Did 64 Colors Hurt the Sega Genesis?
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- Опубликовано: 11 фев 2024
- I do a rundown of some of the Genesis's most popular games to make the case it did just fine with what it could display.
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Opening "Sega" jingle is from Astal for the Sega Saturn.
Ending Music during the credits is from Batman for the Sega Genesis.
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By: Jan Neves
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Intro by Evan S.
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Outro Animation by Kevin Bhall
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Episode Notes:
1. Games captures on the Mega SG and Super NT.
2. Music episode on this subject is already in the works.
3. I had considered a section comparing some Turbografx games, but the video was already 30 minutes long.
4. I tried not to harp on it in the spirit of fairness, but I personally feel many Genesis games looked better than their Super Nintendo counterparts.
5. Transparencies were another issue I have considered covering. 
Игры
The lack of color only hurt Sega when they released the SEGA CD. Those FMV games really needed a large color palette to pull from.
Agree. What's funny to me though, is that when I saw screenshots of Sega CD FMV games in magazines, they looked okay in my eyes. But when playing on a tv or emulator, the limited colors really show.
Not all FMV games were hurt by the color limitations. Look at Silpheed. It used FMV, but instead of live action, it's FMV depicted flat shaded polygons which works a lot better with the limited palette.
@@Dj.D25Playing retro consoles on modern TV sucks!
Using a CRT filter is a must with those games.
I think there were 4 special 32X/SEGA CD games that made use of FMV with a colour pallet of 32,768.
The Sega Genesis' trump card is that it has a resolution of 320x224. So, this resolution favored the dithering technique, which gives the impression of having more colors on a CRT television screen. In fact, the "highlight" method allows you to obtain many more colors than 60 simultaneously, in addition.
Yup. Genesis/Mega Drive used quite often dithering techniques for their graphics, which when viewed with CRT and either with RF module or composite would produce completely new colors and even transparency effects. Those two were the most widely used methods to play games at home so they were designed with those flaws in mind.
So whenever you see a weird checkerboard patterns or pixel wide vertical lines on a Genesis with pixel perfect emulators or with RGB cables, those are the details that you should not be seeing as is but must be viewed through technically inferior displays and cables to see what they are really about.
@@MaaZeus The truth is though, dithering never looked very good back in the day either. It never looked as convincing as actually having those extra colors. The image didn't look clean, almost like visual noise.
The highlight mode of the Genesis came with some heavy restrictions which is why it wasn't used very often. Dithering honestly never looked that good even back in the day. The image looked like it had visual noise and it was certainly no substitute for actually displaying those extra colors.
The SNES internally renders 256 pixel pairs per line, the left pixel of a pair being the "subscreen" pixel and the right being the "mainscreen" pixel. Some graphics registers exist separately for each pixel, and this is how the SNES achieves transparency effects: if you enable a water background on one pixel but not on the other, after averaging both pixels the water appears transparent.
Most games use that for the transparencies and color effects, but some decided to use the full resolution instead. Examples are Jurassic Park (the info screen when you don't move the player character) + Kirby's Dreamland 3 have vertical columns like Genesis games, also lots of text-heavy RPGs use the increased horizontal resolution for more detailed Japanese characters.
As a pixel artist who love to dabble in old system limitations to understand how developers had to think back then, I personally think the biggest hurdle to overcome is how those 64 colours are distributed between just 4 palettes (2 for sprites, 2 for backgrounds.) Take Streets of Rage 2 or 3 for example. Not only do Axle, Blaze and the gang look impressive in their own right, but they all share the same palette of 16 colours so the enemies can switch around the palettes freely for variation. To make a cast of 4 charcters that look pretty widely different from each other but still use the same palette is impressive!
And it's not 15 colors per line like the background and foreground layers. Sprites can move up and down, so you have 15 total. However, I seem to recall a feature where each sprite could select a 15 color palette.
Yes. I have heard other pixel artists say the same. The palette situation meant that a lot more care and planning had to go into color section for Genesis games. And the additional palettes for PC Engine and SNES made it easier to show a bit more detail using color. It's more of a limitation for planning, eve if the results on screen could look very good. I've also heard the total palette of 512 is lacking in terms of some shades.
@@ravagingwolverine666 8 gray shades only.
Fuckin Sonic looks like it has way more colors than Mario World I always said Mario World is the most over rated game ever
@@worsethanhitlerpt.2539People say things that aren't true all the time.
Those 16-bit Disney platformers were pure magic. Castle of Illusion on Genesis holds a special place in my heart.
Fantasia was pretty awful though.
Aladdin was better than it had any right to be
Castle of Illusion was great.
World of illusion was a masterpiece
@@MaNameizJeffI loved Castle of Illusion and was pumped for Fantasia... rented it and couldn't even get past the first level? Seemed just bugged or broken or something.
It was also much harder to notice the difference when most people were gaming on small 13 inch CRT TVs in their bedrooms.
...and using crappy RF input too on top of a crap light grey cheap CRT tubed TV on top of that.
The sprite size and the raw CPU speed always swayed me!
The games then also took advantage of the imperfections of the CRT to cheat out more colors out of the consoles of the time.
@@madcommodore Actually I used always SCART.
@@mariatelos Mmmm... I think that problem only happened with american NTSC tellies, not with PAL ones in Europe.
I think the problem isn't the amount of colors, but rather the colors available and how are used. Batman: Return of the Joker on the NES is good example of this.
Exactly, Mega Drive color precision is only 3 bits per channel. You usually can't get quite the color you want from that. TurboGrafx-16 and Game Gear had 4 bits. SNES and 32X had 5. PSX and Saturn had 8.
@@dfcx1the TurboGrafx 16 was strange in that it can display 482 colors from a palette of 512. I wonder why it couldn't just display all 512 colors.
512 colors would imply 3-bits per channel though, similar to the Genesis.
@@ronch550 You're right, I checked on wikipedia and TurboGrafx-16 was 3 bits per channel as well.
@@ronch550 AFAIK it was a similar situation to the Mega Drive, each tile/sprite had to use a subpalette which contained 16 colours from that 512 colour master palette. There are 32 subpalettes which are split into 16 for sprites and 16 for backgrounds.
Each subpalette had 16 entries but effectively only 15 colours could be used in each. I'm not well versed in PC Engine hardware, but I think the first background subpalette entry is used for the blank background colour, and the first entry for sprites is used for transparency and the border. 32 x 15 = 480 + background + border = 482 max.
Sega really went cheap with giving the Mega Drive only 4 subpalettes IMO.
@@Silanda oh well, not that it really mattered because most TG16 games didn't really look like they took full advantage of the colors available anyway.
Another honor mention: "Gunstar Heroes". It also showed a lot of colors, on-screen sprites (small, but many) and tons of effects.
One of the best shooter of its time.
IDK how he didn’t mention ZPF, it’s one of the most gobsmacking uses of color on the console
And let's not forget another point. With the composite signal, the games had many color blending with the dithering, creating new colors
But if you had too many colors, it looked like a huge mess. The Genesis was a great example of being a bit too much for its time
I'm amazed this wasn't mentioned in the video. So many of these games looked like 256 colors due to the intentional blending of colors that artists prepared the art for. But showing emulator footage with no composite shaders did not show this and made the art look worse than it actually was.
@@NesrocksGamingVideos actually, I dislike many neo retrogame because neoretro like to ignore that retro games don't look like how we see them in modern TV. I am not for using RGB scart neither. And it's also apply to saturn, psx and even PS2 who use composite to create transparency and hide low quality asset
The Mega Drive had some really creative uses, a lot of people think of it just as the fake transparency checkerboards, but in reality dithering is often used very subtly to create smooth gradients, and give the assets a textured look. There’s a lot of interesting techniques that blend the pixels differently to the standard, such as the water gradients in Ecco using only a few shades of blue but mixed together to look very smooth, or the unusual dot patterns in Earthworm Jim, and the dithering in Streets of Rage 2, which blends in with the assets so well that it just looks like texturing, but also provides extra colours.
The truth is the excessive dithering never looked that good even back in the day. Dithering never looked as good as actually having those extra colors. It could sometimes look a bit like visual noise. Definitely not a clean look.
Sonic 3D Blast had a great use of colour. Especially with rendered sprites.
The first time I ever noticed the colour palette limit was the FMV footage on the Sega CD. My young brain didn't understand why the video looked so bad and stupidly thought if I buy a special "video connector" it would make the picture look as good as VHS 😂
FMV footage was a completely different story. The complexity of capture footage simply was dumbed down from Einstein clarity, to basically retarded level of visuals, and alot had to be sacrificed, and even a generous 64 bit colors was simply not enough to handle those dark and light transition tones of a filmed scene. Remember, even though the OG MK graphics were captured, that even with those simple character colors, they had alot of touch up work done to them by digital artists before they were put together.
I was obsessed with SNES vs Genesis comparisons back in the 90s (I was in team SNES). Can't believe after 30 years I'm still drawn to the same content!
Man, the console wars were great. People who turn it into offensive vitriol now are doing it wrong.
Same here. I was team Genesis while my best friend was team SNES. The Achilles heel for the Genesis was sound, while for the SNES it was speed.
@@NewRUclipsHandle1 Nope. That is a myth. There are plenty of lightening fast SNES games. Hell, there are plenty of lightening fast NES games. The games are refreshing at 60 hz. It doesn't matter how fast or slow objects are moving. Do you really think the clawed and masked Vega, is taking up more processing power than Dhalsim?
@@davidaitken8503 Genesis could handle more sprites on screen w/o slowing down. The SNES had a slowdown problem which affected its controls performance. This is why so many sports games played better on the Genesis.
Best example of this: the Adv of Batman & Robin. This is not a direct comparison of both games, just a reference point. The Genesis version is nonstop action with sprites coming at you from all angles w/o any slowdown. If that version were ported to the SNES, it would experience considerable slowdowns.
This is why many games had superior controls on Genesis even if their graphics or sound were of lower quality: MK2, Pitfall, EW Jim, Aladdin, and countless third party sports games.
@@NewRUclipsHandle1 You're repeating the same misinformation you've no doubt heard online many times. What you are saying is not drawn from first hand knowledge though. Any well programmed game should retain fast and responsive controls regardless of whether or not the graphics are slowing down. Just because Stunt Race FX is refreshing the screen at about 15 fps doesn't mean the game isn't recognizing you're inputs between frames. While it probably took much less optimization to get things up and running quickly on Genesis the SNES could absolutely best the Genesis in throwing lots and lots of sprites around on screen. It is hard to know what the bottleneck was on some of those early games, but once developers became more familiar with the SNES those slowdown problems nearly disappeared from the systems library with instances only appearing for the briefest moments in extreme circumstances. If you doubt this I would suggest you check out Super Smash T.V., Space Megaforce, Super Turrican, Super Turrican 2, Rendering Ranger R2, Macross Scrambled Valkyrie, and even the three Parodius games that while not completely flawless in performance still run much, much better than Gradius III.
Earthworm Jim really blew me away. As soon as you started the game the strong use of color really hit you. Hadn't seen anything like it on the console up until that point. Combine that with the unprecedented animation quality and it was truly mind-blowing stuff.
If I recall correctly, by that time they were using tricks to display more color especially on static screens.
Great topic, great video. My answer is: yes, but not at first. In 1988-89, the fact that a home system could create a darn good facsimile of arcade games like Altered Beast and Golden Axe was more than enough. And you could do that with 64 colors, especially on displays that, at the time, were (1) small by today's standards and (2) CRTs, which helps hide a lack of color depth.
The problem came later, when FMV games and popular arcade conversions (especially Mortal Kombat) were based around digitized graphics of real-world assets. At that point, a limited color palette became a challenge. But Sega couldn't have reasonably foreseen that in 1988, and, for that era, all the way up through games like Street Fighter II, you could produce a terrific arcade conversion with "only" 64 colors onscreen at once.
Sega was never very good at future-proofing their consoles.
Great description and I totally agree
The snes colorful palette and cartoonish toddler style graphics made the console for family friendly gaming.
@@Super_Nofriendo Those "toddler style graphics" scared Sega into releasing a $300 mistake called the Sega-CD to combat them.
The PC-Engine/Turbografx-16 was already out in 1987, with a very obviously greater on-screen color depth than what Sega allowed on the Mega Drive/Genesis. This actually hurt its sales quite badly in Japan. Sega upped their use of parallax effects in top tier games to outsell the TG-16 in NA, but they would have done themselves a massive favor by bumping the main palette from 9-bit to 12-bit, and doubling the number of sub-palettes from 4 to 8.
Spot on about the early days of the Genesis. It's reputation of an 'at home arcade' console definitely gave it a coolness factor just like the Neo Geo. I rented as Genesis at blockbuster in 1990 along with Sonic and Moonwalker and Altered Beast. It was magical and felt light years ahead. Something that is kind of hard to picture now, you really had to be there.
I get it - these days with the entire NES and Genesis libraries at my fingertips it doesn't feel like THAT big of a jump with the earlier titles - but back then, seeing Sonic 2 contrasted with Mario 1 was mindblowing.
@@AwakenedPhoenix309 Exactly!
Golden Axe, Streets of Rage 1 and 2.
I think PS2 was the last time the generation jump felt like magic, like you said a "had to be there" experience. Nowdays graphic are obvioulsy amazing but it feels like devs just managed to cram a few more shaders.
I was fine with the visuals but I cringed at the audio. I have to say the first games I heard good audio from, sonic, streets of rage, arrow flash. And these games were not first generation. I did miss out on the shinobi games and they do have some jamming toons. On the other hand the snes had actraiser, castlvania, Final fantasy 4, joe and mac,just to name 4 in the first few months.
BTW since I had to look these up and discovered something, if you are looking for any shortage of things to record about, how about a video of the INSANE number of Sega genesis games that were not released in japan, and the doubly insane number of SNES games released in japan but not the USA. Its not just a few.. its like double! Half of the SNES library is locked up overseas.
As a Super NES kid, I’ve really enjoyed digging into the Genesis library as an adult. Genesis color isn’t really an issue, especially when a developer crafted a game that made use of the console’s strengths.
I look forward to your episode covering sound!
Genesis colors and sound were AWFUL compared to SNES. Don't get me wrong Genesis had amazing games but technically the SNES was at another level.
Genesis sound was another beast altogether with those distinct fm tones.
The Genesis sounded like garbage but it had a few good games that I'm aware of..
As a kid I didn't get to play a huge variety
FM synth can sound decent. Unfortunately it often was far too shrill and farty.@@randylahey1232
@@randylahey1232 the trouble was sound design with fm synthesis is a dark art, and a lot more difficult to get a pleasing sound out of than with samples like on the snes. But those tones have a strong nostalgia pull for many. Companies are making new synthesizers today based off the sound chip in the genesis
Damn that Thunderforce 4 looks incredible.
It sounds amazing as well. Full on pounding soundtrack. Technosoft had incredible musicians on their team.
Don't you mean: *Lightening Force: Quest for the Darkstar* ? 😆
And it's soundtrack is equally incredible. I don't know what they were on when they made that particular game but it'll never be reproduced to create a game where the visuals, gameplay, level design, boss fights, and soundtrack are all straight 10s. It's up there as a contender for quote/unquote "The perfect game".
@@mattb6522I can’t believe the name was changed for the US release I think that is such a stupid name
@@matthewnikitas8905 I know! I have no idea what the heck they were thinking with that name change. I mean, Thunder Force was already an established series. It makes no sense why they changed it. I didn't even realize this game was Thunder Force IV until many years later.
I had a Genesis and SNES. The only thing I have to say about the Genesis is I didn't worry about much slowdown. The SNES had a lot of problems with slowdown.
@@Marmite101Nintendo wanted to make a hardware with retro compatibility but abandoned the idea, the SNES suffer since that
Yes I’d say slowdown did hurt snes. I never so much thought the colours hurt genesis imo.
@@Marmite101Snes cpu is 16 bit, it’s the 16 bit evolution of the 6502. It’s the same cpu as the Apple II GS. The issue of snes slow down is generally that the snes didn’t actually use it’s full clockspeed in a lot of games due to publishers and developers cheaping out on rom speed.
CPU Wise they are about even despite the clockspeed difference.
True. The SNES was definately capable of detailed visuals moving at a high speed, but it seems like developers struggled with that more often on the console then with the genesis.
@@waterheart95The snes had slowdown galore and that's why I despise the hardware.
Thanks for covering this! Imo it hurt the system later in its life, early on no one noticed. Sometimes I feel like it was the developers' engines and pallet choices that hurt more. Although a great many games seem to use the same 24 colors over and over NOT 64.
Ristar, Streets of Rage 2, Alien Soldier, Comix Zone and Quackshot are all definitely some of the best examples of what the Genesis could do within the system limitations. Like all of the best stews, they all got given the same basic set of tools and made slightly different things with it. But all of them ended delicious.
SOR2 was glorious. I still play it to this day.
EWJ had so much dithering
I'd add Adventures of Batman & Robin to the list. One of the most impressive 16bit platformers out there. At least as graphics and special effects are concerned. But it was created by people from a demoscene, so it is a unique case.
Quackshot still looks fantastic
I’m a painter and for me, color is really important. At the end of the day, the SNES usually just looked better to me because the colors on the Genesis were often very garish and not nuanced enough.
More nuanced, indeed, but it's also a matter of taste. I always preferred the more contrasted colors of the Mega Drive than the soft pastel ones of the SNES.
It wasn't until it had to share titles with the SNES that anyone really noticed how limited the colors were. It held its own well enough against the PC Engine, and obviously ran circles around the NES. Honestly, I never felt like I was missing out on much of anything during my time as a Genesis owner.
@@Marmite101Right on. Early Mega Drive games did not compare favorably against the PC-E in Japan, especially when the little NEC powerhouse was more affordable and quickly introduced CD audio and memory capacity. Sega learned to lean on its greater parallax capabilities to outshine the TG-16 in North America (and aided by NEC/Hudson's lackluster support for their console in the Western market).
Same here. Genesis was amazing compared to the NES... but when the SNES came out back in late '91 Genesis started to look completely outdated to me. Hey, even my shiny PC 286 with VGA and Adlib started to look outdated compared to the SNES!!! When I saw SNES Prince Of Persia I wanted to throw my PC through the window... the SNES WAS A MA ZING. Not only the colors the SOUND was top notch.
Once the snes got labeled a console for toddlers by having colorful cartoonish style graphics, I had to abandon the console.
@@Super_Nofriendoget a better schtick mate, did nintendo kill a family member of yours?! because like damn what a hater
@@skyMcWeeds I'm a defender of the genesis, I shall destroy all snes wads in my path. 😤
I think the limited colors hurt the Sega CD more than the Genesis due to the full motion video aspect. It also hurt any other type of digital asset as you pointed out.
I was going to write something similar. The Mega CD was badly bottlenecked by the lack of colours when they started doing FMV and early 3d.
The Mega Drive did fine with what it had to work with. I'd have liked to have seen the race cars and bikers in Super Monaco GP and Road Rash all different colours, but I'm not sure if that was a colour or a memory issue.
As I've gotten older, I started to prefer more clever use of limited colors over highly detailed colorful graphics. The Genesis didn't do as well when using pre-rendered or digitized photos, but the pixel art made by hand holds up so much. Comix Zone is an excellent example of this.
A lot of SNES titles had issues with color banding that just makes backgrounds & sprites look like a smeared mess because while it could do more colors, it wasn’t like a true gradient with thousands of shades to make transitions look smooth.
Genesis titles come across as more “crispy” in the pixels with dithering and makes up for less colors by having greater contrast.
@@mikeg2491 Not in today screens. I'm replaying some SNES games in the Switch and now I doubt CRTs are the way to go for SNES games, they look better on flat panels imo, specially Zelda. On the other hand, Mega Drive games look like they lack gradients and the pixels that were masked with dithering are an eyesore in many cases.
Not just about color display for the Genesis. This is a love letter to Sega's greatest console.
Thank you for the memories Lord X
Facts, there’s a reason why Sega keeps rereleasing Mega Drive compilations because it’s their most successful system by a wide margin, for me the Mega Drive was Sega at its peak.
The Dreamcast had the potential to eclipse the Genesis but Sega abandoned it.
@@user-or6yn8pm3c Sega did not abandon the Dreamcast, they ran out of money. If they continued to support the Dreamcast at the rate they were burning money Sega would have experienced full business seizure as they would not been able to pay their employees before long.
@@Shinjiduo Sega was run by idiots. The Saturn should have been at least a modest success but the Playstation totally destroyed it. Sega was initially in a good position in the mid 90s because of the Genesis. But yes Sega abandoned the Dreamcast. Oh well Nintendo was and always will be the GOAT. I'm glad they delayed the Switch 2 til 2025. Switch is half a Teraflop while PS5 is 10 and I couldn't give a shit about the PS5.
@@Shinjiduo Sega of Japan were run by typical mental cases while Sega of America was run by Tom Kalinske who had better sense. By the way the Nintendo 64 was originally going to be a Sega system and use CD Rom instead of those cartridges.
The C64 only had 16, and they were crappy, yet the games just keep getting better and better as the years roll on.
Back in the days when "imagination" trumped "innovation" ! 🥰 I miss those days...
I Disagree. The colors of the C64 were the perfect choices, for its limited number of colors to utilize. Check out some of the C64 artworks that artists have cranked out, over the many years. Many of them will completely blow your mind... making you wonder how the heck they pulled off such amazing pictures, with so few colors. Special tricks of Dithering, and use of non-traditional color choices... can really expand what is possible.
The thing is, you cant get that level of Artistry, without Hiring professional level Artists, that know what they heck they are doing. That know how to properly shade.. and all of the Artistic principles: of light, shadow, shading, perspectives...etc.
Of course, drawing a Static Picture on the C64, is very different from an Interactive Game. You cant use a lot of crazy shading and details, on you will quickly run out of memory. There are some tricks used to get around some hardware limits... but those also take up space and resources... and can slow down the performance of a game, dramatically.
That said... there was a few Amazing game experiences on the C64 (and a lot of crappy ones too). I personally loved the first level of "The Last V8". The music was to d1e for... and while the controls and challenge was utterly INSANE... I loved every minute of it. That game also was a psychologically scary experience... as that Radiation Alarm, really drove home how dangerous Radiation is.
Invaders of the Lost Tomb (Scarabaeus), was also pretty wild. It may not have been my most favorite game... but again, it was a sort of Psychological Thrilling game. When you went into a tomb to try to solve a puzzle... you had no idea when the Spiders would return.. and that created a lot of Tension, Stress, and Fear. I believe there was a button to Toggle your characters Heart-Beat.. and as your life was fading... it would beat faster and faster... which sort of freaked you out... making your own heart beat faster. It was a pretty Wild experience... and you really dont get that kind of experience in most of todays modern games (if at all).
That said... I think one of the best games of the C64, might be... "Raid Over Moscow". Its interesting changing level types, and great playability and challenge, make it one of the top games to beat, IMO.
Anyway... its not the Colors or Graphics that matter most. Games like Miami Ice, were more fun to play, than many of the other more complex and polished games. Heck, there was a magazine game you could program in... called "Astro Panic" and I played that, and "KICK" more than pretty much any other games for the C64. Look at some of the older 80s arcade games, like Tempest, or Asteroids Deluxe. Both very fun... and there are very few colors used at all, on these games.
On the Flip side, there are many modern games that look great Visually... but they are a pure BORE to play.
But again, do look up C64 Art. As a fellow amateur artist myself... many of these still Impress me deeply. In fact, looking at how they used color and stippling effects, actually improved my own artwork abilities.
Abramson's Law: Graphics/audio will get 20% better each year on the fixed, commercial hardware as developers discover newer and better ways to push the limits.
It came down to devs working WITH the system constraints. I'm a firm believer that the higher contrast appearance resulting from reduced color depth actually makes a great deal of the Genesis titles look phenomenal, especially when playing on a CRT TV. Devs specifically catered their color schemes to CRT resolutions back in the day, especially for the NES and Sega Genesis alike. The SNES could actually look muddy and blurry at times because lesser experienced developers would naively attempt to use as much of the system's color palette as possible in some kind of flex. Good art direction can work with any palette, though. Digitized graphics like Mortal Kombat were definitely the bane of the Genesis's "limited" colors, but again, stylized visuals like Street Fighter or TMNT would just waltz right past the constraints, which is why true pixel art just ages so well. Genesis looks better in RGB output than an SNES, too, again because of the typically higher contrast.
"the higher contrast appearance resulting from reduced color depth actually makes a great deal of the Genesis titles look phenomenal"
For one, gross. And two, wow can you get ANYMORE fanboi than that hahahah
@@TurboXrayYeah, that's just embarrassing. 😓
Umk3 ran flawlessly on the Genesis
@@TurboXrayI owned the nes and snes, I sold them both for Genesis
Lol right? I was no fanboy of either as a kid because my parents were too broke to get me either, I was stuck with a nes in the early 90s(born in 88) but even as a 5 year old I could tell the SNES was a far better looking system, I also prefer the type of games the SNES had too. @@TurboXray
for someone who have worked on pixel art for a lot of retro hardware I would say that I find the total number of concurrent colors being a non-issue for the Genesis, to this day. The only thing that was somewhat limiting was the base 4bit color range of 512 colors. This resulted in a bit harsher gradients, and a difficulty to creating dark and moody art styles since you didn't have a lot of values to choose from to make hue shifts in the dark range... But ultimately, when the output was antenna or RCA, the harsher gradients actually helped the signal to look cleaner on CRTs. The graphics didn't look like it does on modern screens. Due the very nature of CRTs, the pixels were roundeder, softer, and blended together nicely. So really, back then, I would argue that the genesis had no problem with colors, at all even. And showcasing the differences today with sharp pixels and modern displays really don't do the hardware justice since it was designed around the consumer televisions of the late 80's.
It's true, yet I distinctly remember magazine reviewers of the time complaining about the lack of colours compared to the SNES on quite a few occasions, and getting tired of that narrative pretty quickly. Of course it was more obvious on certain games than others, and in the end was more a matter of the devs' skills than anything else as many games showed in this video prove.
@@Shyning77 Yeah, definitely. Going back, I don't know if this subject was overblown as gaming magazines back then were quite unprofessional, many times echoing the console wars of the time, often using the printed specifications without much knowledge of how the hardware worked... I do agree that a lot of multi-platform games didn't always get the best treatment when it came to colors. If the target platform was 8- or 16-bit color machines (like the SNES, NeoGeo and such), and they made a down-conversion to the genesis purely on algorithms with primitive tools of the time. It always looked far worse. You really needed a pixel artist that go through the pixel art by hand for the best result. In games like Mortal Kombat I would argue that it was more of lack of care since I have personally tested to remake the Arcade sprites and backgrounds fit both the Genesis and Game Gear, and both look beautiful in comparison to what we got back then... I guess my point is really from the eyes of a pixel artist targeting the Genesis as a "main platform", with actual care put into the pixel art and not sloppy conversions. But one can probably say that sloppy conversions was an actual part of the Genesis experience back in the days., and a real part of the discussion at the time. But has less meaning these days.
I think the palette limitation hit a kind of sweet spot that really separated the wheat from the chaff. Artists with a good grasp of color theory and planning ahead could create really concise aesthetic tones to the image as a whole. For other artists not used to working in these conditions, you'd often see similar kinds of creative pitfalls, especially when struggling with darker tones where the master palette was heavily biased toward the mids so you'd often see the same limited blue/purple shades when trying to convey darkness. There's more than 1 way to depict a sense of darkness and dim lighting though, and old comic books are a good analogy here since they usually had similar very stringent color limitations with what could be printed on a given page, but artists managed to figure out various ways of depicting darkness without the straightforward method of applying darker color shades.
On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps not as much on the SNES but certainly on other platforms like PC after VGA was standardized, you started seeing lots of games with rigorous use of uninspired monotone shading on everything since the 256 color palettes could now enable that when you no longer have to apply as much creative thinking with your color use.
@@Shyning77 There was a similar situation with audio. They complained about Mega Drive audio not being as detailed and "atmospheric" as SNES because it wasn't a sample based audio design but lots of SNES games sound incredibly bland because devs didn't know how to replicate a proper FM synth, first party Nintendo games included. Then in the Mega Drive we got any game Yuzo Koshiro and Jun Senoue put their hands on and they made magic out of a very outdated audio frankenstein.
Probably it was because for the longest time it was 8 bit everything and was very samey and then in the mid 80s things spiraled out of control. Even if the Mega Drive and the SNES are only 2 years apart, you look at the hardware and you can tell the Mega Drive is old pre 85 hardware philosophy and the SNES is a new mindset. I think most of videogame journalists couldn't tell and appreciate and didn't put things in perspective, the fact that the Mega Drive could trade blows with the SNES for at least 3 years tells how impressive the design was, specially knowing it was conceived to be bottom of the barrel cheap, they halved the RAM it originally was going to have.
@@fordesponja Yes indeed. We'll see what SEGA Lord X has to say about the sound in a next video ;)
even with the color limitations, some people can make it work well. look at all those graphic patches fans made for Mortal Kombat and Street fighter. they look close to the arcade, yet still managed to stick within the color limits.
I played Turtles in Time as a kid on the Super Nintendo, but honestly the Hyperstone Heist IS the better game. It feels faster, the sprites are bigger and have more detail (plus you can change their color to better match the cartoon in the options menu), the backdrops have more detail and are sharper, and it offers longer stages and gives us a fight with Master Tatsu from the TMNT movies. Both the Genesis and SNES versions are awesome, but I like the Hyperstone Heist better personally.
Turtles in Time also has an option to change the color palette
I didn't play Hyperstone Heist to completion, but I did play a few levels. It isn't bad by any means, but Turtles in Time has just more spetacle and more effort put into it
Just compare the first level of both games, Turtles in Time's Big Apple will put you in a construction site with a great view of the city in the background, it'll throw you Wrecking Balls, a giant robot shooting lasers through its eyes, ninjas and a really fun butterfly boss
Hyperstone Heist puts you in a boring-looking sewer with... ummm... increasingly more ninjas and robots to fight, which is very lazy game design in my book and gets boring pretty fast. That's the first half of the first level, then you climb some stairs and you're in the second half which is Alleycat Blues from Turtle in Time which is much better. The difference between the two halves is so jarring that they might as well be 2 separate levels, the only reason they didn't do it is because then they'd have to design new bosses
It really comes down to using the available colors properly, like a ton of western devs didn't know how to manage that well enough, but the japanese devs were masters at it.
Also important to know, many games on any system don't necessarily use the max amount of colors, far from it even.
1) "properly" only gets you so far - you still run into limitations (and if you know how to look, you'll see it in a LOT of games.. even Japanese games). 2) Games didn't max out colors to "64" because it doesn't work like that. The color system is divided into 15 color "sub palettes". There's only 4 of them. And graphic "tiles/sprites" can't simply pick colors from multiple sub-palettes. You only get to pick one sub-palette to use. So obviously, with that design, you're never going to hit max color limitation of 64 "unique" colors simply because you'll need to repeat colors in some of the sub-palettes. So point #2 shows that point #1 only gets you so far.
@@TurboXray Yes, I'm familiar with the sub palettes, which makes it even more reason to know which colors of the available palette to use to not make it look drab, which western devs were a lot worse at than the Japanese devs, that's my point.
As for limitations, they always existed and it's often a miracle how well certain devs were able to work with said limitations.
Easy answer. Back in the days I thought so but now I see that the Mega Drive's limitations led to a unique style that remains valid by today's standards. It's the same with it's soundchip. It became a timeless classic and aged a lot better than the seemingly superior SNES chip once the reverb lost it's magic.
To me, not at all, in fact having a limit (of mostly 32 colors, sometimes 64) drives creativity. A good example is on Amiga: The Chaos Engine was using only 16 colors and looked amazing, and then they made a 128/256 colors version for the Amiga 1200 and it looked absolutely horrible. If anything, the 512 colors palette is a bigger limitation.
I think the biggest limitation for the Genesis was the cartridge size and its cost.
True, but that limitation also applied to the SNES... while SNK didn't give a f**k with their Neo-Geo AES lol
Small palettes look clean and harmonious. It's something pixel artists even today with no real technical limitations emulate.
Yeah I remember when they did the 1200 version of that game, even thought it had a lot more colours on display, it actually looked worse than the 500 version, and mainly because having more colours is one thing, using them correctly is another, the 500 version did a better job on the art style over the 1200 version, even thought it was using fewer colours.
Mind you, I didn't realise it was only using 16 colours, thought it would be around 32 that the Amiga could do, unless it was an ST port and they didn't enhance it, but regardless, the colours looked fine on that game.
The actual limit was 15MB--not 512KB like most early games. The largest in the 90s, IIRC, was 5MB or 40 megabits.
@@MaxAbramson3 The theoretical maximum size for a Mega Drive / Genesis cartridge was 32 Mb (4 Mo). It was technically possible to go beyond that limit (Super Street Fighter II is 40 Mb), but that required to use a bank switching technique, meaning not all data was accessible at the same time. The biggest limit was the price of the cartridges back then though. Developers often had to work under strict cartridge size constraints, so that the game wasn't too expensive for the consumer to buy. That's why arcade conversions released early in the console's lifespan used smaller cartridges than what would have been needed for the best results, while late games would use much larger cartridges as the production price was decreasing.
Great video, brought back a ton of memories of how I used to tinker with my TV settings to get color perfect in Altered Beast.
@Marmite101 For some reason I always felt like the sprites were too grainy, I used to turn the sharpness level way down.
The Genesis really had a leg up in arcade conversions with that Motorola X68000 CPU. Tons of arcade boards used it too. Brilliant decision on Sega's part.
The Motorola 68000 was also used in the Commodore Amiga PC, which had similar graphical capabilities as the Genesis. So the Genesis also got to draw from that library, too.
...But that was the problem with the Genesis. Sega knew the NES had its loyal customers, and couldnt risk making a console that much more expensive than an NES. The Motorola 68000 was found in many computers (and arcade boards), but this was the first console to use it. It made things easier for arcade conversions, especially those arcade boards that were derived from specs similar to a Sharp X68000 computer (most Japanese arcade manufacturers did this).
The issue was that the 68000 processor was also the most expensive chip in the Genesis. To compete with the NES, they had to keep everything else watered down. If Sega went with better graphics or better sound, it would have cost a lot more to manufacture and market, and people would have been turned off. You had an 8-bit NES being marketed for $99, and if you marketed a 16-bit machine for more than $249, people wouldnt have bought in (even with improved technology).
I think it became more noticeable after the fact when we were no longer playing on CRTs. The top tier developers knew how to offset these limitations and the bad developers didn't. This was true for the SNES as well which had different shortcomings.
Some Genesis games look vivid as hell and others look like Oatmeal it seems like the system that really seperates the good coders from bad
Super Fantasy Zone might be the most colorful game on the platform that didn't get released in North America originally. Damn shame, but it's out there now on the Mini.
As a developer on GG/SMS and having some knowledge of the MegaDrive, I can definitely tell you that having only 4 palettes of 16 colors was the biggest bottleneck of the console, and having even only 8 palettes would have changed A LOT of things. And to get an idea of the benefit, it is as simple as taking a look at how colorful PCE games can be (Bomberman for example). This very low number of palettes leads to having used all of them very quickly and not being able to stack 2 or 3 palettes for more variety. In RPGs for example, you end up having a single 16 colors palette being used for the entirety of the characters on screen, and this is a HUGE limitation, and means that you are never getting a very detailed gradient for you characters (unlike FF VI for example). Phantasy Star IV has this, Shining Force etc... And this kind of limitation feels almost like it was a 8 bits console, as the Master System could do just as well.
The 512 global palette was fine overall, even if 4096 would have again helped a lot. That's the GG palette by the way. You see the limitations of that 512 palette as soon as very detailed gradients are required, which happens for all games that use digitalized graphics for example. And on SNES, games that apply transparency benefit a ton from the the huge 32K palette. The SEGA-CD is not helped by the 512 palettes, however I think that the limit of 4 palettes of 16 colors is the bigger constraint here. Anything rendered by the ASIC chip is limited to a single palette of 16 colors, and this limit also applies to the SNES (FX chip games for example) or Virtua Racing (3D layer). To summarize : these consoles were not made for these use-cases.
The choices behind the MD palettes reflect the time when they were made. This is a 1988 console after all. I still think that with the limit of 4 palettes SEGA were a bit greedy. I need to check how tiles are built for the console, because there is always an explanation on these choices in order to maximize how data is formatted/stored.
Obviously, the SNES has an edge on anything using digitalized graphics (Donkey Kong, Mortal Kombat) and abundant transparency (Seiken 3, Maui Mallard) and there is no way for the MD to compete against this. But the console had other strengths, and consoles being different is what made this generation so interesting !
Back at the time I never realized there was any tech limitation but figured it was a design philosophy. Sega's color style and soundchip always recalled Escape from New York, The Terminator, and the dark violent 80s OVAs. Nintendo always felt more cartoony and PG to Sega's PG-13 and it seemed very intentional from both
A shame you didn't show Sonic 3's water effects (comparable to Batman's showing), or Ecco 2's 3D stages. Both of those were absolute marvels to me as a kid. And all the ugly dithering on the captures here? Smoothed out and gorgeous on a CRT. The waterfalls in Sonic were translucent with a bit of rainbow. I always thought the SNES had muddier colors and sounds so it's the one Nintendo system I didn't beg for nor bought later in life. It's still the one main Nintendo system I don't own.
What I did learn though is I need to check out Thunderforce. If you showed me that outside of this video and asked me what system it was on, I would've answered that it's a Saturn or Playstation game. Wow.
Also as someone who's dabbled in pixel art, there's absolutely nothing wrong with having a limited palette. You can have beautiful scenes in only 16 colors.
That was what always put me off on the SNES too, the colors were oftentimes either muddy as hell or verging on 'pastel'... and it was the same with the sounds and especially the music... SMW's soundtrack is muffled muddled garbage compared to the crisp iconic simplicity of the NES Mario games let alone any of the Sonic games.
Sega and Disney games go together like peanut butter and jelly, just perfect. Just look at the difference between Aladdin on the Mega Drive compared to the Snes version, i know the Snes version was made by Capcom but the Sega version just looked like the film itself, from the art style all the way to the music, it was a much better version.
Plus, Virginia games and funcom
@@maroon9273 they made some bangers back in the day didn't they.
Of course it did they had actual help from disneys animators and used digipen i believe. While i like the way the snes version plays i love em both. I kinda miss the days 2 games with the same name would be different.
Unless it’s Fantasia. We must never speak of that tragedy.
@@Nathan-rb3qp there was a fantasia game? NOPE! never heard of it. Dont bring it up or your dead to me! Jk lol
The different palette and soundfont in the Sega Genesis made the system look like it had more grit and attitude, while the colors and sounds in the SNES made it more prim and polished. Both had their own unique personalities; something that can't be said for PlayStation or XBox, really.. sorry, that's just what I miss.
GREAT video! Took me down memory lane so powerfully... You showed games I FORGOT I had played and enjoyed!
You might have forgotten one KEY thing that I i remember happening and being a big deal for Sega:
They found a way to BOOST the display colors to 128 (double!) through this thing called HAM which stands for Hold And Modify... Wow i distinctly remember that!
I agree about the system's early days in 1989 to late 1991. Color looked beautiful simply because we didn't have anything like the SNES to compare it to. And this is probably maybe why it's my favorite years of the Genesis (1989-1991).
But outside some stellar Genesis games, once the SNES hit, it really was pretty noticeable just how limited the color was on the Genesis. The limited main palette and/or only having 4 subpalettes ("64 colors") translated into some games looking "gritty" because the lack of shades, "overly contrast-y" because the lack amount of shades and capable shades (main palette), or had blatant color sharing/re-use.
Sure, not every game but enough of them that you became sensitive to it (much like how you became sensitive to ANY slowdown on the SNES, and the lack or limited parallax in PCE games). But definitely subjective as to whether is "ruins" the experience or not, because gaming is a qualitative experience.. not quantitative. People get weird about things like that (style of sounds for music, colors, palette, scrolls, etc). I personally TRY to care less nowadays than back then.. for obvious reasons haha.
All of those apparent color limitations and graininess go away when character are moving at 20-30fps. 90+% of games had the main character just standing there like a poster board until you moved him.
Genesis also had 320x448i mode and Shadow/Highlight Mode, effectively allowing 256 out of 3,375 colors, though they would need to use larger 3-4MB (24-32 megabit) carts to feed that much graphical data to the screen to overcome those limitations. You can also alternate color palettes in interlaced mode to give the appearance of even more color fidelity.
good topic! One thing I want to mention is the flipside argument is also true when you think of the TurboGrafx 16. One of the reasons why I always thought it stood up decently to both the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo despite it lacking CPU power was that it DID have a terrific colour palette. You often saw bright colorful games that gave the Turbo/PC Engine games a really good 16-bit look despite the 8 bit CPU and the lack of parallax layers. So it kind of works both ways.
Don't let the 8bitness confuse you. TurboGrafx16 has a processor times more powerful than SNES's one. As a matter of fact, that 8bit processor is comparable to the 68k in Genesis in many aspects, it goes near in some and even exceeds it in others... What SNES has in its favor is support hardware, specific functions built into the peripheral chips.
The TG16 didn't lack CPU power. What are you talking about hahah. It lacked a 2nd BG layer. That's what it lacked. smh
Yeah that 7MHz or so 6502 is one hell of a beast. 8bit sure but it’s fast. Some 68000 instructions can take 4 or more clock cycles to complete!
Games had a 16-bit look as they literally where 16-bit as the GPU was 16-bit the CPU being 8-bit was irrelevant to the actual graphics on screen.
Here comes the few delusional pcengine fanboys trying to blur facts. It's been decades... just accept it was far inferior and move on already
The Sega Genesis is still my favorite system.
I had a NES and master system 1st, but the Genesis was the 1st console that grabbed my imagination.
I've had a SNES back then, but I preferred Genesis games way more. Sure there were quality titles on the SNES, but I find overall gameplay style of Genesis games more dynamic. That's why I trade my SNES for a 3DO as soon as I got the chance.
As for difference in color palette of multiplatform titles I think Toy Story and Batman Forever on Genesis suffer from limited colors quite noticeably. Games that rely heavily on scanned or 3D rendered sprites and backgrounds benefit from higher colors available to create smoother gradients for a convincing 3D effect.
Judging from today's perspective, I think Sega could stick with flat-shaded or cel-shaded polygon aesthetic in creating pre-rendered graphics (like helicopter stages in RedAlert). Although Travellers Tales programming wizards showed how you can bypass palette limitation in their games. Or Sega themselves used palette swapping technique to create a streaks of light effect in VectorMan that could replace SNESe's transparency effect (instead of dithered checkerboard sprites in some games). Although Sonic's/Shinobi waterfalls still look convicing.
For the music capabilities, I think FM synthesis was the sound of the era. And still used heavily in synth-pop/retro-wave genre. For me Genesis has its' own unique voice. Where SNES usually relied on low quality metal-rattling samples with too much reverb on top. That's why SNES sounded muffled and fake for me while Genesis sounded bright, grungy and punchy with few exceptions of SNES soundtracks (Water World on SNES for example).
also don't forget most genesis games regularly ran at a higher resolution, so you often got a little more screen real-estate
Yes. And unlike a higher color pallet, higher resolution really impacts the gameplay (and the picture looks better without stretching).
Colours? Ranger X, Pugsy, Flink, Sonic 3D, Story of Thor, Bugs Bunny, Monster World 4. The use of colours is as important as the available but Mega had enough colours to do those wonders.
I remember tiny toon adventures looking pretty vibrant
And that's usually how it went. Games maybe with color limitations in mind, rather than ports, faired better.
yeah, take a look to Sega CD FMV games and tell me that the Genesis had enough colors... c'mon man we're adults now, let's get real.
@@net_newshey! How about try to look at early fmv on PC? Crop pictures, less screen, lot of dithering. It's just the problem with early digitised video and this is not only be problem on sega CD...
@@colos3284 colors on Sega CD sucked, even in an 8bit console like the Turbografix-CD FMV games look better.
Sadly some kids had to put up with an black and white television.
Sega Lord X was one of them until he got a Genesis and shortly after got a job and bought a color TV with composite, he tells this story in his Christmas 2023 video.
Dark days, my friend. Dark days.
I did
You would be happy to have a TV in your room at that time. That's a big reason why the GameBoy was so popular.
Excellent video as always. I totally agree with you I think pretty much on every point. I was just about to say, the Genesis sound was a bigger issue for me and was going to suggest you cover that, but then you mentioned it at the very end of the video. That will be a tough one since sound is maybe a bit more subjective, but I will be interested to see what you come up with. Can't wait!
Top content! keep up the great work! My gripe on the Sega 16 bit is the low sound, not the colours. Rock on Sega!
What killed the Genesis for me was the three button controller. There were some games, especially the fighters, where you really needed more buttons
Yeah Street Fighter 2 was an awkward moment...now go buy 2 6 button pads...most people didn't obviously. At the time I had an Amiga so the Genesis was still 3 times better off in that regard...🤣
It's like the resolution too: in the paper, SNES could do a higher resolution. In practice, the games were cropped in lower resolution than Genesis.
The genesis ran 90% of there games in 224x320. SNES did 224x256. That a lot more pixels than the SNES. Earthworm Jim is a good example. Genesis runs in 320 mode using more pixels and can even see more of the screen. The snes uses that fat pixel 256 mode. Genesis runs at a higher resolution at a cost of less color. SNES uses more color but at the cost of slower frame rate and lower resolution.
@@phonedork Wrong: vast majority of Genesis games use 320x240 while a smaller percentage used 256x224 and the 320x448 was used in split screen games. The SNES used 256x224 for the game and some games (if I correctly remember just one) used the higher 512x448 for menus.
The master palette the Genesis had was a bigger flaw than the number of colors it could show at once. You can find amazing art online that's just made up of 16 colors for example, but draws from a palette of millions of colors. It really makes all the difference.
That music at the beginning of the Siberia stage in Strider is one of my favorites
16:18 That level for JP on the Genesis was based on a white water rafting sequence that was in the original Michael Crichton novel, but not the movie. So gamers got a "deleted scene" in a way.
i never had any issue with 64 colours. It did become noticeable with Mortal Kombat but what bothered me the most with that game was the design/layout of the energy bars and the horrid blue used for the sky with a complete lack of background detail. That really did cast a bad first impression when i played it
Yes, the lack of time/effort put into the graphics and the rather limited cartridge size are really what hurt the Mega Drive port.
The recent "arcade edition" hack proved that a much closer port to the arcade original could have been made on the Mega Drive.
It goes even further when you consider that the dithering that often resulted with the lower color count was far less impactful on a crt back then. Faaaar less impactful .... You didn't see individual staggered squares of colors, rather they'd literally blend perfectly, and result in something impossible to show on an LCD, or anything with pixels. It's something entirely different when you see any of this on period correct displays, and it's a MUCH closer race than anyone would think.
It was still noticeable on a CRT when close to the screen, as I remember, but yes, it was a much closer call than when displayed today on a HD screen using an emulator...
You just need a CRT style shader to replicate the same blending results on LCD. What LCD truly lacks compared to CRT is the additional light emission and deep dark colors
SLX, great video. Flashback looked so beautiful to me as a kid on my MD.
Great video as I grew up with the Master System and when I got my Mega Drive here in Australia it blew me away the games I got that day were Golden Axe and Castle of Illusion , BatMan just wow I can’t describe it as a kid back then it was amazing
Best sega channel on RUclips, no bs or bias, just fun and facts. Colors wasn't really a issue because devs usually find work arounds, it was more the lack of transparency layers on the genesis that hurt it more imo but still didn't make the games bad
I'd argue lack of transparency didn't hinder the MD due to 2d you can work around it... The Saturn however...
@@_TheElMan imo the lack of transparencies was a lot less of an issue than it seems now, given how these games weren't meant to be seen without pixel bleed. pixel perfect modern displays give us a false sense of how these games looked at the time, even those of us who grew up with them.
@@supercrownjosie7732 again, it didn't make the games bad by any means, just lacking certain presentational features like screen overlays, water effects (in certain games) and lighting
Transparency can be created by the Genesis, by using a Stippling Pattern. You wont be able to see / experience this effect properly... unless you display the Genesis on an Older model CRT TV. The older TVs cause the pattern to Vanish... but leave a Translucent "Shadow" effect. Its often used in Sonic, and many other games... such as in, "Revenge of Shinobi".
Even some of the Later model CRTs (which could do Interlacing, and or even higher resolutions) , has a higher Pixel Density "Shadow Masks". The smaller the holes in the Mask... the less the colors would Bleed into each other... and as a result... you end up seeing the "Patterns", rather than seeing color blends and or translucency effects.
Old Arcade games, with "Standard Resolution" monitors (320x240 max) used the same Stippling effect for Shadows, Water, and more colors (shading effects past the standard color pallet limits). In fact, most of the arcades didnt start using higher resolution monitors, until the 2000s. Tekken 3 was one of the rare games that had a special Interlace mode.. BUT... you had to actually turn it on it the games settings... and most Operators didnt seem to ever Enable it.
The only company that was using a select FEW higher resolution monitors in the Arcades, was Atari. However, MOST all of their games were still using Low-Res monitors... due to the increased cost of Medium Resolution monitors.
At one point in time... I used to own an Amiga 500 computer. Its monitor could accept a direct RBG signal. The older model Sega Genesis, was capable of putting an RGB signal out... so I had a cable-company make a Custom RGB cable for my Genesis, to the Amiga monitor. I was pretty shocked at the difference in Detailed Clarity, and Color pop. HOWEVER... a lot of games actually looked horrible, as a result of them not being designed to look like that. You would see the Stippled Patterns, for example... rather than the Translucent effects. As a result.. I rarely used the RGB Cable. Of course, anyone that has used emulators knowns how bad a lot of these games look... since they are using modern displays. That said.. a lot of people never experienced the real deal... and do not really understand the differences... and they think that this hard-pixel look, is somehow "Better".... when in fact, its actually much worse... and not how these games were designed to be seen / experienced.
@@johndough8115 I hear you but most of the time it looked off or they just didn't use it, look at the ring in wwf raw where it's just 1 color instead of multiple shades or the water effects on storm's stage in the spiderman and x-men game. Theres also certain games with completely black backgrounds but look totally different on snes. Majority the time the devs will just leave it out, the example games you named are sega made so they're goingto be top notch in graphics and sound. I'm 45, I grew up with a crt television and I remember what the games looked like.
Shadow dancer was so good when it came out
Great video! Your commentary was engaging throughout the entire video - well done!
One thing i noticed is if multiplat releases came out on both and they are the same cart sizes, Genesis may have a bit more content, as the higher color palette will eat up more of the memory on the SNES version.
That said, 16-bit era was truly something special. The multiplats were usually side dishes and both lived and died by their exclusives and they had lots of them on both and both consoles were unique. It's very unlike modern consoles.
Yes, it was rather common that the SNES version of the game was technically better but was reviewed a bit lower in magazines because a stage or a feature was missing compared to the MD version (Cool Spot, Earthworm Jim, Toy Story, etc.).
@@Shyning77 a lot of those multi platform for those games, especially with the games you mentioned cool spot Mickey mania, etc.
@@Adamtendo_player_1 Yes, Mickey Mania too. Traveller's Tales had a special relationship with the MD.
@@Shyning77 Id disagree. Arcade games and other multi platform games did better on the Genesis.
The SNES won the war because of their solid lineup of Nintendo designed games, combined with strong, early loyalty from Konami and Squaresoft (also exclusive games).
The problem was that several games got slow when ported over to the SNES (Super Mario World also had slow spots). Several of these games that are emulated can be patched to make the game think its on an SA-1 cartridge to increase the game's speed (Gradius 3, in particular).
@@scottythegreat1 We don't really disagree then. When I said "technically better", I meant graphics (better color palette specifically) and sound (voice samples and orchestral music, for example). There were domains were the Mega Drive / Genesis could be better : gameplay, speed, sharper graphics even (higher resolution).
Huh, a video about the color palette of the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and no mention of Dynamite Headdy... I remember magazines always mentioning how DH made full use of those 64 colors.
Anyway, great video! 👍
Yeah, I was thinking about Dynamite Headdy, too. It was one of the most bright and colorful platformers on the system! The masters at Treasure knew how to make some really eye-popping graphics on the Genesis. I'd even say McDonald's Treasureland Adventure and Gunstar Heroes also looked really great despite the Genesis' limitations.
With regards to Mortal Kombat, doesn't the Arcade Edition hack prove the Genesis version was just badly ported than it being a show of color limitation? GREAT video on the topic!
It fixes the abysmal porting
It's still a poor choice of art style for the platform.
Always loved the ol Genesis and it’s great arcade ports!
It all boils down to the programmers. Although the Sega/Mega CD was most definitely hampered by the smaller palette.
It was noticeable on games like Mortal kombat and street fighter 2 but recent hacks show with a little more care in colour selection the difference to the snes was marginal & in some cases the hacks look better
I disagree, I think they often look garrish and unnaturally colored. Original programmers could do better because they had no color restrictions. Edit: They still had limitations, but 64 was pretty limited compared to Amiga, SNES, PC Engine/Turbo Grafx-16. Megadrive/Genesis had raw speed, the parallax scrolling, and graphical power. Colors were not really a problem until games like Donkey Kong Country came out, and SNES started consistently looking better than the Genesis versions in ports.
Dude thanks for helping me find games I'd long forgotten about like forgotten worlds lol what a great game.
Forgotten Worlds is forgotten for a reason 😂😂
Great video. i was a Genesis kid growing up (from '91) and while i always coveted the SNES and thought it looked better overall, I was never disappointed at the look at home on my Genesis. i got the SNES 5 years after i got my genesis and to this day i love both dearly. The Genesis is beautiful, and the fact that it has a very distinct visual style that differs from the SNES' distinct visual style, makes this generation my favorite, the SNES and Genesis together are the yin and yang that create the marvel of the 16bit Generation.
Decepção eram as vozes digitalizadas do Mega drive.
I really appreciate the amount of historical context you bring to these videos. It's vastly different that the view you get looking back at emulations and re-releases, and it really does help re-frame things.
When the Genesis first came out 64 colors on screen was considered a lot by most. NES, the Master System and most computers outside of the Amiga. The Sega CD, that one really should have had 256 on screen colors with a larger color pallet to choose from, but the Genesis was a perfect home console for more than a handful of years!
Also the Genesis has the worst video output of any system. When I cant access the TV menu to bump up the color and Contrast, it looks SHITTY esp. on Dragons Fury
64 colours was decent back then for the home market. However, arcade machines had a lot more colours.
@@worsethanhitlerpt.2539 Could be. I never came across those issues though.
Well, SNES was a clear winner back then.
I still remember playing Adventures of Batman & Robin on SNES at home and then seeing it on a Genesis at my friend's place.
I couldn't believe how bad the Genesis version was and that they made it a ridiculous run n' gun, with Batman throwing 100s of Variants at the speed of light.
You have poor taste the Mega drive version is way more fun
@@HollowRick nope, SNES version at least feels like being Batman, not a psycho with a minigun speed throwing arms and it looks better.
The snes was for toddlers.
@@Super_Nofriendo that's exactly what a kid would write. The fact of the matter is, that SNES games simply looked better.
@@budyll1 The snes colorful pallet and cartoonish toddler style graphics made it perfect for family friendly gaming. 🙂
Just when I think you might be out of topics about Sega, you squeeze another one out. And as always, it was well done and enjoyable. Thanks and please keep it up!
Don't forget the tricks that develpers used at the time as composite blending. Transforming checkerboard pattern and vertical lines to create more colors or transparency. Just check Earthworm Jim, Comix Zone and UMK3 to state a few.
Those developers knew to handle the system. If classic CRTs were still available in good shape I'd play my old Genesis every day.
The foreground waterfalls in the first stage of Sonic 1 is a famous example of clever composite blending, meant to add a "rainbow" effect to the transparency.
@@Shyning77 the full screen picture of earthworm Jim in the beginning of the game looks amazing using both effects
@@niemand7811Retroarch with a shader filter applied does a pretty reasonable job of approximating a CRT I've found.
Damn good & thorough video!
A thought hit me, was the name "Sega Lord X" inspired by EGM's "Sushi X" from back in the day?
Had both systems growing up. SNES games didn’t display as many sprites on screen, but had a better color palette. With that said, I also strongly preferred genesis visuals simply due to the larger field of play (SNES games had 64 less horizontal pixels per line), and colors mattered less when you’re dealing with so much action on screen.
A game that really shows a colorful picture on the sega genesis is Panorama cotton. That game pushed the hardware to the extreme. Making it look more akin to some sega Y arcade game rather than a stock 16 bit cartridge
Appreciate all the editing work put in here.
Honestly? Back in the day, I couldn't really tell the difference. Because all the dithering the Genesis used effectively simulated more colors when using composite or RF.
This is the correct answer. Anyone who doubts this should check out M2's Sega Ages versions of the games. They have an option that shows exactly what we saw back in the day. Soft and colorful, not a sign of dithering to be found.
But even then, games like Lethal Enforcers, Sunset Riders, and Dragon's Lair weren't helping matters.
And by the time those last 2 Mortal Kombat games released, they were being compared to more than just 16-bit. The Genesis was seen as basically the poverty option in critical reviews...the fall was fast once Sega of Japan stopped giving it full support.
The reality is that artists are able to work with what they're provided with. A 64 colour palette is actually pretty huge, unless you're trying to do photo realistic stuff. 256 colours provides a bit more fidelity, but at a distance, with CRT fudging, dithering techniques, and other manipulation you can achieve great results. After all, what you are truly trying to deceive is the human eyeball mk. 1.
Four subpalettes of 15 colors is huge? 1 for far BG layer, 1 for near BG layer, 1 for the player(s), and 1 for enemies to share. That's not huge at all - quite the opposite. Remember, you're stuck with those 15 color when you choose a subpalette for a primitive graphic asset. SNES has 16 subpalettes which is pretty decent.. 4x more than the Gen/MD. PC-Engine has 32 subpalettes... now that's huge. 8x more than the Gen/MD.
Looking forward to the sound episode! I hope you include Super Fantasy Zone; that’s always been the most SNES-sounding Genesis game to me.
This is yet another superb Sega Lord X video. In my eyes, everyone thought that after seeing Sonic 1, Streets of Rage 2, Shinobi 3, RiStar, GunStar Heroes, and quite a few other games, showed that in the right hands, none of those limits hurt the system. Of note is something I bring up quite a lot due to the fact that I’ve only really seen it mentioned in video form on the StrafeFox RUclips channel where the Streets of Rage 2 making of video completely explains how it used 10 audio channels, 6 of the system’s own channels, and 4 more from the Master System 2 sound chip, used to create complete compatibility with the Master System 2 cart adapter. One of those 4 was an FM channel. It would be great to see you cover every 10 channel Sega Genesis game, and in that, I can say many of them were scored by Tommy Talreco. As for colors, I’m happy you mentioned the line doubling technique, in the making of Sonic the Hedgehog, the longer remastered one, also from StrafeFox’s channel, he mentions how it actually worked in Sonic 1’s water stages, which displayed nearly double the colors that it was supposed to be possible to display. The incredible Coding Secrets channel which was developed by the founder and lead programmer of Traveler’s Tales detailing how they pulled off mode 7 like effects in Mickey Mania, a game that actually uses assist chips on SNES to run, and had actual loading times since the stages needed to be decompressed before you start each one.
Definitely did as time went on especially as when compared to some SNES games that looked so much more colorful or detailed as a result of all the extra colours on screen. Most multiplatform games tended to stick more towards the same or similar palettes on the SNES without adding any extra so it often didn't seem like a big difference in like for like comparisons.
Snes graphics were definitely toddler looking, very colorful, while the genesis colors were more adult looking.
When used well, the limit of 64 colors didn't hurt the system. And the same is true of the FM audio.
So, I guess it comes down to how often you think that was the case.
FM audio is what the 16bit era sounded like. Unfortunately it takes work to get it to sound really good and western devs tended to be lazy with MIDI and compose for General MIDI. FM patches just got whatever Gems would crap out.
How have I not seen those outro animations before?
They're bloody great!!!
Already looking forward to the sound comparison episode. Both systems had such unique takes on sound for the time.
Soundwise, without the Sega CD, SNES massacres the Genesis in a one-sided bloodbath. But not a lot bought the Sega CD.
@@WhatIsMatter101 But of course, the same narrative again and again with zero nuance...
The sound is what hurt the Genesis(Mega Drive) more than the colour limitations especially from 1902 onwards as games began to sound worse and it’s very interesting that early Mega Drive (Genesis )games sounded better than later releases.
@@Adamtendo_player_1 In 1902, the Mega Drive was a system quite ahead of its time though.
I keep thinking that the sound was the real question. Color was a minor thing, although you could see the difference between the two consoles.
I’m glad you brought it up at the very end and showed the game that really calls that into question.
One word G.E.M.S.
@@Oysterblade84 Yes, it's really that poor generic driver that gave the Mega Drive that (undeserved) bad reputation about its sound. The sound chip wasn't sample based (unlike the SNES'), thus had its issues rendering voice samples and orchestral scores, but many games proved that the Mega Drive could produce really great music if in the right hands (Yuzo Koshiro and Matt Furniss to only name two).
It did great within it's limitations. But they were there. Games were heavily contrasted in color, darker overall and colors occupied by main sprites were usually off the table for near backgrounds. And when developers did choose this route, you get the effect of E. Honda being nearly the same color as the tile floor and walls as show in this video. And look at Batman, why so purple?
Genesis definitely had the "era of purple" going on, besides the infamous "Genesis brown".
Though the limitation was definitvely there, that was more a a thing with western devs either not being really skilled or really thight deadlines. If you play the first Batman game by Sunsoft, Batman is black.
@@RockoEstalon i meant the game itself had to be purple as batman himself was already blue/ black.
"Darker overall"? That's not what the many comparisons SLX did here showed. In all of them, the SNES looked darker, and I actually got surprised by that, since I used to think the Mega Drive was indeed darker in its presentation.
@@barryschalkwijk9388 Batman is purple on Batman Returns.
I never really got to play the genesis that much back in the day, or mega drive as it was called here, but it really doesn't look like it's held back one bit, looks awesome. Great vid!
What a great video. I just got a retrobit big 6 controller and have been finding all the games I didnt get to play as a kid. I didnt know how good the Genesis really was
The MD had many advantages over the SNES, but bias from American media outlets would make one think it had none at all.
The Snes couldn't handle as many sprites or scroll them like the MD in 2d. Yeah the Snes had Mode 7 and good sound but the MD had the edge everywhere else. Developers managed to find ways of getting more colour out of the hardware too.
I can't remember the RUclips channel that had colour count analysis of MD/GEN games. I think Ranger-X displayed 128 colours at once.
Nope, I saw a full video. It maxed out around 66
@@mikejohnson699 I found it again too, Vectorman got 88 colours but strangely enough is probably the least colourful game on the console.
@@StRoRo It's because color range are mainly used for color gradients which 3D graphics generate a lot of.
The Super NES software library definitely looked more colorful, especially for arcade ports, but the Genesis was still a very strong system.
I remember to feel the same as you, until MK1 we have nothing to complain about GEN colour restrictions. The major complain back them was about the low quality or missing voices in SF2 and MK1. Later, Mk3 proved that a GEN MK game could look good even if it has less colours them the snes. It was just with the advent of emulators that people start to wonder about GEN Colours, bacause we used to play tehse games on CRT TV, ahdn sudden we where playing on PC Monitors (CRT Monitors) with no filters or only simple scanlines. On emulators was the first time we can see the ditherings on GEN graphics that where suposed to render as a third colour on CRT TVs. So back in the day the only conplain was about the voices (not music, to be noted).
Looking at the comparisons, I actually enjoy the higher contrast on the Genesis games that makes the colors look deeper. But why were the black colors often blacker? Was that just a developer choice?
The lack of colors actually help the 16 bit game industry. This meant that we did not get the exact same games across different consoles. The Genesis games were slightly different games from the SNES. Most likely due to color limits. Example; TMNT, and Aladdin. They had different stories. So they were more like sequels to each other. Shadow dancer on the Genesis was more like the sequel to the arcade veesion. I left you always wanting the arcade version. But when games became 32-bit, they all look alike.
Great video.
I think the idea that systems can just be reduced to numbers of elements they can produce (colours, sound channels etc) is a recent and simplistic one. The problem with these sorts of arguments is that they provide little to no nuance or context for the features being critiqued and are simply about numbers. I also think these sorts of arguments are typically made in hindsight by people who didn’t live through the eras in which these systems came about. It’s therefore easy to be reductive about what a given system can output when all you’ve known is consoles and PCs that do not have any of these same kinds of limitations.
I'd say the colour palette was more of a problem, leading to a lack a variety.
Some Amiga games of the early 90s looked more colourful with only 32 colours displayed on average because of a much larger palette.
Megadrive games sometimes looked a bit "bland" or repetitive colourwise.
A larger palette and maybe 128 colours on screen might have helped giving games more variety and a more uninque identity.
Very clever use of colours made up for it to an extent, in Sonic for example. The repetition of colours between the foreground and background was cleverly arranged and it worked brilliantly. Bit it was still the same colours.
In any case, the quality of the visual result was mostly down to the developer's willingnes to make the effort of crafting the graphics with care.
And while some Megadrive games looked quite bland (Phantasy Star III for example), many looked amazing regardless of the limited palette.
Exactly this. This. This. This. :)
Later games like Ristar started to use “hue based intensity middle steps” so to speak to achieve a softer more SNES look. Also as a side effect games usually had a less monochrome look. It worked of course best with more cartoonish or less “techy” art design but I both proved you could make nice colors and also that the limited palette was the real big blocker not the 61 color limit.
Good example with the Amiga 32 colors