How TOY STORY displayed IMPOSSIBLE IMAGES on the SEGA Genesis (MegaDrive)
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- Опубликовано: 18 сен 2017
- Audio rebalanced version here - • How TOY STORY displaye...
In this episode of "Coding Secrets"I explain how we made the SEGA Genesis (MegaDrive) display images from the Toy Story movie which far exceeded what the hardware was normally capable of... 
Игры
***Sorry about the sound balance. I've just found out you can't re-upload a video so I can't fix it I don't think***
GameHut hey look you have a voice
XD
remove the video, fix the source file, and then upload the new version.
It's fine on my laptop actually. Thanks so much for doing these videos!
Just remove this video and upload a fixed one. I can barely hear you and I'm using headphones
retrospiel Your laptop must use a monostero setup where all the sounds are meshed together into a mono output then played trough 2 speakers. Or it only has one speaker.
I really wish more developers took the time to take advantage of shadows and highlights. Of course that's not the only technically impressive feat of Toy Story on the Genesis, there are so many more examples. I'd like to know more about how the scrolling was achieved to give the effect of solid depth... ie: you can see the sides of many objects as you pass.
Game Sack Hi gamesack, I'm a big fan! Nice to see you here :)
Game Sack - I KNEW you'd be in these comments, I literally KNEW it 😂
I wish that Toy Story 1 and 2 and 3 games were remade in a remastered collection.
I couldn't hear it very well due to the song volume , but it's amazing to see how much still you guys managed to pull off during this game production.
if you can understand English well then everything he said could be heard and understood albeit with a bit loud music
It's really awesome to see how the game displayed those stills. I originally thought that the game changed palettes at HSYNC, so each scanline could have its own pallette.
Not being an expert in Genesis hardware I was expecting something like that too.
Those individual layers are the stuff of nightmares
Great video, bg music a tad too loud.
It is extremely cool and much appreciated that you are showing off the development that went in to these games. Sonic R and Toy Story 2 specifically were two of the biggest games of my childhood. I just recently played through a %100 complete run of Toy Story 2 and it is a fantastic game to this day. I'd definitely be interested to see development history on that project and I'll be sure to come up with some specific questions. Subscribed!
The layering + transparency trick is simple - and thus all the more practical/awesome.
(May I suggest that you remix the audio such that the background music is toned down a little?)
There is a section of the credits sequence of Puggsy that flashes a colour chart along with the words "Over 256 colours on screen at once" (or something like that, I can't be bothered looking it up right now). I always wondred how you did that due to the hardware limitations you pointed out in the video, now I have at least an idea! Cheers once againmfor an excellent vid. Keep them coming!
Blue Chicken ah, but that's a different technique for another day... :)
@@GameHut Is that day coming soon? ;)
Great video as always!
I honestly expected some H-Int usage to swap colors out for each picture. What you actually did is much simpler, yet just as impressive!
Wow. Woody's face is even more frightening with the foreground layer.
Noticed the red above his mouth. That looks blood to me.
I'm guessing the Traveller's Tales logo uses the same technique? I've always been impressed by how high quality it looks and how many colors it uses, it looks like something from a SNES game.
Back when developers used to care about optimization. These days they don’t care about optimization or file size.
Mr. Q - iLoveQatar.net
Well, I think developers will have to care about optimization now if they want to make games for the Switch
because developers dont have to care about optimization anymore.
File size is not an issue anymore.
Developer time > filesize
hi, speaking as a modern game developer, we absolutely do care a lot about optimisation and sizes. a lot of work goes into it.
2:38
I thought buzz lightyear was scary in this game lol.
awesome technique to get all those colors on screen, genesis was has some blast processing to it.
Genesis Does What Nintendon't.
WELCOME TO THE NEXT LEVEL.
Lol, glad I wasn't the only one who thought that layer looked freaky. Amazing resourcefulness, though.
@@Justin-Hill-1987 THEIR IS NO NEXT LEVEL!
Wow, this was really interesting. Must have been time consuming to figure out exactly what colors you needed to put in what layer to accurately produce the movie still.
On a fairly unrelated side note, have you ever poked around RUclips and watched video reviews of your games?
RarefoilB oh yes - when I can bare to!
GameHut maybe you should be a indie dev
Need more HBLANK CRAM DMA's ;)
to increase the colors displayed/second
I really enjoy ur vids especially about sega genesis coding topics! I hope u find more interesting stuff the genesis can do!
Keep this how to pieces coming. Very interesting!
I love how succinct these videos are.
1:00 that's strange to see "10, 12 and 14", usually we think about Mega Drive palette color registers as "0, 2, 4, 6, 8, A, C, E"
Probably didn't want to scare away all the non programmers with hex.
I love looking back at these old hacks. Things that are so easy now, displaying an image with a bit of text, required real thought and effort to make them happen at all.
These are great! Keep them coming!
That background layer is horrifying
*Y O U ' V E G O T A F R I E N D I N M E*
Alan Bareiro STOP
Highlight / shadow effect can't apply on sprite (sprite pixels below highlight / shadow operator doesn't dixplay) but even applying it on BG only already increase a lot the number of colors :)
There is so much to say about that game, i always use it as a technical reference for both Sega Genesis and the SNES :)
I was also very impressed by the racing level with realtime object scaling, the road was also well rendered. This level is missing on the SNES version, maybe for technical reasons ? Why don't use the mode 7 instead ?
To be honest i was really impressed by the SNES version as well, i was very surprised to see it was almost on par the Sega Genesis version ! Of course the SNES version is better colorwise, but i didn't expected it to replicate the giant dog animation, the 3D raycasting level (in a lower resolution though) or the "big walking people" (a bit downgraded but still present). I think the SNES version was even more a challenge as it's weaker than the Sega Genesis on many aspects (not only the CPU but also sprite capabilities for instance)
Well, the SNES console is better for total colours to choose from, max colours onscreen, more [proper] background layers, proper transparency, built-in background rotation and scaling, etc, so I think those things could be and possibly were used on its side of things to achieve some of the effects in this game (or at least should have been).
And, just on a personal note, since using enhancement chips in the carts was very much a standard thing on SNES back in the day (the system was literally designed with it in mind, and it was implemented in games on the system from day one, as seen in Pilotwings), I would have also added an enhancement chip in the cart to push its capabilities even further if it were me making that call. I mean, around a hundred games on the system used such chips (from a quick Wiki search), often to push its specs beyond anything the Genesis could do (including increasing it's clock speed far above the Genesis), and almost all of them came out at no extra cost to the end consumer, so that would have been a definite option for me if I were calling the shots.
So, outside of Disney using the chip that Sega developed for Virtua Racing late in the system's life, which was the only expansion chip used in Genesis games and only ever used in that single game and therefore pretty much impossible that we could have seen Disney using it, I think the use of a decent enhancement chip in the SNES version of the game really could have pushed it to heights the Genesis basically couldn't reach. Alas, that never happened, and what the SNES got was a version of the game that definitely looks prettier in many shots and often at a quick glance during gameplay but falls short in some other ways.
Luckily, a crap load of other SNES games did use one of those chips (and there were quite a lot of different ones to choose from), and it definitely helped it push its specs/capabilities past the stock Genesis in many cases (such as Super Mario Kart, Super Mario RPG, Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, Mega Man X2/X3, Star Fox, Yoshi's Island, Doom, Street Fighter Alpha 2, etc).
@@inceptionalthat is really a matter of taste but as soon you use an enhancement chip this is not anymore the stock machine for me, so of course you can go much further..
Awesome channel. I didn't realize you guys were doing this...Travelers Tales was always one of those logos that meant you were about to play a very well made game, even if the game itself isn't that good, it still looks amazing
Yet another awesome video! Would love to see some Toy Story 2 content as well
Your videos are mesmerizing. Thank you!
Awesome video. Can you explain how you guys got the Mega Drive to emulate an Amiga when it came to the sound in this game?
IIRC it's a software mixer that plays the MOD file and mixes everything into the lone sample channel, although I'm sure whoever wrote it has a better explanation
Goddamn, things I just took for granted were actually pretty hardcore behind the scenes! 0_0 Thank you for making these awesome videos, they're fascinating
That was some impressive use of the tools at hand
The must be the coolest channel on yt. Fascinating.
You are my Hardware programming hero.
Not exactly related to this video, but out of interest, why was the US version of Toy Story harder than the PAL version. In the US version you start out with no continues, where as the PAL version starts you with one continue and also has a password system which was absent from the US version. Was the US version deliberately made harder, or the PAL version made easier?
The US version is even harder? No continues? No passwords? Dear lord the game is already difficult as it is (it took months for my brother to get to the last level). Though probably was because many late MD titles were made more difficult in the US because of rentals and often went overboard with it.
American videogame rental laws. In Japan, game renting was mostly forbidden, while in the states, it was incredibly common and still remains legal. Develops make the US version harder to compensate.
The UK version came out later and because people found some levels to hard they added the password mode on all newer copies
Theses videos are so cool! Thank you for sharing!
Absolutely amazing.
The music in your videos is the best!
AMAZING! Thank you! Toy Story on the Genesis was one of the reasons I am a retro gamer now. I still play this game on my Sega Genesis today! Thank you!
Sick, funky music to video game science? I love this channel
Amazing :) Loved it
Awesome video! Subbed!
Thinking back now, I always did wonder how this looked so damn good on the Genesis.
I just got a Prototype of this game for the Sega Genesis traded in at my store. Very cool to see how this was made.
This was a fantastic video, but your voice was a bit low against the really loud music. You might want to look into doing some better audio balancing in your next video like this. Other than that, though, I enjoyed this, and I hope you keep doing them!
Wow those single layered toy story images look absolutely terrifying.
glad i stumbled onto this channel. no idea how i did but its damn interesting
This stuff amazes me so much. It feels like these secrets are a lost art. You don't see any thing similar in modern design or programming. Is there anything like this today?
Thanks a lot. I was always curious about what talented and creative programmers can do with the Genesis. Ever aprecciate game tech info.
Very interesting and informative video. The bg music was a bit too loud tho and made it a tad hard to make out what you were saying but I definitely hope to see more.
Gotta explain the Module player next.
That's really cool!
That was genius level thinking.
excellent video, excellent channel.
Pretty neat!
Christ, that must've taken a long time!
Great stuff.
Finally a proper explanation of this technique, and even smarter than I realised.
I thought it was done by changing the shadow and highlight on different scanlines or something.
I see now that it worked kind of like "bitplanes" on the Amiga (and DLP projectors / plasma displays.)
Do you possibly have any details at all on the "MOD" style music player code on Toy Story as well?
It was practically unheard of to have a proper MOD player on the Genny / MD, so it would be very interesting to know how that came about.
Traveler's Tales were ahead of their time pushing the Mega Drive to its limits.
Amazing work, been wanting to get into programming for Genesis... don't even know where to start though lol.
Wow...This is amazing, thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge with us :-)
What a cool technique! I'd be really interested in a video that goes over the workflow that was used to create those images. Like how did you capture stills back then in the first place? And then process those into separate layers of specific palettes? Was that something you could script in a tool like Deluxe Paint?
Wow that's really cool workarrounds
Amazing!
Could you do a video like this on how you guys pulled off Transparencies in Sonic R on the Saturn for things like the Light Trail when you use a dash panel, the entire level Geometry for Radiant Emerald, etc.?
Shadow and highlight mode can be used to increase the number of colours on screen only on static images? Or could be aplied to sprites and backgrounds during gameplay? Thanks
Awesome technique! Could you speak about how you quantized the full color source images to take full advantage of this technique?
Absolutely incredible! 8O
I remember playing around turning layers off in some games to find secrets on emulators and never understood why sometimes it would have the strange effects here 15 yrs later i find out
Oh wow! I love my Genesis but now I love it even more (not cuz it can do more colors, lol) cuz developers go through a lot to make the Genesis shine a bit brighter then when it first came out. I like to call what you just showed us in the video as "Blast Colorcessing" or just "Blast Color Processing". Lol.😊
Song : Ritornata Dalla Luce by DJ oNemesis & Lilly (Instrumental Version)
On the storage, was necessary to have 3 static sets of "tiles/sprites" to use that?
or the layers are generated on the fly from a single "7-8 bit image" ? perhaps a compressed one?
I kept wondering because the rom space is often at a premium on those projects.
i am not familiar at all with m68k asm to debug the code and figure that out myself =(
This game has one of the most beautiful graphics of SEGA Genesis (Mega Drive).
How did you split the original image into the 3 used for bg/foreg/sprt?
Hi Jon! could Shadow and highlight mode be used to increase the number of colours not only in static images? could these modes be applied to sprites and backgrounds during gameplay? if yes, do you know of games that used that technique? Thanks for your time and congratulations for your impressive work!
What a smart bloke! That was very interesting.
As a big fan of SEGA in the 90's, my favorite consoles (Mega Drive and Saturn) were not exactly the most powerful systems of their time. Hopefully more developers would have show this kind of talent clearly born from passion, harnessing the hardware with clever ideas to achieve results that others believed impossible. Thank you for all your videos, you can't imagine how much I enjoy them! (sorry if my english is not perfect)
That's fucking awesome! This was one of my favorite games as a kid
excellent!
+GameHut Why the password system was removed from The American version of this game?
Did you do a video on Mickey Mania's NTSC Mega Drive screen? Is it true that the game checks the region of the console while playing?
but how do you know which colour is which how is it chosen? doesn't adapting images to this method take ages?
So when creating the 3 Images to put together to make the movie stills, did you have to manually pick out what parts of the images to use, or did you have some kind of script that automatically did that?
If you don't wanna lower the music volume at least equalize the voice frequency so we can hear it more clearly.
Interesting tricks :)
Amazing
Similar to how Sonic draws it's water by mixing the pixels every frame. I have a question hopefully you could answer because it really is a rare sight for developers to elaborate their in-depth processes. Anyway, I was wondering if you could explain the unused song in the Roller Bob level that never made it into the Genesis version and the bonus level if you have the time it would be really interesting.
Good video. The music could be turned down a little, but other than that, good video.
Did you work on the SNES version ? If you did, did you first work on the genesis version or on the SNES version ? And which one do you prefer ?
Can anyone please answer this question: if you use this method on a 32x game, where Genesis does backgrounds and 32x is used for sprites, how many colors can you potentially be using or is this video pretty much answering that question?
I mean because these are still images, not actual game play and so, 32x would really not be adding
anything to the background except maybe making it clearer. Right?
Holy shit what a hard work! No coincidence TT games were between the best ones of Genesis!
That is really impressive to achieve in a hardware that wasn't designed for do it 😱.
I've been wondering......how does the Gameboy use pre rendered graphics??
Anyone know the name of the song?
This game looks mind blowing, it even serpasses donkeykong country 1 .
the different layers of color look like somethin out of FNAF
brilliant
Lets ask how KH CoM intro works on a gba
So, even with all of that, it was still less than on SNES? Or was it more than the SNES did with those images?
I see plenty of people stating that the music is too loud, but here I am just wanting to know what the song is. Shame it's not listed anywhere.
Song : Ritornata Dalla Luce by DJ oNemesis & Lilly (Instrumental Version)
REPLY
Thank you! Loving this song already.
Whats the song name?
can the name of the music please
This is one of my favorite channels. I have trouble hearing what you are saying because I am autistic, and what seems like background music to you is VERY foreground to me. I wonder if you would consider having just intro and outro music, and very nice and quiet while you speak so I can get every word. Thanks!