos. Could not find you on Twitter. And yup, you described a lot of the issues we've ran into where the MD/Gen simply makes it better/easier in some areas where a person might believe the NG would be dominant.
Your material is awesome !!! greettings from MX
Very good video!
Can you make a video explaining how the last boss scaling effect was achieved in the game The Lawnmower Man?
0:43 Flashback music? Nice!
OUTSTANDING!
Greetings from Trinidad! Great channel, surprised it hasn't blown up yet !
Hello to Trinidad! Great to have you around. Did you guys know this console as the Genesis like North America, or was it called the Mega Drive for you? Please spread the word to help the channel grow :)
@@WhitePointerGamingthanks i definitely will !
It was called the genesis here too, the relative few that I saw. Which may seem kind of strange given that Brazil is closer to us than the USA ! You'd think sega would have been more popular here given that. I suspect that most people got their stuff from relatives in the US or Canada.
The Sega master system wasn't even a thing here and I only ever knew of one rich kid who had one in the country.
Despite that I was still a Sega fan and had a genesis...years after it was already obsolete of course. I was retro before it was cool !
@@WhitePointerGaming Definitely ! Also it was called the Sega Genesis here, with most people getting stuff from relatives in US and Canada rather than the much nearer Brazil where Sega was really popular.
Always interesting, I apprechiate this kind of content and I'm glad I discovered your channel. The Megadrive was my first console and it's one of my all time favourite systems, together with the SNES and NeoGeo. 16bit era still rules!
Welcome aboard!
something ive always wondered about: why megadrive games usually on average used more frames of animation than snes games? ive noticed that looking at spritesheets of some games that came out on both, or exclusives for sega always usually had more frames.
im thinking of 2 konami games, contra hard corps vs contra 3, or castlevania bloodlines vs castlevania 4 or dracula x (snes). i wonder if it had something to do with the size of the game ram, or maybe the faster cpu in the sega?
of course looking at dracula x pcengine cd vs castlevania dracula x snes spritesheets is crazy! they really went all out for the pcengine cd game. i know theyre not the same game and of course cd has way more space than a 8 or 16 meg game but its really cool.
of course theres exceptions to the rules and all, and for the record i adore ninty and my snes, tho by 1993 i had all 3 consoles and cd adaptors and man the world was glorious! i loved em all!
It probably just has to do with esoteric differences between how MD/Gen and SNES handled memory management. That said, one contributing factor could be the MD/Gen's smaller color palette. That would have made sprite data more compact as well.
It has to do with the fact that the snes only has access to 2 x 8 kb frame banks for sprites at any one time .
The genesis can use near the whole 64 kb of vram for sprites and is not segmented in any way.
The snes sprite system was crippled in many ways, only two sprite sizes on screen vs 16 for genesis for example this often totally negated the raw number of sprites that the genesis had 80 vs the snes 128 also.
The genesis could readily outperform the snes on the sprite side of things and regularly showed this.
The genesis also has about a 20 percent benefit In dma speed so can upload graphics to vram faster than the snes for streaming animations etc.
The snes can handily beat the genesis in some areas , color for example but sprite handling is not one of them.
@@jasonblalock4429Not really - the SNES (in its most used graphics modes at least) and Mega Drive both used 16 colour tiles/sprites (4 bit). The SNES just had more palettes available at once.
@@shannonbirt9267That simply isn't true. SNES games like Super Smash T.V., Space Megaforce, Rendering Ranger R2, 3 different Parodius games, and plenty of others proved otherwise.
Space Megaforce often has full screen scaling and rotation effects that pass behind the player score and other info. The SNES can only display one layer when in mode 7. This means all of that stuff is constructed of sprites. I still can't figure out how they pulled off the first level boss. Either they somehow got the system to not update the backdrop that was already there or they literally constructed it out of sprites too as their is a rotating sphere in the center of the boss' huge body that is clearly the real background layer.
Contra 3 on SNES was 8 meg. Contra Hard Corps was 16 meg. Both Castlevania 4 and Bloodlines were 8 meg but they prioritized different animations. There is literally just 1 frame of animation for swinging with your whip in Bloodlines while Castlevania 4 has several and the character is much larger. Their are a number of unique animations for walking up and down steps in Castlevania 4 as well. Bloodlines look like they are just using certain frames from your walk cycle.
If you want to see very smooth animations on the main character of a SNES game check out Konami's The Adventures of Batman and Robin, any of the DKC games, etc. Final Fight 3 and The Ninja Warriors have tons of animation on a number of huge characters all running at once.:)
More, please. That was excellent.
Check out my retro console tech tricks playlist for more videos like this one :)
I always preffered the smoother snes color palette. Genesis felt crude most of the time, to me at least.
Alas, the programming tricks of the genesis were simply amazing! Good programmers are history's unsung mathematical gods.
Discovered your channel through Reddit! Fun and educative as well. Would be cool to see one video in the same spirit dedicated to the PS1 as well
Thanks for discovering me, hope you enjoy my content :) The PS1 is a very different beast to these guys but I might look into it at some point.
@@WhitePointerGaming Yeah, the PS1 is definitely a more complex system, so I get it. Anyway, what is the name of the scrolling shooter shown at the beginning? Looks pretty cool to me :D
The first game shown in the video is Gunstar Heroes.
Thank you. I've learned much today.
Great vid mate!
You don't seem to have mentioned the Megadrive's 68000 CPU being 16-bit (with 32-bit registers), with 16-bit RAM and a 16-bit bus to the cartridge. In the SNES all of those things are just 8-bit. The SNES's CPU is pretty hopeless for more than it's intended purpose, slinging bits around it's custom graphics hardware, which was very decent.
The SNES CPU is back-compatible with the 6502 used in the NES. Originally there were rumours of back-compatibility with NES games, but they dropped that. The choice of CPU might be down to that, because otherwise it's a terrible, slow, useless microprocessor. The 68000 meanwhile was used in arcade games at the time, the Megadrive is pretty much cut-down arcade hardware.
6:30. That's actually wrong. You can change the background colour. They do this on the first stage before the boss appears in Thunder Force IV.
The 32X can also use all colours simultaneously. You can see this on the option screen of Space Harrier, which uses a promotional artwork consisting of thousands of colours.
What I meant by that was that it was always the bottom-most layer. It was set in that position and couldn't be changed. I didn't mean that the colour couldn't be changed, though I can see the way I worded it could be a little confusing.
I really like your videos! Good work!
Thank you!
when your talking about the raster effects to display more color (or colour for you, lol) is that the same as HAM (hold and modify)?
No, hold-and-modify is a different technique.
HAM was a special video mode for the Amiga in which for each new pixel, two channels (in HSV colorspace) would be *held* in their current values while the third would be *modified* . This allowed a gamut of 4096 colors while still taking up only 6 bits per pixel. The cost was, for sudden color changes where two or more channels needed to be updated, you got color artifacts.
The Genesis did not support HAM in any way, shape, or form. The Amiga supported raster interrupts as well, particularly through the use of the Angus chip's Copper; many more than the Amiga's nominal simultaneous 32 colors could be displayed through careful Copper programming.
PS: The great FPS Zero Tolerance was done with a method called raycasting, right?
That's correct, it's using raycasting, similar to how the original Wolfenstein 3D did it.
"I'll be referring to it as the Mega Drive for the rest of the video"
We're used to it by now
The Megadrive was capable of transparencies under certain conditions and used them in a fair few games bitd.
Examples include the main player sprite in 'Haunting starring Polterguy', 'Rambo 3 (Helicopter spotlight in intro), Mortal Kombat (fighters shadows), Landgrisser 2 (in battle) and loads more. I think most of these were achieved through clever use of the shadow and highlight mode.
There is a recent demo showing the large 'Boo' boss from Super Mario World running on Megadrive but showing two transparent 'Boo's' moving around the screen and when overlapping having a double transparency.
It's on RUclips, it's very impressive and well worth checking out.
The player in Haunting starring Polterguy.. is just a single color (what is supposed to black)... and it's just shadow mode.
@@TurboXray Yes i know but great effect though and does the job. It should really have been used more bitd.
Have you seen the two ghost, Mario world demo someone did on Twitter? Managed to get two giant 'Boos', transparent and overlapping on the Megadrive. There was also a single transparent 'Boo' done on the PC Engine demo. Both very impressive and great work by the guys that did it.
This is all explained in my latest video: ruclips.net/video/YWtZO1TC9G8/видео.html - it's still not actual transparency or translucency, just shadow and highlight creating a fake effect.
sooo goooood! thanks!)))
So how DID they do that FPS shooter? The way they did it on Toy Story was very impressive, and used much more of the screen. They "cheated" by mirroring the screen halfway across, vertical mirroring. Since the walls were symmetrical in that dimension on purpose. I can only imagine the way they did it, in this un-named game, was with raw CPU power. The Atari ST, running the same CPU but with a chunky bitmap screen, ran a simple FPS, though years after the computer was popular, called "Substation". It was Wolfenstein-esque and mostly full-screen.
I give up, you tell me!
That FPS was done with Raycasting.
What's the game at 3:58? Bending roads I've seen, but warping the ground around it?... Wow.
Contra: Hard Corps (or Probotector in PAL regions).
Can someone explain how systems like the Intellivision displayed graphics and what tricks it used. Thanks
It's something I might look into for a future video.
@@WhitePointerGamingit will be amazing
Great video. I do have one minor complaint though. The impression many seem to have in comment sections of videos of this nature is that the Genesis could do effects that the SNES couldn't. Every one of these graphicsl tricks can be found in a number of SNES games.
Yeah, that's a good point, though I think it bares mentioning that many of these tricks, while possible on SNES, aren't used all that often. Some games make use of them, but it's not particularly common, probably because the SNES had a lot of other graphical toys for developers to play with (eg there wasn't much point in combining vertical and horizontal scrolling to create tilts because mode 7 could do that much better). However they are used extensively on the Mega Drive.
@@WhitePointerGaming Agreed. They weren't used as often but there is a helicopter that tilts forward in Time Trax on the SNES just like the unreleased Genesis version. There is an iceberg that rocks back and forth in Prehistoric Man though I think that only does vertical slices if I recall.
Both Axelay stage 4 and Macross Scrambled Valkyrie (don't remember the stage number) switch color palettes to essentially double the colors with a layer of water. The SNES version of Sparkster does the whole reflection in the water thing like Castlevania Bloodlines, except it looks even better with some additional effects.
I think too often people just assume something is being done on SNES with one of the built in functions like transparency or rotation but those effects have there own set of restrictions so sometimes it actually makes more sense to do some effect the same way they do it in Genesis games.:)
@@davidaitken8503 Yeah, and, having personally looked at hundreds of SNES games to specifically find similar uses of these types of effects there, I can say it's more cases than likely most people think. It's just often nowhere near as obvious as on Genesis and not quite as prevalent either, as I think Genesis developers tended to really embrace these kinds of visuals effects as a way to balance out the [Edit: Generally much nicer colours], typically more actual overlapping background layers, and obviously the widespread use of Mode 7 on SNES. I actually wish more SNES developers had used the combination of both the SNES-centric effects and the Genesis-centric effects more often, as it really does have the potential to produce some really impressive results.
@@inceptional The limited color palette of the Genesis couldn't compete with that of the SNES and even Turbo Grafx 16. It isn't as necessary to run extra graphical effects when you can paint more beautiful and detailed artwork. Capcom would often have large pieces of art as a backdrop, such as clouds in the Minks level of U.N. Squadron, or the waterfalls at the end of Armored Armadillo's level in Mega Man X. The water effect during that one boss fight in Ranger X is interesting, but I don't know if I would call it better looking than some detailed, beautifully drawn pixel art. While I do agree with you to some extent, there is such a thing as going overboard with graphical effects and losing sight of what is actually more visually pleasing too.
@@davidaitken8503 I totally agree with you.
Very cool 😮
Great video! Subscribed!
Thanks for the sub!
What is the game at 4:00? It looks pretty cool!
Contra: Hard Corps. And it is.
In hindsight, I think I find the MD more impressive than the SNES. Everything achieved on the MD came down to coding skill and the sheer brute force of the CPU. This isn't to diminish the SNES, which is a fantastic machine by all metrics, but it's just these graphical tricks were almost a given on the SNES, and it had the extra chips to help. Developers for Sega just had to code these kinds of things without special hardware.
What’s the name of the game at 11:47?
Alien Soldier.
@@WhitePointerGaming thanks, looks amazing.
YEAH, CALL IT MEGADRIVE!
Do a video where you cover the 32x
I've done just that with my newest video! :) ruclips.net/video/gIVZZcY9vBA/видео.html
I noticed that lots of Mega CD games use low-res mode.
This is a beginner-level explanation that is completely redundant if you already have some familiarity with how console hardware works. Also, it has several mistakes I won't bother to correct, just be warned that the guy is re-telling information from elsewhere with some errors and omissions.
Otherwise, nice work, useful if you belong to its intended audience. Nowhere as deep as Retro Game Mechanics Explained, or Coding Secrets. Just a friendly warning.
P.S. Just as an example to show that I'm not talking out of my ass:
* The official number of simultaneous colors is not 64 but 61, because one color of every palette is transparent and there is background color, separately. so, we have (16-1)*4+1=61
* 32x can display all 32768 colors simultaneously, not just 256, with no effort, unlike SNES, but this only applies to its own separate layer of graphics that has no graphics acceleration for doing anything similar to what the base hardware can do easily. And attempts to bring PC-level games to 32x are crippled by its RAM size that is too small for any advanced graphics/audio and by the cost of bigger ROMs. Very misguided hardware.
This was only meant to be a high level overview so obviously if you are already familiar with it you'll get little benefit from this. In this context the 64 colour thing is just easier to explain (4x16=64, plus the transparent ones don't show up as transparent when you view the palettes), but I do go into why it's technically only 61 colours in another video. Same thing with the direct colour mode of the 32X and its other capabilities, that's also explained in another video. I recommend people go and watch Coding Secrets in this very video if viewers want to go into more detail, and I've recommended other channels like RGME and Pigsy in other videos as well.
@@WhitePointerGaming Sure, saw that video already. Just this one felt not very informative and occasionally incorrect. I'm not doing emudev anymore for roughly 20 years though, just sometimes refreshing my memory with the stuff I previously missed/ignored.
As I said, my prob with your video was that it was obviously not the original source for most of the info and therefore felt redundant. Sorry.
Nice Video ! Sub & Big Like ! And Love Retro Sega Game !
Thank you!
@@WhitePointerGaming Thank you for your reply ! If you are interested in the nostalgic game culture of Japan, please subscribe to my channel !
Don't apologise, yanks don't apologise for calling it the genesis and it is refreshing to hear it called the Mega Drive for once.
Even more refreshing is hearing the snes called just that and not the es-en-ne-es.
I'm beginning to think all British youtubers that cover retro gaming was not around in the 80s and 90s (coupled with ninty not having much of a presence in Europe until later) and that's why they only repeat what yanks have said.
Most British seem to say "Snez" from what I've noticed.
@@WhitePointerGaming Yes, that's how we pronounced it back then but with RUclipsrs it seems to be drying out in favour of en-ee-es or es-en-ee-es which just seems like more work.
So basically the genesis does have 3 background layers,even if that window layer does not support transparancy,but still,,,
No. It has two background layers. You can assign a chunk of one of them to be used as a static HUD instead though, but at the cost of being able to display any actual background visuals on that layer where you've chosen to use it as a fixed HUD instead. Outside of using sprites to fake extra layer elements, you can never show more than two overlapping background layers at once on Genesis. And, since I think I know why you mentioned this, you can display up to four actual full-screen fully-overlapping background layers at once on SNES.
No. It doesn't. The window layer is there simply to avoid having to use horizontal interrupts to reposition the screen for a HUD.. because the MD doesn't have a scroll list for Y values like it does for X. It also inherits this from the SMS. Gameboy also has this, and IS considered more of a pseudo 2nd BG layer *because* you can give a horizontal and very offset.
2:11 The lower resolution on Mega Drive/Genesis is imo not a great option to use over the 320x224 resolution in most cases due to the fact that, obviously, it runs in the lower resolution that means the Genesis no longer has any display advantage there, and also the fact it reduces the max on-screen sprites on Genesis from 80 to 64 (so now down to only half of the SNES' 128 max), the max sprites per scanline from 20 to 16, and the max sprite pixels per scanline from 320 to 256, which is now even less than the SNES' 32 sprites and 272 sprite pixels per scanline (Genesis normally has an advantage with the sprite pixels per scanline in 320x224 mode). So, really, in 256x224 mode, the SNES beats the Genesis almost across the board other than raw speed, as it already has the way more colours, proper transparency effects, up to two times as many background layers, built-in Mode 7, HDMA, and now also both more sprites on-screen max (which is always the case anyway) and more sprites per scanline and sprite pixels per scanline too (which is one of the few meaningful advantages the Genesis actually has over the SNES normally), along with the exact same resolution there as well.
It's also worth noting that every effect you see the Genesis doing here, by using the likes of row/line/column scrolling, background tile priority, dithering, using raster effects and palette swaps to increase on-screen colours even more, using some layer element to create a static HUD and so on, can also be done on the SNES as standard as well, and in some cases actually better, such as being able to vertically column scroll to a finer granularity and a smoother effect (every 8 pixels on SNES vs every 16 pixels on Genesis). Plus, even though the Genesis can use shadow/highlight mode to increase the on-screen colours in some ways, it is a very limited-use feature that isn't as clear or easy a colour increase as it sounds. This is similar to how the SNES has a standard background feature in some background modes called Direct Colour that allows it to display a whopping 2048 colours on background 1 alone, which is alongside another 128 totally separate colours for background 2 and the additional standard 128 totally separate colours for sprites on top of that too (and that's even before any colour math or HDMA backdrop gradients are used to increase the colours even further), but that also has similar caveats in terms of how it specifically works.
The Genesis definitely does have some advantages over the SNES though, like the faster CPU and the normally higher horizontal resolution and higher sprite pixels per scanline that come with that, and a couple of other things too. But, dropping down to 256x224 resolution is not something I would recommend, especially if the idea is to try and match or even surpass what the SNES is capable of. Genesis should stick with the 320x224 resolution in most cases, as that's where pretty much all of its strengths lie and where it is then able to properly compete with the SNES in some [but not all] ways and even surpass it in a few important areas.
None of the snes hardware advantages matter anymore, the genesis hardware is the modern standard.
The snes is obsolete.
how did you learn that?
@@andresdigi25 Just reading up all the developer manuals, documentation and online sources about the general inner workings and specs of each system, as well as working on a bunch of SNES concepts myself and even having a few of them coded up in conjunction with some SNES programmers. And, right now I'm currently working with another SNES programmer who's make a shmup for the system, and I'm creating some art and doing a little bit of level design.
@@Troll_On_RUclips Tell that to Woodfrog as he works on Till & Hat, Maxwel Olinda as he works on his new SNES shmup, Kulor as he works on his new SNES shmup, rumbleminze as he works on his many direct NES to SNES ports, infidelity as he works on his many direct NES to SNES ports and Super Mario Bros. Maker for SNES, The new 8-Bit Heroes as they work on the "SNESmaker" development tool, Something Nerdy Studios as they plan to make a game for SNES after completing Former Dawn, id and Randy Linden software as they work on the SNES Doom Definitive Edition as well as an "FX3" chip and new rumble controller for SNES, Kannagichan as he works on Super Dan, the team brining Cooly Skunk to SNES properly, the team brining Shockman Zero to SNES properly, Voultar who made the SNES Edge-Enhancer bringing super sharpness, Landsat as he works on Triple Impact, Straynus as he works on Cronela's Mansion for SNES, Proteus as he works on his SNES port of Bloodlines, Bitmap Bureau Ltd. as they work on multiple new SNES games for 2025, etc.
@@inceptional i am a big fan of snes and 16 bits machines in general. I am a developer but only focus on high level and with some experience in python/js game libraries. Can you give me a recommendation where to find more in depth tech information about the snes? maybe a book, or the name of the manual, or a game tutorial? Thanks
Why are you appologising to USA for calling it what it is??? It IS the Mega Drive.
Might be better appologising to the rest of Australia for not pronouncing Sega like the rest of us!! 😂 No one here ever called it sayga, it was always seega. In Australia, we say it as we spell it!
I admit I did say "Seega" back in the day, but corrected myself sometime in the early 90s once I heard the game startup jingle which always sang "Sayga" :P
@@WhitePointerGaming i know what it said yes, but this is Australia, and you're apparently Australian, you didn't correct yourself.
Simply because they feel they need to reinvent the wheel at every step of life doesn't mean we need to follow their lead!! 😄
@@CaseTheCorvetteMan Uhh, hello? Australia saying "seegah" is Australia "re-inventing" the pronunciation while the rest of the world pronounced it how it was. The rest of us cringe when we hear an Aussies say "seegah". It's true lolol.
@@TurboXray we cringe here over most things you do and say over there 😝
@@CaseTheCorvetteMan Yeah, but we don't butcher the name for Sega ;)
Sure, the Super NES was half as fast clock for clock, but due to all the specialized hardware, it was essentially accelerated to around the Genesis/MD's raw performance, because the Super NES was doing MORE per clock than the Genesis/MD was. :p
Honestly the MD was more like somebody took an '80s EGA card, gave it more RAM (thus a better colour palette) and bolted on a CPU for good measure, whereas the Super NES was actually a game machine, in the truest sense of the word. It was a CPU (as well as related components) specifically designed for running games.
True. It was Segas philosophy when it came to their game consoles. From the SG1000 to the Dreamcast they all had chips available in the market. The only one I'm unsure of is a chip in the Sega Saturn called the SCU. I think it is a DSP like chip that might have been customized for Sega.
As I point out in the video, you can't just compare the raw numbers due to all of the rest of the differences in the hardware. The SNES had a lot of specialised components that were designed to take load off the CPU. But the Mega Drive did still run slightly faster than the SNES at the end of the day. Also the 68000 inside the Mega Drive was used for a lot of gaming applications, such as arcade machines, gaming-focused computers like the Amiga and X68000, and later consoles like the NeoGeo, Jaguar and Saturn.
all very true. i think nintendo's mistake was in the early stages of sfc development the cpu had been intended to be backward compatability with the famicom, and when they decided not to do bc it was too late to change the sfc cpu. well that and developers cheaping out and using the slowrom to save a buck. heck some games have fastrom compatibility and were changed before production to slowrom but still have fastrom code that just needs to be activated to get rid of slowdown.
maybe nintendo underestimated how cheap some developers were and thought theyd choose the fastrom lol. well that and nintendo's games used game specific chips (dsp, spc-1, fx, fx2 etc, like their nes mappers) that made the games themselves have the extra power to run said games, which offloaded the cost of performance onto the game carts themselves.
the only game i know sega did that with i believe was virtual racing with their svg chip. love your vids btw and subbed!
wasnt the dreamcast bespoke chips? i recall they had nec i think make a custom chip and didnt tell them they had 3dfx doing the same, and actually were going to choose the 3dfx chips till someone leaked that info which made the 3dfx stock go higher and pissed off sega and nec.
and sega went with the japanese company as was custom then, for japanese companies to go with japanese companies over abroad companies. i believe at the time the dreamcast protos were referred to as project katana and project black belt. @@BubblegumCrash332
The MD/Gen was absolutely a real game machine. The M68000 was used in a huge number of computers, consoles, and arcade machines. Also, it was extremely well-understood by programmers, because of its widespread use. That made it much easier for devs to jump into MD/Gen development, especially those coming from the Amiga and Atari ST gaming space.
I grew up in the US (though born and once again live in Melbourne) and I still cringe every single time I hear a RUclipsr call it the "Genesis". Yuck. What a garbage fire of a name. Mega Drive is way better
I agree and it's not just because of my Aussie bias lol. I think "Mega Drive" sounds like a much cooler name but Sega of America clearly disagreed.
@@WhitePointerGaming supposedly there was a copyright issue but the old SoA pres denies it... weird story