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Would have been possible to program a version of Street Fighter Alpha for the Megadrive? Could the MD handle a cartridge with data decompression chips inside like the S-DD1 found on the SNES SFA?
If so, we would see the same load times before each round in the same way as in the SNES?
IMHO it may have been possible but it would have been ugly. Some of Super Street Fighter 2's backgrounds were already pretty nasty due to colour limitations, and I suspect that a port of Alpha 2 would have suffered even more.
I started writing about this, then I realized there are far better qualified people to explain this than I am. I will say, though, is that the art direction for SFA was presented in a way that, unlike the original SFII ports, it could have been more easily replicated on the Genesis than what was done for the originals.Quote:
Originally Posted by Silanda
There was a similar thread about SFA2 for Genesis on another forum. Here's a post I made with a mock-up screen shot-
Quote:
Originally Posted by Black_Tiger
Dull coloured backgrounds or not, it would be nice to see this game on the Genesis.
Absolutely.Quote:
Originally Posted by Black_Tiger
Personally I think that what held back the Mega Drive / Genesis the most always was storage space.
The reason why the voices in (Super) Street Fighter II sound awful isn't the MD's PCM playback capabilities but the space requirements for storing hundreds of (uncompressed) PCM samples.
The reason Golden Axe 3's backgrounds lack in detail isn't the video hardware but the tiny 8 Mbit cart that they somehow managed to squeeze the game onto.
The reason why Streets of Rage 2 looks so vastly superior in comparison with Streets of Rage 1 is that Streets of Rage 1 was designed to fit nicely onto a 4 Mbit cartridge while Streets of Rage 2 was an impressive 16 Mbit monster.
If smaller, redrawn sprites would allow more slots for animation I think I'd prefer that approach.
I'd advise everyone to check out the port of SFA3 on the GBA, it's quite impressive. Not only did they fit in all the extra characters from the console versions, they even managed to squeeze in some additional SF3 characters. Then again, GBA cartridges had a lot more raw space than the Genesis ones. Still, with the equivalent amount of dedication that was put into SFA3 on GBA, I think the results could be quite good.
As much as I love Street Fighter Alpha, i'd rather see a 32X port of Killer Instinct
Sorry for being slightly off-topic ><
I think both SFII games on Genesis would have been much better if the engine had been developed for the Genesis first rather than ported from the SNES. The biggest problem with the backgrounds, especially in SSFII, is that they just didn't even try to optimize them for Genesis palettes.
Likewise, the audio in SFIISCE sounds garbled because it is one of the few games that plays digital samples simultaneously in the music and sound effects.
Just look at Eternal Champions, or especially Challenge from the Darkside, and imagine what a Genesis specific engine for SFII would have been like. Also, looking at Samurai Showdown on Sega CD, I can't see any reason why Street Fighter Alpha couldn't have been done with only minor cuts.
Eternal Champions had the advantage of been designed from the ground up with the limitations in mind though, SFII wasn't and I'm really not sure what they could have done with some backgrounds short of significantly altering them.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
I going to have to disagree with some of you here I'm afraid. The sprites were fine, they may of lacked shading but they didn't use less colours although that shouldn't be a problem. As for the backgrounds, some may have looked ok but others would just be butt ugly. While Alpha 2's backgrounds may have been duller than SF2's this isn't necessarily a good thing as they are also more subtly coloured, with a more "drawn" and less "pixel art" look. Subtle isn't the MD/Genesis' strong point and I simply don't see how it would have enough colours left after everything else to do decent renditions of many of the backgrounds. They'd either need to be simplified (losing their original look) or horribly dithered (like MK3).
I'm not sure how much more frames of animation SFA had, but SF2:SCE would just about cut it on the SegaCD's ram (all the character frames need to be uncompressed for fast access. Probably the back ground animations too).Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
As for the game on the Genesis. I don't see why not. We never got arcade perfect ports BITD. But that never stopped me from liking said home console ports. They had their charm and whatnot.
And what about the support chips in Megadrive carts? I always thought that the additional chips found in the Super Nintendo cartridges were something "common in the SNES carts because the hardware was "meant" for the use of such chips
The SNES is known also for its loading times even in games without decompressing memory chips (Fatal fury) , I wonder if they could avoid those loading times on the Megadrive using similar chips?
Me too, I found myself many times playing the ports of World Heroes 2 SNES and Fatal Fury special on the PC Engine even if I already the have the same "superior" versions for the AES.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
I'd have liked to hear what Genesis renditions of SFA music would have sounded like.
ANYTHING was possible on the Genesis, with a little Blast Processing power and a lot of love.
After all, we got Virtua Fighter 2 on Genesis.....
(chirp, chirp...)
It would have probably been similar to the CP Changer (Home CPS1) Version:Quote:
Originally Posted by Waterfaller
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ9CAWchNL0
Top sprites show SFA2(SFC) left and SF2 Turbo(SFC) right. Bottom sprites compare the SFC to the arcade with adjusted resolution...256x224.
I tried out a few basic moves and found that Street Fighter 2 has a few more frames than Street Fighter Alpha, atleast for Ryu.
http://i567.photobucket.com/albums/s...Alpha2U000.png
I am sure there would be differences, in a Genesis or Sega CD port, that is a given. Even a 40mbit Genesis conversion of Street Fighter Alpha (fairly certain that SFA 2 and 3 are way too much to ask for) just would not have the sound quality that it would need. Maybe if they did all of the music in FM+PSG and focused purely on sound effect and voice sample clarity it might have worked, but I doubt it.
Some Samurai Shodown comparison videos I did a few years back between 3DO and Sega CD: (Divx or K-Lite required)
Intro and Attract Mode
Gameplay
Those do look like you're using different video sources (like RF vs S-Video).Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
Sorry, should have clarified. 3DO is S-Video, Genesis 32X and Sega CD (separate files for comparison!) are Composite.Quote:
Originally Posted by Christuserloeser
I think given similar storage capacity of the SNES version of SFA2, a Mega Drive version could be possible by using the SVP chip as a decompressor, if it has the logic of it being programmed as such. Gameplay if anything, would be faster and smoother on the Mega Drive due to the faster CPU. The ONLY things that will suffer in translation would be graphics and sound. Then again, a 32x port would be much easier at that point...
The decompression chip in the SNES cart was also used as a deterrent for piracy. It probably would have cost about the same just to have uncompressed sprite frames, simple mapper, and larger on cart rom(s). No reason GEN/MD couldn't go that route as well. It doesn't specifically require a compression chip for either system to handle the game.
I agree with Silanda. The backgrounds are going to take a bit hit this time around. If you separate the status bar into a separate plane with a black border, then update CRAM on the scanline that the BG and sprites start, you could help maximize some color distribution. Each fighter is going to need 15 colors each. That only leaves one 15 color and one 16 color subpalette left. You could assign one to each BG layer. Problem area would be the projectiles and other 'sprites' on the play field. Most likely gonna have to reduce the two BG layers to 12 colors each or such, to give back a little for said sprites. Four most subpalettes (even if you did a separate sprite/BG setup like SNES/NES/TG16/etc) would seriously free up a lot of color limitations.
It's a shame they didn't go down that road as they could have got some extra attention for it being the biggest SNES cart ever. Admittedly not much attention by that point but every little helps.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
As for the music, I would have liked to have seen a Megadrive rendition of that, it could have been good. The SNES version was atrocious in that department: it sounded as if the arrangers were told to use as little sample ROM as humanly possible, and then when they are finished cut it by a third again. Really weak sounding music that the YM2612 could have knocked into a cocked hat.
I've read somewhere that SFA2 has 90 megabits of game data compressed to fit into a 32 mb cartridge, or something like that, isn't 48mb the maximum cart size suported by the SNES??
No. AFAIK 64Mb was the largest cart officially supported, but there was always the option of using bank switching hardware on the cart to use as much as you wanted to (which is what was done for SSF2 on the MD/Genesis and lots of NES games).Quote:
Originally Posted by chinitosoccer
Up to 96megabits can be configured without a mapper, for the SNES external address range (a little more than that, but you need some additional logic to sort it out). And as Silanda mention, there's always bankswitching till your hearts content ;)
Damn why bother with thinking about how crappy of port the Genesis can pull off when we have the 32X which would be an interesting system to port these games to.
You know.. I was expecting someone to say this, and I'll be frank..Quote:
Originally Posted by Da_Shocker
I hate it when people bring up the 32X during these discussions,
it ruins the whole idea of porting something to the original Genesis with all its limitations.
Limitations can be fun to talk about, saying "oh 32X can do a sweet almost perfect port" is not.
I like talking about how to optimize a palette, i enjoy tinkering with images and trying to see if i can downgrade them to 16 colors and still making them look good.
32X as interesting as it is, kinda defeats the point of saying "Snes did it, can the Genesis?!"
Good points. Also, if the game was actually created, how many of us have a 32x? I understand that many here may have it but in large, many will not be able to play it.
There's a lot of trade-offs with color optimization and dithering: modifying graphics to use fewer colors and using ditheirng where additional shading/colors is absolutely necessary, etc.
Eternal champions is a poor example as they got lazy and did everythign with dithering... though it looks good if totally blurred out.
One other thing is using the 320 wide res mode rather than 256 wide as the finer pixels would blend far better, plus that's closer to the arcade resolution, so you wouldn't end up with mishapen graphics for non-optimized stuff. (much of the SFII graphics look stretched in 256 wide NTSC -worse in PAL- and correct in emulators set to square pixels -that includes SNES/PCE, some graphics -like the level select screen and character portrates are optimized for NTSC resolution, but most of the in-game stuff, especially sprites seem rather stretched)
http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/3663/sfa2genesis.png
Here's how SFA2 on Genesis could have looked.
Foreground = 15 colors
Background = 13 colors
Fighters are both 16 colors (includes transparancy color)
and their palette includes the colors for the lifebar/superbar/time.
I should have resized the sprites from the Arcade but i really couldn't be bothered, So I just used the Snes sprites.
also all colors are real Genesis colors, all from the Genesis palette.
Got some palette rom for projectiles and other stage sprite objects?
Wow, that looks pretty nice! I'd play it :)Quote:
Originally Posted by NeoVamp
That look pretty good. If there was enough memory on the cartridge would it be possible to get full size Arcade sprites or would that be beyond the limitations of the Genesis?Quote:
Originally Posted by NeoVamp
This, and it might be interesting to try on a background with more variety of colours to begin with. The stage you used was the one that Black Tiger used too; it seems to be being cherry picked a little. Nice job with the mock up though :ok:Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
I don't like black borders and I am still not sure why they are an advantage for anything.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
@ NeoVamp: Good job on your proof of concept! :)
Because the way suggested allows you to change the colours in the palette used by the status bar, therefore allowing an extra 15 colour palette that can be used for the background/foreground. The alternative is that you are left with just one 15 colour palette for the background/foreground.Quote:
Originally Posted by Christuserloeser
Can somebody please point me to the preferred tools to create images like this? I have a couple of tile tools that I downloaded from Spritesmind, but if there is an easier way to play with palettes alone I'd love to get involved. I use Photoshop CS3 and Irfanview extensively, I'm sure I can figure out the whole tile thing in time if that's the only way to go about it.
I've always used Paint Shop Pro 5 myself (the newer ones got too weird imo)
they easily let me play around with palette's and layers, its my preferred tool.
As for room for projectiles and that stuff.. I'm sure i could fit that in if i had the complete sprite sheet.
I'd love to make this a reality, something a long the lines of "Street Fighter Alpha.. GENESIS"
or something like that anyway.
Then we code it specifically for Krikkz Everdrive flash cart, which will let you load files on the fly,
so instead of one 4Mb rom you can get it to load characters/stages from the SD card,
effectivly letting us put all the chars on there from all SFA games.
but yeah, we have no fighting engine, personally I'd use the SF2CE engine since it feels the most robust.
(then again i never had the luxury of getting an Ntsc copy of Super SF2 so i don't know how that plays at full speed)
so there you have it, a SFA game is perfectly possible, if we had a fighting engine.
Anyone interested in a decompile project? http://www.sega-16.com/forum/images/icons/talking.gif
Edit : If i had had full rips of the SFA stages i would have made the proof of concept full screen, but i was lazy. ;)
And yeah, i did pick the easiest stage :D
I can see the palettes in Photoshop or Irfanview, but haven't figured out how to stick purely to Genesis palettes or the colors per tile limits. I've done work on a pixel by pixel basis before, but it doesn't seem like that is how you all are doing this.Quote:
Originally Posted by NeoVamp
Here, why not try Street Fighter Alpha 3 instead of 1: http://sdb.drshnaps.com/game.php?game=634
EDIT - SFA2: http://www.spriters-resource.com/snes/sfalphaII/
PS: Even Game Boy Color (!) can handle SFA: http://www.spriters-resource.com/gam...agb/sheet/5577