VDP in sega genesis has 12 colors resistor like game gear so it has 4096 colors to choose from. Unfortunately sega decide to use 9 of that resistor giving only 72 bytes of CRAM and 4 group of 16 color pallet.
=WHAT .......BUT WAIT,WERE SONIC 3&KNUCKLES OR SONIC ADVENTURES MADE BY THEM=???..... *NOPE* ,THOSE WERE MADE BY SEGA TECHNICAL INSTITUTE ALSO KNOWN AS *SONIC TEAM USA* ....WHICH WAS FIRED BY SEGA IN 2006,ISNT IT....SO NO MATTER HOW GREAT TECHNICAL ADVANCE IS,IT'S NOT QUITE THE THING....
Lol, he changed the thumbnail from the original upload. Honestly, I think the promo art for Sonic Colo(u)rs better demonstrated the technical brilliance due to the more diverse color palette. This pic of Movie Sonic is primarily blue, making the feat less noticeable (and less impressive).
@@Sillybuns985 or maybe he was waiting for the stunning image to be shown. I'll admit,.. I saw nothing I could quite describe as concise and high quality.
It's not a glitch, it's blast processing, the thing that the 90s west has commonly misattributed to processor speed when it's the act of "blasting" more colors beyond the 4-palette limit onto the screen on a per-pixel basis.
The tuning has been automated. Search for direct color demo. There is even a wolf 3d style demo that runs on the mega cd and uses this technique to render the image on the genesis/mega drive side.
Nope. That was another story. Those guy use 9 bit color and decrease resolution to not go out of vram capacity and to get things easy to sega cd. The guy in this video talk about glitch, many colors in statics images at sega genesis standard. Sega genesis can run games with 512 color fluently, but you have to play game with game gear-like resolution and nothing of that is new for devs.
thats why i love seeing new genesis releases. Pushing the system beyond ever seen before. My favorite console ever. Was blown away by sonic 3d's graphics back then.
In theory, they could save the tuning config to the cartridge ram, using a battery backup to hold the info. This would mean you'd only have to do the tuning once, but it would prevent this from working on other consoles and isn't really feasible outside of games where they already are using battery backups for saves (since using one just for this is kinda ridiculous).
What about liability to adhere to Sega‘s specifications? What would happen if a newer version of the console with newer revisions of the ICs came out and the game would no longer work? Was this in some way in the contracts?
I wonder if you could skip the tuning process if you had a way to detect how fast things were. Like if your cartridge had hardware that could track the passing of time with enough precision, you could measure that and know how to draw.
I've watched this several times, and I think I finally understood it. He's not using the CRAM dots at all, but rather streaming changes the background color to manually paint each and every pixel with precise timing. Basically, a CPU-based video card. I'd love a follow-up video to explain this a little bit more, especially the delivering. It'd also be amazing if he could now source some truecolor images and attempt to display them with the Genesis. 😄
I might get it too. In CRAM there is an address for painting the entire BG in a single 9bit color? But what causes the glitch to display different colors? Or is the address irrelevant and the stride, step is only zero because that is faster? My guess is that CRAM has just one port and writing any address changes that port. Thus he is writing straight to the DAC.
It'd be great to see you edit that demo to insert a 4096 colour image. Lack of colour and lack of hardware sprite scaling were basically the Mega Drive's biggest issues. Another was the limited audio chip in terms of sampled sound channels. It was a great era of pushing hardware beyond expected limits.
This reminds me of a glitch in a Sesame Street N64 game where if you disturb the cartridge while playing the game one of the NPC's becomes a moving, geometric and modern work of art
For the record, this is what "Blast Processing" originally was, it was using this DMA trick on scanlines with specific timing to draw 256-colour static images. But because of what he mentions here, with it being slightly different on different versions of the hardware, it was never actually used in any commercial games.
I love these videos. Thanks for posting them! As someone programming on the original NES it inspires me to look at the hardware differently and see what else I can do!
The tuning may have been cumbersome, but it could have been interesting to gamify it with some in-game context/excuse (having the player "decode" an image or something like that).
I think that would've been a great idea, but the problem was if the player chose not to decode the image and just started the game. I assume it was difficulty to detect if the screen was tuned correctly, otherwise he would've had the game tune it automaticaly, but if the player has to do the tuning and you wanted to make a mini game out of it, you needed a way to detect if they failed to tune it properly, otherwise there was nothing stopping the player from just starting the game and getting funky graphics. I'm sure it would fail Sega's testing as well.
@@CrossoverGameReviews A solution to that is to encode something in to the image, which is very hard to read when the image isn't tuned properly, but becomes easy to read when it is. Then you gate the player based on those knowns. Another option is, for example, a simple tile slider puzzle which is impossible to visually make out when out of tune. Yes, all of this is bypassable - but when the effort needed to bypass it versus just doing it is sufficient, you're more likely to end up with people talking about how cool it is that you can mess with it if you *really* try to.
@@CrossoverGameReviews You are underestimating game creator's creativity. Here's a simple example on an easy way to make it work: Game creates a random, 4 digits password Player has to "decode" the image to get the password Player goes ahead into the next screen by pressing a button once they have the password, and introduce it If the password is wrong, they go back to the previous screen Since the password is randomly generated every time, you can't just skip the tuning.
@@papuel I think you also underestimate the human mind's ability to make sense of a distorted image. When those colour bands are distorted, you can still see that they are colour bands. If you mapped an image of some kind onto it, most people would still be able to read it without the image being completely tuned. Players would get the image "close enough", read the password correctly, proceed, and wonder why the game they spent good money on had such janky images in it, and most likely get a refund and complain. The only way to get the users to tune the image correctly would be by being completely honest about what they were being asked to do.
Glitches like these have been the secret sauce of demo scene coders for years, such as the discovered ability to draw graphics on the border on the Commodore 64. The trick used in the above video reminds me of the demos for the Amiga that allowed an almost HAM (Hold and Modify) mode in hires before that was possible with the AGA machines. Basically the color pallet would be changed on every line. The results were quite striking, though not practical for much other than showing still images (same goes for HAM mode which was used very rarely in actual game play on the Amiga).
In a lot of ways this reminds me of the many, MANY tricks you could pull with an 8 bit atari microcomputer. It has 256 colour video output (4 bit luma + 4 bit chroma), but it's internal colour registers are 7 bit, so the vast majority of modes only allow selection of 128 colours. (3 bits of luma + 4 of chroma) Add in the fact that it's high resolution mode is listed as 1.5 colours (you can specify two luma values but only one chroma) and that the majority of modes are 4-5 background colours + 4 sprite colours, and the machine seems quite limited in practice. These higher colour modes also drop the horizontal resolution from 320 to 160 pixels. (well, you can choose 'wide','normal' or 'narrow' widths, which are 384/320/256 in high resolution mode and half of those numbers in high colour modes) That is, until you get to GTIA modes. There are 3 of them. In each case this drops the horizontal resolution to 80/64 pixels. One of them is simply that you can freely choose any of the 9 palette entries. (though this disables all sprites). The other two are 16 colour modes; Luma mode (16 shades of a single colour), or chroma mode (16 colours with the exact same luma value/brightness) these two modes are both kind of awkward. The real magic happens when you realise that the system has built in ways of easily triggering per-scanline interrupts in specific places (not that common on 8 bit systems), and that it has 'display lists' which let you change between a number of graphics modes on a per scanline basis without the CPU needing to be involved. Over many years a huge variety of pseudo-modes came into existence that combined the visual artifacts of NTSC and PAL respectively to blend together adjacent lines that had different graphics modes, creating novel combinations of effective colour depth. One was to alternate between luma and chroma mode. Since one is 16 shades of a single colour (or grey), and the other is 16 colours at the same intensity, the net effect of alternating between the two - especially on PAL televisions, is to create a 256 colour mode. A slight extension to this logic was to have 3 alternating lines. All of them set to Luma mode but with different colours chosen. (in particular, Red, Green & Blue). - this one would in fact produce a 4096 colour mode. Other options were available with different implications. Alternating a 160 pixel 4 colour mode with an 80 pixel 16 colour mode gives a 64 colour mode that is 160 pixels wide, but with some limitations on colour resolution (and an effective drop in vertical resolution) An even more peculiar mode resulted from the realisation that many systems had a slightly faulty GTIA chip. Much like the Mega Drive demonstration here, it's an unreliable trick that doesn't work consistently on all hardware. (and worse, can be temperature dependent even on the same hardware) But the short version is this; According to spec, the various different modes should all be aligned. That is, a row of 320 pixels should line up perfectly with a row of 160 pixels which then lines up with one of 80. In reality however, some of the graphics modes have a half pixel offset in relation to the others. The interaction allowed a 256 colour mode that was also 160 pixels wide... Which shouldn't be possible if the hardware actually consistently stayed in spec... Hardware from that era could have some weird quirks... Nowadays hardware all broadly looks alike. And even where there are quirks, the use of API's smooths over the cracks and makes such things all but invisible and inaccessible...
Amazing, had no idea this channel was run by one of the people at TT(New viewer!). Those games were a big part of my childhood in the 90s, but never saw them again after the genesis era. Now I see they're the ones behind the Lego games people always rave about? Well shit, I should have jumped on those.
Would love to see a video on the sprite scaling boss in Puggsy. I believe it was offered up in a vote some time ago against other effects but did not win.
You should make new Genesis games (yes, gamesss in plural) using this amazing techniques you developed and maybe you would discover a few more tricks along the way to make truly remarkable Genesis games. People are buying this stuff now. Plus you can sell to new games clouds like the Xbox Pass, PS5, Switch, Steam and others.
The image in the thumbnail can be used to stun confuse or terrify those who see it, but I wouldn't call it stunning in anything other than the sense that it is ridiculous for the hardware
What if you would game-ify the tuning bit? Like imagine a Metal Gear Espionage kind of game where you needed to get codes and clues from devices in the game; These devices showing high resolution photos displayed using this technique. That way, the cumbersome job of tuning is a genuine gameplay element of the experience.
We could run ps1 on genesis now of we build an entire new game in this format with solid colors and minimal focus on graphics and nominal focus on gameplay and performance using simple shapes and taking maximum advantage of alfa like mdk and crashbandicoot combined with a turok weapon load out we might have a retro-esq masterpiece on our hands
Mad respect to the people developing games on modern hardware, but this type of thing is on another level. The OG game devs of the ~80’s were and still are Wizards of the old magic
That's the Puggsy space ship! Someone knows about Puggsy, hoorah! Edit: wait a minute, this is the guy who founded travelers tales, no wonder he knows so much about all of this! He helped MAKE Puggsy! You're Jon Burton, right?
For those thinking that the thumbnail is clickbait, he lowered the resolution and the amount of colors to fit Genesis limitations with his 256 color demo. He also did this to the thumbnail of the original upload so the thumbnail isn't clickbait and isn't misleading. Here's the full size image which you can tell when you see it up close. i.ytimg.com/vi/_euM-nL6g1s/hqdefault.jpg
Would be interested to know more about why C RAM dots occur. I have always assumed it was interference in my setup and not actually coming out of the mega drive. Any chance of a video on that? Bonus points if you use the Mega CD game Snatcher, it has loads of them and I can't work out what it is doing!
I have a ton of old GIF images and that clown is one of them. Someone actually wrote a GIF converter for the Commodore 64 back in the late 80s or early 90s. I'd have friends send me PC screen cap tut used images and if download them and after about 15 to 20 minutes my C=64 would convert them. Anything with many colors looked horrible. But EGA graphics and CGA gr as phocs looked pretty good.
Love this man, Coders today will never understand the feeling you get from utterly abusing the hardware like this. Everything is just handed to a coder on a silver platter and they don't understand the love/hate relationship of doing stuff like this or abusing various DOS modes for higher resolutions and color combinations.
Isn't this "blasting" colours directly to the DAC (through the CRAM admittedly) where the term "blast processing" came from? I recall reading an interview with a dev. He was with some Sega marketing suit who had come searching for buzzwords to put into his ad copy, since buzzwords that neither the reader nor writer understand are the bread and butter of computer games journalism. Anyway this programmer mentioned doing the trick you mention here, how you can basically just "blast" colours into the DAC, and he thought that was a pretty cool trick. Obviously the marketing droid wasn't listening, or didn't understand what he was told, but liked the word "blast", heard it spoken by a programmer which therefore made it legit, and later on in the day must've heard someone say "processing". This is something I read in I think Retro Gamer a few years back.
The cartridge slot on the Mega Drive did have a clock pin, as the various divided clock frequencies that drive the whole system come from a single master crystal, would any variance likely be system wide or was there enough of an error rate in the clock divider to make that uncertain? If you had your own reference crystal on the cartridge you could possibly calculate the picture adjustment needed to make the images stable automatically as a difference between expected clock values of both (possibly). Although, it might be a lot of R&D and extra cartridge hardware for the sake of a nicer picture!
sonic 2 has the same flickering line i noticed (on my native mega drive Model 1 and also on emulators (not the new android ports just the original roms)
If only there was some constant clock you could check to calculate what clock speed the console had 🤔 Like run a calculation that took X amount of cycles and compare that to a clock. Anyways cool demo! Was thinking you could have added it as an Easter egg in a game, but then again memory was in such high demand for these old games that wouldn't have been possible.
I think it might have been posible to include a precalibrated clock in the cartridge, but don't quote me on this, I'm not a dev and I don't really know
@@YOEL_44 that sounds possible, but really unfeasible due to how expensive each cartridge would be. We're talking an additional processor in each cartridge. Considering how devs would normally opt for passwords to save putting batteries in their cartridges, this would be shot down immediately.
is there a way to make music like the SNES? I just always had a problem with the music. I saw DOOM's genesis version, and the music was rushed. in 2020 is there a new technique to make the music limitless?
To sound like a snes is a waste of time. It would drain all Genesis' personality. What people could do is rip some fan-made ost (check the video "Doom OST Final Fix for 32X" by The Spoony Bard) and create a rom hack
If I recall correctly the SNES uses samples for all its sound. Genesis can use samples too but in doing so either the main CPU or the coprocessor needs to be completely busy playing samples
Love these videos. Can you do videos on games that for some reason the developer just blew it? Why did they do it that way? Why were the buttons reversed? How can a game be fixed? Can the game be fixed? Why were they able to get it so right in the sequel? You can start with the letdown that was Final Fight for Snes.
There is a website dedicated to doing this called the Bad Game Hall of Fame. www.badgamehalloffame.com/ No Final Fight unfortunately, but they do have postmortems for tons of other bad games.
Silly nitpicky question: colours were represented using 9-bits giving 2^9=512 colours. Using dithering to "simulate an extra bit" of colour information gives you 1,024 colours. How do you then get to 4,096 colours (12-bit colour)? Am I missing something obvious? My best guess is that I'm being overly literal with "a bit of extra colour" here (I thought you'd only be able to simulate halftones and so get double the number of colours) and the truth is that there's some nice "colour math" that proves this.
Modern computers are far more complex than old game consoles, which can really be treated as tightly coupled embedded systems. DMA is a recipe for disaster today, where hundreds or even thousands of applications can be running simultaneously and all need memory access. Applications are given virtual address space while the operating system's kernel actually reads and writes to memory. If applications could DMA, then you can't really have modern computing where so many heterogenous programs can simultaneously coexist - and even if you did out of some miracle of teamwork, you would not have security.
So its working similar to flicketing on atari 2600? when you want another color in place that you cant use or its simple not exist. Flicketring can create additional color or hue i use that in simple way on my one game but when somebody could be good enough then he can even had no 2 but (with a bit of creativity) a 6 colors
Are there any new coding techniques in 2020 that could achieve higher fidelity graphics on a megadrive or snes that wouldn't have been possible when those systems were in their prime? I've always wondered this. if a game were developed today for those systems, and you could use let's say a much larger storage medium, could you create a game that simply wouldn't have been possible back then? Or did developers get everything that was ever possible out of those systems?
Japan had a modem for the mega drive back in the day. You could do banking on it. the US did too and you could download games from the service if i remember correctly (though that might have been the south american one)
So the thumb is click bait! I was hoping to see how a modern image would look now that we have access to better images. Could you release a demo so we can see it on real hardware with the best results?
I'm so confused... Did GameHut rebrand? Is this a second channel? Is this something totally different and I just think all people with an accent sound the same? 😅
over00lord Unknown It technically is click bait, but also not. He does state that the only reason that the demo doesn’t have images like the thumbnail, is because that at the time, it was hard to find images with more colours. He states that using the dithering technique used in the Sonic 3D Blast intro, it is possible to get 4096 colours.
If you look at the thumbnail in full screen, you can tell that he lowered the resolution and the amount of colors to where it fits Genesis limitations with his color demo so it wasn't clickbait. Here's the thumbnail in the full resolution: i.ytimg.com/vi/_euM-nL6g1s/hqdefault.jpg
Sega: Here is a device that can display 61 colors on screen at a time!
Jon: Did you say 65536 colors at a time?
Everyone makes this error at some point, harmless mistake
Wait a second, comander keen is that you?
VDP in sega genesis has 12 colors resistor like game gear so it has 4096 colors to choose from. Unfortunately sega decide to use 9 of that resistor giving only 72 bytes of CRAM and 4 group of 16 color pallet.
Technically, 4096 colors per frame, but only one at a time.
@Travis Rodrigo Try Flixzone. You can find it on google =)
You guys must have impressed the heck out of Sega of Japan. Really pushed their Mega Drive and Saturn to the limit. Travelers Tales rules.
=WHAT
.......BUT WAIT,WERE SONIC 3&KNUCKLES OR SONIC ADVENTURES MADE BY THEM=???..... *NOPE* ,THOSE WERE MADE BY SEGA TECHNICAL INSTITUTE ALSO KNOWN AS *SONIC TEAM USA* ....WHICH WAS FIRED BY SEGA IN 2006,ISNT IT....SO NO MATTER HOW GREAT TECHNICAL ADVANCE IS,IT'S NOT QUITE THE THING....
@@robotnikkkk001 The thing you refer to is greed
I’m confused. What’s he talking about?
Too bad they stopped traveling
@@cathyas3749 at this point, i dont even think they know what they're talking about. just insider joke gibberish ha
Lol, he changed the thumbnail from the original upload. Honestly, I think the promo art for Sonic Colo(u)rs better demonstrated the technical brilliance due to the more diverse color palette. This pic of Movie Sonic is primarily blue, making the feat less noticeable (and less impressive).
And more cursed
Jono99 That especially
and then doesn't update it for the fixed sonic
Yeah this thumbnail is stupid and almost entirely unrelated
By the time the video ended I was like "Wait, what?" I was genuinely prepared for much more video, it felt like such an abrupt end
Guess we’re just not used to videos that are concise and generally high quality
@@Sillybuns985 or maybe he was waiting for the stunning image to be shown.
I'll admit,.. I saw nothing I could quite describe as concise and high quality.
never a glitch, always a feature
It's not a glitch, it's a DEF (Dynamic Emergent Feature).
It's not a glitch, it's blast processing, the thing that the 90s west has commonly misattributed to processor speed when it's the act of "blasting" more colors beyond the 4-palette limit onto the screen on a per-pixel basis.
@@Eltro920 it's a glitch, the marketing department named it blast processing.
The tuning has been automated. Search for direct color demo. There is even a wolf 3d style demo that runs on the mega cd and uses this technique to render the image on the genesis/mega drive side.
found a blog post about it : gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1203
Ah yeah found it!
"Chilly Willy's Direct Color DMA Video Demo v4 Wolf3D
"
Nope. That was another story. Those guy use 9 bit color and decrease resolution to not go out of vram capacity and to get things easy to sega cd. The guy in this video talk about glitch, many colors in statics images at sega genesis standard.
Sega genesis can run games with 512 color fluently, but you have to play game with game gear-like resolution and nothing of that is new for devs.
thats why i love seeing new genesis releases. Pushing the system beyond ever seen before. My favorite console ever. Was blown away by sonic 3d's graphics back then.
If only you didn’t have to go through the tuning process
I know, right!
In theory, they could save the tuning config to the cartridge ram, using a battery backup to hold the info. This would mean you'd only have to do the tuning once, but it would prevent this from working on other consoles and isn't really feasible outside of games where they already are using battery backups for saves (since using one just for this is kinda ridiculous).
What about liability to adhere to Sega‘s specifications? What would happen if a newer version of the console with newer revisions of the ICs came out and the game would no longer work? Was this in some way in the contracts?
@@masterofx32 that's the million dollar question isn't it
I wonder if you could skip the tuning process if you had a way to detect how fast things were. Like if your cartridge had hardware that could track the passing of time with enough precision, you could measure that and know how to draw.
I've watched this several times, and I think I finally understood it.
He's not using the CRAM dots at all, but rather streaming changes the background color to manually paint each and every pixel with precise timing. Basically, a CPU-based video card.
I'd love a follow-up video to explain this a little bit more, especially the delivering. It'd also be amazing if he could now source some truecolor images and attempt to display them with the Genesis. 😄
I might get it too.
In CRAM there is an address for painting the entire BG in a single 9bit color?
But what causes the glitch to display different colors?
Or is the address irrelevant and the stride, step is only zero because that is faster? My guess is that CRAM has just one port and writing any address changes that port. Thus he is writing straight to the DAC.
It'd be great to see you edit that demo to insert a 4096 colour image.
Lack of colour and lack of hardware sprite scaling were basically the Mega Drive's biggest issues. Another was the limited audio chip in terms of sampled sound channels.
It was a great era of pushing hardware beyond expected limits.
do developers still push hardware like old times?
I really wish Travellers Tales could be allowed to focus on more than just LEGO games. I’d love to see an original TT game with today’s tech.
It's unreal how cool the programming tricks for the Genesis were.
This reminds me of a glitch in a Sesame Street N64 game where if you disturb the cartridge while playing the game one of the NPC's becomes a moving, geometric and modern work of art
Game developers HATE him!
Find out how he pushed the limits of Sega hardware with this one WEIRD trick!
For the record, this is what "Blast Processing" originally was, it was using this DMA trick on scanlines with specific timing to draw 256-colour static images. But because of what he mentions here, with it being slightly different on different versions of the hardware, it was never actually used in any commercial games.
I love these videos. Thanks for posting them! As someone programming on the original NES it inspires me to look at the hardware differently and see what else I can do!
What are you making
@@seronymus working on a vertical scrolling shooter
@@clearvus Can you graze for points?
Most companies: 61 colors is well enough.
Jon: Hold my beer.
Man I'm an idiot. When you zoomed in to show the glitchy 1 pixel, I focused on the shovel for the longest time and said to myself "I don't see it".
The tuning may have been cumbersome, but it could have been interesting to gamify it with some in-game context/excuse (having the player "decode" an image or something like that).
I think that would've been a great idea, but the problem was if the player chose not to decode the image and just started the game. I assume it was difficulty to detect if the screen was tuned correctly, otherwise he would've had the game tune it automaticaly, but if the player has to do the tuning and you wanted to make a mini game out of it, you needed a way to detect if they failed to tune it properly, otherwise there was nothing stopping the player from just starting the game and getting funky graphics. I'm sure it would fail Sega's testing as well.
@@CrossoverGameReviews A solution to that is to encode something in to the image, which is very hard to read when the image isn't tuned properly, but becomes easy to read when it is. Then you gate the player based on those knowns. Another option is, for example, a simple tile slider puzzle which is impossible to visually make out when out of tune.
Yes, all of this is bypassable - but when the effort needed to bypass it versus just doing it is sufficient, you're more likely to end up with people talking about how cool it is that you can mess with it if you *really* try to.
@@CrossoverGameReviews You are underestimating game creator's creativity. Here's a simple example on an easy way to make it work:
Game creates a random, 4 digits password
Player has to "decode" the image to get the password
Player goes ahead into the next screen by pressing a button once they have the password, and introduce it
If the password is wrong, they go back to the previous screen
Since the password is randomly generated every time, you can't just skip the tuning.
@@papuel I think you also underestimate the human mind's ability to make sense of a distorted image.
When those colour bands are distorted, you can still see that they are colour bands. If you mapped an image of some kind onto it, most people would still be able to read it without the image being completely tuned.
Players would get the image "close enough", read the password correctly, proceed, and wonder why the game they spent good money on had such janky images in it, and most likely get a refund and complain.
The only way to get the users to tune the image correctly would be by being completely honest about what they were being asked to do.
If you were a PC gamer in the early 90's you know what cumbersome really is.
it's always a mystery when people downvote videos like this. are you disappointed that he managed to get... more colours than intended?
SEGA: I got a limited amount of colors.
DEV: Color glitching bug go brrrrrr
It's like you are analyzing alien technology.
I would love to see a video where you create the thumbnail image with the Genesis GLITCH.
Is that possible?
Glitches like these have been the secret sauce of demo scene coders for years, such as the discovered ability to draw graphics on the border on the Commodore 64. The trick used in the above video reminds me of the demos for the Amiga that allowed an almost HAM (Hold and Modify) mode in hires before that was possible with the AGA machines. Basically the color pallet would be changed on every line. The results were quite striking, though not practical for much other than showing still images (same goes for HAM mode which was used very rarely in actual game play on the Amiga).
In a lot of ways this reminds me of the many, MANY tricks you could pull with an 8 bit atari microcomputer.
It has 256 colour video output (4 bit luma + 4 bit chroma), but it's internal colour registers are 7 bit, so the vast majority of modes only allow selection of 128 colours. (3 bits of luma + 4 of chroma)
Add in the fact that it's high resolution mode is listed as 1.5 colours (you can specify two luma values but only one chroma) and that the majority of modes are 4-5 background colours + 4 sprite colours, and the machine seems quite limited in practice.
These higher colour modes also drop the horizontal resolution from 320 to 160 pixels. (well, you can choose 'wide','normal' or 'narrow' widths, which are 384/320/256 in high resolution mode and half of those numbers in high colour modes)
That is, until you get to GTIA modes. There are 3 of them. In each case this drops the horizontal resolution to 80/64 pixels.
One of them is simply that you can freely choose any of the 9 palette entries. (though this disables all sprites).
The other two are 16 colour modes; Luma mode (16 shades of a single colour), or chroma mode (16 colours with the exact same luma value/brightness)
these two modes are both kind of awkward.
The real magic happens when you realise that the system has built in ways of easily triggering per-scanline interrupts in specific places (not that common on 8 bit systems), and that it has 'display lists' which let you change between a number of graphics modes on a per scanline basis without the CPU needing to be involved.
Over many years a huge variety of pseudo-modes came into existence that combined the visual artifacts of NTSC and PAL respectively to blend together adjacent lines that had different graphics modes, creating novel combinations of effective colour depth.
One was to alternate between luma and chroma mode. Since one is 16 shades of a single colour (or grey), and the other is 16 colours at the same intensity, the net effect of alternating between the two - especially on PAL televisions, is to create a 256 colour mode.
A slight extension to this logic was to have 3 alternating lines. All of them set to Luma mode but with different colours chosen. (in particular, Red, Green & Blue). - this one would in fact produce a 4096 colour mode.
Other options were available with different implications.
Alternating a 160 pixel 4 colour mode with an 80 pixel 16 colour mode gives a 64 colour mode that is 160 pixels wide, but with some limitations on colour resolution (and an effective drop in vertical resolution)
An even more peculiar mode resulted from the realisation that many systems had a slightly faulty GTIA chip.
Much like the Mega Drive demonstration here, it's an unreliable trick that doesn't work consistently on all hardware. (and worse, can be temperature dependent even on the same hardware)
But the short version is this;
According to spec, the various different modes should all be aligned. That is, a row of 320 pixels should line up perfectly with a row of 160 pixels which then lines up with one of 80.
In reality however, some of the graphics modes have a half pixel offset in relation to the others.
The interaction allowed a 256 colour mode that was also 160 pixels wide...
Which shouldn't be possible if the hardware actually consistently stayed in spec...
Hardware from that era could have some weird quirks...
Nowadays hardware all broadly looks alike.
And even where there are quirks, the use of API's smooths over the cracks and makes such things all but invisible and inaccessible...
Thanks for taking the time to write this. Was super interesting to read!
Reminds me of the amiga HAM video modes lol
I didn't read this because I'm stupid, but I think this lad has a lot of knowledge and I appreciate it.
Amazing, had no idea this channel was run by one of the people at TT(New viewer!). Those games were a big part of my childhood in the 90s, but never saw them again after the genesis era. Now I see they're the ones behind the Lego games people always rave about? Well shit, I should have jumped on those.
Would love to see a video on the sprite scaling boss in Puggsy. I believe it was offered up in a vote some time ago against other effects but did not win.
This is crazy and super impressive!
You should make new Genesis games (yes, gamesss in plural) using this amazing techniques you developed and maybe you would discover a few more tricks along the way to make truly remarkable Genesis games. People are buying this stuff now. Plus you can sell to new games clouds like the Xbox Pass, PS5, Switch, Steam and others.
The image in the thumbnail can be used to stun confuse or terrify those who see it, but I wouldn't call it stunning in anything other than the sense that it is ridiculous for the hardware
That thumbnail is anything but beautiful.
What if you would game-ify the tuning bit? Like imagine a Metal Gear Espionage kind of game where you needed to get codes and clues from devices in the game; These devices showing high resolution photos displayed using this technique. That way, the cumbersome job of tuning is a genuine gameplay element of the experience.
We could run ps1 on genesis now of we build an entire new game in this format with solid colors and minimal focus on graphics and nominal focus on gameplay and performance using simple shapes and taking maximum advantage of alfa like mdk and crashbandicoot combined with a turok weapon load out we might have a retro-esq masterpiece on our hands
I'm definitely no coder but this was surprisingly entertaining 👍👍
I wanna see the demo with the 4096 color images
Now that you have access to images with higher color resolutions, have you tried this again with the genesis hardware?
As Jason Scott once said:
The clown is everywhere, it's following me.
Remember the t-rex and manta demo on the ps1? that was so amazing what they could do with that
They really could've marketed this as a feature
Mad respect to the people developing games on modern hardware, but this type of thing is on another level. The OG game devs of the ~80’s were and still are Wizards of the old magic
Hang on. I’ve already watched this...
Yeah. The guy behind Gamehut decided to separate Coding Secrets from it and in doing so, he's remastering all the one cs videos for this channel.
Thanks to your amazing voice your helping me sleep at 3 am
The thumbnail of this video tells me something’s wrong with it
In all honesty, it looks pretty good
*Meanwhile, the version of Movie Sonic in the thumbnail is terrifying*
That's the Puggsy space ship! Someone knows about Puggsy, hoorah!
Edit: wait a minute, this is the guy who founded travelers tales, no wonder he knows so much about all of this! He helped MAKE Puggsy! You're Jon Burton, right?
@Din Also a playthrough of Mickey Mania.
For those thinking that the thumbnail is clickbait, he lowered the resolution and the amount of colors to fit Genesis limitations with his 256 color demo. He also did this to the thumbnail of the original upload so the thumbnail isn't clickbait and isn't misleading. Here's the full size image which you can tell when you see it up close. i.ytimg.com/vi/_euM-nL6g1s/hqdefault.jpg
That feature was called a "blast processing" back in the days)
You are genuine genius!!
So awesome I see maximum potential here
This guy is the Michael Abrash of Sega Genesis
0:10 link to previous video please!
I missed this video. Nice
Edit: you are a genius
Would be interested to know more about why C RAM dots occur. I have always assumed it was interference in my setup and not actually coming out of the mega drive. Any chance of a video on that? Bonus points if you use the Mega CD game Snatcher, it has loads of them and I can't work out what it is doing!
So this technique could only be used for building up static images, or could you apply this sorcery to BG/FG layers and sprites?
You could layer both backgrounds and all the sprites over the top of it I guess...
60 fps: exists
Sega Genesis: That's easy
Nintendo 64's Starfox: I'm gonna end this man's whole career
Isn't this what "Blast processing" actually is?
Lol
I have a ton of old GIF images and that clown is one of them. Someone actually wrote a GIF converter for the Commodore 64 back in the late 80s or early 90s. I'd have friends send me PC screen cap tut used images and if download them and after about 15 to 20 minutes my C=64 would convert them. Anything with many colors looked horrible. But EGA graphics and CGA gr as phocs looked pretty good.
Love this man, Coders today will never understand the feeling you get from utterly abusing the hardware like this. Everything is just handed to a coder on a silver platter and they don't understand the love/hate relationship of doing stuff like this or abusing various DOS modes for higher resolutions and color combinations.
we need a demo with 4k colors!!!!
Colors aren't 4k, resolution is, or am I being whooshed?
@@YOEL_44 4k just means 4,000 in this instance. So they're saying they want a demo with the 4,000 colors mentioned at 2:10
@@Julian_H Oh OK, missed that
Isn't this "blasting" colours directly to the DAC (through the CRAM admittedly) where the term "blast processing" came from? I recall reading an interview with a dev. He was with some Sega marketing suit who had come searching for buzzwords to put into his ad copy, since buzzwords that neither the reader nor writer understand are the bread and butter of computer games journalism.
Anyway this programmer mentioned doing the trick you mention here, how you can basically just "blast" colours into the DAC, and he thought that was a pretty cool trick. Obviously the marketing droid wasn't listening, or didn't understand what he was told, but liked the word "blast", heard it spoken by a programmer which therefore made it legit, and later on in the day must've heard someone say "processing".
This is something I read in I think Retro Gamer a few years back.
They had to tune Sonic in the movie or it would alternate between 2 states causing his appearance.
But Titan showed 512 colors on screen at once in there mega demo!
How about revisiting this glitch and taking it to its fullest expression? 512 colors (or whatever), and hopefully with minimal dither.
I though the clown was just a random meme image but it was me, graphics sample
The cartridge slot on the Mega Drive did have a clock pin, as the various divided clock frequencies that drive the whole system come from a single master crystal, would any variance likely be system wide or was there enough of an error rate in the clock divider to make that uncertain? If you had your own reference crystal on the cartridge you could possibly calculate the picture adjustment needed to make the images stable automatically as a difference between expected clock values of both (possibly). Although, it might be a lot of R&D and extra cartridge hardware for the sake of a nicer picture!
Out of curiosity is that demo available to play around with on a flash cart or emulator? Looks great thanks for posting the video!
This is blast processing, isn't it?
can you do it now with an image that has more colors? out of curiosity to see how it looks.
sonic 2 has the same flickering line i noticed (on my native mega drive Model 1 and also on emulators (not the new android ports just the original roms)
What is the name of the previous video where he showed this? I didn't see it during the video uploaded right before this one.
My first DOS PC came with that clown pic (amongst others) for my vpic viewer for GIF files.
Genesis did what Nintendidn’t
If only there was some constant clock you could check to calculate what clock speed the console had 🤔 Like run a calculation that took X amount of cycles and compare that to a clock. Anyways cool demo! Was thinking you could have added it as an Easter egg in a game, but then again memory was in such high demand for these old games that wouldn't have been possible.
I think it might have been posible to include a precalibrated clock in the cartridge, but don't quote me on this, I'm not a dev and I don't really know
@@YOEL_44 that sounds possible, but really unfeasible due to how expensive each cartridge would be. We're talking an additional processor in each cartridge. Considering how devs would normally opt for passwords to save putting batteries in their cartridges, this would be shot down immediately.
Those images took up 698MB
is there a way to make music like the SNES? I just always had a problem with the music. I saw DOOM's genesis version, and the music was rushed. in 2020 is there a new technique to make the music limitless?
To sound like a snes is a waste of time. It would drain all Genesis' personality. What people could do is rip some fan-made ost (check the video "Doom OST Final Fix for 32X" by The Spoony Bard) and create a rom hack
If I recall correctly the SNES uses samples for all its sound. Genesis can use samples too but in doing so either the main CPU or the coprocessor needs to be completely busy playing samples
Love these videos. Can you do videos on games that for some reason the developer just blew it? Why did they do it that way? Why were the buttons reversed? How can a game be fixed? Can the game be fixed? Why were they able to get it so right in the sequel?
You can start with the letdown that was Final Fight for Snes.
There is a website dedicated to doing this called the Bad Game Hall of Fame. www.badgamehalloffame.com/ No Final Fight unfortunately, but they do have postmortems for tons of other bad games.
Silly nitpicky question: colours were represented using 9-bits giving 2^9=512 colours.
Using dithering to "simulate an extra bit" of colour information gives you 1,024 colours.
How do you then get to 4,096 colours (12-bit colour)? Am I missing something obvious?
My best guess is that I'm being overly literal with "a bit of extra colour" here (I thought you'd only be able to simulate halftones and so get double the number of colours) and the truth is that there's some nice "colour math" that proves this.
The 9 bits are 3 for each colour (RGB) giving you 512. Dither gives you an extra bit - per colour. So that’s then 4 bits per colour = 12 bits (4096)
@@CodingSecrets Perfect! Thank you so much!
Computers in 2020: "Gets DMA"
Sega Genesis: "Gets DMA"
Why? Just why did we lose this ability on computers until recently?
Modern computers are far more complex than old game consoles, which can really be treated as tightly coupled embedded systems. DMA is a recipe for disaster today, where hundreds or even thousands of applications can be running simultaneously and all need memory access. Applications are given virtual address space while the operating system's kernel actually reads and writes to memory. If applications could DMA, then you can't really have modern computing where so many heterogenous programs can simultaneously coexist - and even if you did out of some miracle of teamwork, you would not have security.
@@LynnXternal you know AMD systems can have more allocated space?
Isn't that DMA?
@@davidbass6780 AMD systems?
Because DMA usually requires you to completely halt the CPU.
4096 colour images were readily available.
So its working similar to flicketing on atari 2600? when you want another color in place that you cant use or its simple not exist. Flicketring can create additional color or hue i use that in simple way on my one game but when somebody could be good enough then he can even had no 2 but (with a bit of creativity) a 6 colors
Are there any new coding techniques in 2020 that could achieve higher fidelity graphics on a megadrive or snes that wouldn't have been possible when those systems were in their prime? I've always wondered this. if a game were developed today for those systems, and you could use let's say a much larger storage medium, could you create a game that simply wouldn't have been possible back then? Or did developers get everything that was ever possible out of those systems?
I wonder if you could get working, on a dreamcast, a RUclips app. Or hell, on a Genesis although no idea how you'd get the internet part working
Japan had a modem for the mega drive back in the day. You could do banking on it. the US did too and you could download games from the service if i remember correctly (though that might have been the south american one)
The background music reminds me of Tron
@Calx I have no idea it just does
2:13 why did you show my face without my consent
So this is almost like the genesis equivalent of the amiga OCS hold and modify mode? If not in function then sort of in form lol
considering that the Amiga used the same processor (Motorola 68k) it's probably the exact same or at least similar
So the thumb is click bait! I was hoping to see how a modern image would look now that we have access to better images. Could you release a demo so we can see it on real hardware with the best results?
It isn’t necessarily. The scan lines obscure it a bit.
Otherwise, the thumbnail just sucks in general. I don’t want to see old movie sonic again.
I didn't expect to see the Personal Paint Clown in this video :-)
The Amiga was a pretty popular choice for developing Sega Megadrive games.
Genius
Couldn't you have hot (or created) 4096 colour images on the Commodore Amiga? There were 4096 colour HAM mode images on the Amiga, after all.
Steven Hurdle I can remember 6 million colors on the Amiga.
Wow nice trick
Sad even channels like this starting to stoop to clickbait titles and thumbnails.
@Cole yop
yea i agree
How was this clickbait
@@notrandomtypek
*G*
You really don't have to put trailer Sonic in every thumbnail
chili dogs
This is cool.
this guy has to use a mic
I'm so confused... Did GameHut rebrand? Is this a second channel? Is this something totally different and I just think all people with an accent sound the same? 😅
This is his 3rd channel.
Impressive. But you said it could do even more colours with better source images. Any chance of a new version showing off higher colour depths?
The click bait thumbnail disappoints me. I rather enjoy this channel, and to see you stoop to such tactics is just sad in my opinion.
over00lord Unknown It technically is click bait, but also not. He does state that the only reason that the demo doesn’t have images like the thumbnail, is because that at the time, it was hard to find images with more colours. He states that using the dithering technique used in the Sonic 3D Blast intro, it is possible to get 4096 colours.
If you look at the thumbnail in full screen, you can tell that he lowered the resolution and the amount of colors to where it fits Genesis limitations with his color demo so it wasn't clickbait. Here's the thumbnail in the full resolution: i.ytimg.com/vi/_euM-nL6g1s/hqdefault.jpg
Id like a video you Megacolor please
there's something grating about an englishman calling a megadrive a genesis. do you say lays instead of walkers too?