Further proving hardware is nothing without skilled devs. Regardless of which console had better hardware, it's safe to say TT is one of the most impressive devs and can make magic happen. This is some seriously amazing optimization.
This is why Nintendo are so good at squeezing everything out of their limited hardware. I mean look at Super Mario Galaxy on Wii for example, it's nothing short of ground breaking to get a game to run and look that good on the Wii, all at 60FPS.
The credit needs to go to the Amiga developer who made the demo and inspired TT to learn to use its magic. :) These video are very interesting and sharing this knowledge to other programmers is a great way to keep good programing alive. It would be neat to see limit breaking programing tricks discoverer and shared for newer consoles. This way programmers for current generation can impress us too. I would SUB to a series like that.
Desolation Indeed. Development in the 16-bit era (or even earlier than that) require a lot of creativity and workarounds to achieve quite impressive effects with very little resources. I love the quirkiness that surrounds these software solutions. Nowadays we got a lot of memory and processing power available even on our smartphones, but look like development got worse and kinda sloppy and the newer generation developers relies too much on unoptimized engines and their quick tools or templates, because everything must be done quickly and be highly profitable. Besides, these younger developers are usually impatient, don't read manuals nor study their tools and got a very short attention period... They just care about the results and achieve it with the minimum time and effort. The same thing happened to many areas, like in animation where the magic hand drawn lines are being replaced by uninspiring and boring CGI. It's not like the old technology was better, but the *newer and better technologies* are being used by untalented and/or impatient people.
Except on Wii U. I'm playing Lego Jurassic world on Wii U right now, and it drops to about 15FPS when you play 2 player with a screen each (player 1 Wii U gamepad, player 2 TV). Then again, it's not developed by the actual TT, just a subsidiary. I can't remember if Lego batman 3 has the same frame rate problems.
This takes me back. I worked on the PC conversion of MM back in the day for Psygnosis based on the Sega CD version. This was the first section I worked on.. I remember looking at it for the first time wondering how they'd got it to run at 60fps.. really cool effect.
@@chilistudiosvideodump4135 The PC version was completed. It was based on the Mega CD version with retouched graphics. Psygnosis canned it shortly before release due to the fact that windows was taking off by that point and the game was dos based.
Yes, it does in every genesis related video if you are not aware of it, genesis fans are aways talking about how powerfull they are and how much more it can be done with his "Blast processing"
It's absolutely blowing my mind how licensed games on the Genesis could have such absurd programming tricks behind them. You're definitely giving me a new appreciation for these games.
As someone who absolutely loved Mickey Mania as a kid - thank you. This is an amazing look back and it's awesome that the actual developers are able to showcase their talents by breaking down the incredible visuals from their games!
@@filevans well... You ignore the fact that a gaming machine and a pencil are completely different technologies - that's a brain dead comment by definition. And I didn't even need to highlight it.
Only if you are a REALLY terrible coder. This effect could be done in a single fragment/pixel shader using approximately the same technique, would use a negligible amount of memory, and would run blazingly fast.
Yeah, some games are really poorly optimized to PC, even on console some of them doesn't perform as good as it could compared to what the game is offering
I mean, back then a lot of developers did things that we puzzle at nowadays. Even if something isn't really 3D, it can still be a pretty impressive effect. Calling these things "impossible" seems a little proud of oneself, but then again, considering the stuff developers worked with he dang well has the right to be proud.
JJ Frunkington It simply checks for a couple reserved bits, which are refresh rate and JP flag. With a modded console you're also capable of triggering said message by flipping a switch.
Just one word: Genius!! I would like to see a video with the difference of work used to make the SNES version of Mickey Mania compared with the Mega Drive / Genesis version.
YOU DID THE TEXTURE WITH ONLY PALETTE SWAPS??!?!?? Damn, that's really impressive. I'm still curious how you distorted it to make it look like a cylinder, though. Also, do you think you'll ever make a video about how you did the scrolling tower in Mickey Mania? That's one of my favorite special effects you've ever done.
Well, the original base shape itself is distorted like a cylinder. The different steps in the gradient are remapped to a different palette each scanline, and it simply just follows the shape of the background. You can use other shapes and get different effects.
That wasn't what I was asking, I already know how the palette thing works. My question was how he made the ground be shaped like a cylinder rather than, say a straight surface. Did he distort an originally straight tileset to make it that shape, or is it as simple as already having an image of that shape to begin with that you just change the palette of?
You know the still striped cylinder he used? It was probably hand drawn / generated by a computer once, and the that still layer was then pallet swapped to make the animated background
Ohhh, I see. I first thought some special effect was used to make the image shaped like a cylinder, but it's probably drawn in that shape to begin with like you said. Thank you for answering my question!
Wow, that is so resourceful! Keep the videos coming please. This is the total opposite of the approach that most things seem to have these days, they all yell: "Oh, let's just upgrade the hardware to push through more frames/fps/effects". But back in the day you were stuck with meager hardware for longer and so true talent would come to surface. I wish modern console and PC game-makers would have a similar mindset. The more hardware resources we have, the more we waste, same as with everything else really.
Hello, John Burton. When I first saw your games, I thought these games were impressive and they inspired me to add pre-rendered sprites in my games, and when I started watching your videos on RUclips, the coding secrets did not spoil the surprise and excitement for these games, instead, I was impressed even more, knowing how much effort has been put into this. And I was also shocked by the fact that _you_ were the one, who founded TT Games (Traveller's Tales). Impressive, very impressive, keep up the good work.
This is really some demoscene-like setup for cool effects ported into an actual game. Every video that you post is so amazing man, keep them up. I'm learning so much from all these videos!
I don't find that to be weird at all. This is some high quality, extremely interresting content! It would be weird if it DIDN'T get so popular this quickly!
That's just maths. Exponential growth is the norm on youtube, not linear. But people suck at understanding exponential stuff. If you have 100 subscribers, and gain 10 per day, how many days to hit 1000? Now say you gain 10% per day, how long does THAT take? (answer: first one takes 90 days. second takes about 25. Did you expect that? How about 10,000 at the same rates? first is 990 days. Second is 49 days... how about 100,000? first is 9990 days. Second is about 74 days) Anyway, see why any remotely popular channel seems to explode out of nowhere all of a sudden? It always seems surprising, but it really isn't.
I just want to say, thanks for being one of the only people on the internet talking about the nitty gritty of the genesis. It's a console that was so much more capable than a lot of people thought, because a lot of devs just didn't use it to its fullest potential.
Learning about how people code with such restrictions is so interesting because you learn something so left field every time, these videos are awesome!
Knowing how the movement of the floor works is especially interesting for me; I once played the game on an old emulator, but when it got to the Moose chase, the graphics of the floor and sky glitched out, so that you could actually somehow see each "column" of color rapidly move from side to side, even changing color depending on what terrain you were on. Essentially, this made everything except Mickey look as if it was part of a psychedelic hyperspace warp.
So glad I stumbled on your channel. I love these old behind the scenes of games that pushed the limits. I remember most of these games growing up but didn't realise they were all from Traveller's Tales. You guys were 68k gods
With all of these secret trickery, I'm sure you'd be able to make Doom on the genesis after all (the 2016 version)!! I challenge you! 😋 Joking! Awesome work as usual! Incredible content. Love it!
You worked on PUGGSY!? That is my all time favorite adventure game. I wish you developers would make a new game in the same setting, diverse environment, an adventurous island, and so many secret routes. Thanks for making that game!
Wouldn't the tower be pretty much the same as this? Except with the pallet swapping from bottom to up, it's changing from right to left or from left to right?
thenonexistinghero Not quite. Scanlines are horizontal. While you can change palette for each one of them, it's not really possible to do it vertically. Just to give you an idea, the water in the Genesis Sonic games does the same.
My guess is that it stores every possible rotation for a row of bricks, then every line it picks one according to the current angle (repeating rows as needed), which would be achieved by changing the scroll value. This would be the most reasonable way to work around memory size and bandwidth issues. Then just place sprites accordingly. At that point it becomes more a matter of what you do with it (and what the artist can come up with).
Nebulous (at least on the C64) used only 8 frames until the brick-gaps repeated during rotation. This could've even been done by simply switching the character-set start for the brick characters (you could chose 8 start adresses within the selected VIC-bank), saving you the redraw of the tower. But given the number of systems that Nebulus was ported for, it's probably implemented differently on the diverse platforms.
A fascinating insight in Sega mega drive development as always. I remember playing this game to death as a kid and loving every minute. Its really interesting to see how some of my fave games were made. I've actually set up alerts on my phone so I get to watch a video as soon as you upload it! 😄
This is absolutely amazing. This channel shows magical optimisation that no modern gamedev can handle, because hardware progressed so much that developers don't really need to know their hardware. Simply incredible.
Oh man, Leander? I thought I'd seen that warp effect before. I'm loving your channel. TT was a huge part of my childhood growing up, even though I was in a weird limbo due to being born in the late 80s.
Thanks for the explanation, that was incredibly impressive! A similar technique was used in Sonic 3's Blue Spheres special stages to create the illusion of running across a 3D sphere. The checkered floor appears to move, but the entire animation is achieved purely via palette rotation.
This is awesome. I had no idea so much "cheating" was involved in making games. People like me who are self taught on Unity really have no idea how good (easy) we have it. This channel helps though.
I always look at retro game developers like skilled and intelligent people. This video explaining the trick in this game makes me want to create games for older hardware...
As a former graphics and computer vision programmer, I really appreciate your videos. I always find coding tricks, especially ones for visuals, to be extremely fascinating!
This was a much beloved game from my childhood, so it's really interesting to see some behind the scenes stuff about the effects. Thanks so much for making these videos.
These insight videos are fascinating, and I especially like having more information on Mickey Mania, as it's my all-time favourite Travellers Tales game, and indeed one of my all-time favourite games overall. I was both thrilled and heartbroken to learn of te sequel that never came to be! I still play the Mega Drive version of the first game a few times a year at least and am still finding new secrets in it (such as the alcove with eight stars in the second Lonesome Ghosts section). To me it's the game that keeps on giving. I have played through both the Mega Drive and Mega CD versions of the game to completion (my idea of a definitive version of the game is the Mega CD port with Mega Drive music), and am still working on beating Mickey's Wild Adventure on PS1, which understandably has its fair share of differences being a 32-bit upgrade. However, I recently gave the SNES version of the game a try and it feels like a completely different 16-bit game. As well as some obvious changes (different layout for Moose Chase and Gurney Ride), there's a lot of small changes and nuances in gameplay (such as the amount of hits needed for the upper/lower cogs on the Steamboat Willie boss, and the seemingly more random bone patterns for the exploded skeletons). I'd be fascinated to have further insight into these changes and why they were a thing, if you still had access to information for both versions. In the meantime, thank you so much for all of the videos you upload. It's genuinely thrilling to have so much information on the games of my childhood.
This trick is much older than amiga, I use it on c64, one fix colors, and 6 animated colors. I enjoy your videos so greatly that I decided to buy C64 and recover/rewrite my old demos.
Very interesting video. I was looking through your videos yesterday hoping to find some Micky Mania videos, but found just one, so thanks for uploading this. I need to pick up a copy of Mickey Mania; it looks fun.
you're like a 16bit wizard. never cease to amaze me. too bad this kind of story must have mostly died with the 6th gen of consoles because from beyond there everything was made from pre-made game engines and devs started working more and more only on high level programming.
i must commend u for taking the time to explain these games in details this is marvelous work and as a kid of this era i am happy to learn about this stuff
Ive actually seen this effect before! I figured it out not too long after I saw it, then later saw this confirming my theory, thanks Jon! Also with this you could do all sorts of shapes and images, making it pretty useful! You just gotta know what your doing.
Wow. Played this when I was maybe 6 years old and it was the best game I had ever seen, and I couldn't believe how it could be so cool. Still one of the best games, if not The best game I have ever played or seen. This little insight into what exactly it was that blew my little boy brain was a pure gem, thank you
This was incredibly informative and inspiring. The endless creativity an resourcefulness of that era was just outstanding and unbelievable. Thank you so much for making these videos from your own time, you are a legend. Instant favorite channel.
Great video. Mickey Mania and Toy Story were two of my chilhood videogames and two of my favorite Sega Génesis games ever. This videos are really interesting. I always liked that chase level. Maybe you can do a video about the Day-Toy-Na level un Toy Story? Keep the good work.
Wow! That's so clever. I feel both amazed and stupid watching these videos. You're a genius! I really want to know who the dislikers are and why they are disliking.
You gotta love the tricks you could pull on 8 and 16 bit hardware... Probably what draws me to trying to work with those systems over more recent ones. The key to the vast majority of these tricks turns out to be exploiting the way the hardware draws the display. Which is a sequence of scanlines. Most of the 8 and 16 bit hardware (even the CGA, EGA and VGA cards had a few such things, such as palettes and scrolling registers. - though the ISA bus on PC really rather cripples you for stuff like this.) has a set of parameters you can change, such as palettes, scroll registers and other stuff. Normally you'd change these once a frame or less, but you can easily change them once per scanline on most hardware from that era. (indeed on some systems it wasn't optional - The Atari VCS/2600 DEMANDED that you do this if you wanted yo draw anything at all that wasn't trivial). You could in theory change it once per pixel even, but this is impractical. You see why when you consider say, a mega drive - A PAL system just to be consistent. You have 50 frames a second; the regular concept of doing changes once a frame thus asks you to do something 50 times a second. Each frame is 312 scanlines, but only 240 of those are visible. Everything else is vblank. So if you do an effect per scanline... You have to do it 12000 times a second. (you can get away with less for various reasons though. - like in this video only half the screen is being done this way). If you wanted to do it every pixel... You'd have to do it anout 3.8 million times a second... Which a CPU from that era would never cope with... And in general doing any effect that involves a vertical split requires something to change every scanline for each split. Whereas anything done horizontally only has to happen at most once per scanline. To see the difference more clearly, imagine trying to create a splitscreen multiplayer game - if you use a horizontal split you need to do a single change every frame timed to the scanline on which the split. That's one update of your scrolling registers to split your screen in two horizontally. Now try it vertically, and you see that you have to time the change to happen somewhere in the middle of the line, but then on the next line you have to change it back, then change it again! Your vertical split on a 240 line image costs you 480 updates, while your horizontal split costs you... 1. (2 technically if you count the per frame update you were probably doing anyway). This is why horizontal effects are everywhere, but vertical ones usually only happen if the graphical hardware has features to help out. (such as per column scrolling on the mega drive, or offset per tile mode on snes, or using the copper chip on Amiga). You might ask if such complex effects are possible using just scanline tricks, why was mode 7 a thing? Well, mode 7 makes many things easier and cheaper to pull off. implementing vertical scaling using scanline tricks is easy. Horizontal scaling is quite hard, but can be done in limited fashion if you precompute things. No, the main thing mode 7 allows is rotation. And it makes scaling easier and more flexible. The perspective effect mode 7 is known for is actually in itself a per scanline trick; Just like old racing games used, but they pre-calculated scaled versions of the road, so terrain variations were limited, where mode 7 can just scale the scanline directly. The rotation though... Short of just throwing huge pre-computed graphics at it... That was what mode 7 truly gave you... In theory you could even do per scanline changes to the rotation parameters, if you could think of a way that made any practical sense... It's certainly possible to create a set of effects using per scanline rotation and scaling changes that would be nearly impossible to replicate efficiently on other hardware... But what kibd of effect this would give... Is hard to say. No, the real benefit of mode 7 is just that it makes the CPU workload much lower, and the image more detailed with less effort. Consider a racer like F-Zero. Conceptually not much different from older racers like outrun or the like... But where outrun would have to drastically limit terrain detail and create pre-scaled versions of the road to work... (and rotation effects are basically non-existent. - turns are faked by skewing the road sideways rather than truly turning your perspective) F-Zero just loads the terrain as if it were a top-down racer. To create perspective requires calculating a perspective transform for each scanline, but if you're observant you'll notice a fixed perspective is used. Because the mode 7 registers provide a 2d transformation matrix, you can pre-compute the transformation needed for each line, store it, and just re-use it over and over every frame with no recalculation needed. As for rotating the world as you turn... Yes, you actually have to calculate a full 2d rotation matrix. ... But only once per frame. Thus, mode 7 gives you rotation and scaling with minimal effort. Some of which can indeed be replicated without it, but in more limited fashion requiring much more careful thought, (some scaling effects), or by throwing a lot of precomputation or raw CPU power at the problem. (pretty much any kind of rotation effect). Still if you learn one thing about 8 and 16 bit hardware, is that per scanline effects are the key to nearly anything that seems impossible or improbable. And you should learn about them as much as you can if you're into dealing with any such hardware. (after all, even the majority of mode 7 tricks still require knowing how to do per scanline effects as well. )
This is nuts. Devs these days don't know shit! In the 16bit era it was all tricks and effects to create magic. Now we have crazy hardware and no magic, just crazy bloatware. Awesome job dude! You are a genius
Lion King for the SNES was released the same year, also had a running towards the camera section. Mickey Mania was March/April in japan and pal regions though, whereas Lion King was in December, but it probably still felt very close for the October release of MM in America.
@37 yo, I grew up with the megadrive, TT games back then were something to look forward to becuase i knew at some point, i was going to see some crazy shit. You boys and treasure really knew how to push the limits, great channel :)
These videos are amazing. I loved the genesis and I think we had this game because I seem to remember it. The fact that you were able to use programming tricks to push the genesis that far is very impressive.
Great stuff! FYI "Dragon's Lair II: Escape from Singe's Castle" from 1987 had a "into-the -screen" chase. Unsurprisingly much much basic, but still great for 8bit micros.
I know you're explaining it, but it's still going over my head. I have to say, that in spite of all the challenges that developers had to face at the time, I think if I were a game developer in the 90s, I would've enjoyed it a lot more. These days, the tools are so powerful, and there's a template and a plugin for everything. It's not as fun.
Further proving hardware is nothing without skilled devs. Regardless of which console had better hardware, it's safe to say TT is one of the most impressive devs and can make magic happen. This is some seriously amazing optimization.
This is why Nintendo are so good at squeezing everything out of their limited hardware. I mean look at Super Mario Galaxy on Wii for example, it's nothing short of ground breaking to get a game to run and look that good on the Wii, all at 60FPS.
The credit needs to go to the Amiga developer who made the demo and inspired TT to learn to use its magic. :)
These video are very interesting and sharing this knowledge to other programmers is a great way to keep good programing alive.
It would be neat to see limit breaking programing tricks discoverer and shared for newer consoles. This way programmers for current generation can impress us too. I would SUB to a series like that.
Desolation Indeed. Development in the 16-bit era (or even earlier than that) require a lot of creativity and workarounds to achieve quite impressive effects with very little resources. I love the quirkiness that surrounds these software solutions.
Nowadays we got a lot of memory and processing power available even on our smartphones, but look like development got worse and kinda sloppy and the newer generation developers relies too much on unoptimized engines and their quick tools or templates, because everything must be done quickly and be highly profitable.
Besides, these younger developers are usually impatient, don't read manuals nor study their tools and got a very short attention period... They just care about the results and achieve it with the minimum time and effort.
The same thing happened to many areas, like in animation where the magic hand drawn lines are being replaced by uninspiring and boring CGI.
It's not like the old technology was better, but the *newer and better technologies* are being used by untalented and/or impatient people.
Except on Wii U. I'm playing Lego Jurassic world on Wii U right now, and it drops to about 15FPS when you play 2 player with a screen each (player 1 Wii U gamepad, player 2 TV). Then again, it's not developed by the actual TT, just a subsidiary. I can't remember if Lego batman 3 has the same frame rate problems.
The Wii U is not developer friendly at all. I'd definitely blame the hardware.
Dude if you wrote a book about all this stuff I'd buy it in a heartbeat
Same here. Truly fascinating.
Me too.
I second that motion!
he's like a magician!
+1
This takes me back. I worked on the PC conversion of MM back in the day for Psygnosis based on the Sega CD version. This was the first section I worked on.. I remember looking at it for the first time wondering how they'd got it to run at 60fps.. really cool effect.
Did you use the same technique? 😯
The first section you worked on? Gee, they really were expecting SOMETHING from you.
Nice job.
I can't find any info on a PC version of Mickey Mania. Did you perhaps mean to say PS1, or was there a cancelled PC release?
@@chilistudiosvideodump4135 The PC version was completed. It was based on the Mega CD version with retouched graphics. Psygnosis canned it shortly before release due to the fact that windows was taking off by that point and the game was dos based.
@@ThisuraDodangoda Yes, pretty much exactly the same, other than I simulated the palette changes as we had 256 colours to play with on the PC.
Your vids are the coolest, Jon. Cheers
Even the N fans show respect !
He deserves all da respecc
HELLO NINTENDREW!!! Sorry for the caps
Wait, Wut, Nintendrew? HERE?
Scott's Games Well Hardware is cool.
Geeze, the programers on the Genesis don't get much credit as they should.
Shiny Char Blame it on those Nintendo fanboys
Yes, it does in every genesis related video if you are not aware of it, genesis fans are aways talking about how powerfull they are and how much more it can be done with his "Blast processing"
MrDmoney156 Damn those blind fanboys saying the SNES has better graphics!
AmazinChannel oh, I guess I need to start watching these Genesis videos and stop watching channels like Game Theory.
The developers*
It's absolutely blowing my mind how licensed games on the Genesis could have such absurd programming tricks behind them. You're definitely giving me a new appreciation for these games.
Have you seen Time Trax on the Genesis? Looks great!
Unfortunately Time Trax wasn't released.
All of these old hardware tricks are incredibly interesting!
That must have given you a headache when creating that floor =P
Hey redhotsonic!
Red Hot Sonic & Knuckles
Nathaniel Grizzle is he famous? :D
redhotsonic Yooo I didn’t believe it was you until I saw your channel and it said I was subscribed:0
SonicLover 261
s&k is 23 years old today!
The first time I saw this stage, I was totally blown away!
It’s so cool to have a RUclips channel from a game developer behind some of my favorite games
This is actually very similar to how Sega pulled off the Blue Spheres special stages from Sonic 3, but waaaay cooler
The floor is a gradient with a checkerbord pattern, and the colors shift downward to give the illusion that the checkerboard is moving as you walk.
Is the same done in Sonic Mania or is that a actually 3D model for the floor? I know the sphere in Mania are 2D sprites as well.
Matheusfpolis1 Yes, the same done in mania.
What they probably did is used a huge texture for the floor a-la-SNES mode 7(or that similar thing that the Sega CD pulled off in Sonic CD).
my younger friends swear that stage is actual 3d. pretty hard to convince them otherwise
This is hands down one of the best channels I've ever seen on RUclips.
As someone who absolutely loved Mickey Mania as a kid - thank you. This is an amazing look back and it's awesome that the actual developers are able to showcase their talents by breaking down the incredible visuals from their games!
I love this channel. So insightful.
Brilliant! The Genesis/Mega Drive was a very capable machine in the right hands.
so is a pen and paper
@@filevans ok, now run Mickey Mania on pen and paper.
@@vinisasso just highlighting how brain dead your comment is. Anything is based on capable hands
@@filevans well... You ignore the fact that a gaming machine and a pencil are completely different technologies - that's a brain dead comment by definition. And I didn't even need to highlight it.
@@vinisasso i haven't got the time you have to spout verbal diarrhea, bye
IIRC this was the same trick used in Sonic 3's special stages, except the horizontal gaps between the different palette maps were much larger.
Meanwhile in 2017 this effect will cost you 1GB of VRAM and 3GHZ worth of cycles
LOL that's so true it's almost sad, really.
OPTIMIZATION IS FOR SCRUBS /s
Only if you are a REALLY terrible coder.
This effect could be done in a single fragment/pixel shader using approximately the same technique, would use a negligible amount of memory, and would run blazingly fast.
deathybrs Yes. But the point is that today THERE ARE a lot of terrible coders, unfortunately. :(
Yeah, some games are really poorly optimized to PC, even on console some of them doesn't perform as good as it could compared to what the game is offering
The moment I saw that cylinder color pattern I figured it was palette trickery of some sort. That stuff is *everywhere* in games of that era.
I think Tt was making the impossible, possible in the 90s.
Lasky Labs *random comma intensifies*
And when I was a kid they were making the best lego games ever!
I mean, back then a lot of developers did things that we puzzle at nowadays. Even if something isn't really 3D, it can still be a pretty impressive effect.
Calling these things "impossible" seems a little proud of oneself, but then again, considering the stuff developers worked with he dang well has the right to be proud.
You should write a book about all this stuff. It's interesting.
I needed to watch 2 times to understand the basics of how it was done, great job man
These descriptions are so quick, concise and mindblowing all at once. Great stuff!
The rotating floor effect is... _color cycling_ ??! Mission accomplished, mind blown. You, sir, have my respect!
Do a video on how Mickey Mania's "intended for use on NTSC systems" message on startup somehow KNOWS if an emulator changes regions during that screen
JJ Frunkington It simply checks for a couple reserved bits, which are refresh rate and JP flag. With a modded console you're also capable of triggering said message by flipping a switch.
Hush i want more insider KNOWWWWWWWWWWWWLEDGE
zummone but why does it give the message
As a form of regional encoding, perhaps
Maybe because PAL and NTSC systems ran at different frequencies so just putting one in another wouldn't give the correct picture?
Just one word: Genius!!
I would like to see a video with the difference of work used to make the SNES version of Mickey Mania compared with the Mega Drive / Genesis version.
This is one of my favorite videos of the ones you made. I love seeing older games being analyzed and picked apart like this. Keep it up :)
YOU DID THE TEXTURE WITH ONLY PALETTE SWAPS??!?!?? Damn, that's really impressive. I'm still curious how you distorted it to make it look like a cylinder, though.
Also, do you think you'll ever make a video about how you did the scrolling tower in Mickey Mania? That's one of my favorite special effects you've ever done.
Well, the original base shape itself is distorted like a cylinder. The different steps in the gradient are remapped to a different palette each scanline, and it simply just follows the shape of the background. You can use other shapes and get different effects.
That wasn't what I was asking, I already know how the palette thing works. My question was how he made the ground be shaped like a cylinder rather than, say a straight surface. Did he distort an originally straight tileset to make it that shape, or is it as simple as already having an image of that shape to begin with that you just change the palette of?
You know the still striped cylinder he used? It was probably hand drawn / generated by a computer once, and the that still layer was then pallet swapped to make the animated background
Ohhh, I see. I first thought some special effect was used to make the image shaped like a cylinder, but it's probably drawn in that shape to begin with like you said. Thank you for answering my question!
yeah it was just a regular 2D image the whole time, lol
Wow, that is so resourceful! Keep the videos coming please. This is the total opposite of the approach that most things seem to have these days, they all yell: "Oh, let's just upgrade the hardware to push through more frames/fps/effects". But back in the day you were stuck with meager hardware for longer and so true talent would come to surface. I wish modern console and PC game-makers would have a similar mindset. The more hardware resources we have, the more we waste, same as with everything else really.
Hello, John Burton. When I first saw your games, I thought these games were impressive and they inspired me to add pre-rendered sprites in my games, and when I started watching your videos on RUclips, the coding secrets did not spoil the surprise and excitement for these games, instead, I was impressed even more, knowing how much effort has been put into this. And I was also shocked by the fact that _you_ were the one, who founded TT Games (Traveller's Tales). Impressive, very impressive, keep up the good work.
This is really some demoscene-like setup for cool effects ported into an actual game. Every video that you post is so amazing man, keep them up. I'm learning so much from all these videos!
It's weird but i started following you when u had about 800 subs
That was early September
Now its October
And you have like 34k subs
Holy crap.
The guy has legitimately interesting content! Also, I'm sure a shout out from OneyPlays helped.
lazrpo What is that? I would have thought online news articles were what caused the biggest growth.
I don't find that to be weird at all. This is some high quality, extremely interresting content! It would be weird if it DIDN'T get so popular this quickly!
That's just maths.
Exponential growth is the norm on youtube, not linear.
But people suck at understanding exponential stuff.
If you have 100 subscribers, and gain 10 per day, how many days to hit 1000?
Now say you gain 10% per day, how long does THAT take?
(answer: first one takes 90 days. second takes about 25. Did you expect that? How about 10,000 at the same rates? first is 990 days. Second is 49 days... how about 100,000? first is 9990 days. Second is about 74 days)
Anyway, see why any remotely popular channel seems to explode out of nowhere all of a sudden?
It always seems surprising, but it really isn't.
This stuff is mindblowing 😲 I played your games to bits on my Mega Drive back in the 90s. Still some of my alltime favourites 😊
I just want to say, thanks for being one of the only people on the internet talking about the nitty gritty of the genesis. It's a console that was so much more capable than a lot of people thought, because a lot of devs just didn't use it to its fullest potential.
It's really something to see what people were able to do with such low spec hardware.
I don't know how you're in my recommended but RUclips is definitely doing something right. Instant subscribe.
Learning about how people code with such restrictions is so interesting because you learn something so left field every time, these videos are awesome!
Knowing how the movement of the floor works is especially interesting for me; I once played the game on an old emulator, but when it got to the Moose chase, the graphics of the floor and sky glitched out, so that you could actually somehow see each "column" of color rapidly move from side to side, even changing color depending on what terrain you were on.
Essentially, this made everything except Mickey look as if it was part of a psychedelic hyperspace warp.
So glad I stumbled on your channel. I love these old behind the scenes of games that pushed the limits. I remember most of these games growing up but didn't realise they were all from Traveller's Tales. You guys were 68k gods
With all of these secret trickery, I'm sure you'd be able to make Doom on the genesis after all (the 2016 version)!! I challenge you! 😋 Joking!
Awesome work as usual! Incredible content. Love it!
Even as a kid I knew that something special was going on with this now after all these years it's more complicated than I could have imagined
These videos about programming are AWESOME! Keep them coming!
You guys are truly wizards. All of us, that likes games and game development has a debt with you.
You totally blew my mind. I had no idea those old warped text demo fx did this.
You worked on PUGGSY!? That is my all time favorite adventure game. I wish you developers would make a new game in the same setting, diverse environment, an adventurous island, and so many secret routes. Thanks for making that game!
Absolutely brilliant. TT really understood the Genesis hardware and how to code for it. It shows in the games.
Great video Jon! Thanks for making these. I'd like to know how you did the "Nebulus" tower in MM. And then the background rotation in Puggsy.
Hey man! Fancy seeing you here :-D i love your compositions of the games you worked on, such as Soccer Kid on the Jaguar ;-)
Wouldn't the tower be pretty much the same as this? Except with the pallet swapping from bottom to up, it's changing from right to left or from left to right?
thenonexistinghero Not quite. Scanlines are horizontal. While you can change palette for each one of them, it's not really possible to do it vertically.
Just to give you an idea, the water in the Genesis Sonic games does the same.
My guess is that it stores every possible rotation for a row of bricks, then every line it picks one according to the current angle (repeating rows as needed), which would be achieved by changing the scroll value. This would be the most reasonable way to work around memory size and bandwidth issues. Then just place sprites accordingly.
At that point it becomes more a matter of what you do with it (and what the artist can come up with).
Nebulous (at least on the C64) used only 8 frames until the brick-gaps repeated during rotation. This could've even been done by simply switching the character-set start for the brick characters (you could chose 8 start adresses within the selected VIC-bank), saving you the redraw of the tower. But given the number of systems that Nebulus was ported for, it's probably implemented differently on the diverse platforms.
I found the most impressive aspect of the game was the animation. It really looked like you were traveling through an animated cartoon.
A fascinating insight in Sega mega drive development as always. I remember playing this game to death as a kid and loving every minute. Its really interesting to see how some of my fave games were made.
I've actually set up alerts on my phone so I get to watch a video as soon as you upload it! 😄
This is absolutely amazing. This channel shows magical optimisation that no modern gamedev can handle, because hardware progressed so much that developers don't really need to know their hardware.
Simply incredible.
This channel is getting one of my favourite. Thx for the videos man and keep up with the great videos
Oh man, Leander? I thought I'd seen that warp effect before. I'm loving your channel. TT was a huge part of my childhood growing up, even though I was in a weird limbo due to being born in the late 80s.
Thanks for the explanation, that was incredibly impressive!
A similar technique was used in Sonic 3's Blue Spheres special stages to create the illusion of running across a 3D sphere. The checkered floor appears to move, but the entire animation is achieved purely via palette rotation.
The ONLY time additional frames are used is when you turn!
I can't imagine the amount of work that would have gone into making the floor look good using that method. extremely impressive
This is awesome. I had no idea so much "cheating" was involved in making games. People like me who are self taught on Unity really have no idea how good (easy) we have it. This channel helps though.
It was cool tricks and creativity like this that made games of that generation far more interesting than games today.
I played on PlayStation and I genuinely believed that the tower and the moose section were true 3D! Great work!
I always look at retro game developers like skilled and intelligent people. This video explaining the trick in this game makes me want to create games for older hardware...
The stuff you guys came up with on the Megadrive is insane :) i love this channel
As a former graphics and computer vision programmer, I really appreciate your videos. I always find coding tricks, especially ones for visuals, to be extremely fascinating!
This channel just answers about all of the idle thoughts about the wackier things I'd seen my Genesis do week after week.
Your ingenuity never ceases to amaze!
I can't believe how quickly you're putting these videos together. Fantastic stuff!
This was a much beloved game from my childhood, so it's really interesting to see some behind the scenes stuff about the effects. Thanks so much for making these videos.
Game devs back then were so creative and smart holy hell
These insight videos are fascinating, and I especially like having more information on Mickey Mania, as it's my all-time favourite Travellers Tales game, and indeed one of my all-time favourite games overall. I was both thrilled and heartbroken to learn of te sequel that never came to be!
I still play the Mega Drive version of the first game a few times a year at least and am still finding new secrets in it (such as the alcove with eight stars in the second Lonesome Ghosts section). To me it's the game that keeps on giving.
I have played through both the Mega Drive and Mega CD versions of the game to completion (my idea of a definitive version of the game is the Mega CD port with Mega Drive music), and am still working on beating Mickey's Wild Adventure on PS1, which understandably has its fair share of differences being a 32-bit upgrade.
However, I recently gave the SNES version of the game a try and it feels like a completely different 16-bit game. As well as some obvious changes (different layout for Moose Chase and Gurney Ride), there's a lot of small changes and nuances in gameplay (such as the amount of hits needed for the upper/lower cogs on the Steamboat Willie boss, and the seemingly more random bone patterns for the exploded skeletons).
I'd be fascinated to have further insight into these changes and why they were a thing, if you still had access to information for both versions. In the meantime, thank you so much for all of the videos you upload. It's genuinely thrilling to have so much information on the games of my childhood.
This trick is much older than amiga, I use it on c64, one fix colors, and 6 animated colors. I enjoy your videos so greatly that I decided to buy C64 and recover/rewrite my old demos.
Very interesting video. I was looking through your videos yesterday hoping to find some Micky Mania videos, but found just one, so thanks for uploading this. I need to pick up a copy of Mickey Mania; it looks fun.
God, just what a cool channel! It’s great hearing these stories of programming tricks for an older console from someone with all this enthusiasm!
Thanks sir ! It blew my mind as a genesis kid and once again as an adult with this explaination.
Fantastic video as always. Please keep the coding secrets coming even if they aren't from games you've worked on.
Never played this game, but I feel the urge to play it after watching this video.
This is INSANE! Your videos are amazing!
you're like a 16bit wizard. never cease to amaze me.
too bad this kind of story must have mostly died with the 6th gen of consoles because from beyond there everything was made from pre-made game engines and devs started working more and more only on high level programming.
We all should be thankful for the Demoscene that rised from the Amiga & Atari ST ;-)
I love these videos. Please keep em coming. It’s awesome to have such an insight to these games.
Pretty good stuff here. You probably could've given the Saturn transparencies I bet.
Medachod I did, to fade out the objects in the distance on Sonic R
I'm still immensely impressed and curious about how that worked.
The saturn did support transparencies under certain conditions.
i must commend u for taking the time to explain these games in details this is marvelous work and as a kid of this era i am happy to learn about this stuff
Ive actually seen this effect before! I figured it out not too long after I saw it, then later saw this confirming my theory, thanks Jon! Also with this you could do all sorts of shapes and images, making it pretty useful! You just gotta know what your doing.
Your channel is going to explode, man. I'm happy that RUclips finally recommended something really interesting to me. Subscribed.
I love your videos man. They are just absolutely interesting to watch.
Love this! Wow one of my fav childhood games. Amazing. Love the channel
Wow. Played this when I was maybe 6 years old and it was the best game I had ever seen, and I couldn't believe how it could be so cool. Still one of the best games, if not The best game I have ever played or seen. This little insight into what exactly it was that blew my little boy brain was a pure gem, thank you
This was incredibly informative and inspiring. The endless creativity an resourcefulness of that era was just outstanding and unbelievable. Thank you so much for making these videos from your own time, you are a legend. Instant favorite channel.
Seriously, more old programmers should make RUclips channels and explain how they programmed their games, just like Jon :-)
That's what I really loved about old hardware, it pushed developers to be creative and push the hardware to its limits.
This is an amazing channel about amazing work on amazing games. Thank you for your service.
This channel is a treasure trove of gaming insights, thanks for putting them out there!
Great video. Mickey Mania and Toy Story were two of my chilhood videogames and two of my favorite Sega Génesis games ever. This videos are really interesting. I always liked that chase level. Maybe you can do a video about the Day-Toy-Na level un Toy Story? Keep the good work.
Wow! That's so clever. I feel both amazed and stupid watching these videos. You're a genius! I really want to know who the dislikers are and why they are disliking.
Puggsy deserves to be way better known than it is, that game was awesome. One of my favourites on the system.
You gotta love the tricks you could pull on 8 and 16 bit hardware...
Probably what draws me to trying to work with those systems over more recent ones.
The key to the vast majority of these tricks turns out to be exploiting the way the hardware draws the display.
Which is a sequence of scanlines.
Most of the 8 and 16 bit hardware (even the CGA, EGA and VGA cards had a few such things, such as palettes and scrolling registers. - though the ISA bus on PC really rather cripples you for stuff like this.) has a set of parameters you can change, such as palettes, scroll registers and other stuff.
Normally you'd change these once a frame or less, but you can easily change them once per scanline on most hardware from that era. (indeed on some systems it wasn't optional - The Atari VCS/2600 DEMANDED that you do this if you wanted yo draw anything at all that wasn't trivial).
You could in theory change it once per pixel even, but this is impractical.
You see why when you consider say, a mega drive - A PAL system just to be consistent.
You have 50 frames a second; the regular concept of doing changes once a frame thus asks you to do something 50 times a second.
Each frame is 312 scanlines, but only 240 of those are visible.
Everything else is vblank.
So if you do an effect per scanline... You have to do it 12000 times a second. (you can get away with less for various reasons though. - like in this video only half the screen is being done this way).
If you wanted to do it every pixel...
You'd have to do it anout 3.8 million times a second...
Which a CPU from that era would never cope with...
And in general doing any effect that involves a vertical split requires something to change every scanline for each split.
Whereas anything done horizontally only has to happen at most once per scanline.
To see the difference more clearly, imagine trying to create a splitscreen multiplayer game - if you use a horizontal split you need to do a single change every frame timed to the scanline on which the split.
That's one update of your scrolling registers to split your screen in two horizontally.
Now try it vertically, and you see that you have to time the change to happen somewhere in the middle of the line, but then on the next line you have to change it back, then change it again!
Your vertical split on a 240 line image costs you 480 updates, while your horizontal split costs you...
1. (2 technically if you count the per frame update you were probably doing anyway).
This is why horizontal effects are everywhere, but vertical ones usually only happen if the graphical hardware has features to help out. (such as per column scrolling on the mega drive, or offset per tile mode on snes, or using the copper chip on Amiga).
You might ask if such complex effects are possible using just scanline tricks, why was mode 7 a thing?
Well, mode 7 makes many things easier and cheaper to pull off.
implementing vertical scaling using scanline tricks is easy.
Horizontal scaling is quite hard, but can be done in limited fashion if you precompute things.
No, the main thing mode 7 allows is rotation. And it makes scaling easier and more flexible.
The perspective effect mode 7 is known for is actually in itself a per scanline trick;
Just like old racing games used, but they pre-calculated scaled versions of the road, so terrain variations were limited, where mode 7 can just scale the scanline directly.
The rotation though...
Short of just throwing huge pre-computed graphics at it... That was what mode 7 truly gave you...
In theory you could even do per scanline changes to the rotation parameters, if you could think of a way that made any practical sense...
It's certainly possible to create a set of effects using per scanline rotation and scaling changes that would be nearly impossible to replicate efficiently on other hardware...
But what kibd of effect this would give... Is hard to say.
No, the real benefit of mode 7 is just that it makes the CPU workload much lower, and the image more detailed with less effort.
Consider a racer like F-Zero.
Conceptually not much different from older racers like outrun or the like...
But where outrun would have to drastically limit terrain detail and create pre-scaled versions of the road to work... (and rotation effects are basically non-existent. - turns are faked by skewing the road sideways rather than truly turning your perspective)
F-Zero just loads the terrain as if it were a top-down racer.
To create perspective requires calculating a perspective transform for each scanline, but if you're observant you'll notice a fixed perspective is used.
Because the mode 7 registers provide a 2d transformation matrix, you can pre-compute the transformation needed for each line, store it, and just re-use it over and over every frame with no recalculation needed.
As for rotating the world as you turn...
Yes, you actually have to calculate a full 2d rotation matrix.
... But only once per frame.
Thus, mode 7 gives you rotation and scaling with minimal effort.
Some of which can indeed be replicated without it, but in more limited fashion requiring much more careful thought, (some scaling effects), or by throwing a lot of precomputation or raw CPU power at the problem. (pretty much any kind of rotation effect).
Still if you learn one thing about 8 and 16 bit hardware, is that per scanline effects are the key to nearly anything that seems impossible or improbable.
And you should learn about them as much as you can if you're into dealing with any such hardware. (after all, even the majority of mode 7 tricks still require knowing how to do per scanline effects as well. )
Wow very informative!
Didn't knew the SNES had interesting technical workaround like this. Imitating a texture in "3D" by palette swapping :D
This is nuts. Devs these days don't know shit! In the 16bit era it was all tricks and effects to create magic. Now we have crazy hardware and no magic, just crazy bloatware. Awesome job dude! You are a genius
Lion King for the SNES was released the same year, also had a running towards the camera section. Mickey Mania was March/April in japan and pal regions though, whereas Lion King was in December, but it probably still felt very close for the October release of MM in America.
@37 yo, I grew up with the megadrive, TT games back then were something to look forward to becuase i knew at some point, i was going to see some crazy shit.
You boys and treasure really knew how to push the limits, great channel :)
These videos are amazing. I loved the genesis and I think we had this game because I seem to remember it.
The fact that you were able to use programming tricks to push the genesis that far is very impressive.
Great stuff! FYI "Dragon's Lair II: Escape from Singe's Castle" from 1987 had a "into-the -screen" chase. Unsurprisingly much much basic, but still great for 8bit micros.
I love the background music and your explanations! Great to see what innovation there was, I just took it all for granted!
Amazing how with these tricks you guys made such awesome games, as a teenager i was amazed the first time i played this stage on my snes.
I know you're explaining it, but it's still going over my head. I have to say, that in spite of all the challenges that developers had to face at the time, I think if I were a game developer in the 90s, I would've enjoyed it a lot more. These days, the tools are so powerful, and there's a template and a plugin for everything. It's not as fun.
Man, all that effort to get a realistic chase sequence, and it was *years* before Crash Bandicoot even came out!
Your videos are for me, the geek equivalent to those of o blacksmiths forging knives and other things. Really cool!